spin [get convinced]

AP: al-Shabaab beheads 7
The public killings in the southwestern town of Baidoa followed weeks of fierce fighting as the Islamists try to seize Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, amid mounting concerns about the influx of hundreds of foreign fighters to the failed state.
NYT: some fighters recruited among Somali immigrants in the US
They had fled Somalia as small boys, escaping a catastrophic civil war. They came of age as refugees in Minneapolis, embracing basketball and the prom, hip-hop and the Mall of America. By the time they reached college, their dreams seemed within grasp: one planned to become a doctor; another, an entrepreneur...

The students are among more than 20 young Americans who are the focus of what may be the most significant domestic terrorism investigation since Sept. 11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed, blew himself up in Somalia in October, becoming the first known American suicide bomber...

The men appear to have been motivated by a complex mix of politics and faith, and their communications show how some are trying to recruit other young Americans to their cause...

Most of the men are Somali refugees who left the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in two waves, starting in late 2007. While religious devotion may have predisposed them to sympathize with the Islamist cause in Somalia, it took a major geopolitical event — the Ethiopian invasion of their homeland in 2006 — to spur them to join what they saw as a legitimate resistance movement, said friends of the men.

For many of the men, the path to Somalia offered something personal as well — a sense of adventure, purpose and even renewal. In the first wave of Somalis who left were men whose uprooted lives resembled those of immigrants in Europe who have joined the jihad. They faced barriers of race and class, religion and language...

Even among the world’s jihadists, the young men from Minneapolis are something of an exception: in their instant messages and cellphone calls, they seem caught between inner-city America and the badlands of Africa, pining for Starbucks one day, extolling the virtues of camel’s milk and Islamic fundamentalism the next...

They cut their hair at Somali barber shops, prayed at Somali mosques and organized themselves along the same clan lines that had divided them for decades, calling on tribal elders to settle family disputes and community rifts...

Developments in the homeland, followed obsessively by the adults, held little interest among teenagers. They rolled their eyes at the older men known as “the sitting warriors,” who debated clan politics with such gusto at one Starbucks that the staff bought a decibel meter to ensure that the noise did not rise above legal limits...

Of the estimated 100,000 Somalis in the United States, more than 60 percent live in poverty, according to recent census data.

After graduating from high school in 2000, Mr. Ahmed [the suicide bomber] seemed to flounder, taking community college classes while working odd jobs, friends said. But he had done better than many peers, who turned to crime and gangs like Murda Squad and Rough Tough Somalis...

By 2004, Mr. Ahmed had found a new circle of friends. These religious young men, pegged as “born-agains” or “fundis,” set themselves apart by their dress. Their trousers had gone from sagging to short, emulating the Prophet Muhammad, who was said to have kept his clothes from touching the ground...

Spurred by a newfound sense of nationalism [after Ethiopia invaded Somalia], college students distributed T-shirts emblazoned with the Somali flag and held demonstrations during a frigid Minnesota winter.

The protests took on a religious dimension as well. While the United States had defended the Ethiopian invasion as a front in the global war on terrorism, many Somalis saw it as a Christian crusade into a Muslim land. They were outraged at reports of Ethiopian troops raping Somali women, looting mosques and killing civilians...

If the Ethiopians were seen as infidel invaders, an insurgent group known as the Shabaab — “youth,” in Arabic — was emerging as “freedom fighters.” In its online propaganda, the Shabaab conflated nationalist sentiments with religious ideology, following a tactic honed by Al Qaeda...

The recruitment of the Twin Cities men can be traced to a group of Somali immigrants from Northern Europe and other countries who, in 2005, traveled to Somalia to fight with the Islamist movement, a senior law enforcement official said. A handful of those men later went to Minneapolis, the official said, and helped persuade the first large group from the Twin Cities to leave for Somalia starting in late 2007...

If the first men who left for Somalia had struggled to find their place in America, the boys to follow were “our best kids,” in the words of one uncle...

“They saw it as their duty to go and fight,” the friend said. “If it was just nationalism, they could give money. But religion convinced them to sacrifice their whole life.”...

By January, most of the men were at a training camp in southern Somalia, following a strict routine that Mr. Hassan and others described to their Minneapolis friends in phone calls. They woke before dawn to pray and study the Koran. They engaged in rigorous training, running obstacle courses and learning to make bombs...

The manager of University Travel Services said that since November, he had turned away at least 20 men looking to buy tickets to Somalia, adding that the requests had slowed considerably. Meanwhile, some Somali parents in the Twin Cities have taken to hiding their sons’ passports...

For many older Somalis in Minnesota, the deepest mystery is why so many young refugees would risk their lives and futures to return to a country that their parents struggled to leave.

AJE: UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, accuses DRC military of human rights violations
The Congolese army, which is partly comprised of former rebels, has repeatedly been accused of rape, pillage and murder...

MONUC backs the army's operations against the FDLR, seen as a root cause of the violence in eastern Congo.

But aid agencies have criticised the drives for sparking rebel reprisals on local civilians rather than stabilising the situation.

NYT: Baluchistan Liberation Army seems to gain political ground in separatist war as Pakistani intelligence agency cracks down
Baluch nationalists and some Pakistani politicians say the Baluch conflict holds the potential to break the country apart — Baluchistan makes up a third of Pakistan’s territory — unless the government urgently deals with years of pent up grievances and stays the hand of the military and security services.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Baluch were rounded up in a harsh regime of secret detentions and torture under President Pervez Musharraf, who left office last year. Human rights groups and Baluch activists say those abuses have continued under President Asif Ali Zardari, despite promises to heal tensions...

Schoolchildren still refuse to sing the national anthem at assemblies, instead breaking into a nationalist Baluch song championing the armed struggle for independence, teachers and parents said.

For the first time, women, traditionally secluded in Baluch society, have joined street protests against the continuing detentions of nationalist figures. Graffiti daubed on walls around this town call for independence and guerrilla war, which persists in large parts of the province.

The nationalist opposition stems from what it sees as the forcible annexation of Baluchistan by Pakistan 62 years ago at Pakistan’s creation. But much of the popular resentment stems from years of economic and political marginalization, something President Zardari promised to remedy but has done little to actually address.
AJE: conditions insecure for return of displaced Swat residents

AJE: displaced Sri Lankans - mostly Tamils - continue to suffer, die in camps

NYT: map of China's ethnic groups
NYT: bureaucrat manages the ethnic conflict in western China
Mr. Wang, 64, the Communist Party secretary and absolute power in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, is largely unknown outside China, and until lately stayed in the shadows even at home. But China’s leadership elite, and perhaps especially his patron, President Hu Jintao, have put their faith in him: they have let him run Xinjiang for 15 years, well beyond the usually strict limit of a decade in one powerful post. They have elevated him to the Politburo, the ruling party’s inner sanctum.

They have made him their go-to expert on policies toward minorities, which account for the more than 100 million of China’s 1.3 billion citizens who are not ethnically classified as Han. Those in power are reputed to have given him leading roles on senior advisory groups that coordinate and oversee ethnic policies...

Iron fist and velvet glove, he has suppressed Islam, welcomed industry, marginalized the Uighur language, built roads and rail links to the outside world, and spied on, arrested and jailed countless minority citizens in the name of stopping terrorism and subsuming Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) into a greater China.

Even his detractors allow that he has done a masterful job. His nickname is “the stability secretary” — a tribute to his ability to step into chaos and haul it to order.
AJE: mosques in Urumqi defy order to close
It was not clear whether the decision to hold prayers at the mosques was a change of policy or whether the mosques were opened because crowds had gathered outside.


BBC: more than 500 Srebrenica victims buried, 14 years later
Some 8,000 Bosniak Muslims, mainly men and boys, were killed by Bosnian Serbs near the town of Srebrenica in 1995 and buried in mass graves.

About 5,000 of the victims have been identified to date..

Ranging in age from 14 to 72, most of latest victims to be buried were found in secondary mass graves where they had been moved from initial burial sites in a bid by Serb troops to cover up war crimes...

Gen Ratko Mladic, who led the Bosnian Serb troops involved in the killings, remains in hiding. He is said to be in Serbia.

LAT: in Honduras, old tactic for new politics
In some ways, it was a throwback to the old Latin America, when coups and men in uniform more often than not decided who ruled. But it was also emblematic of a struggle underway today on the continent, where a crop of leftist leaders with authoritarian tendencies have risen to power through elections, defied the status quo and tested the bounds of democracy.

Ideology might not have been important to Zelaya, but it was to his inner circle, whose members traced their roots to Honduras' small radical left that emerged in the 1970s. They had gone to university together, fought against the brutal military dictatorships of the day, suffered persecution. Eventually they went into human rights or became lawyers, but didn't abandon their goals.

They helped coax Zelaya to the left, and last year he stepped firmly into the Chavez camp by joining a group of Latin America's leftist presidents formed five years ago by the Venezuelan leader and Cuba's Fidel Castro.

With the old left gaining power, the old right leapt into action, with businessmen and the news media at their service, hitting back at Zelaya relentlessly.

Then came an old trauma. Zelaya began speaking of changing the constitution, and his enemies decided he was making a move to end term limits and so he could stay in office -- much as Chavez had done in Venezuela.

The Honduran Constitution bars presidential reelection, a provision born of a history replete with rulers who overstayed their welcome. Most famously, Tiburcio Carias, a military man with close ties to the foreign-owned fruit companies that made Honduras the original banana republic, rewrote the constitution to stay in office from 1933 to 1949...

Ignoring an appeals court ruling that again declared the June 28 vote illegal, Zelaya announced that the army would help with the election by distributing and collecting ballot boxes.

This threw the army command into turmoil: It was being tasked to carry out an operation that had been judged illegal.

On Thursday, June 25, troops deployed throughout the capital as Congress met to depose Zelaya. Politicians, including Micheletti, worked to put together the legal and constitutional cover to remove a president who was breaking the law...

Even among some who supported the removal of Zelaya, the decision to expel him went beyond the pale, and the army's chief juridical advisor now acknowledges that the expulsion was illegal.
WP: freedom of the press under fire
Several countries condemned the events of June 28 as a military coup. But in Honduras, some of the most popular and influential television stations and radio networks blacked out coverage or adhered to the de facto government's line that Manuel Zelaya's overthrow was not a coup but a legal "constitutional substitution," press freedom advocates and Honduran journalists said.

Meanwhile, soldiers raided the offices of radio and TV stations loyal to Zelaya, shutting down their signals. Alejandro Villatoro, 52, the owner of Radio Globo, said soldiers broke down doors and dismantled video surveillance cameras.

LAT: advisor to Khamenei recommends tolerance of dissent
"We cannot order public opinion to get convinced," Mohammadian said, according to the Mehr news agency. "Certain individuals are suspicious about the election result, and we have to shed light on the realities and respond to their questions."

Providing an unyielding counterpoint, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firoozabadi, the armed forces chief of staff, issued stern warnings against protesters.

"God has chosen us in military uniform to sacrifice our lives against the enemies," he said, according to the Iranian Students News Agency, or ISNA. "Certain individuals and groups imagine that we will back down if they shout slogans against us. We have come to die, and we have proved our determination during the war with Iraq."

NYT: in the category of least surprising, yet horrifying, revelations: Cheney ordered CIA to hide still-classified spy program from Congress
The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy...

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.
WP: DOJ investigation into CIA torture not completely ruled out

LAT: Obama visits Ghana

++
Slate: New Haven's finest...example of 'special treatment'? the lead plaintiff in the firefighters' case
The other way to look at Frank Ricci is as a serial plaintiff—one who reacts to professional slights and setbacks by filing suit, threatening to file suit, and more or less complaining his way up the chain of command...When Frank Ricci testifies against Judge Sotomayor, it will be worth recalling that under any other set of facts he would have looked to his GOP sponsors like the kind of unscrupulous professional litigant Rush Limbaugh lives to savage. Is America's conservative movement really ready for an anti-affirmative action hero who has repeatedly relied on the government to intervene on his behalf to win him—and help him keep—a government job?

outsourcing justice [slippery little bugger]

BBC: ICC issues warrant for Bashir's arrest; genocide charges dropped
Gdn: Bashir tells ICC to eat its warrant
He is accused of "masterminding and implementing" a counterinsurgency campaign designed to destroy the Fur, Marsalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, which were deemed supportive of a rebel uprising in Darfur in February 2003.

According to the ICC prosecution documents, Bashir's strategy caused 35,000 violent deaths.

But genocide is extremely difficult to prove, and even among human rights experts there is no consensus that it occurred in Darfur. Some analysts believe that the ICC will only push forward with the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Within Sudan, Bashir's indictment has increased the pressure on his ruling National Congress party, which faces an election this year. Senior ministers have warned that the ICC's action could trigger a rise in Islamic extremism, and attacks on foreigners in the country.
LAT: Salva Kiir, former SPLM leader, weighs in
[Q:] You just issued a statement that was very supportive of Bashir, calling him "Brother Bashir" and warning the international community against provoking chaos in Sudan. Does that mean you think the ICC case against Bashir is a mistake?

[A:] It's not a mistake. I didn't say it was a mistake. It's something that is looking for justice. The ICC is not indicting the whole country. It's looking for particular people that are accused of crimes against humanity and human rights violations. These include the president. The issue is that the president is still in office. The ICC has never done this to any president before. Why is it being done for the first time to the president of Sudan? That's the question that everyone is asking...

[Q:] The ICC case puts the SPLM in a tricky spot. Are you worried that if Bashir's government collapses, the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement] could be at risk? At best, the ICC case will likely distract the government from implementing the final provisions of the peace deal.

[A:] It puts us in a very difficult situation as a country to have an indicted president who is not flexible in his movement. But we have said let us maintain the situation so that there are no clashes that will throw the whole country into chaos. The situation in Darfur can still be handled. And in southern Sudan, there is the CPA. Unless somebody is interested in taking people back to war, there is no connection between the ICC and peace in the south.

[Q:] Are you preparing militarily for possible violence?

[A:] I'm a soldier. I'm prepared.
BBC: Sudanese army deserter speaks out
Khalid, who is of black African origin, says he was forcibly recruited into President Omar al-Bashir's Sudanese army in late 2002.

He and several other men where he lived were taken to the headquarters of his regiment which was based near the north-western Darfur town of Fasher.

He admits to having taken part in seven different attacks on Darfur villages with the help of Janjaweed militia.

The first one was in the Korma area in December 2002 several months before the conflict in Darfur officially began.

He claims to have been extremely reluctant to carry out the savage orders he was given.

"When they asked me to rape the girl, I went and stood in front of her," he said.

"Tears came into my eyes. They said: 'You have to rape her. If you don't we will beat you.' I hesitated and they hit me with the butt of a rifle...

Before long, he said, he was ordered to join other brutal raids on Darfur villages.

I asked him what he was told to do with unarmed civilians who did not resist in any way.

"They told us, don't leave anybody, just kill everybody," he said.

"Even the children, if left behind in the huts, we had to kill them," he said. "People would cry and run from their huts.

"Many couldn't take all their children. If they had more than two they had to leave them behind. If you saw them you had to shoot and kill."

...

Khalid insists that he always fired over the heads of civilians and didn't kill anyone himself despite the orders he was given.

He says he could do this without his fellow soldiers noticing but he admits that there was no way he could avoid carrying out orders to torch peoples homes.

"I did take part," he admitted. "They forced me. We had no choice. If you didn't they would kill you."

Did anyone refuse?

"Two of my colleagues refused and they were shot dead."

I asked him how the Sudanese officers had justified killing unarmed civilians in cold blood. How they had explained the need to slaughter women, babies and children?

He replied: "They said they are the ones who take food and water to the rebels.

"They said that if we kill these people and burn their villages then the rebels will not have any supplies so they'll have to move out to the neighbouring country."
CSM: armed groups still competing for control of villages, and Darfuris continue to be displaced
[Mr. Hari] is one of 50,000 people displaced from the town of Muhajiriya in South Darfur after a rebel advance followed up by government and janjaweed reprisals in February.

More than 23,000 have trudged and trucked their way to the capital of North Darfur, filling already overstretched aid camps to the breaking point.

Thousands more have been arriving in Otash, on the outskirts of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur...

The town of Muhajiriya had been under the control of guerrillas loyal to Minni Minnawi, the only rebel leader to sign a 2006 peace deal with the government. However, a spate of defections and fighting saw the town switch to another rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement in January amid weeks of deadly clashes.

That was the signal for the government forces to retake the town, which they did with the help of air support.

AJE: Karadzic, on trial in the Hague, refuses to enter plea
Last week, judges at The Hague tribunal in the Netherlands approved the prosecution's third amended indictment against Karadzic, which lists two genocide charges and nine of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
LAT: Stanisic, Milosevic's intelligence chief on trial at ICTY, was a CIA informant
For eight years, Stanisic was the CIA's main man in Belgrade. During secret meetings in boats and safe houses along the Sava River, he shared details on the inner workings of the Milosevic regime. He provided information on the locations of NATO hostages, aided CIA operatives in their search for grave sites and helped the agency set up a network of secret bases in Bosnia.

At the same time, Stanisic was setting up death squads for Milosevic that carried out a genocidal campaign, according to prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which was established by the U.N. Security Council in 1993 to try those responsible for serious human rights violations in the Balkan wars.

Now facing a trial at The Hague that could send him to prison for life, Stanisic has called in a marker with his American allies. In an exceedingly rare move, the CIA has submitted a classified document to the court that lists Stanisic's contributions and attests to his helpful role. The document remains sealed, but its contents were described by sources to The Times.

The CIA's Lofgren, now retired, said the agency drafted the document to show "that this allegedly evil person did a whole lot of good." Lofgren, however, doesn't claim to disprove the allegations against Stanisic...

The chief prosecutor, Dermot Groome, says that Stanisic's actions to help the CIA and counter Milosevic only underscore the power he had. In his opening argument, Groome said that the "ability to save lives is tragically the very same authority and the very same ability that [Stanisic] used . . . to take lives."...

At the time, CIA Director John M. Deutch was trying to clean up the agency's image by cracking down on contacts with human rights violators. Years later, the "Deutch rules" were cited as a reason the agency hadn't done better penetrating groups such as Al Qaeda.

But Deutch had no problems with Stanisic. He invited the Serbian to CIA headquarters in 1996, and an itinerary of the visit indicates that Stanisic got a warm welcome.

The Serbian spy chief was taken to hear jazz at the Blues Alley club in Georgetown and driven to Maryland's eastern shore for a bird hunt. Deutch even presented Stanisic with a 1937 Parker shotgun, a classic weapon admired by collectors.

Deutch, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, declined to comment.
LAT: chronology of Stanisic's alleged activities
March 1992 to 1995: Special [paramilitary] units [created by Stanisic] allegedly "committed crimes in and attacked and took control of towns and villages in the municipalities of Bijeljina, Bosanski Samac, Doboj, Sanski Most, Zvornik." Simultaneously, Stanisic cooperates with CIA, providing information on Milosevic regime and conveying communications from the U.S. to his boss.

CSM: in Kosovo, rebel leader turned politician
Limaj's own story began when he was a student leader in the early 1990s. The Berlin Wall had fallen, but Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic had revoked Kosovo's special status in Yugoslavia. The Albanian, 90 percent of the population, lived a second-class existence under brutal police-state repression – checkpoints, arbitrary killing, torture – as Serbs revived a deeply felt national myth of Kosovo as their spiritual heartland, something disallowed under Yugoslavia's longtime leader, Marshal Tito...

For a decade, Limaj and Kosovo waited as the political and spiritual leader of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, reacted to Serbian tactics with a Gandhian strategy of patience and nonviolence.

A tipping point for Kosovars arrived with the US-led Dayton peace deal on Bosnia.

"After Dayton, all our hopes and dreams fell," Limaj says. "That Milosevic could kill with impunity for years, then present himself as a man of peace ... this was totally depressing for us. There was no hope. We saw what he was doing here. It's true, if a normal person has choices, he would never choose war. But it was either leave Kosovo, or organize ourselves to resist."...

The former commander plays down his KLA hero status. But Limaj was the first to switch KLA tactics – characterized by guerrilla skirmishes in villages and hiding in the hills – by confronting Serb forces in the open. His units eventually held two main highways and sheltered 85,000 people, a hospital, and a radio station...

Limaj's time at The Hague remains a sensitive one. He was arrested for crimes while serving as KLA commander of the Llapushnik region. He denied guilt, but agreed to face charges. "As much as I didn't agree with the accusation, I felt it was our responsibility to respond," Limaj says. "So I said I would go to The Hague, and was sure justice would prevail."...

What Limaj took from Obama's "Audacity of Hope" was the new president's community organizing in Chicago. "He went house to house to understand the people, their hopes and dreams, so by the time he ran for president could speak to everybody."

That will be a task in Kosovo, still divided between Albanian and Serb. "Kosovo's intentions are humane… we don't want to harm or do damage to others… but allow everyone live together in a new state."

Ind: Guinea-Bissau president assassinated by soldiers
The country's 1.6 million people have endured years of instability since independence in 1974. This has been fuelled in recent years by the country's emergence as a key transit point in the smuggling of Latin American cocaine to Europe.

Vieira was a former military ruler who was ousted after a civil war in the 1990s and returned to power in a 2005 election.

He had been at odds with armed forces chief of staff General Batista Tagme Na Wai, who was killed in an attack on Sunday evening that also destroyed part of the military headquarters.

A security source said soldiers from Na Wai's Balante ethnic group led the attack on Vieira, who is from the smaller Papel community, and looted his home afterwards...

In January, the armed forces command said militiamen hired to protect Vieira had shot at Na Wai. The militia denied the shooting had been an assassination attempt but the miltiary nevertheless ordered the militia be disbanded.

The 400-strong force had been recruited as Vieira's personal bodyguard by the Interior Ministry after the president's house was targeted by heavy weapons late last year.

A policeman said soldiers loyal to Na Wai had freed people accused of that attack ahead of the president's death today.

According to the constitution, if the president dies, the speaker of parliament runs the country until new elections.

Following a bloody independence war, Guinea-Bissau's military has long been involved in politics. The military issued a statement on Monday saying that the situation was under control but it would respect democratic institutions.
AP: speaker of parliament now sworn in
CSM: some suspect link to drug trafficking
In recent years, Colombian drug cartels have begun flying small planes across the Atlantic, landing on tiny islands dotting the Guinean coastline. Since Guinea-Bissau has no navy to patrol its waters, the cartels were free to unload tons of cocaine destined for Europe. The drugs were then distributed to impoverished African migrants, who would carry the drugs north by boat to the shores of France, Italy, and Spain.

Government corruption, fed by poor government salaries at the bottom and uncertain political leadership at the top, means that Guinea Bissau has few tools to stop the drug trafficking...

"This recent set of killings can be explained [as] the action of the drug traffickers, who would not allow anything to get in the way or to obstruct their links with Europe," says David Zounmenou, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, formerly known as Pretoria.

NYT: calm in the Congo?
wronging rights: maybe, but somehow doesn't seem sustainable

Econ: the Economist plays the optimist about Somalia (in the headline at least)
The battleground is Somalia’s centre and south, which has water and food. Everywhere the complex mix of clans and sub-clans is combustible. By contrast, the arid north, peopled largely by nomadic camel-herders, is fairly peaceful. Puntland, in the north-east, is semi-autonomous, but most of its people want to be part of a federal Somalia. It hosts some of the pirates, as well as people-traffickers, kidnappers and a fair number of jihadists. But its government has disarmed freewheeling militias and more or less keeps order.

The recently ousted previous Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf, a Puntland warlord, has taken several hundred gunmen back north from Mogadishu and now seems more interested in his businesses, mainly in the town of Bossaso. Somaliland, a former British territory, has been fairly stable since it declared independence in 1991. If coming elections there go well, with voters using biometric identity cards, it may slowly start to win recognition from some African countries and others farther afield. It is not clear what Mr Ahmed thinks about independence for Somaliland. But nationalists and jihadists are violently against it, as is Puntland, which disputes a border zone with it.

What is clear is that no one controls the country, neither the government, nor the Shabab. But, certainly until Mr Ahmed’s arrival, the Shabab have been in the ascendant. Its system of 20 to 30 men per cell, each one locking into larger command structures when they take a town, is hard to crack.
GQ: pirates still on patrol
Boosaaso is perfectly positioned near the mouth of the Red Sea, at the crossroads of Africa and Arabia, to supply this lawless corner of the world with all its contraband needs: guns, drugs, expired baby formula, counterfeit electronics, counterfeit dollars, even smuggled human beings. If it’s illegal and it makes money, then someone is trafficking in it here. When we arrived, the center of town was packed with people—money changers sitting sphinxlike in front of bricks of Somali shillings, waiting to convert pirate dollars into the filthy local notes; old men in skullcaps chewing camel steaks at dingy, whitewashed restaurants; boys hawking slices of watermelon from roadside carts. Several late-model Land Cruisers, trucks that cost at least $50,000, prowled the deeply rutted roads. As we moved through town, our driver jutted his finger toward a large white house with a steel gate. “C.I.A.,” he said. He may have been right. It was an open secret that the American government was working with notorious figures in northern Somalia to track Islamist terrorists. Not far from the center of town was a neighborhood called New Boosaaso, where just beyond a cluster of refugee huts made from bits of cloth and cardboard rose a colony of palatial new homes with huge walls surrounding them and satellite dishes on their roofs. Spectral figures tramped through the dust on the way to their hovels, and right next to them were some of the nicest houses I had seen anywhere in Somalia, where so many buildings have been reduced to piles of machine-gun-chewed bricks. I suspected that this was where the pirates lived...

[Pirate spokesman] Sugule seemed happy to chat. He talked for a while about the typical pirate diet—“rice, meat, bread, spaghetti—you know, normal human-being food”—and then he explained to us his notion of Somali piracy. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”

Ind: Pakistan 'at war' after attack on Sri Lankan cricket players in Lahore
The spectacular military-style raid in Lahore bore marked similarities to the assault in Mumbai last year, which left 172 people dead. Pakistani officials suggested the Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the carnage in the Indian city, also carried out the attack in Lahore.
NYT: arrests have been made
Gdn: 3 Taliban factions said to have formed alliance
The Guardian has learned that three of the most powerful warlords in the region have settled their differences and come together under a grouping calling itself Shura Ittihad-ul-Mujahideen, or Council of United Holy Warriors.

Nato officers fear that the new extremist partnership in Waziristan, Pakistan's tribal area, will significantly increase the cross-border influx of fighters and suicide bombers - a move that could undermine the US president's Afghanistan strategy before it is formulated...

The Pakistani Taliban movement was split between a powerful group led by the warlord Baitullah Mehsud and his bitter rivals, Maulvi Nazir and Gul Bahadur. While Mehsud has targeted Pakistan itself in a campaign of violence and is accused of being behind the assassination of the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Nazir and Bahadur sent men to fight alongside other insurgents in Afghanistan.
CSM: villagers around Peshawar forming militias
In the town of Budaber, six miles from Peshawar's city center, Daud Khan makes sure his Kalashnikov is loaded before stepping into the dark street. As he walks out, seven young men join him, all armed.

Mr. Khan is a member of the nighttime civilian patrols that guard the streets and escort residents home. They usually work from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., the peak time for bomb attacks, a local says.

Do-it-yourself security teams are becoming a fixture in and around Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, as residents grow wary of the Taliban's growing presence – and doubtful of the government's ability to protect them. Some officials have backed the vigilantes, even supplied them with weapons, raising concerns they may fall into the wrong hands...

A city of more than 1.4 million people, Peshawar has long been known as a melting pot of Afghan and Pakistani cultures and a haven for musicians, artists, and intellectuals.

Gdn: registering voters in Afghanistan for August elections
[The Independent Election Commission] is preparing for new presidential elections in August and its workers have just finished registering 4.5 million voters, visiting every district in the country without suffering a single casualty.

Zekria Barakzai, the deputy head of the commission, argues this extraordinary feat is explained by the IEC's softly-softly methods. Its officials do not arrive in a big cloud of dust and convoys of heavily armed men, even in the turbulent south.

"We organise security with the elders with the help of tribal leaders. We talk to them first," Barakzai said...

Karzai, with no previous experience of administration, has tried to run it from his mobile phone. As the Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid argues in his new book on the region (depressingly titled Descent into Chaos), the president has sought to project his power through deals with a network of strong personalities, warlords mostly, rather than building enduring institutions.

The one exception is the Afghan national army, which is more than 80,000-strong and involved in 90% of the military operations around the country. But the army cannot build roads, bring electricity or teach children. That requires a functioning and energetic government.

The British and French are working on a common approach to present to Obama before the Nato summit next month that would put more emphasis on local and traditional forms of government, and less on Kabul. The Americans are reluctant to give up on Karzai.

BBC: re-establishing order on Baghdad's roads
Law and order broke down straight after the US-led invasion in March 2003.

For many Iraqis, "democracy" meant doing exactly what you felt like, when you felt like it - including behind the wheel of a car.

The few traffic police who dared remain on duty did not dare to stop drivers. It could be anyone at all in the driver's seat, and he'd certainly have a gun. Many traffic policemen lost their lives at the hands of militants, or were blown up by roadside bombs.
Slate: Obama's plan for troop withdrawal
CSM: US contractors leaving Iraq
NPR: US military closing prisons
"It seems to be hard to get this in the press, but last year we released 18,600 detainees. Only had 157 come back," [Brig. Gen. David Quantock] says.

Quantock credits that low rate of recidivism to the rehabilitation programs offered by the U.S. detention system, including education programs, health care, and religious discussions with moderate Islamic clerics.

He also says the system works because it separates the extremists from people who were not motivated by ideology.

"Most of our detainees were motivated primarily by two things — money, because they didn't have jobs, they needed to earn some money, or fear of retribution. I mean, if you're in a bad neighborhood, you join the local gang," he says.

As for the most dangerous inmates, Quantock says the U.S. is building a new prison in the northern town of Taji, which will eventually be turned over to the Iraqi government.
NYT: who won those elections, anyhow?

Ind: arrest in Bangladesh of 'mutiny' leader
AP: charges filed against 1,000 border guards

NYT: privatizing security in India
Capsi, an industry trade group, estimates that India’s $2 billion private security sector will add a million employees this year, even as other industries lay off workers while the economy cools.

Already, it employs about 5 million people, 1.3 million more than India’s police and armed forces combined. In fact, with India’s official police stretched thin (there is one officer for every 1,000 people in India, less than half the United States average and one-tenth the average in China), security guards are moving from fetchers of tea at government offices and car washers at wealthy homes to becoming corporate India’s de facto police force...

Kammesh Baboo Rathore, a 28-year-old recruit, said that Terra Force was his third choice. “I tried the army and the police and didn’t get through” he said. “This is my next choice. I want to work for the nation and am enamored by the uniform.”

WP: getting through military checkpoints in Sri Lanka
The passengers quietly exited the bus and stood behind the razor wire, identification cards in hand. The men split off into one line. A far smaller number of women went into a separate row, some cradling sleeping babies.

But it was the women's line that took twice as long to navigate. That's because female officers rummaged through women's purses and bags before moving on to their breasts, even feeling the insides of their bras for explosives.

They didn't stop there. They patted down their groins and occasionally looked inside their underwear. Pregnant women routinely had their swollen bellies squeezed or prodded, just to make sure.

Women are often singled out for scrutiny because, in Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war, more than two-thirds of the Tamil Tiger suicide bombers have been women, according to experts from the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

AJE: 'scuffle' between opposition and ruling party in northern Malay state

LAT: Mexico sends more troops, federal police to Ciudad Juarez
The border city is in the throes of a vicious turf war between a local drug-smuggling organization and rivals from the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The feud, and the Mexican government's 2-year-old crackdown on organized crime, has sent killings soaring.

The city's police chief, Roberto Orduna Cruz, resigned almost two weeks ago after several of his officers were shot to death and anonymous signs appeared warning that an officer would be killed every 48 hours unless he stepped down.
Foreign Policy: is it really just crime? or a civil war?
The U.S. Department of State has its view of Mexico's problems: On Feb 20, it issued a travel alert to U.S. citizens, warning them about "small-unit combat," "large firefights," and "public shootouts during daylight hours" in Mexican cities along the U.S. border. According to the State Department, since January 2008 there have been 1,800 killings in Juárez, a border city with a population of 1.6 million.

Does Mexico have a really bad crime problem? Or is Mexico at war with itself and at risk of sudden societal collapse? To answer this question, we should look not just at quantitative measures of the violence (as grim as they are), but also qualitative factors...

...Mexico's struggle against the drug cartels seems more like a counterinsurgency campaign than a fight against crime. According to the Wall Street Journal, the cartels control 200 counties in Mexico, including much of the U.S. border; generate more than $10 billion in annual revenue; and can muster thousands of gunmen, including defectors from Mexico's Army Special Forces. With much of the police suborned, Calderón has now deployed the Army, exposing its soldiers to the same corruption. The outcome of this campaign remains unknown, as are its consequences for the United States.

BBC: after worst year in four decades, FARC launches 'Plan Rebirth'
Last October, security forces captured several laptop computers and memory sticks that outline the new rebel strategy and the focus of Plan Rebirth, including:

• increase urban attacks
• wage a war of attrition on two fronts. The first is military, using homemade anti-personnel mines and snipers to increase army casualties and undermine morale and secondly economically by attacking infrastructure just as the global credit crisis begins to be felt in the country
• build up finances through extortion and drug-trafficking
• expend more effort on political indoctrination to counter growing desertion
• consolidate territorial control, particularly in the areas where drugs crops are grown
• launch a campaign of political work, both nationally and internationally, to recover lost ground and increase followers, particularly in urban areas

The Farc is certainly a leaner army now, down to perhaps 8,000 fighters from more than double that in 2002.

Finances have been hit along with morale. However, a leaner Farc may well turn out to be harder to hit.

Econ: the Yakuza is even feeling the squeeze
“IN THE old days,” laments the retired mobster, with a broad smile, slicked hair and a heavily tattooed body, “the yakuza served a useful purpose in society to solve civil disputes and keep the streets clean.” He draws on his cigarette, the stub of an amputated little finger visible in his beefy hand. “Now”, he goes on, “it has lost its samurai spirit to moneymaking.”

Or perhaps, the yakuza—Japan’s organised-crime groups that date from the 17th century—are getting squeezed. For most of the post-war period they operated openly: tolerated by the public, used by politicians and protected by police. Crime will happen anyway, went the argument, so better to know whom to call when it crosses the line. In the 1950s ministers and industrialists relied on the mobsters and nationalist groups to quash unions and socialists. The gangs upheld classic Japanese virtues of manliness and loyalty—and paid for mistakes by slicing off one of their fingers in atonement.

NYT: Ukraine faces unrest over economic downturn
It is not hard to understand why world leaders are increasingly worried about the discontent and the financial crisis in Ukraine, which has 46 million people and a highly strategic location. A small country like Latvia or Iceland is one thing, but a collapse in Ukraine could wreck what little investor confidence is left in Eastern Europe, whose formerly robust economies are being badly strained.

It could also cause neighboring Russia, which has close ethnic and linguistic ties to eastern and southern Ukraine, to try to inject itself into the country’s affairs. What is more, the Kremlin would be able to hold up Ukraine as an example of what happens when former Soviet republics follow a Western model of free-market democracy.

Gdn: for first time in 29 years, nationalists lose election in Basque region

Econ: upcoming elections in Albania

NYT: the CIA destroyed 92 interrogation tapes
LAT: US pledges to reduce nuclear weapons stockpile
NYT: US sends two envoys to Syria, in play to try to isolate Iran

++
abu muquwama: civil war rivalries die hard

bad liars [caught on satellite]

WP: bombing reflects, deepens sectarian rift in northwest Pakistan, kills at least 30
The suicide bombing, which turned a solemn [Shia] mourning procession into a scene of strewed limbs and bloody clothing, provoked a frenzy of retaliatory violence against local Sunnis, police and witnesses said. Dozens of Sunni-owned houses and shops were burned, and security forces imposed a curfew on the area.
BBC: how the cleavage has changed over time
In Pakistan, the focus of the sectarian violence has arguably changed. In the 1980s and 1990s the problem was acute in Karachi and in the province of Sindh.

But tough policing - especially in Karachi - over this period meant that many militants were either killed or arrested.
Slate: more skepticism on the Swat Valley deal
...as respected journalist Ismail Khan notes in an article in today's Dawn, the country's most widely read English-language newspaper, the deal calls for Pakistan's secular criminal code to be observed, unless a council of sharia judges rules that some law or another is un-Islamic. The deal also calls for a halt in the fighting between the Pakistani army and the Taliban militias.

The key facts here are that, at the moment, there is no working judicial system of any sort in the Swat Valley—and that the Taliban militias have routed the numerically superior Pakistani army in their armed confrontations. So the deal imposes national secular authority even more than it legitimizes sharia justice. And given the balance of power, it's unclear why the Taliban would go along with that.

The deal was made not with "the Taliban" as a whole—the term implies a more cohesive entity than actually exists—but rather, specifically, with Maulana Sufi Muhammad, whom the Pakistanis arrested two years ago for leading jihadist raids across the border into Afghanistan. He was released from prison after agreeing to give up the struggle and to work for peace.

The hope is that he would strike a deal with his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, who is the deputy to a much more militant Taliban leader—or that, if he can't come to terms with his son-in-law, a wedge might be driven between various Islamist factions, peeling Sufi Muhammad and his followers away from the radicals and thus strengthening the hand of the central government.

This is why the deal is not only ill-fated but potentially disastrous: It reveals the severe weakness of the Pakistani state. The politicians pursued the deal only because the state cannot control its own territory. Unless Sufi Muhammad can convince his son-in-law to accept peace and obeisance to secular authority in exchange for a parcel of land where Islamic law carries some weight, the deal is more likely to convince the militant Taliban simply to press on for more favors still.
AP: ...but it appears that the Taliban have agreed to a cease-fire
Slate: technology and warfare: Google Earth pinpoints a US drone base in Pakistan
The picture, together with a second picture of the same site taken sometime this year and posted on Google Earth, destroys much of the political advantage of the U.S. drones. The drones aren't supposed to be a U.S. military presence in Pakistan. They're unmanned, and until now, they were thought to be flown exclusively from the Afghan border. The satellite images, backed by expert analysis, prove otherwise. The drones are on Pakistani soil. And if the drones are there, so are the U.S. personnel who physically manage them.

BBC: militias in Paktia, Afghanistan
The insurgency has raged and grown in this part of the country. Paktia borders Pakistan and is a route for insurgents coming into the country. The Taleban and al-Qaeda have a growing presence here and clashes between them and government and foreign forces have escalated.

But Ahmadabad district is an exception, thanks to the gunmen of the Arbakai, a tribal militia that has protected this area and its people for centuries, making it something of a safe-haven from the violence all around.

They are a volunteer force of men and boys, armed with old rifles and true grit. They are part of a traditional code of conduct and honour called Pashtunwali.

The tribal elder is Haji Gulam Khan. He tells us that the area is stable and that there is a good relationship between the people and the government.

He is in no doubt who to thank: "If it weren't for the Arbakai, this area would've been controlled by the Taleban or mafia groups."
AJE: US acknowledges 13 civilians killed in missile strike in Herat earlier this week

AP: US Army medic sentenced to life in prison for executing four detainees in Iraq
NYT: another US soldier found not guilty in killings of 2 New York National Guard soldiers
AJE: Abu Ghraib re-opens as "Baghdad Central Prison"
NPR: how many have died in Iraq since the start of the war?
"By orders of minister's office, we cannot talk about the real numbers of deaths," says a man who works at the Baghdad central morgue statistics office, where all the deaths that take place in Baghdad get recorded. He doesn't want his name used because he's been told by his superiors at the Ministry of Health that he is not allowed to talk to the media. "That's been the case since 2004. When press comes to the morgue, they are taken to our boss's office and we have never been allowed to meet with them."

The reason, he says, is because the number of deaths the morgue registers never corresponds with numbers from the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Interior.

"They do it on purpose," he says. "I would go home and look at the news. The ministry would say 10 people got killed all over Iraq, while I had received in that day more than 50 dead bodies just in Baghdad. It's always been like that — they would say one thingm but the reality was much worse."...

Dougherty [of Iraq Body Count] estimates at least 20,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during U.S. military operations.

The military and human rights groups often disagree over whether victims were civilians or insurgents.

Econ: Turks and (Iraqi) Kurds getting along better for the moment
Turkish officials, who used to dismiss Iraq’s Kurdish leaders as “tribal upstarts”, privately concede that part of the solution is to co-opt Iraq’s Kurds. In the past year Turkish intelligence men and diplomats have held secret talks with Nechirvan Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish region’s prime minister, to get the PKK to call off its fight, even as Turkish aircraft continue, with America’s blessing, to pound rebel strongholds near Iraq’s mountain border with Iran. One idea is that rebels untainted by violence might be coaxed home and their leaders offered cash inducements to move to any European country that would take them in.

NYT: Netanyahu invites Kadima and Labor parties to form moderate coalition
Mr. Netanyahu and Ms. Livni have agreed to meet Sunday, but the negotiations are likely to be tough. Ms. Livni, his chief rival for the premiership, has said she would rather go into opposition than serve as a fig leaf for a coalition of the right.

Mr. Barak, whose Labor Party fared badly in the elections, has already said he would head into the opposition.

To many here, it is increasingly likely that Mr. Netanyahu’s government will consist exclusively of parties from the right, which oppose a Palestinian state and favor expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, making it much harder for him to exercise his pragmatic penchant.

NPR: Saudi religious police facing more constraints

NPR: Lebanon no longer requiring sect identification

WP: Calderón will not relent, despite demonstrations against militarization
Calderón, who has sent more than 45,000 troops to fight the cartels, said the military would remain on patrol until the government had control of the most violent parts of the country and civil authorities were fully able "to confront this evil."

Only then, he said, "will the army have completed its mission." Turf battles involving the drug traffickers, who are fighting the army, police and one another in order to secure billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States, took the lives of more than 6,000 people in Mexico last year. The pace of killing has continued in 2009, with more than 650 dead, most in the violent border cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. In the past few days, a running gun battle between soldiers and gunmen through the streets of the northern city of Reynosa, captured live on television, left five people dead.
LAT: Ciudad Juárez police chief opts out after threats, though
BBC: photos of the violence indicate why
SDT: lessons from Colombia's drug war (via Adam Isacson)
The drug-trafficking operation in Mexico is different than in Colombia. While there is some marijuana and opium grown in Mexico, as well as methamphetamine manufacturing, the cartels aren't fighting over production. They are battling to control the smuggling routes used to move drugs, including Colombian cocaine, into the United States...

The strategy of Mexico's leaders is to break the cartels into smaller pieces, as happened in Colombia, where local police in urban areas were better able to get a handle on street crime once the larger criminal organizations receded.

The assumption is that smaller drug operations would be better handled by state and local police, Shirk said. But it is not clear such a strategy will succeed, and institutional corruption presents a challenge...

But even if the Mexican government is successful in breaking up the big cartels, neither Mexican soldiers nor U.S. equipment and training are going to stop the demand for drugs, [former DEA regional director] Holifield said.

“The biggest lesson is for the U.S.,” he said. “And that is to stop using (drugs). Until that happens, nothing the U.S. does can prevent these people from doing this. There is absolutely no way to stop it.”
NPR: on top of that drug demand issue, US also arming Mexico, informally
The weapons and ammunition are being bought on the black market and at gun shows, but mostly from licensed dealers. Arizona and Texas make it especially easy to buy guns retail. Basically, any adult with a valid ID and no criminal record can buy as many as he or she wants...Authorities call the weapons smuggling trafico de la hormiga, or "ant traffic," because it's done in small steady shipments to avoid detection. And after all, the main mission of the customs service is not examining vehicles leaving the U.S....nearly 8,000 guns sold in America last year were traced to Mexico. That was more than double the number the year before.

Econ: Ortega as Somoza

WP: LTTE bomb Colombo, kill three and injure 48
The attack shows the apparent air power of the Tamil Tigers far from the northern war zone, where they are said to be boxed into a 34-square-mile sliver of the jungle, with government troops closing in.

AJE: riots claim lives in Bauchi, Nigeria
Several churches and mosques were set on fire in the violence on Saturday and at least 28 people were injured, but it was not immediately clear what triggered the unrest.

NYT: Latvian PM steps down, gov't dissolves over recession
BBC: 100,000 march in Dublin
Many are angry at plans to impose a pension levy on public sector workers.

Trade union organisers of the march said workers did not cause the economic crisis but were having to pay for it.

BBC: Bosnian Serbs ordered to pay for mosques destroyed between 1992-1995

Ind: German MP appointed to head new museum of expellees from Eastern Europe after WWII; Poland takes umbrage
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Poland’s special envoy on German affairs and a former foreign minister, summed up Warsaw’s objections to Mrs Steinbach’s planned appointment. “It is as if the Vatican had decided to give the Holocaust-denying Bishop [Richard] Williamson the task of overseeing its relations with Israel,” he said.

NYT: Guantánamo complies with Geneva Conventions, according to Pentagon report
Slate: (other) prison growth in the US
The United States has a prison population like nowhere else. With one out of every 100 adults behind bars, our incarceration rate is the highest in the entire world. Our inmates—1.5 million in prison, with another 800,000 in jail—comprise one-third of the world's total. This is a surprisingly recent development. After barely budging for 50 years, our incarceration rate increased sevenfold (to 738 per 100,000 people) between 1978 and 2008.

BBC: Italy implements new rape law
The decree sets a mandatory life sentence for the rape of minors or attacks where the victim is killed.

It also establishes rules for citizen street patrols to be conducted by unarmed and unpaid volunteers.

The number of sexual assaults fell last year, but three high-profile rapes last weekend sparked national outrage.

Many recent rapes have been blamed on foreigners, especially Romanians. Violent attacks on immigrants have since been reported.

Police say a mob of around 20 masked men beat up four Romanians outside a kebab restaurant in Rome on Sunday in an apparent vigilante attack.

The government has pointed to official statistics saying immigrants committed as many as 35% of crimes in Italy in 2007.

But analysts and opposition parties say many of these are related to breaches in immigration rules, and that foreigners have often been unfairly targeted amid a xenophobic backlash from right-wing politicians and the media.

++
Slate: Q: does decapitation have a special meaning in Islam?
A: Yes, but it's important in other cultures, too. [eg, Mexican drug gang violence above.]

++
Salon: Murakami accepts award in Israel
In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies...

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories -- stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

NYT: resisting North Korean propaganda by parody

overwhelming fire [from your friends in Pine Bluff, Arkansas]

BBC: LRA focuses brutal attacks on civilians in Congo and Sudan, in response to coordinated government offensive...
This pattern of attacks, all along a 300km (186-mile) stretch of the Sudan-Congo border, follows a co-ordinated offensive against the LRA late in 2008. On 14 December the forces of three countries ­- Uganda, Sudan and Congo -­ attacked LRA bases in Congo. It was an attempt to kill as many of the LRA as possible and shatter the movement's command structure.

But the operation was hampered by poor co-ordination and the dense forests in this region -­ ideal cover for guerrilla forces... The LRA responded as it had done in March 2002, when the Ugandan army launched a massive military offensive, named Operation Iron Fist, against the LRA bases in South Sudan, with the agreement of the government in Khartoum. In 2002 LRA leader Joseph Kony split up his forces, before bringing them together again and crossing back into Uganda to carry out attacks on civilians on a scale and a brutality not seen since 1995 to 1996.

In December 2008 the LRA repeated this tactic, dividing into small units,­ some as few as five or six men. These units launched a series of attacks on an unprecedented scale in towns and villages across northern Congo and South Sudan. The UN and humanitarian agencies estimate the rebels have slaughtered some 900 civilians since Christmas. Villages along the border are now empty as people have fled before the LRA atrocities, which have included tying groups of women together before smashing their skulls and killing babies with heated machetes.
BBC: ...and despite "catastrophic" effects for civilians, Uganda troops to continue offensive
The mandate of the Ugandan army in the DRC had been due to expire this week, but a Ugandan army spokesman said this had now been extended. A Congolese minister said the extension would last until the end of this month.

Last week a top UN official said the offensive against the Ugandan rebel LRA had been "catastrophic" for civilians. But he said the operation against the LRA should continue.
BBC: still, more UN troops needed; Security Council to meet today to discuss
"We're seeing very little protection of civilians there. We have less than 300 UN peacekeepers in a humungous area, this is something like 15,000 sq km," Anneke van Woudenberg, a senior HRW researcher, told the BBC.

"Almost no UN peacekeepers are there. And of course the Ugandans and the Congolese who are involved in an operation against the LRA are not doing nearly enough to protect the civilians," she said. She said an additional 3,000 troops authorised for DR Congo by the Security Council had not yet materialised.

BBC: Sudanese government signs declaration of good intentions with Justice and Equality Movement rebels, in move toward peace deal
The accord was struck in Qatar, which has been mediating a week of talks. It includes an end to attacks on more than two million people in refugee camps and an exchange of prisoners.

But hanging over the agreement is a proposed indictment from the International Criminal Court of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir for alleged crimes. And other rebel groups are refusing to talk to the government.

AJE: fresh protests in Madagascar as police fire warning shots

BBC: judge in trial of Niger Delta rebel steps down amidst discussions over the trial's location
Mr Okah's legal team had accused the judge of bias against their client, because of his insistence the trial continued behind closed doors miles away from where the offences occurred.

They have demanded the trial is relocated to the southern state of Bayelsa, where the alleged offences were committed... A militant group says two British hostages will only be handed over when Mr Okah is released.

LAT: Mugabe jails MDC opposition leader, previously named deputy agriculture minister, for treason; violates power-sharing agreement
[O]n Friday, Mugabe tried to swear in more than 20 ministers from his own party, not the 15 agreed upon by the two sides. He ended up with 18 -- and even senior members of the MDC were confused about whether Mugabe's last-minute maneuvering had stripped them of a majority in the Cabinet.

"We are absolutely angry. We are furious. You can't talk about power sharing when people are being arrested," a senior MDC member said, speaking by phone from State House, the presidential residence, shortly before the swearing-in ceremony... Another senior MDC figure said that in addition to the 18 ZANU-PF ministers, 15 with the MDC and three with a smaller MDC faction were sworn in. It was not clear Friday whether some of these would be excluded from the Cabinet.

Analysts said the treason charges against Bennett and the wrangling over Cabinet positions were ominous signs. Bennett was charged just days after a judge threw out treason charges against another top MDC member, Tendai Biti.
BBC: opposition politician charged with various crimes; defense claims the government is "shooting in the dark"

BBC: UN special rapporteur in Kenya investigating 2007 post-election killings...
[Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings,] will talk to human rights groups and eyewitnesses to the violent aftermath of the 2007 presidential election. Mr Alston will also look into allegations of increased arbitrary killings by security officers. They include operations against rebel militias in Mt Elgon in western Kenya, and violent encounters against the Mungiki sect in the capital, Nairobi. His visit comes just days after the government's failure in parliament to establish a local tribunal to charge the perpetrators of the post-election violence which killed 1,500 people.
BBC: ...while Kofi Annan suggests an ICC investigation
[A Kenyan commission of inquiry into the 2007 violence] delivered a sealed list of suspects to Mr Annan and said it should be sent to the ICC if a local tribunal was not set up by 1 March...

Parliament on Thursday rejected a bill to establish the special court... Under parliamentary rules, the bill cannot be re-introduced to parliament until six months have elapsed... The opposition to the bill came from MPs who support both Mr Kibaki and Mr Odinga.

BBC: Rwanda genocide expert Alison Des Forges one of the dead in Buffalo plane crash

LAT: Karadzic to face two genocide counts in UN tribunal for Bosnia war crimes
The new indictment covers the same allegations as the existing charge sheet but reduces the number of crime scenes from 41 to 27 in an attempt to speed up what is expected to be a lengthy trial... According to Monday's decision, the first genocide count covers ethnic cleansing campaigns throughout Bosnia and the second refers only to the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre where Serb troops and paramilitaries rounded up and murdered some 8,000 Muslim men...

Karadzic will be asked to enter pleas to the new indictment at a Feb. 20 hearing. He faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if convicted.

He refused to enter pleas when he was brought before the tribunal's judges last year after his arrest on a Belgrade bus in July ended 13 years on the run from international justice. The court entered not guilty pleas on his behalf. No date has yet been set for his trial to begin.
LAT: France's top judicial body recognizes history of deporting Jews to death camps during the Holocaust; rules out any further reparations
LAT: Khmer Rouge torturer on trial
Kaing Guek Eav — better known as Duch, who headed the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh — is charged with crimes against humanity, and is this first of five defendants scheduled for long-delayed trials by the U.N.-assisted tribunal...

Duch, 66, is accused of committing or abetting a range of crimes including murder, torture and rape at S-21 prison — formerly a school — where up to 16,000 men, women and children were held and tortured, before being put to death.

He has made no formal confession. However, unlike the other four defendants, Duch "admitted or acknowledged" that many of the crimes occurred at his prison, according to the indictment from court judges. Duch, who converted to Christianity, has also asked for forgiveness from his victims.
NYT: ...amid criticism over politicized indictments and lengthy trials
Four senior Khmer Rouge officials who were in a position to give those orders are also in custody, but court officials say their trials may not start until next year. They are Nuon Chea, 82, the movement’s chief ideologue; Khieu Samphan, 76, who was head of state; Ieng Sary, 82, the former foreign minister; and his wife, Ieng Thirith, 75, a fellow member of the Khmer Rouge Central Committee...

The trials are being held by a hybrid tribunal supported by the United Nations that includes Cambodian and foreign judges and prosecutors in an awkward legal compromise that has drawn criticism from human rights advocates and legal scholars.

The chief concern is that the Cambodian members of the tribunal will not be independent of their government’s political agenda. Questions have already been raised about the Cambodian co-prosecutor’s reluctance to recommend further indictments.

Foreign and Cambodian analysts say the government, fearing that a widening circle of defendants could reach into its own ranks, wishes to limit the number of those being tried, harming the tribunal’s credibility.

AJE: UN claims Tamil Tigers abusing civilians, preventing thousands from leaving the war zone
"There are two critical things here - one, that women and children be allowed to leave the conflict zone and go to safe areas where they can be reached with support; the other one is that both sides to this fight - the government troops and the LTTE - need to ensure absolute protection for those [trapped] civilians, and that has not been happening," [James Elder, a spokesman for Unicef] said Unicef has "reliable reports" that children as young as 14 are being forced to fight for the LTTE, Elder said.
BBC: pro-Tigers humanitarian organization claims UN not fulfilling its mandate
A statement by the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO) published on the pro-rebel website TamilNet said: "The UN's inability to fulfil its obligations to civilians is explicit. Yet they don't say who is preventing them from their responsibilities."

TRO president Velupillai Sivanadiyar was quoted as saying by the website that the UN was "openly" talking about "withdrawing even the remaining few local staff from the conflict zone, completely shedding its responsibility of caring for the civilians trapped here... If they really care for the civilians, this is not the time for useless talk and accusations," Mr Sivanadiyar said.

LAT: South Koreans make money as vigilantes by selling information on crime to the government
The former gas station attendant isn't choosy. Even small crime pays big time -- more than $3,000 last month alone, he says. "It's good money. I'll never go back to pumping gas. I feel free now."

The skinny 34-year-old is among a new breed of candid-camera bugs across South Korea -- referred to as paparazzi, though their subjects are not the rich and famous, but low-grade lawbreakers, whose actions are caught on film that is peddled as evidence to government officials.

In recent years, officials here have enacted more than 60 civilian "reporting" programs that offer rewards ranging from as little as 50,000 won, or about $36, for the smallest infractions to 2 billion won, or $1.4 million, for reporting a large-scale corruption case involving government officials. (That one has yet to be made.)

The paparazzi trend has even inspired its own lexicon. There are "seonparazzi," who specialize in pursuing election law violators; "ssuparazzi," who target illegal acts of dumping garbage; and "seongparazzi," who target prostitution, which is illegal in South Korea.

PCB: FARC massacres 17 members of indigenous tribe in Colombia's Nariño state...
IHT: ...but the guerrilla group claims just 8 "executions" of "combatants"
There are about 20,000 Awa, and like many indigenous groups, they have often become enmeshed in Colombia's conflict, where warring parties including far-right militias and drug traffickers frequently exact violence on civilians they accuse of collaborating with their foes.

"Given the pressure of the operation, their responsibility in the death of numerous guerrillas and their irrefutable active participation in the conflict, they were executed," the statement on the ANNCOL site said.

The country's armed forces chief called the guerrilla claim false... In a separate communique, the army division that operates in the area accused the FARC of forcing the Awa off their reserve so it can plant coca, the basis for cocaine. Fighting over coca crops is a key reason behind the forced displacement of more than 2.8 million Colombians — an internal refugee problem second only to that of Sudan.

LAT: Tabasco state police officer killed along with 10 of his family members in Mexico
A team of gunmen in southeastern Mexico opened fire on the homes of a state police officer and his extended family, killing 12 people, including a 2-year-old and five other children, authorities said Sunday.

The shootings Saturday night in the state of Tabasco stunned an oil-rich part of Mexico that has not experienced the same level of drug-related warfare common elsewhere in the country, despite its position of strategic importance to traffickers.

The killing of police officer Carlos Reyes Lopez came days after police in Tabasco captured four gunmen and left one suspect dead. Although some speculate that the motive was retaliation, the state prosecutor's office also suggested that a personal dispute involving the Reyes Lopez family might have been behind the attack.
NYT: Hispanic day laborers easy targets for criminals in New Orleans
It is an under-the-radar crime epidemic: unarmed Hispanic workers are regularly mugged, beaten, chased, stabbed or shot, the police and the workers themselves say. The ruined homes they sometimes squat in, doubling- or quadrupling-up at night, are broken into, and they have been made to lie face down while being robbed.

They are shot when, not understanding a mugger’s command, they fail to hand over their cash quickly enough, shot while they are working on houses, and shot when they go home for the day. Some have been killed, their bodies flown home to families who had been dependent on their remittances.

NYT: Chávez wins battle over term limits

LAT: strikes against living costs and elite privilege turn violent in Martinique and Guadeloupe
Police detained about 50 people after coming under a barrage of stones as they tried to take down barricades on the island of Guadeloupe, said Nicolas Desforges, the island's top government official.

On the sister island of Martinique, 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Guadeloupe, police said that as many as 10,000 demonstrators marched through the narrow streets of the capital to protest spiraling food prices and denounce the business elite.

Government offices, schools, banks and stores have been shuttered for most of the past 12 days as islanders demand lower prices and higher wages...

Living costs are high on the French islands, which depend heavily on imports and use the euro. The strike also is exposing racial and class tensions on islands where a largely white elite that makes up 1 percent of the population controls most businesses.

AJE: Pakistan to restore sharia law in Pakistan's Swat Valley, in peace move toward pro-Taliban rebels there...
The agreement was reached after talks in Peshawar between members of Tahrik-e-Nafiz Shariat Muhammadi and officials of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) government on Monday... Officials gave few details of the kind of sharia they were planning to implement in the Malakand region, which includes Swat Valley, but said that laws that fail to comply with Islamic texts would be suspended... The Pakistani government has also agreed its troops will refrain from launching military operations in Swat as part of the deal.

The US, which is battling Taliban and al-Qaeda groups in the area, has previously said that such deals only serve to allow fighters to regroup. A senior US defence department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the deal a "negative development"...

[C]ritics expressed doubt that the deal would stop the violence in the region, pointing out that similar agreements in the past had broken down, the latest one in August, and only allowed fighters to regroup and rearm.

Shuja Nawaz, a strategic analyst with the South Asia Centre, told Al Jazeera that the agreement could prove problematic for Pakistan in future. "It will mean that the government is ceding territory to the Taliban, which will be a repeat of what happened when Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was in power in 1994 and a number of districts in Swat and Malakand were handed over to essentially the same group so they could impose their rather convoluted view of sharia on those districts."
WP: ...despite past failures, hope for new, more fair justice system
In announcing the agreement, Pakistani officials asserted that the adoption of sharia law would bring swift and fair justice to the Swat Valley, where people have long complained of legal corruption and delays. They said the new system would have "nothing in common" with the draconian rule of the Taliban militia that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, during which thieves' hands were amputated and adulterers were stoned to death.

"There was a vacuum . . . in the legal system. The people demanded this and they deserve it," said Amir Haider Khan Hoti, chief minister of the North-West Frontier Province. The new system will include an appeals process, something the Afghan Taliban justice system did not allow for.
LAT: meanwhile, Predator strike in South Waziristan targets leader of Taliban in Pakistan...
NYT: ...and the Taliban extends its own reach to Swati immigrants in the US
Pakistani immigrants from the Swat Valley, where the Taliban have been battling Pakistani security forces since 2007, say some of their families are being singled out for threats, kidnapping and even murder by Taliban forces, who view them as potential American collaborators and lucrative sources of ransom. Some immigrants also say they, too, have been threatened in the United States by the Taliban or its sympathizers, and some immigrants say they have been attacked or kidnapped when they have returned home...

Before the start of the Taliban’s incursion into the region in 2007, Swat was treasured as a vacation spot, particularly among Pashtuns, the ethnic group that dominates the region. Known as “the Switzerland of Pakistan,” it has snowy peaks, fruit orchards, lakes and flower-covered meadows.

But the tourism industry has evaporated amid the Taliban’s uprising, and by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of residents have abandoned their homes, fleeing for Mingora or other regions of Pakistan. Immigrants have been coming from the Swat Valley for years, well before it became a front in the war between the Taliban and Pakistani government troops. There are an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 people from the Swat Valley in the United States, about half of whom live in the New York metropolitan region...
WP: US played important role in bringing together Indian and Pakistani intelligence in investigation of Mumbai attacks...
In the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the CIA orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing the two former enemies to quietly share highly sensitive evidence while the Americans served as neutral arbiters, according to U.S. and foreign government sources familiar with the arrangement.

The exchanges, which began days after the deadly assault in late November, gradually helped the two sides overcome mutual suspicions and paved the way for Islamabad's announcement last week acknowledging that some of the planning for the attack had occurred on Pakistani soil, the sources said.

The intelligence went well beyond the public revelations about the 10 Mumbai terrorists, and included sophisticated communications intercepts and an array of physical evidence detailing how the gunmen and their supporters planned and executed their three-day killing spree in the Indian port city. Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks with gleanings from its networks, the sources said. The U.S. role was described in interviews with Pakistani officials and confirmed by U.S. sources with detailed knowledge of the arrangement. The arrangement is ongoing, and it is unknown whether it will continue after the Mumbai case is settled.
WP: ...which were indeed planned in Pakistan, admits the government

NYT: Taliban commander killed in Afghanistan
[Five months ago], Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, had intervened to release Mr. [Maulavi Ghulam] Dastagir from jail, where he was being held on charges of conspiring with the Taliban.

To many Afghans, the ambush seemed to vividly confirm one of the most biting complaints here: that the corrupt and the criminal often find a way to get out of jail. And it did it in a way that seemed to implicate the highest authority in the land...

But in the wilds of Afghanistan, fortunes can change in an instant. On Sunday night, five bombs fell on a compound in Badghis Province near the Turkmenistan border, where Mr. Dastagir and a half-dozen fellow Taliban commanders were meeting...

Mr. Karzai’s biggest mistake may have been failing to discover that some of the tribal elders who sought Mr. Dastagir’s release had been threatened and forced by the Taliban to seek the pardon, as some later admitted.
LAT: and new US troops deployed in conflictive region
The new unit — the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division — moved into Logar and Wardak provinces last month, and the soldiers from Fort Drum, N.Y., are now stationed in combat outposts throughout the provinces... Militants have attacked several patrols with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, including one ambush by 30 insurgents, Lt. Col. Steve Osterholzer, the brigade spokesman, said.

"In every case our vehicles returned with overwhelming fire," Osterholzer said. "We have not suffered anything more than a few bruises, while several insurgents have been killed."...

[Col. David B. Haight, commander of the 3rd Brigade] said he believes the increase of militant activity in the two provinces is not ideologically based but stems from poor Afghans being enticed into fighting by their need for money. Quoting the governor of Logar, the colonel called it an "economic war." Afghan officials "don't believe it's hardcore al-Qaida operatives that you're never going to convert anyway," Haight said. "They believe that it's the guys who say, 'Hey you want $100 to shoot an RPG at a Humvee when it goes by,' and the guy says, 'Yeah I'll do that, because I've got to feed my family.'"

Still, Haight said there are hardcore fighters in the region, some of them allied with Jalaludin Haqqani and his son Siraj, a fighting family with a long history in Afghanistan. The two militant leaders are believed to be in Pakistan.
NYT: UN says Afghan civilian casualties increased by 40% in 2008
More than half of the 2,118 casualties were caused by militants’ roadside bombs and suicide attacks, but many were from airstrikes and other actions by NATO and American forces battling the resurgent Taliban, the report said... The insurgents were blamed for 1,160, or 55 percent, of the deaths — an increase of 65 percent over similar attacks in 2007, the report said. The report said 828 deaths, or 39 percent, were caused by pro-government forces, an increase of almost a third over the 2007 level.
AJE: as Holbrooke, in Afghanistan, signs an agreement with Karzai to include an Afghan delegation in review process of US policy
LAT: ...and the GAO reviews (negatively) US control of weapons in Afghanistan
LAT: on Russia's role in Afghanistan
In recent days, Russian officials have rushed forward to offer logistical help to NATO troops in Afghanistan -- at the same time dipping into a dwindling budget to offer impoverished Kyrgyzstan more than $2 billion in an apparent payoff for ejecting a U.S. military base crucial to the war against the Taliban.

In fact, Russia is tugged between two strong, conflicting impulses. It distrusts U.S. motives, especially when it comes to America's penetration of former Soviet states. But Moscow's sense of invulnerability appears shaken by falling oil prices and the precarious economy. Many analysts believe the Kremlin is looking for an opening to make nice with the West. Nearby Afghanistan, where instability also spells danger for Russia, presents a handy opening.

And so Russian officials offer help with one hand, lash out with the other.

NYT: Israel-Gaza cease-fire talks slow but steady
The new prospective accord, again being mediated by Egypt, is aimed at rebuilding Gaza after the war and involves both reconstruction and reconciliation between Hamas and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, according to Ismael Ridwan, a Hamas spokesman, who spoke by telephone after extensive talks between Egyptian and Hamas officials.

He said among the materials that would be allowed to flow into Gaza in the new arrangement were cement and steel, which Egypt would monitor. Those materials are desperately needed for rebuilding, but the agreement would not allow pipes, cables and chemicals that Israel fears could be used for bombs.

Israel wanted to include the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, seized and held by Hamas since the summer of 2006, but Hamas said that would happen only in a separate, if linked, deal that frees hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
LAT: war crimes investigations may focus on events in Khozaa...
Weeks after Israel declared a unilateral end to its offensive in the Gaza Strip, the aftermath still burns in Khozaa, a farm town of 11,000 in the south of the territory. Chunks of white phosphorus still lie scattered throughout neighborhoods, buried in dirt and sand; when excavated, they immediately ignite and spew noxious smoke that smells vaguely of garlic.

As the International Criminal Court weighs a war crimes investigation of the Gaza offensive, the experience of Khozaa could be a key part in the evidence. It was here that Israeli troops staged a series of incursions from Jan. 11 to 13, facing off against local militant fighters and leaving a trail of accusations and recriminations in their wake.
LAT: ...as HRW examines evidence of white phosphorus use
On Jan. 24, a research team from Human Rights Watch visited Khozaa. Researcher Marc Garlasco, a weapons expert, examined the markings on the artillery shell that killed Hannan Najar. "This is clearly white phosphorus," said Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official. "See those markings? PB. This was made in Pine Bluff, Arkansas."

In the streets and yards around Najar's home, Garlasco found remnants of several more phosphorus shells. Khozaa, he concluded, had seen the heaviest use of the controversial munitions in the three-week Israeli offensive. Garlasco reconstructed the X-shaped tray that holds 160 phosphorus wafers per shell. When the tray ejects, the wafers disperse over a 150- to 250-yard radius, depending on the height of the airburst.

The burning phosphorus puts out a dense white fog and causes intense chemical burns if it comes in contact with human skin. Its use as an offensive weapon in residential areas is internationally banned. Israel isn't a signatory to the phosphorus treaty, but in response to questions from The Times, the Israeli military released a statement saying that it "only uses weapons permitted by law."

NYT: support for UN tribunal investigating 2005 assassination of Lebanese prime minister
A huge rally on Saturday marking the fourth anniversary of the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri turned into a show of support for a United Nations court that will pursue the case. Anti-Syrian politicians also urged supporters who engulfed central Beirut to vote for them in force in a parliamentary election in June that will decide whether their coalition will retain its slim majority, or lose to an alliance led by the militant group Hezbollah...

The United Nations tribunal is due to open in The Hague on March 1... After more than three years of inquiries in Lebanon, a United Nations investigative team has yet to identify any suspects. The team leader, Daniel Bellemare, has said the opening of the tribunal does not mean that legal proceedings will start immediately.

Since Rafik Hariri’s killing, Lebanon has suffered a wave of political assassinations, mostly of anti-Syrian figures.

Mr. Hariri’s killing intensified anti-Syrian sentiment, helping Saad Hariri’s alliance win the last legislative election in 2005.

LAT: Hezbollah defends right to (anti-Israeli) air defense system
LAT: Iran reorganizes military to build up air defense too

NYT: moderation in new Saudi appointments weakens hard-liners
King Abdullah removed the chief of the feared religious police and a conservative cleric who declared last fall that it was permissible to kill the owners of television stations that broadcast immoral content, the Saudi Press Agency reported. Also, for the first time in the kingdom, he appointed a woman to serve as a deputy cabinet minister, choosing a respected technocrat who will preside over girls’ education.

The changes are seen as an effort to moderate the power of hard-line clerics in Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment, which wields tremendous power but has come under strong criticism in recent years. The intolerance of the cane-wielding religious police, known as the mutawa, has become a special source of popular anger...

The changes announced by the official news agency included a reconfiguration of the Grand Ulema Commission, an influential body of religious scholars from all branches of Sunni Islam. In the past, the commission had been dominated by clerics from the austere Hanbali school, but now moderates will be represented. There were also changes to the Saudi military establishment.

LAT: high unemployment of young men threatens stability in Iraq
Overall, the country's unemployment rate is 18%, but an additional 10% of the labor force is employed part time and wanting to work more, said the first Iraq Labor Force Analysis, which cited falling oil prices and a weak public sector as major problems facing the nation. Among its findings: 28% of males ages 15 to 29 are unemployed, 17% of women have jobs, and most of the 450,000 Iraqis entering the job market this year won't find work "without a concerted effort to boost the private sector."....

The findings also bode ill for government vows to find civilian employment for nearly 100,000 Sons of Iraq, the mainly Sunni Arab paramilitary force, many of whom once supported the insurgency but who have been paid about $300 a month to bolster security alongside U.S. and Iraqi forces.
LAT: Shiite pilgrims face female suicide bomber in Iraq; 35 dead
NYT: Iraqi tourism and culture ministries debate reopening of the National Museum
The museum has undergone extensive renovations since the violence in 2003, with assistance from other countries, including Italy and the United States. Meanwhile, the repatriation of its looted treasures has continued, most recently with three objects that ended up in Peru, including a letter written on a tablet. The returning holdings, though, appear to have overwhelmed the museum and its staff. The Culture Ministry’s statement said the museum had effectively become “a large warehouse” for unregistered items, adding that allowing the public to visit could jeopardize “priceless relics.”...

The discord underscores the conflicting aims of the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. It has called the reopening of the museum, along with the preservation of archaeological sites, a high priority. But hopes of reviving a cultural institution and tourism have been tempered by declining resources and the danger that is still palpable in Baghdad, despite a significant drop in violence in the past year.

NYT: hunger-striking British Guantánamo detainee, whose lawyer begged for his release due to health reasons last week, to be released
WP: cases of four Guantánamo detainees reveal problems for Obama
As officials try to decide who can be released and who can be charged, they face a series of murky questions: what to do when the evidence is contradictory or tainted by allegations of torture; whether to press charges in military or federal court; what to do if prisoners are deemed dangerous but there is little or no evidence against them that would stand up in court; and where to send prisoners who might be killed or tortured if they are returned home.

Answering those questions, said current and former officials, is a massive undertaking that has been hampered by a lack of cooperation among agencies and by records that are physically scattered and lacking key details.

It is "a tough, unenviable task with imperfect solutions," said Sarah E. Mendelson, director of the human rights and security initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of a report on closing Guantanamo Bay. "But they need to get fully underway now," she said, reviewing files, marshaling evidence and finding countries willing to take those detainees who can be released.

Approximately 60 detainees who have been cleared for release by the Bush administration remain at the camp. An additional 21 detainees are facing charges before military commissions and are almost certain to face trial in federal court, courts-martial or some new version of the current system of military commissions. Nearly 60 others could be prosecuted, the Pentagon has said, although many legal experts say that is unrealistic because of a lack of evidence and other problems. That leaves the fate of roughly 100 prisoners unclear.

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photographs of 2006 Congo election, from a current exhibit at the SF MOMA