alternatives [packing heat]

NYT: updates on protests in Iran

BBC: troops, Islamists fighting in northern Nigeria
Nigeria's security services have been flooding Maiduguri, the city worst affected by the violence, the BBC's Caroline Duffield reports.

They surrounded the area housing the headquarters of Mohammed Yusuf's group, known as Boko Haram. The group is also referred to locally as the "Taliban", though it has no known links to the Afghan militants.
AP: thousands are displaced
Soldiers in tanks and armored cars besieged the shelled compound of a radical Islamist sect and sporadic gunfire exploded as hundreds of innocents fled on the third day of fighting in Nigeria's northern city of Maiduguri.

Relief official Apollus Jediel said about 1,000 people had abandoned their homes Wednesday, joining 3,000 displaced this week in four states caught up in the violence...

Reporters on the ground say the trouble started with militants attacking a police station in Bauchi state Sunday. Then they attacked police in Kano, Yobe and Borno, of which Maiduguri is the capital.

But President Umaru Yar'Adua disputed that, saying troops struck first.

''I want to emphasize that this is not an inter-religious crisis and it is not the Taliban group that attacked the security agents first, no. It was as a result of a security information gathered on their intention ... to launch a major attack,'' the Nigerian leader told journalists before he left Tuesday night for a state visit to Brazil.

WP: meanwhile, in Niger Delta, situation tenuous
Two weeks before the government is set to begin disarming as many as 10,000 militants in a 60-day amnesty program, it has revealed little about how it will reintegrate participants into society or address the demands for increased development and oil revenue that Niger Delta militants say drive their campaign of attacking oil installations and holding foreigners hostage.

The offer's vagueness is fueling fears that it will fail to lure militants and instead trigger a full-scale military offensive that could ensnare civilians living on the remote creeks where militants keep their camps.

BBC: Taylor remembered
HuffPo: (Rob Blair): and defended
Meanwhile, to many Liberians, Taylor remains a hero. For foreigners like myself, this is not an easy thing to understand. At times, his popularity seems a byproduct of his savagery. During the Liberian civil war, recruits for Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) were often heard chanting a grim refrain: "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I'll fight for him." A decade later, this mystique has not dissipated in many pockets of the country. While we in the international peanut gallery gape at the spectacle of the trial - a murderer defending indefensible acts - many Liberians continue to endorse Taylor and his charismatic brutality.

Why?

NYT: Islamists in the borderlands between Somalia and Kenya
The Shabab has already penetrated refugee camps inside Kenya, according to camp elders, luring away dozens of young men with promises of paradise — and $300 each. It has carried out cross-border attacks, kidnapping an outspoken cleric in May from a refugee camp 50 miles inside Kenya. Last Wednesday, in one of its boldest cross-border moves yet, a squad of uniformed, heavily armed Shabab fighters stormed into a Kenyan school in a remote town, rounding up all the children and telling them to quit their classes and join the jihad.

“If these guys can come in with their guns and uniforms in broad daylight,” said one of the teachers at the school, “they must be among us.”...

The raging war in the country next door, between Somalia’s weak transitional government and the Shabab, is rapidly becoming a proxy war — with Western arms and money keeping the transitional government alive, while Arab and Pakistani jihadists with links to Al Qaeda fight for the Shabab.
BBC: meanwhile, EU to train Somali anti-piracy force

NYT: redrawing boundaries in the Sudan
The new ruling includes important concessions for both sides, giving the government in the north control of the region’s richest oil fields, but consolidating control of the remaining region under the Ngok Dinka, an ethnic group loyal to southern Sudan and likely to vote to join it in a coming referendum.

Both sides in the conflict — President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s government in the north, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which controls the semiautonomous south — said Wednesday that they would accept the ruling, which was hailed by representatives of the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.

LAT: interview with Gen. McChrystal on strategy
[Q:] Do you think there has been too much focus on counter-terrorism?

[A:] I think there hasn't been enough focus on counterinsurgency. I am certainly not in a position to criticize counter-terrorism. But at this point in the war, in Afghanistan, it is most important to focus on almost classic counterinsurgency.

I don't want people to think it is inflexible; it should be uniquely adapted to the conditions in each part of the country...

[Q:] Are there safe havens in Afghanistan for insurgents?

[A:] It would be how you define a safe haven. If you said a safe haven is a location where you are never under threat, you can't be bombed, you can't be attacked, then you could define that there are no safe havens in Afghanistan.

But I would tell you practically speaking, there are areas that are controlled by Taliban forces. There are places ANSF [Afghan] and coalition forces cannot go routinely, insurgents are free to operate and free to impose a shadow government. While they are not typical safe havens, the insurgency is more comfortable than we want them to be. And so over time those are areas we intend to reduce.

[Q:] But those areas are not the first priority? If the population is sparse or rural you may wait on that.

[A:] Absolutely it is a case of prioritizing. Our intent is to prioritize first on those areas where we have significant population centers; in some cases those are also places with a heavy insurgent presence. But it is to protect the population. If the insurgents are in very remote areas with very little population, they don't have access to what they need for success, which is population. So we will seek to separate them from the population.

WP: recruiting and training police in southern Afghanistan
"It's a challenge to get people down here," said Hix, adding that units that deploy to southern Afghanistan often suffer higher rates of unauthorized absences. "The guys think there is a monster down here." Drug use in the forces is another problem, according to U.S. and Afghan officers. "We lose 5 to 10 percent of every class in the police force to opiate use," Hix said.

Training the police and army poses other challenges, he said. Police officers and soldiers -- the vast majority of them illiterate villagers -- require extensive training, but during a war only so many can be pulled away from their jobs at any one time.

Building training and other facilities for the forces and providing them with equipment remain slow because of red tape and contracting rules, he said. It takes 120 to 180 days to start work on a training facility and often more than a year to 18 months to field new equipment, such as the 1,000 Humvees on order for the Afghan army in the south. "We can't swing the money cannon quickly enough to adapt," Hix said.

Still, Hix said, the Afghan forces have made significant progress in the south. In the past year, the training capacity for regional police has doubled and the rate of those absent without leave has halved.

Despite the problems, Hix said that replacing foreign forces with homegrown ones is the only viable long-term solution, in part because the latter cost far less. "We should not be substituting U.S. troops for Afghans, which is what we are effectively doing now . . . in trying to secure and stabilize Afghanistan," he wrote in an e-mail.

AJE: Taliban distributes code of conduct
The book, with 13 chapters and 67 articles, lays out what one of the most secretive organisations in the world today, can and cannot do.

It talks of limiting suicide attacks, avoiding civilian casualties and winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the local civilian population.

Al Jazeera's James Bays, reporting from the capital, Kabul, said every fighter is being issued the pocket book entitled "The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Rules for Mujahideen".

AP: ceasefire agreement reached with small Taliban unit in Afghanistan
Seyamak Herawi, a spokesman in President Hamid Karzai's office, said the agreement will allow a road construction project to move forward and permit presidential candidates to open offices in the region ahead of an Aug. 20 election...

The agreement covers the Bala Morghab district of northwestern Badghis province, an area where the Afghan government has little or no control. The cease-fire, agreed to Saturday, was reached with the help of tribal elders.

Afghan election coverage
WP: Hazaras, a minority ethnic group, may be a bloc swing vote
During various periods in history, the Shiite Hazaras have been forced from their lands and slaughtered in bouts of ethnic or religious "cleansing." In more recent times, they have often been relegated to lowly jobs as cart-pullers or domestic servants...

But the group now stands poised to play a decisive role in the Aug. 20 presidential and provincial council elections.
NPR: an interview with Holbrooke
NPR: the leading opposition: Abdullah

NYT: landowners won't return to Swat
About four dozen landlords were singled out over the past two years by the militants in a strategy intended to foment a class struggle. In some areas, the Taliban rewarded the landless peasants with profits of the crops of the landlords.

Some resentful peasants even signed up as the Taliban’s shock troops. How many of those peasants stayed with the militants during the army offensive of the last several months, and how many moved to the refugee camps, was difficult to assess, Pakistani analysts said...

The landlords, many of whom raised sizable militias to fight the Taliban themselves last year, say the army is again failing to provide enough protection if they return.

Another deterrent to returning, they say, is that the top Taliban leadership, responsible for taking aim at the landlords and spreading the spoils among the landless, remains unscathed.

If it continues, the landlords’ absence will have lasting ramifications not only for Swat, but also for Pakistan’s most populated province, Punjab, where the landholdings are vast, and the militants are gaining power, said Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to Mr. Holbrooke, the American envoy.

“If the large landowners are kept out by the Taliban, the result will in effect be property redistribution,” Mr. Nasr said. “That will create a vested community of support for the Taliban that will see benefit in the absence of landlords.”

NYT: settlements in West Bank not so militant
But appearances are deceiving. Modiin Illit and its sister community, Beitar Illit, are entirely ultra-Orthodox, a world apart, one of strict religious observance and study. They offer surprising potential for compromise.

Unlike settlers who believe they are continuing the historic Zionist mission of reclaiming the Jewish homeland, most ultra-Orthodox do not consider themselves settlers or Zionists and express no commitment to being in the West Bank, so their growth in these settlement towns, situated just inside the pre-1967 boundary, could be redirected westward to within Israel.

Their location also means it may be possible, in negotiations about a future Palestinian state, to redraw the boundary so the settlements are inside Israel, with little land lost to the Palestinians. And the two towns alone account for half of all settler growth, so if removed from the equation, the larger settler challenge takes on more manageable proportions.

WP: straddling the Arab-Kurdish conflict in Iraq
Louis Khno is a city councilman whose city is beyond his control. In his barricaded streets are militiamen -- in baseball caps and jeans, wielding Kalashnikov rifles, with the safeties switched off. They answer to someone else. Leaders of his police force give their loyalty to their ethnic brethren -- be they Kurd or Arab. Clergy in the town pledge themselves to the former. Khno and his colleagues to the latter.
WP: Iraqi troops raid Iranian camp


AJE: ceasefire in the Philippines
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) called the ceasefire on Saturday, two days after Gloria Arroyo, the Philippines president, ordered the army to suspend its offensives in the south in an attempt to restart peace talks.

An order was issued to the estimated 12,000 members Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces to "support and co-operate with efforts to revitalise and strengthen ceasefire mechanisms on the ground"...

The MILF broke a five-year-old ceasefire in August last year and launched attacks across the southern island of Mindanao, where they have been waging a bloody war since 1978...

The two sides are expected to meet next week in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to prepare for the resumption of talks and the return of about 60 monitors from Malaysia, Brunei, Libya and Japan, who pulled out in November 2008...

Mohaqher Iqbal, the head of the separatists' peace panel, told the Reuters news agency that his group would discuss government plans to return more than 300,000 displaced families to their homes before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in late August.

AJE: attack in southern Thailand blamed on separatist group
The attacks come amid a spike in violence during a five-year insurgency in the area that has left at least 3,700 people dead.

Since last month, at least 40 people have been killed and more than 100 wounded in violence in the region.

The deadliest recent incident was the killing of 10 Muslims at a mosque in Narathiwat in early June.

Most of the violence in Thailand's south has been blamed by authorities on Muslim armed separatist groups.

However, no group has claimed responsibility for the latest attacks.

The fighters in Thailand's southern provinces have not specifically stated their motives, but they are thought to be fighting to establish an independent state in the three Muslim-majority provinces.

The latest rebellion in the former ethnic Malay sultanate began in January 2004 when fighters raided an army base, killing four soldiers.

WSJ: the suspension of democracy in Honduras: anticipated and actual
But in fact, a close look at Mr. Zelaya's time in office reveals a strongly antidemocratic streak. He placed himself in a growing cadre of elected Latin presidents who have tried to stay in power past their designated time to carry out a populist-leftist agenda. These leaders, led by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, have used the region's historic poverty and inequality to gain support from the poor, but created deep divisions in their societies by concentrating power in their own hands and increasing government control over the economy, media and other sectors.
NYT: Zelaya poised to return
Since Mr. Zelaya arrived [in Nicaragua] on Friday to taunt the de facto government that exiled him a month ago, hundreds of Hondurans have answered his call to join him just across the border in Nicaragua.

Arriving here in mud-caked jeans and ripped shirts, after sleeping on soaked mountaintops and hiding among the coffee plants from patrolling helicopters, they have set up camps in the border towns of Las Manos and Ocotal.

They are teachers, students, the self-employed and laborers. Many said they came to support Mr. Zelaya because his policies benefit the poor...

The de facto government in Honduras responded to Mr. Zelaya’s presence by calling for a 24-hour curfew in the border departments that began Friday. At checkpoints on major roads to the border, soldiers stopped traffic to conduct searches while more soldiers and police officers in riot gear blockaded roads before the border.

The soldiers have turned back hundreds of protesters.

LAT: Swedish rockets sold to Venezuelans found in the FARC's possession; Colombia 'angry'
Sweden has asked Venezuela for an explanation of how the weapons ended up in FARC hands.

The disclosure does not prove that the Chavez government sold or willingly gave them to rebels, said Jane's Americas analyst Anna Gilmour. Venezuelan arsenals, she said, are notorious for "seepage" by corrupt officers, who resell arms and munitions as contraband.

LAT: eh, global warming helped the Incas expand their empire?
A several-degree increase in temperature allowed the Incas to move higher into the Andes mountains, opening up new farmland and providing a water source through the gradual melting of glaciers at the top of those mountains, paleoecologist Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima reported online Monday in the journal Climate of the Past.

WP: at a loss for how to fight the cartels in Mexico
Mexico, nearly twice Colombia's size, faces a more daunting challenge, many officials and analysts said , in part because it sits adjacent to the United States, the largest illegal drug market in the world. In addition, at least seven major cartels are able to recruit from Mexico's swelling ranks of impoverished youth and thousands of disenfranchised soldiers and police officers...

"No one has told us what alternative we have," said Interior Minister Fernando Gómez Mont, gently slapping his palm on a table during an interview. "We are committed to enduring this wave of violence. We are strengthening our ability to protect the innocent victims of this process, which is the most important thing. We will not look the other way."

Drug-related deaths during the 2 1/2 years of Calderon's administration passed 12,000 this month. Rather than shrinking or growing weaker, the Mexican cartels are using their wealth and increasing power to expand into Central America, cocaine-producing regions of the Andes and maritime trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific, according to law enforcement authorities.

In Mexico, neither high-profile arrests nor mass troop deployments have stopped the cartels from unleashing spectacular acts of violence.


NYT: studying soldiers' brains to answer questions on sensing danger
Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do...

Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do...

“Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”...

The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.
WP: returning brigade seems exceptionally violence-prone
Soldiers returning from Iraq after serving with a Fort Carson, Colo., combat brigade have exhibited an exceptionally high rate of criminal behavior in their home towns, carrying out a string of killings and other offenses that the ex-soldiers attribute to lax discipline and episodes of indiscriminate killing during their grueling deployment, according to a six-month investigation by the Colorado Springs Gazette newspaper.

During their deployment, some soldiers killed civilians at random -- in some cases at point-blank range -- used banned stun guns on captives, pushed people off bridges, loaded weapons with illegal hollow-point bullets, abused drugs and occasionally mutilated the bodies of Iraqis, according to accounts the Gazette attributed to soldiers who said they witnessed the events. The unit's casualty rate was double the average for Army combat teams deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the paper said.

WP: (EJ Dionne) get rid of metal detectors for pro-gun senators!
Congress seems to think that gun restrictions are for wimps. It voted this year to allow people to bring their weapons into national parks, and pro-gun legislators have pushed for the right to carry in taverns, colleges and workplaces. Shouldn't Congress set an example in its own workplace?

WP: projecting nationalism back in time: Macedonians claim Alexander the Great as their own

++
GDN: come out, come out: the gay games in Copenhagen

untold horror [only the beginning]

NYRB: the Holocaust was worse than you thought
The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not...

By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden—were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust...

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived...

All in all, as many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas, but they were killed by bullets in easterly locations that are blurred in painful remembrance...By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist...

In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)
NYRB: (podcast interview with historian Tim Snyder)

Gdn: alleged Nazi death facility guard to stand trial in Germany
Demjanjuk has claimed he was a Red Army soldier who was a prisoner of war, and that he never hurt anyone.

But Nazi-era documents obtained by US justice authorities and shared with German prosecutors include a photo ID card identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor camp and information that he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki in Poland.

BBC: violence in the Northern Caucuses

AP: presidential elections held in the DRC, opposition boycotts
Few took part in demonstrations called by the opposition in the lead-up to the vote, but there was apathy among many of the 2.2 million eligible voters.

Mr. Sassou-Nguesso, who has attracted large crowds at campaign rallies and told his followers not to fear political violence, voted under a heavy security presence.

He has been in and out of power since a 1979 coup, losing multiparty elections in 1992 before sweeping back into power in a war that destroyed much of the capital, Brazzaville, in 1997. He won the election in 2002, when his main rivals were barred or withdrew, citing irregularities.

LAT: contemporary child slavery in Ghana


LAT: militarization and murder in Mexican cities
The offensive [against drug cartels] has exposed corruption so widespread that key institutions, from police forces to city halls, appear rotten to the core. And a battered society has grown increasingly worried about the effects of the massive military deployment on its democracy...

By disrupting the cartels' operations, the offensive intensified turf struggles among the traffickers. About 11,000 people, some of them bystanders, have died in the violence...

More than 45,000 troops have been deployed in these 2 1/2 years to hot spots across the nation. It's not just boots on the ground: Army generals and colonels have taken command of law enforcement in seven states and, from Juarez to Tijuana to Cancun, have supplanted civilian authority...

In November, killers were able to break into the police radio frequency and play narcocorrido music [a style of music associated with, and often commissioned by, narcotraffickers] as a sign an officer had been killed, or was about to be. Now, officials are developing a secure radio system...

Troops were dispatched in February this year to the northern border state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico's wealthiest and long a symbol of relative stability. Traffickers quickly mobilized low-level dealers and their families to protest the military presence and to create the impression that the traffickers had a broad social base. Monterrey, the capital, and other cities were paralyzed for days...

A politician from the Monterrey area's richest district was caught on tape describing the power of the drug lords. Mauricio Fernandez is heard saying that the area was relatively peaceful because the Beltran Leyva cartel wanted it that way.

"Their families live here," he said. "You don't think it's the police [that maintain order], do you?"


WP: Marines with a new mandate in Helmand
But employing U.S. forces to restore a sense of normalcy in a country ravaged by 30 years of war involves a series of assumptions and a set of challenges that are already proving more complicated than mounting hunt-and-kill missions against the Taliban. Will residents want the Marines to stick around? Will those who do be convinced that the Americans will stay until security improves? Will residents trust the local leaders -- including the police chief, whom one Marine officer calls "the Tony Soprano of Nawa" -- to run the town better than the Taliban?...

Although he is now in a different country, with different traditions and a different insurgency, [Nicholson, the troop commander] nonetheless sees lessons from Anbar that can be applied to Helmand. At the top of his list is the need for more indigenous security forces...

Nicholson had wanted his troops to conduct every patrol and man every checkpoint with members of the Afghan National Army, largely because people here take less umbrage at being searched by fellow Afghans, and Afghan soldiers have a keener sense of who ought to be searched. But plans to partner with the Afghan army have been scaled back because the Marines have been allotted only about 400 Afghan soldiers instead of the several thousand Nicholson had sought.

He has been promised more troops, but they will not start rolling in until next year. In the interim, he has asked his superiors for permission to arm young men and train them to serve as a local protection force. It is similar to the Sons of Iraq initiative the Marines created in Anbar that resulted in locals turning against foreign fighters in the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But senior commanders have shown no sign of approving the request. They feel Helmand has too many overlapping tribal rivalries. Arming groups of young men could exacerbate tensions and lead some factions to turn to the Taliban for protection.

NYT: more on Tamils still in IDP/internment camps
“We were liberated,” [a Tamil civil servant] said in an interview at one of the sprawling, closed camps set up here to house those displaced in the war against the rebel group, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. “Now we are prisoners again. I lost everything in this war. The Tigers killed my son. I lost my property. Now I have lost my freedom, too.”

Hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain locked in camps almost entirely off limits to journalists, human rights investigators and political leaders. The Sri Lankan government says that the people in the camps are a security risk because Tamil Tiger fighters are hiding among them...

“Perversely, if we keep helping we become the jailer of these people,” said one diplomat from a country that is helping pay for the relief effort.

AJE: Naxalites attack police in Chhattisgarh, India

truth and relevance [hearing what you expect]

HuffPo, Rob Blair: Liberians' takes on the Sirleaf-TRC controversy
Sirleaf is under fire, it seems, because she failed to repent her actions, while more sordid characters were dropped from the TRC's list because they expressed remorse. Among them is the notorious Joshua Blahyi, alias Gen. Butt Naked, a warlord-cum-preacher known for his brutality and his penchant for entering battle wearing nothing but boots. Blahyi's compunction outweighed, in the TRC's peculiar calculus, the more than 20,000 deaths he caused during the war. Asks Kristof: "Can anybody explain?"...

I posed Kristof's question to five Liberians living in Monrovia. I picked individuals from disparate backgrounds to try to capture some of the variety in Liberian views on the TRC. Everyone I interviewed agreed that Sirleaf supported Taylor, but disagreed on just about everything else. These are some of their insights.

Making Sense of Darfur, Alex de Waal: on interviewing, listening, and understanding (via wronging rights)
I have observed the same person say completely different things in different contexts. It’s not deceit or even contradiction: it’s that courtesy demands saying certain things, context constrains what can be said, and the ways in which questions are posed—or discussions left unfinished—means that only one part of a complicated picture emerges. In some cases, political instructions dictate that certain things are said in a formal exchange, and other messages passed when the proceedings have formally closed.
Sudan commentary: Kristof responds to Mamdani (via Chris Blattman)

Boston Review: development debate featuring Collier, Miguel, Easterly, Diamond, Krasner, Birdsall, and McGovern (via Chris Blattman)
Collier:
Chad is not alone. It is one of a group of about 60 small, impoverished, post-colonial countries that “came unnatural into the world.” With neither the social unity needed for cooperation, nor the size to reap the benefits of larger scale, they are structurally unable to provide the public goods—such as security—that are critical for decent quality of life and imperative for economic development. They have diverged from the rest of mankind. They will never tap their vast reservoir of frustrated human potential unless the international community, at least for a time, supplies basic public goods that go beyond the typical aid agenda. This, stated baldly, is the thesis of my new book, Wars, Guns, and Votes. It is a troubling thesis. I have come to it reluctantly, and the international community has shied away from it, as have the societies of the bottom billion themselves.

Why is outside intervention necessary? The countries of the bottom billion are, paradoxically, too large to be nations, yet too small to be states. They are too large to be nations because, with rare exceptions, too many different peoples, with too many distinct ethnic and religious identities, live in them. This is not because they have large populations: on the contrary, the typical bottom-billion country has only a few million people. But these populations have yet to forge a strong sense of national identity that overrides older sub-national ethnic and religious identities. Considerable research shows that where sub-national identities predominate, it is more difficult for people to cooperate in providing public goods.

Easterly:
I have been troubled by Paul Collier’s research and policy advocacy for some time. In this essay he goes even further in directions I argued were dangerous in his previous work. Collier wants to de facto recolonize the “bottom billion,” and he justifies his position with research that is based on one logical fallacy, one mistaken assumption, and a multitude of fatally flawed statistical exercises...

Yet even if Collier got valid correlations, which he has not, correlation does not equal causation, which he also fails to address. As Daron Acemoglu of MIT commented on Collier’s earlier research on civil wars: “The correlations that are interpreted as causal effects are really no more than correlations. . . . It is too early to jump to policy conclusions.”

Collier:
Nothing could better illustrate the true nature of the disagreement about peacekeeping than Easterly’s accusation of colonialism. This accusation is founded on coarse thought, not statistical rigor. Colonialism was an oppressive system in which non-democratic empires conquered territories and ran them according to the interest of their own elites. International peacekeeping is temporary, sanctioned by democratic governments whose electorates have no appetite for empire, and aimed at establishing governments that are accountable to their own citizens. Conflating peacekeeping with colonialism is too crude to constitute abuse.

LAT: Uighur - Han violence in China
China's worst ethnic violence in years broke out Sunday in the northwestern city of Urumqi, leaving 140 people dead and more than 800 injured, the state news agency Xinhua reported.
NYT: the violence was sparked by government repression of a Uighur protest
The clashes on Sunday began when the police confronted a protest march held by Uighurs to demand a full government investigation of a brawl between Uighur and Han workers that erupted in Guangdong Province overnight on June 25 and June 26. The brawl took place in a toy factory and left 2 Uighurs dead and 118 people injured. The police later arrested a bitter ex-employee of the factory who had ignited the fight by starting a rumor that 6 Uighur men had raped 2 Han women at the work site, Xinhua reported.

WP: Mexican army accused of egregious human rights abuses in drug war
In Puerto Las Ollas, a mountain village of 50 people in the southern state of Guerrero, residents recounted how soldiers seeking information last month stuck needles under the fingernails of a disabled 37-year-old farmer, jabbed a knife into the back of his 13-year-old nephew, fired on a pastor, and stole food, milk, clothing and medication...

Mexican security forces have long had a spotty human rights record, but the growing number of abuse allegations appears to be a direct response to the savagery unleashed by the cartels after President Felipe Calderón put the military in charge of the drug war in December 2006. Most of the violations have occurred in regions where the sight of dismembered bodies of soldiers and police is remarkably common. In the state of Michoacán, investigators with the government's National Human Rights Commission concluded that the army committed abuses against 65 people over three days -- including several cases of torture and the rape of two girls -- after five soldiers were killed in an attack in May 2007.

LAT: stellar series on gangs and intervention programs in South L.A.
...The boys' lives were at risk, she told him. The gun was for defense. There were no jobs, not here; they had no money to move away from their troubles. Finally, defeated, she whispered: "This is South-Central."

And so it's been for decades -- the cradle of the thug life, the home, still, to many of the city's 400 gangs. But nights like this one are no longer explained away as simply the way things are and the way things will be.

Looking to capitalize on declining crime rates, and gang violence in particular, the LAPD has doubled its rate of gang arrests in some pockets of South Los Angeles, as South-Central is now known officially, and has implemented a new enforcement strategy against six gangs, including Barrio Mojados. Meanwhile, a wave of construction is underway and, in an area long crippled by an absence of social services, community-based groups are bringing job training, kids' baseball -- even a free Internet "cloud" over one neighborhood.

This is still a troubled place, and will be for years to come. But police, residents and civic leaders alike believe there is an opportunity here, however fragile, to restore a sense of community that many feared was lost forever in the crack-and-bullet epidemic of the 1980s and '90s. If so, South L.A.'s identity within the city could begin to shift, revealing a far more dynamic place than the one cemented in the public consciousness as an intractable ghetto.

++
NYT: a non-war-related story on Colombia! (who cares if it's about the 'environment'? SV will take it.)

the first day of true and complete independence [fresh coat of paint]

WP: US to develop “civilian surge” in Afghanistan
At the briefing for Jones, Nicholson pointed to the mission statement, which said that "killing the enemy is secondary." His campaign plan states, "Protect the populace by, with and through the ANSF," the Afghanistan National Security Forces, which makes the absence of the additional Afghans particularly galling to Nicholson.
LAT: …while Pakistan puts military pressure on South Waziristan rebels
The army has now deployed in South Waziristan, where Baitullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban's ruling council, along with Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders are believed to be hiding.

This is hopeful news. But the army will have to take a different path than in the past. Since 2005, the army and its intelligence services have periodically launched offensives against the Taliban along the Afghan border, only to pull back, holding talks and conducting cease-fires.

In the North-West Frontier Province, in the autonomous tribal agencies known as the Federal Administered Tribal Agencies, or FATA, the army has failed to protect pro-government tribal elders and chiefs. More than 300 were executed by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while hundreds more fled the region with their families. Just recently, a tribal leader who had switched sides from the Taliban to the government was shot dead by the Taliban.

The disappearance of that traditional leadership, which supported Islamic moderation, tribal culture and the code of the Pashtuns, allowed the Taliban to extend its writ over the whole region. Protecting the population, especially those loyal to the government, is the very first lesson in counterinsurgency, but the army failed to apply it in FATA. It cannot afford to make the same mistake in South Waziristan.

LAT: Ahmadinejad claims “soft” revolution failed
WSJ: ramifications of Iran’s domestic conflict for the region: more extremism
In the 10 days leading up to the June 30 deadline for American combat forces to leave Iraqi cities, more than 200 Iraqis were killed. In recent weeks, suspected al Qaeda militants have set off a string of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods and marketplaces in Baghdad, killing dozens of civilians. On Tuesday, a car bomb killed at least 20 people in Kirkuk, in northern Iraq.

There have also been increased attacks in areas in Baghdad where Shiite extremists say they are regrouping, such as Baiyaa and Sadr City. An explosion in Sadr City last week at a market killed more than 70 people.

CSM: US troops leave Iraqi cities, cooperation in transition phase but still weak
"June 30 is the first day in the history of the true and complete independence of Iraq," said Atheel al-Najaifi, standing next to US military and state department officials at a press conference for Iraqi journalists on Thursday. To drive home the point, the top US general in the region displayed a sign reading "Iraqi approved US assistance teams" that will be placed on American military vehicles. He also showed a sign illustrating a military convoy with American vehicles sandwiched between Iraqi escorts.

CSM: UN hearings on war crimes in Israel-Gaza conflict faces criticism, roadblocks
Led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, himself of Jewish descent, the fact-finding mission has a mandate to investigate all suspected violations of international law, including those carried out by Hamas and other Palestinian militants throughout the conflict. A 15-member UN team came to Gaza earlier this month to speak with victims and survey the destruction.
Despite the mission's scope, however, serious doubts exist about its ability to yield prosecutions or produce a sense of justice for either side. Israel's refusal to cooperate with the mission, and the fact that it is not a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC), make it unlikely Israeli officials will end up on trial, human rights groups say.
CSM: Israel’s blockade of Gaza coast severely impacts once-flourishing fishing economy
Citing security concerns and fears of arms smuggling, Israel has progressively tightened the blockade over the past 15 years. Once a thriving enterprise, Gaza's fishing industry is now on the verge of collapse. Fishermen are cut off from the heavily populated shoals, and have seen total revenue drop by half in less than a decade…

Following the Oslo peace accords, signed in 1994 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel permitted the fishermen to go 20 nautical miles (NM) out to sea. This was restricted to 12 NM in 2002, after the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. This area was further limited to the current 3 NM when the Islamic movement Hamas wrested control of Gaza after an intense fight with its rival Fatah led to a collapse of a unity government headed by Western-backed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

CSM: new leader of Kashmir faces troubles with new ideas

BBC: Ecuador court brings charges against ex-defense minister of Colombia for cross-border raid
CSM: Obama considering deployment of 1500 volunteer National Guard troops to border with Mexico

CSM: Sarkozy passes tough anti-gang law, criticized for vagueness of criminal definition
The new antigang law says that anyone identified with a group, formal or informal, known by police to have committed criminal acts, or is intending to, may be subject to a three-year sentence or a 45,000 euro (US$63,000) fine… The new measure allows police to make arrests of known gangs, but also in cases of spontaneous outbreaks of violence where gangs or mobs form quickly.

A compromise amendment to arrest only gangs already identified, or having a "structured" identity, was not adopted. But the new law does include measures for first-time offenders to enter community service programs.

The proximate cause of the law dates to a March 10 incident in Saint Seine Denis, a Paris suburb, of gang rivalry – possibly over a girl. A knife-wielding crowd entered a high school in session, and sought out and beat a student with iron bars. Eleven other students and staff were harmed in a general melee.

BBC: Guinea-Bissau elects new president after military-led coup
BBC: Niger Delta militants defy amnesty offer, attack oil facilities
The amnesty for militants is a bid to end years of crippling attacks, which have sharply cut oil production. Some of the militant groups which operate in the Niger Delta's lawless swamps have agreed to disarm, on condition that they meet the president to iron out various issues. The main group - the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) - has said it will not disarm until militant leader Henry Okah is freed from jail. He is facing trial on charges of gun-running and treason after being arrested in Angola in 2007. On Friday, the government offered to free him - but only if Angola agrees.
BBC: US envoy in Darfur to meet with rebels
Diplomatic sources say that the US envoy is hoping for a sign of the rebels' willingness to agree to a cessation of hostilities and to become more of a political force. However just four weeks ago Jem said they took and briefly held the towns of Kornoi and Um Baru in Darfur, and Jem sources told the BBC that they may consider trying to retake Kornoi if the circumstances are right. Although Mr Gration initially said it was not in his mandate to talk to Chadian rebels who recently staged an attack in the east of Chad, it is thought that he may now try to look at their role in the whole destabilisation of the region.

++++

CB: on political violence and transactional sex

you are near paradise [on revolt, martyrs and memory]

CSM: Iranian Revolutionary Guard steps in against protesters, while foreign intervention blamed for violence
Until now, the government has employed police and ideological militia to quell protests. But now Iran's Revolutionary Guard have vowed to weigh in. It ordered protesters to "end the sabotage and rioting activities" and warned them to be ready for a "revolutionary confrontation with the Guards, Basij, and other security... and disciplinary forces" if they dared to gather in public again.

The Revolutionary Guard is tasked with preserving the 1979 revolution, The force was created by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini because he did not trust the regular Army. The Guard is considered more ideological than the regular Iranian Army.

But on Monday afternoon an estimated 1,000 protesters tried to gather at Haft-e Tir Square in central Tehran. Row upon row of waiting riot police and militiamen kept them from assembling. They were met with teargas and bullets fired into the air… The student rembembered, Neda Agha Soltan, was reportedly shot in the chest by a basiji militiaman passing on a motorcycle. Graphic Internet video of the aftermath has turned her into an instant icon of the movement lead by defeated moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi… Mr. Mousavi – who has not been seen since Thursday – urged his followers late Sunday to keep up the pressure…

But the protesters are torn between their desire to challenge an election result they consider a fraud – relying on Article 27 in Iran's Constitution that says peaceful marches "may freely be held" – and their fear of more violent confrontations that won't bring them any closer to their goals.
WSJ: ...and stakes rise for protesters
Witnesses said security forces appeared particularly alert to spectators on balconies or nearby buildings taking pictures or filming the clashes. Homemade videos and photos have flooded the Internet despite attempts by Iranian officials to restrict reporting of protests… A 33-year-old woman who has been attending protests said the stakes were getting higher as the crackdowns intensified and said she wasn't sure how long she and her friends would keep it up. "It's now crossed the line, if you come out it means you are ready to become a martyr and I'm not so sure I want to die yet," she said.
WP: a vision of Neda, the icon of the protests
CSM: Chatham House releases study showing numerous statistical problems in election
LAT: ...but no “major” irregularities, according to Guardian Council, so results remain
LAT: on the role of memory and imagery in rebellion
Rebellion is about passion, but it's driven by universal themes and images. It is moved by the clear delineation of two sides, which in Iran's case are a police state, where militias roam and camouflage-clad police race around on motorcycles, and a protest movement humming with text messages citing bygone heroes and video of anonymous bloodied hands rising toward cameras.

Twitter may be the sound bite of the new century, but it takes more than 140 characters to rally a nation. The electronic discourse streaming out of Iran onto online social networks feeds on images that offer the power of poems and anthems. Hence the references to King and Mohandas Gandhi -- unimpeachable moral authorities -- against the stony visage of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, the white-bearded ayatollah who has scolded protesters and sent out security forces to force them back.
WrongingRights: protesters sing pre-Revolution anthem: "if the regime was going to get nervous this would be the moment."
Salon: dispatches from Tehran

WP: Republicans seek to draw contrast with "weak" Obama vis-a-vis Iran
During a single weekend interview, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) invoked the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the Prague Spring, the Solidarity movement, and Reagan's 1982 "evil empire" speech on the Soviet Union to argue for more explicit U.S. criticism of the Iranian government, which the Obama administration has made clear it will engage no matter who ultimately emerges as president.
WSJ: “Obama and the rogues”: on legitimacy and coercion

NYT: US to adopt new war planning strategy focused on hybrid warfare
In officially embracing hybrid warfare, the Pentagon would be replacing a second pillar of long-term planning. Senior officials disclosed in March that the review was likely to reject a historic premise of American strategy — that the nation need only to prepare to fight two major wars at a time…

The previous Pentagon strategy review focused on a four-square chart that described security challenges to the nation as perceived then. It included traditional, conventional conflicts; irregular warfare, such as terrorism and insurgencies; catastrophic challenges from unconventional weapons used by terrorists or rogue states; and disruptive threats, in which new technologies could counter American advantages.

“The ‘quad chart’ was useful in its time,” said Michele A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, who is leading the strategy review for Mr. Gates. “But we aren’t using it as a point of reference or departure,” she said in an interview. “I think hybrid will be the defining character. The traditional, neat categories — those are types that really don’t match reality any more.”

The nation’s top military officers are reviewing their procurement programs and personnel policies to adapt to the new environment, focusing in particular on weapons systems that can perform multiple missions.
CSM: gun laws, loopholes and the terror watch list
Nearly 900 people on the FBI’s terror watch list applied for and received a certificate to buy a gun in the United States between 2004 and 2009, according to a Government Accountability Office report released today… The GAO document is a follow-up to a 2005 report, which said the FBI cleared gun purchases for 80 percent of terror watch subjects who applied. The current report shows that the percentage has gone up: of 963 background checks, 865 were given the go-ahead – 90 percent.

There's currently no basis to automatically prevent a person from buying a gun simply because they appear on the terrorist watch list, wrote Ellen Larence, the GAO's director of homeland security and justice issues. There must be additional disqualifying factors, such as a felony conviction or illegal immigration status.
WP: Guantanamo detainee, first held and tortured by al-Qaeda, to be released
Abdul Rahim Abdul Razak al-Janko was tortured by al-Qaeda and imprisoned by the Taliban for 18 months because the groups' leaders thought he was an American spy. Abandoned by his captors in late 2001, he was picked up by U.S. authorities, who shipped him to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion that he was a member of the two groups.
Yesterday, a federal judge ordered Janko's release, saying the government's legal rationale for continuing to detain him "defies common sense."

CSM: weekend attacks in Iraq kill more than 100, highlight tensions remaining before official US pull-out
The Iraqi government's failure to pass several important pieces of legislation also poses a threat to the country's political stability. They include:
•Approving a national oil law for an equitable distribution of the country's oil revenues.
•Finding a solution to Kirkuk's ethnically based territorial dispute.
•Passing legislation to help combat rampant corruption…

A less physically imposing but still robust American military and diplomatic presence should focus on developing "good governance" principles at all levels of the Iraqi government, says Mr. Nagl, author of a new report, "After the Fire: Shaping the US Relationship with Iraq." Moreover, the US must concentrate on building professionalism within the Iraqi military.

NYT: same goes for Afghanistan: focus on training local forces
The Bush administration planned to increase the Afghan Army from 90,000 troops to 134,000. That still won’t be big enough to secure a vast, rugged country with a larger population than Iraq’s. American planners propose expanding it to as many as 260,000 troops — roughly the size of Iraq’s Army. No decision has yet been made.

The Pentagon estimates that it would cost $10 billion to $20 billion over a seven-year period to create and train a force that size. Paying it would cost billions more, especially if the current $100-a-month salary is to become more competitive with the $300 the Taliban pays.

The total bill would still be a lot smaller than the cost of sustaining a huge American fighting force there. By the end of this year, there will 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan, costing American taxpayers more than $60 billion a year.

Afghanistan’s national police force will have to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Kabul’s central government is notoriously corrupt, but the tales from the field are even more distressing. Journalists for The Times have reported seeing police officers burglarizing a home and growing opium poppies inside police compounds. American soldiers complain of police supervisors shaking down villagers, skimming subordinates’ wages and selling promotions and equipment. Muhammad Hanif Atmar, the interior minister, has pushed for greater accountability by senior police officials. He has a lot of work ahead of him.
LAT: McChrystal to issue new tactical directive to protect Afghan civilians
In a "tactical directive" to be issued in coming days, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has ordered new operational standards, including refraining from firing on structures where insurgents may have taken refuge among civilians unless Western or allied troops are in imminent danger, said spokesman Navy Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith.

Also under revision are ground search and seizure practices and the treatment of detainees, changes officials hope will reduce tensions between U.S. forces and Afghan citizens, and build a "civilian surge" to improve reconstruction and governance.

The directive is described as the most stringent effort yet to protect the lives of Afghan civilians, which McChrystal has identified as the crucial task of NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

"We can easily destroy the enemy," Smith said. "But if we do not know precisely who is in that structure, we need to take measures to avoid loss of innocent life -- step back or put up a cordon, or other measures."
WSJ: rules on airstrikes highlight differences between two US wars
The rules reflect key differences between the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Iraq, most fighting took place in urban areas where the U.S. maintained enough troops that it rarely needed to call in airstrikes. In Afghanistan, combat mainly takes place in remote areas that reinforcements can't easily reach, leaving ground forces far more reliant on air power.
CSM: Qari Zainuddin, rival of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, killed

LAT: focus on institutions required to achieve goal of statehood, says Palestinian Authority PM
Western officials credit [Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad], a Texas-trained economist, with improving the Palestinian Authority's effectiveness in the West Bank since being appointed to the post two years ago. He has modernized government ministries and overseen the deployment of Western-trained security forces to fight crime and armed militants in the territory's cities, though he said Monday that much work remains to be done.

BBC: former Rwandan deputy interior minister who lured thousands of Tutsis to be murdered sentenced to 30 years by ICTR; total tribunal judgments now reach 38
BBC: al-Shabab carries out amputations as punishment in Somali capital
Three mobile phones and two assaults rifles were displayed, which the accused had allegedly stolen, reports the AFP news agency... No date was set for the punishment, which will be carried out after the health of the accused is assessed. Furthermore, Monday was very hot and the court decided that carrying out an amputation in such conditions could lead the accused to bleed to death.

Amnesty International said the four men had not been given a fair trial.
CSM: Ethiopian troops quietly take up posts in Somalia, although "past foreign interventions haven't gone well"
Sources close to Western embassies in Nairobi confirmed news reports that Ethiopian troops have taken positions in the Central Somali town of Beledweyne, and that Ethiopian troops were also active in the Gelgadud region north of the capital of Mogadishu. Kenyan forces, too, are reportedly amassing along the Somali border as a defensive measure, in what Kenya's foreign minister described in a press conference as a matter of "national security."

The intervention – officially denied by the Ethiopian government – comes as Somalia's parliament speaker, Sheik Aden Mohamed Nor Madobe, sent an urgent call Saturday for military intervention by Somalia's neighbors within the next 24 hours. At present, pro-government militias and a 3,000-strong contingent of African Union peacekeepers control a few city blocks around the presidential palace in Mogadishu, along with the airport and seaport. The rest is firmly in the hands of hardline Islamist militias....

After a brief period of back-channel negotiation between the Sharif government and Sheikh Aweys, organized by clan elders, fighting broke out anew over the weekend. Clashes in the central parts of Mogadishu claimed the lives of at least 20 in the past two days, and wounded some 60 others.

The best evidence of a new foreign Islamist presence in Somalia are the string of high-level assassinations, most recently the suicide-bombing of Security Minister Omar Hashi in the central town of Beledweyne, and the attempted assassination of Interior Minister Sheikh Abdulkadir Ali Omar. The rising use of suicide attacks has even drawn the criticism of some top Islamist militia commanders, including Aweys, the leader of Hizbul Islam.

WP: many of 10,000+ dead in Mexico's drug war since 2006 are low-level dealers
Much attention is given to Mexican drug cartels warring over lucrative transport routes to the United States. But more and more, they're battling for an exploding number of Mexican consumers, a market that barely existed a decade ago. While the United States is expected to remain the largest and most coveted market, local consumers are a big and rapidly growing source of cash.

That makes street dealers like Mr. Rodriguez prime targets for assassins. Low-level sellers are easy prey for rivals seeking to expand turf because they work openly on street corners without bodyguards or armored cars...

His stints in prison put him in touch with important drug runners, and he used his contacts to move up from corner dealing to managing a handful of dealers when he got out.

Low-level dealers make about $20 a day on 100 hits of methamphetamine, said Julian Leyzaola, Tijuana's public-safety secretary. Many opt to be paid in drugs instead to support their habits. That's a handsome wage in hardscrabble neighborhoods where bricklayers earn the equivalent of $5 a day and factory workers make $60 a week...
NYT: a profile of Mexican cartel hitmen in the US
The two teams of assassins took direction from Lucio Quintero, or El Viejon, a capo in the Zetas across the river, trial records show. They received $500 a week as a retainer and $10,000 to $50,000 for each assassination, and the triggerman was given two kilos of cocaine.

Detective Roberto A. Garcia Jr. of the Laredo Police Department said they all worked for Miguel Treviño, the leader of the Zetas in Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican city across the river
from Laredo, who goes by the name El Cuarenta, which means Forty. (Many Zetas identify by a number.)

In addition to their retainers, the assassins received perks. At one point, Mr. Reta was given a new $70,000 Mercedes, for a job well done. Family members described how the young men would go to parties hosted by cartel capos. To keep up morale, the drug leaders would raffle off automobiles, firearms and even dates with attractive women, the family members said, speaking on the condition of anonymity...

Speaking of his upbringing, [one of the assassins] said that to him and his friends, growing up in ramshackle houses on dirt lots, the narcotics traffickers were heroes. The poorest counties in America lie along the Rio Grande, and Mr. Reta recalled stealing gummy bears from a local candy shop with Mr. Cardona when they were children.

“You know, here, all the little kids that are young, they say, ‘I want to be a firefighter when I grow up,’ ” Mr. Reta said, “Well down there, they say, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a Zeta’... You know, it’s the money, cars, houses, girls,” he said, pausing, “and you know that ain’t going to last a lifetime, that it’s going to end.”

Chron: 7 Colombian police killed in FARC ambush in southwest
CSM: 11 officers killed in India, by Maoist Naxalites feared to be gaining momentum
Since [1967], the movement, which claims to fight for India's poorest, has spread across strips of eastern, central, and southern India. Naxalites now operate in at least 11 of the country's 28 states and are thought to boast some 22,000 fighters.

On Monday, the central government warned that five states in central and eastern India were under threat of attacks during a two-day strike called by the rebels. That strike was called to protest against a government offensive in Lalgarh, a Maoist-seized jungle enclave in West Bengal. Last week, after the local police fled, the state government sent 1,000 paramilitary forces to Lalgarh where they are still fighting to commandeer hundreds of villages.

Here, as in other areas affected by Naxalism, the rebels have set out to attract the poor and alienated – "any group that has a grievance," says Ajay Sahni, a terrorism expert at the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. In India, where hundreds of millions survive on less than a dollar a day and 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas largely bypassed by the country's recent economic boom, there is no shortage of such groups.

Geography also plays its part. The areas of West Bengal into which the Maoists are making inroads are close to the eastern states of Orissa, Jharkland, and Chhattisgarh, where the Maoist presence is heaviest. There are new concerns, too, that the rebels, who have tended to focus their operations on rural areas, are attacking areas close to cities. Mr. Sahni says the rebels are also stepping up a campaign to recruit more Indians to their cause. In Delhi, where the Maoists have previously tried to appeal to university students, they are now seeking to attract small retailers who have been displaced by multinational companies and urban planning laws, he says.
LAT: Moscow-backed president of Ingushetia republic wounded in suicide attack

BBC: ICRC study finds civilians bear major costs of war

guinness book of world suffering [hard nut to crack]

Gdn: number of IDPs worldwide reaches historic high; Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Somalia lead growth
The number of people internally displaced within their own countries has reached a historical high of more than 28 million, the UN's refugee agency said today, as conflicts in Pakistan's Swat valley and Sri Lanka compound a growing global problem. At the end of last year the total number of people forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution around the world stood at 42 million, including 16 million refugees and asylum seekers and 26 million people uprooted within their own countries, according to UNHCR's annual Global Trends report, which was released this afternoon...

Those conflicts have taken the number of internally displaced people to more than 28 million and the total number of people forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution to 45 million, UNHCR said... The report says 80% of the world's refugees are in developing countries, as are the vast majority of internally displaced people. Since 2005 the agency has seen the number of people it cares for in the latter group double.
WP: displaced in Pakistan fear, and are feared
In the conflict between Pakistan and Islamist extremists, a fight that has drawn in the United States, trust is in short supply. Holbrooke's visit to this refugee camp and another earlier this month was an attempt to build confidence on all sides, and to seek some ground truth for the administration in a situation where it is sometimes as scarce as good faith. In the end, his presence boosted America's image in Pakistan but brought the refugees no closer to home.

Pakistani authorities appear distrustful of the refugees, wary of their loyalties and of the possibility of Taliban infiltrators. The government and military, while ostentatiously grateful for U.S. aid and concern, continue to mistrust American motives and staying power...

In meetings with Pakistan's government, military, judiciary and political opposition leaders, he pressed the message that getting the refugees back home safely was as crucial, and perhaps even more immediately important, as the ongoing military offensive. Temporary refugee camps tend quickly to become permanent, he argued. They are breeding grounds for public dissatisfaction and recruitment centers for extremists; getting people out of them is key to building confidence in the government.

"This has got to happen," he told a senior U.S. official in an aside at a dinner for international relief workers during the trip. "Figure out whatever we need to do. Don't worry about how much it costs."

Holbrooke is no stranger to refugee camps. He toured them in Southeast Asia, where he began his career as a junior Foreign Service officer in South Vietnam. In the 1990s, as chief U.S. negotiator for the Dayton peace accords, he walked the camps in Bosnia. As United Nations ambassador in the Clinton administration, and an activist official and board member for nongovernmental organizations during the George W. Bush years, he saw refugee squalor across Africa.

The Pakistani refugees, from their tent cities on the hot, dry plain west of the Indus River, can see the high mountain ridge to the north, the gateway to their homes in the Swat Valley and the neighboring districts of Buner and Dir. If they are still here when the summer monsoons arrive next month, the camps will become muddy swamps.

NYT: military offensive to begin in South Waziristan, targeting Taliban leader Baitullah Behsud
The government holds him responsible for dozens of suicide bombings across the country, including one on Sunday in western Pakistan that killed eight people, and the military has long indicated that he would be their next target.

The military has been conducting a campaign against the Taliban in a valley north of Islamabad, the capital, since last month, but the militants’ main base is Waziristan, and analysts said Pakistan could not curb their influence without controlling that area. Still, Mr. Ghani gave no specific time for the start of an operation, saying it would depend on the military, which has declined to disclose details in the past... South Waziristan is a mountainous area on the border with Afghanistan, an entry point for Taliban militants in the war against American soldiers. It is much more difficult terrain than the valley north of the capital, where 22,000 troops are currently fighting, and analysts expect the campaign to be much more costly in lives.
LAT: McChrystal officially takes command of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, puts civilians at core of mission
"The Afghan people are at the center of our mission -- in reality, they are our mission," he said to an audience of senior commanders, Afghan officials and diplomats. "We must protect them from violence, whatever its nature."...

Karzai's office said the president had stressed to McChrystal that recent instances of civilian casualties posed the single greatest threat to public support for the war effort... Because special-operations forces have been involved in many cases involving large-scale civilian deaths, McChrystal's extensive background in special operations may prove a double-edged sword.
NYT: only a third of Aghans now support Karzai

WSJ: leaders of India and Pakistan meet briefly, discuss security
The neighbors, with help from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, are already sharing intelligence on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based group believed by officials in all three countries to have carried out the gun-and-grenade rampage in Mumbai, which left more than 170 people dead…

Indian officials have linked nearly all terrorist attacks in the country since 2005 to Pakistan-based groups once nurtured by Pakistan's military to wage an insurgency against Indian forces in Kashmir. But until the Mumbai attack, New Delhi remained steadfast to the peace process.

CSM: Tamil Tigers call for formation of “provisional transnational government” to fight for independence; role of diaspora stressed

LAT: near-silent protest against Iran election result following 8 deaths from recent clashes
Mousavi supporters, who had been told by the candidate to stay away from the square, instead assembled in a quiet march in northern Tehran along Vali Asr Street. The crowd, holding green banners and flags, marched in near silence. They held up posters of Mousavi and placards calling Ahmadinejad a "liar." Anti-riot poice stood along the roadways but did not interact with the demonstrators.

The dispute over election results have riven Iran, leading to massive protests, demands for a recount and clashes that state radio said today had taken the lives of at least seven people.

Khamenei has ordered the Guardian Council, which is led by a hardline cleric close to Ahmadinejad, to review the charges of voting fraud. Associated Press reported that a spokesman for the council, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, was quoted on state television as saying the recount would be limited to voting sites where candidates claim irregularities took place. He did not rule out the possibility of canceling the results, saying that is within the council's powers, although nullifying an election would be an unprecedented step.

The government meanwhile reportedly barred foreign media from covering today's rally by Ahmadinejad's supporters.
CSM: 300 rounds fired in scenes reminiscent of 1979 revolution

LAT: Netanyahu speech calls for two state solution conditioned on Palestinian demilitarization and possibly no right to return
Netanyahu has said previously that Israel could not agree to the creation of a Palestinian state that possessed a military, had full control of its borders or wielded authority over electronic communications...

U.S. officials were willing to overlook the fact that Netanyahu did not agree to the Obama administration's insistence on a complete halt in the growth of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories...

Netanyahu said in his speech that the Palestinians would need to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state," a comment that was widely taken to mean there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees.

BBC: 800,000 displaced in DRC since January (pictures)
BBC: ex-Congolese VP Bemba to face 5 war crimes counts at the ICC for 2002-2003 CAR attacks

BBC: a view of Eyl, Somalia's main pirate town…
BBC: …and of the government navy trying to take down the pirates
When Somalia cut ties with the Soviet Union in 1977 (because of Russian support for Somalia's arch rival Ethiopia), Mogadishu signed a deal with Washington three years later. It gave the US access to Somali ports and airfields in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in military equipment and aid in subsequent years. "We used to be among the top navies in Africa. We had ships that carried deadly missiles and we had 10 battalions covering the whole coast," said Mr Omar.

The navy has not been operational since the country descended into violence in 1991, but its commander predicts a Somali naval renaissance. "The international community should give us one year and let them see what we are going to do," he said.

BBC: no more aid for refugees in Ethiopia, thanks to congested Djibouti port
Following a border war, Eritrea denied Ethiopia access to its ports, so the landlocked country relies on Djibouti. Correspondents say this time of year is known as "the hunger season", three months before the next harvest. The UN World Food Programme says breast-feeding mothers, children and refugees will be among those worst hit…

It warns after it hands out final rations this month there will be no further deliveries until September or October. The agency says it has no option but to cut back on the food they provide, which has already been cut by a third since July 2008.
CSM: Sudanese govt allows aid groups to return to Darfur, with few assurances and more red tape
As a result, Care Switzerland, Mercy Corps Scotland, and Padco, an international development consulting firm, have all begun the registration process. Save The Children Sweden is already operating in Darfur, after Save The Children US was expelled… The decision to return exposes rifts within the agencies and is opening fresh debate on how best to deliver aid to people living under oppressive regimes…

Fouad Hikmat, Darfur analyst with the International Crisis Group, says Khartoum was up to its old tricks, using tactics of divide and rule – this time directed at aid agencies, rather than tribes or rebel groups. "I would have thought [the aid groups] should have stuck together, insisted they had done nothing wrong, and established clear criteria for their return – guarantees on access, security, visas, an end to smears in the media. With that established, then they could think about returning," he says. "Instead, Khartoum has done a rather clever job of giving the US envoy what he wanted, but without any guarantees [that] conditions for the NGOs are going to be any better."

WSJ: high-level corruption and French-West Africa relations
Back then, Gabon was a budding oil producer. To maintain its sway on the country, France sealed a series of military, monetary and trade pacts with Gabon. Although the African country was independent, France kept a military base there, minted its currency -- the CFA franc -- and secured priority access to its raw materials. Defense deals, some of which remain secret, allowed France's military to intervene in Gabon to protect the country's national security or help with internal policing... Over the past decade, both France and Africa have focused on other directions, with France working on European Union integration, while Gabon started to trade extensively with China.

Still, France maintains a military base in Gabon with 1,100 soldiers, and French oil company Total SA produces about a third of Gabon's oil. Mr. Sarkozy has moved slowly toward fulfilling his pledge of making Gabon and other former French colonies in Africa fully responsible for their own security.

The embezzlement case due to be examined by the Paris appeals court stems from a complaint filed in December by the French branch of anticorruption association Transparency International against the "ruling families" of Gabon, Congo and Equatorial Guinea for "embezzlement of public funds."

Chron: nearly 10,000 migrants kidnapped in Mexico en route from Central America in last 6 months; bribes paid may total $25 million

WSJ: State Dept overpaid Blackwater by some $55 million due to "shortfalls"
The audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and the State Department's Inspector General said the firm didn't employ enough guards, medics, marksmen and dog handlers to fully man the teams, which were responsible for protecting the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and other high-level officials.

The failure to consistently field the right numbers of guards endangered the U.S. officials whom the company was being paid to protect, the report concluded.

Chron: in released CIA memo, detainees (including KSM) say US torture made them give false evidence
One detainee, Abu Zubaydah, told the tribunal that after months "of suffering and torture, physically and mentally, they did not care about my injuries."

Zubaydah was the first detainee subjected to Bush administration-approved harsh interrogation techniques, which included a simulated form of drowning known as waterboarding, slamming the suspect into walls and prolonged period of nudity. Zubaydah claimed in the hearing that he "nearly died four times… After a few months went by, during which I almost lost my mind and my life, they made sure I didn't die," Zubaydah said in his statement to the tribunal.

He claimed that after many months of such treatment, authorities concluded he was not the No. 3 person in al-Qaida as they had long believed.
WSJ: EU to accept some Guantanamo detainees
Since Mr. Obama ordered a review of each prisoner's case, government lawyers have reviewed the files of more than half the 232 men remaining at Guantanamo... Several have been recommended for prosecution in U.S. criminal courts and their case files are being reviewed by Justice Department lawyers to determine what charges may be brought. More than 50 have been approved for transfer to other countries...

In recent weeks, Guantanamo detainees have been transferred to France, Chad, Saudi Arabia and Bermuda. In some cases, the transferees are freed; in others, they are handed over for prosecution. Saudi Arabia is in talks to possibly accept a group of Yemenis, who make up the largest single nationality at the facility. The government of Palau, a Pacific island nation, said it will accept a group of Uighurs -- a minority ethnic group from China -- who have languished in Guantanamo for years despite being cleared for release...

The EU said it would "on a case by case basis" assist in resettling detainees "who the United States has determined it will not prosecute, and who for compelling reasons cannot return to their countries of origin." The U.S. promised to share intelligence on transferred detainees and to help with resettlement costs.
CSM: post-Guantanamo life for resettled Uighurs

WSJ: FBI to devote resources to “lone-wolf” political extremists, like Holocaust Museum attacker
The lone-wolf initiative is one element of a broader strategy to fight domestic terrorism, dubbed "Operation Vigilant Eagle," launched late last year in response to what the memo identified as "an increase in recruitment, threatening communications, and weapons procurement by white supremacy extremist and militia/sovereign citizen extremist groups."

The memo, and the recent killings, also show the limits of the lone-wolf effort. Both James von Brunn, who is charged with the Holocaust Museum shooting, and Scott Roeder, the man arrested in the murder of George Tiller in Kansas, had openly expressed to associates and on Web sites their extremist views, on anti-Semitism in Mr. von Brunn's case and on abortion in the case of Mr. Roeder. The FBI, in fact, was aware of Mr. von Brunn because of the postings but wasn't tracking him.

Neither man appears to have been active in groups that might have tipped off authorities to the danger. In the search for potentially violent individual extremists, "an emphasis should be placed on the identification of individuals who have been ostracized from a group for their radical beliefs," the FBI memo said. It added that officials should look for "those who have voluntarily left a group due to their perception of the group's inactivity, or those forced from the group for being too extreme and or violent." That description doesn't appear to have fit either Mr. von Brunn or Mr. Roeder.

WSJ: international monitors leave Georgia upon Russian SC veto
Moscow had already forced the U.S. and its European Security Council allies to abandon a draft resolution that would have given the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia, which monitors the conflict zone in the breakaway territory of Abkhazia, a fresh post-war mandate. That draft included language reaffirming Georgia's territorial integrity and calling for all sides to abide by the terms of an Aug. 12 cease-fire, which among other things requires a partial Russian troop withdrawal.

Russia said that language was unacceptable and that the mission needed to be renamed so it didn't include the word Georgia. Since the war last August, Moscow has recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries. Only Nicaragua has followed Moscow's lead, but Russia insists the two territories are now independent.

writers and despots [like recognizes like*]

BBC: Chávez ends 4-day-long television broadcast to celebrate 10th anniversary of Alo Presidente, has spat with Vargas Llosa
The decision to suspend Alo Presidente comes after a series of challenges and counter-challenges about holding a televised debate with the Peruvian writer - and arch-critic of President Chavez - Mario Vargas Llosa.

Mr Vargas Llosa is currently in Venezuela to attend an opposition-led seminar about democracy and authoritarianism in Latin America...

The Venezuelan leader has described his four-day TV extravaganza as a "soap opera", promising that there would be singing, debate and "a little bit of everything".
NYT: while everyone's watching the telenovela, Chávez grabs more control of military
Since February, Mr. Chávez has moved against a wide range of domestic critics, and his efforts in recent weeks to strengthen his grip on the armed forces have led to high-profile arrests and a wave of reassignments.

These are seen here as part of a larger effort by Mr. Chávez to cement loyalty in the military, where some officers are growing resentful at what they see as his micromanagement and politicizing of a proud and relatively independent institution...

In March, Mr. Chávez replaced the chiefs of the army, the air force and the Bolivarian Militia, a Cuban-inspired reserve force created to repel what Mr. Chávez repeatedly raises as the threat of an invasion by the United States.

BBC: writers' glimpses of Nigeria, on 10th anniversary of democracy

BBC: after 100 days, still awaiting substantive change in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe's prime minister has set out a bleak assessment of the pace of democratic change in what was once one of Africa's most prosperous nations...Although his party is now part of the government, commentators have warned that the MDC has responsibility without authority.

BBC: Sudanese military takes Darfuri town back from JEM
An army spokesman said Jem had "completely evacuated" the area of Kornoi, 50km (31 miles) from Chad, and retreated towards the border, AFP news agency reports.

Jem seized Kornoi earlier this month and it tried to take an army base at nearby Umm Baru twice last week.

The rebels said they had withdrawn from the area for "humanitarian purposes" to protect the civilian population from air attacks.
WP: astounding one-third of refugees surveyed report or show signs of sexual violence
About half the rapes were carried out in Darfur by Janjaweed militiamen allied with the Sudanese government, and half were assaults by Chadian villagers near the U.N. refugee camp, usually when the women left to search for firewood or herd livestock, according to the report by the U.S.-based group Physicians for Human Rights.

The group reached the 88 women included in the survey through camp leaders and by word of mouth -- a sampling method the report said hinders drawing general conclusions about the prevalence of rape in Darfur or in the Farchana refugee camp in Chad...Further complicating the effort, women displaced inside Darfur live mostly in government-controlled areas and fear reprisal...

As many as 450,000 people have died as a result of the violence, mostly from disease, hunger and malnutrition, and more than 2.5 million have been forced from their homes. About 250,000 have fled into Chad, where they live in refugee camps.
AP: tribal clashes in Kordofan region leave hundreds dead
Tribal clashes over cattle grazing and water rights is common across Sudan, but the violence has grown worse over the years with the number of arms left over from the two-decade long civil war between the north and the south that ended in 2005.

The Messariah and Rezeigat tribes that clashed Tuesday and Wednesday straddle the border region between southern Kordofan and neighboring Darfur, where a separate conflict that has claimed 300,000 lives has raged for more than six years.

Interior Minister Hamed Ibrahim told the Cabinet on Thursday that in addition to the police, 169 tribesman were killed in the fighting, including 89 from the Messariah and 80 from the Rezeigat. Calm has now returned to the area, he was quoted as saying by the state news agency.

A previous round of fighting last year between the two tribes left over 70 from both sides dead, Messariah chief Babou Nimr Mukhtar told The Associated Press.

Mukhtar said fighting began Tuesday when 2,000 Rezeigat gunmen on horseback and in trucks attacked his tribe. Police were deployed to the area to prevent the fighting but were attacked by the Rezeigat, he said.

"Calm is restored. But there is no guarantee it will last," said Mukhtar. He stressed that tribal chiefs, not security forces, were the only ones who could end the rivalry...

Separate tribal clashes in the country's south over the last three months claimed the lives of some 900 people, mostly women and children.

Gdn: report from Mogadishu (spoiler alert: things aren't good)
After the parliament voted to introduce sharia I went back to visit the police officer. He shrugged and smiled when I told him about the debate. "We have always used sharia in our work," he said, handing me a cup of murky tea. "When the whole state is collapsing all that we have is our religion."

He told me he had joined the army in 1970 and then the police just before the collapse of Mogadishu 20 years ago. He had been wearing the same beige uniform ever since. "You are trying to impose law but where is the law when everyone is fighting? When the Ethiopians came those same Islamists that are in the government attacked us every day. They said we were supporting the invaders. In one day 15 shells fell on our police station. Now they are the government hopefully things will be better."...

"This how we establish sharia," the judge told me. "First we establish order and judgment in the middle of the chaos of war and destruction. When we started back in 1996 we were not a political movement. We started as judges to bring justice, then we became a political movement and then we became military." We crossed the basketball pitch of the compound that was once an army college. A lone boot sat in the middle of the pitch. The judge went on: "You know, sharia is fearing God and establishing religion. It's not about chopping hands off. First we establish security and then impose the rulings. It's the fear and hunger and chaos. If I cut the hands of hundreds of thieves I will not bring justice. Feed the hungry first and then punish them if they steal."...

After 20 years people had become used to life without a functioning state, explained one businessman with interests in fuel, mobile telephones and food. "Businessmen learned to do their work without a government. In the port the shipment is downloaded just as if there was a government – only you are the government, so if you have a ship you have to bring your men and your guards and do your work. Amongst the businessmen everything is run through trust – for example, when we need to buy fuel 20 merchants put money together, send it to Dubai, and our Somali friends send us a fuel tanker. Every merchant has his own militia and men who protect his interests. We do business with the government and the Shabaab. Our friends in Dubai are envious of us because we live without a state and we can do trade everywhere without control."

AJE: ongoing protests become clashes between civilians and police in south Yemen
Aden is the former capital of South Yemen, which was united with the north of the country in 1990.

Protesters carried banners with anti-government messages and posters of Ali Nasser Mohammed, the former president of South Yemen.

The death toll since protests started in the south in late April is now 16, including five security personnel.

Socialists, who formerly ruled the south, previously tried to gain secession in 1994, igniting a two-month civil war before the movement was crushed by forces loyal to the government.

Some southerners want independence because of alleged discrimination and neglect.

However, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has give warning that the nation could split up into several entities.


NYT: what unrequitted means during wartime
It goes like this: Boy meets girl. They exchange glances and text messages, the limit of respectable courting here. Then boy asks girl’s father for her hand. Dad turns him down. Boy goes to girl’s house and plants a bomb out front. The authorities call it a “love I.E.D.,” or improvised explosive device, and it is not just an isolated case.

WP: Pakistan military claims control of Mingora
Capturing Mingora, 80 miles north of Islamabad, the capital, has been one of the army's primary objectives. But Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, conceded that the Taliban had not put up a strong fight for the city and that many insurgents probably slipped away. Large parts of Swat remain beyond the government's grip.
LAT: in possible tactical shift, the Taliban targets Pakistan's cities
Only a week ago, the military said it was expecting a long, hard-fought battle with Pakistani Taliban militants who had fortified themselves in the city's hotels and buildings. It now appears that, after initially putting up stiff resistance, many militants chose to flee...

But the militants may have decided to fight another way: seeding fear in other parts of the country through well-coordinated bombing attacks.
WP: meanwhile, insurgent-linked groups offering humanitarian aid to some of the millions displaced from Swat
The government has been overwhelmed by the human tide that has washed over the northwest as about 2 million people have fled fierce clashes in Swat. With Pakistan experiencing its largest exodus since the nation's partition from India in 1947, only a fraction of the displaced civilians are receiving assistance in government-run camps. The rest are fending for themselves or getting help from private charities, including some that are allied with the very forces the Pakistani army is fighting in Swat.

Refugee camps in Pakistan have been prime recruiting grounds for militant groups ever since the Soviet invasion forced millions of Afghans to cross into Pakistan in the 1980s. Now, concern is growing that this latest wave of displacement will create a fresh crop of Pakistanis with grievances against the government and loyalty to groups that seek to undermine the state through violent insurgency.

AP: violence in Afghanistan's western Bala Murghab district; bomb detonated in Kunduz
Northern Afghanistan was once thought to be a peaceful enclave unaffected by rampant Taliban violence in the south and east. But militants have increased attacks in the area in the last two years as the insurgency has spread across the country.

LAT: Azerbaijan enters the fray
The case offers an inside look at one of the stealthy duels being fought by Israel on one side and Hezbollah and Iran on the other in remote locales, from Latin America to Central Asia...

Azerbaijan, a moderate Muslim nation of 8 million, finds itself in a delicate spot. It has strong commercial and diplomatic ties to Iran, on its southern border. About a quarter of Iran's population, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are ethnic Azeris.


AP: battle between Hamas, Palestinian police leave 6 dead
Despite Hamas' threats of reprisals, it was not immediately clear whether it would change its tactic of lying low in the West Bank while it weathers Abbas' crackdown. Since Hamas' Gaza takeover, Abbas' security forces have detained hundreds of Hamas supporters in the West Bank and closed the group's institutions and charities.

The Qalqiliya clash began late Saturday when Palestinian troops surrounded a hideout of Mohammed Samman, a leader of Hamas' military wing, and his assistant, Mohammed Yassin. Both had been on Israel's wanted list for six years, Palestinian security officials said..

Hamas officials in the West Bank said that some 40 loyalists of the group had been arrested in Qalqiliya in the past week as part of the search for the top two fugitives. Some 200 Hamas supporters are in Palestinian Authority custody...

But Abbas aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh said going after militants is key to one day setting up a Palestinian state. "To build our country and our state, we need to have one authority, one gun, one law," he said.
WP: Obama pushes Israel to stop settlements


BBC: contested statistics in Sri Lanka
The Sri Lankan government has strongly denied allegations that more than 20,000 civilians were killed during its recent onslaught against Tamil rebels.

The figures published in The Times newspaper in the UK - quoting official documents and witness accounts - is far higher than previously thought...

"I am bemused that The Times, like a jilted old woman, is continuing a bitter campaign against Sri Lanka based on unverified figures and unsubstantiated assertions," [Permanent Secretary to the Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr Palitha Kohona] said.

"The simple fact is that Sri Lanka eliminated a detestable terrorist group and in the process rescued over 250,000 hostages held as a human shield by the terrorists."
WP: satellite imagery seem to back the jilted old woman

WP: in Northern Ireland, eleven Protestants arrested in death of Catholic
Kevin McDaid, a plasterer who worked with youths in the community, was beaten to death by a large number of Protestants who drove into a Catholic neighborhood armed with bats and clubs after a soccer match. McDaid had gone into the street to make sure his four children were safe.

A 1998 peace accord known as the Good Friday agreement is often credited with ending the religious violence that had caused more than 3,600 deaths since 1969. But despite enormous political strides, an average of four incidents of sectarian violence or threats are reported to police each day in Northern Ireland. Now, instead of paramilitary groups using rifles and bombs, the incidents often involve youths armed with knives, bats and hate...

The mob Sunday night assembled after the Rangers, a soccer team with a long history of Protestant support, clinched the league championship over archrival Celtic, a team favored by Catholics. Both teams are Scottish, and many of their Northern Irish fans fly or take the boat over to Scotland for every game.

The rivalry between the two teams is a "proxy war" between the two long-feuding groups in Northern Ireland, Shirlow said. He said territorial conflicts continue in working-class neighborhoods where boundaries between Catholics and Protestants are clearly known and often marked by fluttering flags: the Union Jack or the Irish Republic's flag. The wearing of a blue-and-white Rangers scarf or the green-and-white Celtic shirt also distinguishes Catholics from Protestants.

After the championship match that the Rangers won Sunday, a group of fans, many of whom had been drinking, drove in several cars to a Catholic housing estate in Coleraine, a town of 24,000 people 55 miles northwest of Belfast. Witnesses told police they beat up the first people they came across.

McDaid had worked with youths in the community to ease sectarianism and had married a Protestant. His wife was severely beaten and suffered head injuries. Another man, Damien Fleming, was critically injured...

Between April 1, 2008, and March 31, 2009, police recorded 1,595 incidents of sectarian violence or threats, a slight rise over the year before. Most are not publicized, and few result in death. The largest category -- nearly 500 reports -- involved "criminal damage," and 287 were assaults...

Catholics accounted for 40 percent of Northern Ireland's 1.7 million people in the 2001 census, while 45 percent considered themselves Protestant. Bew said Protestants would probably remain in the majority for at least another generation. But in many areas, traditional working-class Catholic neighborhoods are expanding because of larger Catholic families and exiting Protestants. In the shrinking Protestant enclaves, some feel threatened and "left behind," Bew said.

LAT: La Familia penetrated state political institutions in Michoacan
A relatively new and particularly violent group, La Familia Michoacana, is undermining the electoral system and day-to-day governance of this south-central state, pushing an agenda that goes beyond the usual money-only interests of drug cartels...

Just last week it became clear how deeply embedded La Familia is. Federal authorities detained 10 mayors and 20 other local officials as part of a drug investigation, saying the organized-crime group has contaminated city halls across the state. The roundup comes at the height of the electoral season, as Michoacan and the rest of Mexico approach local and national contests July 5.

Dozens of mayors, city hall officials and politicians have been killed or abducted in Michoacan as La Familia has extended its control in the last couple of years...

Unlike some drug syndicates, La Familia goes beyond the production and transport of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine and seeks political and social standing. It has created a cult-like mystique and developed pseudo-evangelical recruitment techniques that experts and law enforcement authorities say are unique in Mexico.

No party has been spared its influence or interference, politicians of all stripes said in a series of interviews conducted before the arrests of the mayors...

La Familia emerged this decade as a local partner of the so-called Gulf cartel, whose operatives were moving into the region along with their ruthless paramilitary force, the Zetas. La Familia and the Zetas gradually muscled out most of the other gangs, and La Familia announced its dominance by tossing five severed heads onto the floor of a dance hall in the Michoacan city of Uruapan in September 2006. The gruesome calling card soon became all too common in areas where drug traffickers settle accounts...

Nonetheless, La Familia is stronger today than ever. It has expanded into the neighboring states of Guerrero, Queretaro and Mexico, which abuts the national capital, Mexico City, while battling remaining pockets of the Gulf cartel.

La Familia also has steadily diversified into counterfeiting, extortion, kidnapping, armed robbery, prostitution and car dealerships. The group offers money or demands bribes; increasingly, people in Michoacan pay protection money to La Familia in lieu of taxes to the government...

They recruit at drug rehab centers and indoctrinate followers with an ideology akin to religious fundamentalism, complete with group prayer sessions. Some armed guards wear uniforms with the FM logo, witnesses say. Failure by a recruit to live by the rules is said to be punishable by death.
NYT: being part of una familia has its pay-offs and consequences
NYT: Mexican cartels expanding business in US


Slate: there already are inmates convicted of terrorism in US jails

NYT: the NYC projects where Sotomayor (and Jay-Z, Wesley Snipes, and Marc Anthony) grew up
Slate: status question: can you immigrate from within the Commonwealth?
In the [2001] speech, Sotomayor called her parents "immigrants," but the island they departed has been an American territory for 111 years. Why it has remained so longer than any other overseas possession (save the odd atoll or guano deposit) is an enduring historic puzzle.

Puerto Rico is often described as the world's oldest colony, having recently entered its sixth century under off-island rule. Spanish settlers seized Puerto Rico from the Taíno Indians in 1508, a decade and a half after Christopher Columbus "discovered" it. It remained a Spanish colony until the United States chased Spain out of the neighborhood in the Spanish-American War. That was 1898, the same year the United States acquired the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaii became a state. Puerto Rico did not. (Another island acquired in 1898 is Guam, which would share Puerto Rico's 111-year record as a U.S. territory but for its seizure by Japan during World War II.)...

Debate now focuses on whether to continue commonwealth status or to make Puerto Rico a state. Commonwealth status has the advantage of sharply restricting island dwellers' exposure to federal taxation but the disadvantage of limiting their representation in Congress, excluding them from nonprimary presidential elections, and reducing their eligibility for Medicaid and other federal entitlements. Statehood would bring more taxes, more representation, more government benefits, and some loss of cultural identity (including, in all likelihood, additional pressure to make English the island's primary language). During the past 40 years, Puerto Rico has conducted four plebescites on the island's fate.

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NYT: sv mournfully suggests new Cleveland slogan: 'better luck next year'

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*sv has finally gotten to 'the brief wondrous life of oscar wao,' in which she currently delights, and from which this allusion comes: "What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Lke the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destind to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that's too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like" (p97, fn11). sidenote: he was referring to a dissertation writer in particular.
bonus sidenote: to wit, the ferocity of poets
triple bonus sidenote: Pinochet henchman arrested this week for murder of Jara 36 years ago
Jara, a political songwriter and poet and high-profile supporter of socialist President Salvador Allende, was among thousands swept up in the aftermath of Pinochet's CIA-backed coup in September 1973. The author of El cigarrito and Manifiesto was herded into Santiago's football stadium which was used as a mass jail.

Soldiers broke the musician's hands before shooting him in the head and riddling his body with bullets, one of 3,100 murders committed by Pinochet's forces during military rule which lasted until 1990, when democracy returned to the South American country.