peaceful satellite launch preparations [into the sea]

NYT: North Korea threatens to shoot down US planes "spying" on its rocket launch...
“If the brigandish U.S. imperialists dare to infiltrate spy planes into our airspace to interfere with our peaceful satellite launch preparations, our revolutionary armed forces will mercilessly shoot them down,” the North’s state-run Korea Central Radio said...

The United States, South Korea and Japan say that North Korea is using the launching to test its long-range missile technology, a violation of a 2006 United Nations resolution banning the country from all ballistic missile tests.

They warned that if North Korea presses ahead with it, they will seek punishment for the North at the Security Council.
LAT: ...which is considered a failure outside North Korea

NYT: Filipino militants kidnap, threaten to behead Red Cross workers
Abu Sayyaf head demanded that the military pull its soldiers out of an island province in the south, warning that it would behead one of the three Red Cross workers if the demand were not met by 2 p.m. Tuesday.

Abu Sayyaf, responsible for many of the deadliest terror attacks in the Philippines, has a grim record of following through on threats to behead its captives. Guillermo Sobero, an American from Corona, California, was decapitated by the group in 2001. Abu Sayyaf guerrillas also beheaded two Filipino teachers in 2000 as a “birthday gift” to President Joseph Estrada.

LAT: #2 in the Juárez drug cartel, son of the "Lord of the Skies," captured in Mexico City
Mexico is seeing a crop of younger, university-educated narcojuniors emerging as leaders of drug-trafficking organizations that are bound primarily by family ties. Carrillo Leyva was paraded before news cameras in a white Abercrombie & Fitch sweatsuit and stylish glasses -- a far cry from the narco archetype decked out in cowboy boots and oversized jewel-studded belt buckles...

The Juarez gang has been locked in a vicious turf war with a band of traffickers based in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and led by Joaquin Guzman, the country's most wanted fugitive.

The bloodletting left about 1,600 people dead in Ciudad Juarez last year. Violence continued in the border city during the first two months of 2009 but has dipped since Calderon sent 5,000 more troops and hundreds of additional federal police there in recent weeks.
CSM: just as Holder and Napolitano arrive in Mexico to discuss the southward gun flow
WP: and complaints rise about delays on Mérida Initiative aid

NYT: peace semi-secured, Haiti now needs jobs
The [UN] has spent some $5 billion on peacekeeping operations here since 2004, when the government of the still popular President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was toppled — many say with a shove from the Bush administration.

The peacekeeping force declared war against the gangs that plague Haiti, with some success. Kidnappings dropped to 258 victims last year from 722 in 2006, according to United Nations figures...

It required five months to seat a new government after the April 2008 food riots, and United Nations officials say development is stymied by a corrupt judicial system, weak land tenure laws and wildly inefficient ports. The roads are such moonscapes that some 40 percent of the mango crop gets too bruised to be sold abroad, said Jean M. Buteau, a leading exporter.

CSM: Binghamton shootings put into question role of the economic downturn
That event, as well as three policemen wounded in a Pittsburgh shooting after responding to a domestic disturbance call – friends said that gunman was also upset about his recent firing – fit a larger pattern of mass killings which have seemed to proliferate since America's economic downturn, experts say. Forty-four people have died in a string of five such incidents in the past month, from Oakland, California to Alabama to North Carolina.
LAT: database on killings by long-haul truckers in US reveals patterns
But the pattern in roadside body dumps and other evidence has prompted many investigators to speculate that the mobility, lack of supervision and access to potential victims that come with the job make it a good cover for someone inclined to kill...

Michael Harrigan, who oversees the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, said the program helps local police "connect the dots" to slayings outside their jurisdictions. He said most of the victims led high-risk lifestyles that left them particularly vulnerable.

NYT: new Israeli foreign minister: “those who wish for peace should prepare for war”
The aim of the Annapolis process, as it became known, was to agree on the framework for a Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2008, a goal that was not achieved.

Mr. Lieberman said that the Israeli government “never ratified Annapolis, nor did Parliament,” and that it therefore “has no validity.”...

As the new prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu has tried to strike a more conciliatory tone, promising to hold negotiations with the Palestinian Authority toward a permanent accord. But he has also stopped short of endorsing the two-state solution, putting the new government at odds with the United States and the European Union.
NYT: Israeli advocate general closes investigation into military abuses in Gaza

NYT: new face/phase of insurgency in Iraq
Most of the latest attacks, at a time when overall violence is at its lowest level since the beginning of the war in 2003, have singled out Iraqis, but one development affects the Americans. A new weapon has appeared in Iraq: Russian-made RKG-3 grenades, which weigh just five pounds and, attached to parachutes, can be lobbed by a teenager but can penetrate the American military’s latest heavily armored vehicle, the MRAP. The grenades cost as little as $10, according to American military officials, who would not say how often they have killed soldiers...

Military officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the news media, say they have reduced the number of jihadi militants to under 2,000, from about 3,800. “In most places there isn’t an insurgency in Iraq anymore,” said an American military intelligence officer in Washington, who was not authorized to be quoted by name. “What we have now is a terrorism problem, and there is going to be a terrorism problem in Iraq for a long time.”

Other officials, Iraqi and American, are more worried. They observe jihadi and other insurgent groups activating networks of sleeper cells, which are already striking government and civilian targets. Insurgent groups linked to the rule of Mr. Hussein are also reviving.
NYT: along with the end of blackwater?
CSM: all under a new US commander

NYT: Taliban militants attack government office in Kandahar, during democracy seminar
The assault by multiple gunmen followed a pattern of militant attacks across the region recently, from Kabul, the Afghan capital, to Lahore in Pakistan and Mumbai in India...

The attack, in daylight in the center of the city, was the second in the past year in which Taliban fighters infiltrated Kandahar, an important city in the south, in such a brazen manner.

Hajji Agha Lalai, a provincial council member who attended the institute’s seminar, said the attackers were dressed in Afghan National Army uniforms.
NYT: European role in Afghanistan conflict uncertain, but probably a "civilian surge"
[Obama's] increasing American troops in Afghanistan to some 68,000 by the end of the year, from 38,000 today, is also likely to significantly Americanize an operation that in recent years had been divided equally between American troops and allied forces. By year’s end, American troops will outnumber allied forces by at least two to one.

His NATO allies are giving the president considerable vocal support for the newly integrated strategy. But they are giving him very few new troops on the ground, underlining the fundamental strains in the alliance.

The war in Afghanistan was the first time that NATO had ever invoked its Article 5, which requires collective defense of a member under attack... What Afghanistan needs, a senior German official said, is not more foreign soldiers but more Afghan troops and police officers. Germany is sending in new police mentoring teams, and several hundred more police officers and gendarmes will come from France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Spain, according to the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner. France is trying to coordinate a second pillar of the European police force in Afghanistan to do training in the countryside for periods of up to 11 months. That project, which European officials say is more efficient than trying to bring local police officers to Kabul for mass training, can have a European label.

Europeans will also concentrate on the “civilian surge” to help create functioning Afghan political, judicial and security structures in the countryside.
LAT: ...comes down to 5,000 combat troops and trainers

NYT: DoD officials testify before Senate: Pakistani intelligence agency a "problem"; benchmarks for success are coming
...Ms. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, acknowledged the administration’s concerns about a wing of the ISI, which American intelligence officials say is providing money and military assistance to the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan...

Senators on the panel expressed some impatience with the Obama administration’s failure so far to articulate benchmarks for judging progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although Ms. Flournoy promised that they would be ready soon...

Ms. Flournoy responded that “a key point of defining success is when both the Afghans and the Pakistanis have both the capability and the will to deal with the remaining threat themselves.”
NYT: US drone aims for Taliban leader in Pakistani tribal region, kills at least 12
The attack was the first of its kind in the Orakzai region, which lies southwest of Peshawar and close to the border with Afghanistan, residents said. The region is strategically important because it borders other areas in Pakistan known for widespread Taliban activity.

Mr. [Hakimullah] Mehsud is a prominent lieutenant of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who claimed responsibility for an assault this week on police cadets in Lahore, Pakistan.
NYT: militants attack police training center in Punjab, resulting in 8 hour siege...
The attackers issued no demands but went on a rampage, killing at least eight recruits and instructors. One attacker was killed in the siege that followed and, in a gory finale, three detonated suicide belts, killing themselves. More than 100 people were wounded.

“They were barbaric,” a senior trainer at the center said. “They had no demands. We didn’t understand what they wanted. They just kept killing.”...

Some at the police academy believed that the attackers had come from Afghanistan, or at least were Pashtun, an ethnicity indigenous to tribal areas in western Pakistan...

The attackers had more sophisticated weaponry than in past attacks, said Mr. Sukhera, the police official. A factory-made antipersonnel explosive that bore the markings Claymore Mark 5 was found near one of the dead attackers in a plastic box, said Zulifkar Hameed, an elite force member who was among the first inside.
Gdn: ...and a few days later, 22 killed in suicide attack on mosque
LAT: video released on public flogging of a 17-year old girl by the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley causes outrage
Jahangir said the girl was believed to have been punished after refusing to marry a Taliban commander in the Swat Valley, where the government in February struck a truce with Islamic militants to stem violence. The militants then accused her of immoral behavior and ordered 34 lashes, Pakistani news reports said...

The Swat accord was reached between the North-West Frontier Province government and a cleric named Sufi Muhammad, whose son-in-law Maulana Qazi Fazlullah leads a Taliban army that for nearly two years held off army and paramilitary troops seeking to regain control of Swat.

The alpine valley was once a tourist haven, with stunning mountain scenery and a ski resort, which the militants burned down.

Over the last two years, they also burned down nearly 200 schools that provided education to girls and beheaded dozens of local officials and paramilitary troops, terrorizing anyone who dared speak against them.

The central government was not a party to the peace accord but signaled its approval and pulled back army troops.
CSM: ...and could threaten peace deal
In Swat's main town of Mingora, however, anger is overridden by a practical desire to maintain good relations with the Taliban whom residents say are in de- facto control of the region. The consensus is that the video, which was shot with a cellphone camera, took place in January – before the peace accord – and that the Taliban has done nothing as controversial since that time...

The much-vaunted Islamic courts are partly operational, hearing mainly financial or land disputes that are settled through a quick verdict by Qazis (religious scholars, who were already in place and working as magistrates before the peace-deal). Opposing parties describe their disputes, which could center around a bounced check or a defaulted loan, to the Qazi who in turn makes a swift decision and orders the families to come together and shake hands. There are few documents involved and no lawyers. One hundred and fifteen new cases have been heard since the peace deal, of which 50 have been resolved. "People seem to prefer it this way," says court clerk Zafar Ali. "Things are done a lot sooner."

NYT: human rights activist beaten in Russia...
NYT: ...as former Chechen general turned opposition leader is assassinated in Dubai
The attack evokes others on Chechens, in Russia and abroad, who ran afoul of President Ramzan A. Kadyrov.

The Kremlin has invested Mr. Kadyrov with almost unchecked authority in a bid to return stability to Chechnya after nearly a decade of bloody war and political turmoil. With Moscow’s blessing, Mr. Kadyrov has created a personality cult and imposed his own interpretation of Islamic morality in Chechnya, whose population is predominately Muslim.

He has also built a powerful security force that has all but crushed Chechnya’s separatist movement, often, rights groups say, with the help of torture and extrajudicial killings.

In January, a Chechen hit man tracked down and killed Umar S. Israilov, a former bodyguard of Mr. Kadyrov, who had received asylum in Austria after accusing the president, and officials in his circle, of kidnapping, torture and murder. Ruslan Yamadayev, one of Sulim’s brothers, was shot dead in his car last September as he waited in a traffic jam in Moscow just outside the White House, the government building where the offices of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin are situated.
NYT: firebombing anarchists in Athens attack banks and cars

NYT: Guinea-Bissau needs help to assure post-coup on-time elections
The tiny West African country, which is used by Latin American drug-smuggling gangs as a transit point to Europe, has said it will hold elections in June to replace the president who was assassinated last month.

Soldiers killed President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira on March 2 in a revenge attack after an explosion killed his rival, General Batista Tagme Na Wai, the military chief... The deaths of Vieira and Na Wai ended a long-running and violent feud between the two men.

But it left a power vacuum which analysts say could lead to greater instability and allow Latin American cocaine smuggling gangs, already active in Bissau, to extend their influence.
NYT: trial highlights crime, insecurity in South Africa; some clamor for reintroducing the death penalty
The nation’s homicide rate, while declining, is among the worst. In 2006, it was about eight times more than the United States’ and 20 times higher than Western Europe’s, according to Antony Altbeker, a criminologist. Electrified barbed wire surrounds many of the finest homes in Johannesburg. South Africa exceeds international norms in its number of police officers, and by some estimates there are more than four times as many private security guards as police officers, with most companies promising their clients “armed response.”

Criminologists have long puzzled over not only the nation’s high crime rate but also the unusual amount of homicide and torture that accompanies burglaries and carjackings...

The three men [on trial] did not realize that they had killed someone both famous and widely beloved until they read the newspapers the next day. They had thought their victim “was a Nigerian,” Ms. Maruping said.

Gdn: human rights case against Shell goes to court
In a New York federal court, Shell and one of its senior executives are to face charges that in the early 1990s in Nigeria they were complicit in human rights abuses, including summary execution and torture.

The Anglo-Dutch company, if found liable, could be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. No multinational has ever been found guilty of human rights abuses, although two previous cases saw major claims settled outside court...

Lawyers in New York will allege that Shell actively subsidised a campaign of terror by security forces in the Niger Delta and attempted to influence the trial that led to Saro-Wiwa's execution. The lawsuit alleges that the company attempted to bribe two witnesses in his trial to testify against him.
NYT: Arab leaders band together to back Sudan's Bashir
NYT: Fujimori, on trial for massacres during Peru's civil war, defends himself
Mr. Fujimori is believed to be the world’s first democratically elected former president to be tried for human rights violations in his own country...

None of the 80 witnesses and nearly two dozen outside experts who testified during the trial have directly linked Mr. Fujimori to two deadly operations by the Colina group, a special military unit. Rather, prosecutors have argued that as commander in chief and leader, he did nothing to try to stop the killings of guerrilla suspects and their supporters. He is charged with failing to stop the Colina group from massacring 15 people, including an 8-year-old boy, in 1991 at a barbecue in Lima, Peru’s capital.

He is also charged with human rights violations related to a raid at La Cantuta University in 1992 that left nine students and a professor dead. Their incinerated bodies were found a year later.
NYT: first defendant in Khmer Rouge trial tries the chain of command defense
One of five defendants in the United Nations-backed trial, [Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch] faces a life sentence on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, as well as homicide and torture...

Duch’s lawyers presented a vigorous defense of a man who has admitted to overseeing the torture and execution of at least 14,000 people, portraying him as someone trapped in a giant killing machine who now finds himself singled out for prosecution.

Asserting that Tuol Sleng was just one of 196 similar institutions — and far from the worst of them — one of his lawyers, Kar Savuth, asked: “Is it fair? Is this called justice?

“Each prison had the same orders from Angkar,” he said, referring to the Khmer Rouge leadership, “all conducted torture and execution. Why is only Duch brought to trial? He is only a scapegoat.”

NYT: fate of Tamil leader central to outcome of Sri Lankan civil war
A pioneer in the tactic of suicide bombings, Mr. [Velupillai] Prabhakaran created a squad called the Black Tigers — up to 40 percent of its members women — that carried out scores of attacks over the years, both targeted assassinations and mass terrorist killings.

Many of his regular fighters have taken their own lives as well rather than surrender, biting into cyanide tablets that they often carry on strings like small memento mori around their necks.

This dedication is part of a cult-like devotion to Mr. Prabhakaran — a chubby man with a thick mustache whose charisma is not always evident to outsiders — and nobody knows what will come of his mission once he is gone.

Without Mr. Prabhakaran, some analysts say, his rebellion may collapse. Or perhaps he might be seen as a martyr and a rallying cry for further insurgency.
Gdn: while civilian suffering unlikely to decline soon