tight in the eyes [lines, peaceful and violent]

LAT: wall still stands in Belfast, 10 years after peace deal
"...for dozens of front-line communities of Belfast, fences still make the best neighbors...In this city of 650,000, roughly half Catholic and half Protestant, only the university district and upper-class streets, chiefly on the south side, bear no clear-cut tribal identity...

[One Protestant] says his varied work experiences since -- as security guard, construction worker and now grocery store deliveryman -- mellowed him through regular social contact with Catholics...But he says that some neighborhoods, those most notorious for Irish Republican Army sympathies, give him the creeps...Catholic colleagues on occasion have invited him across the wall for an after-hours pint at their pub. He won't go.
'You'd be afraid that they might recognize you're from the other side. Am I too tight in the eyes?' he said, referring to a stereotype of Protestant eyes supposedly being closer together...

There are striking similarities between the experiences of the [Catholic] Quinns and the [Protestant] Youngs. Both feel safe living beside a peace line. Both say their problems come from hell-raisers within their own communities, not the other side. Both feel powerless to stop them.

Quinn said her previous neighborhood -- barely half a mile away in a sprawling, low-rise housing project -- was increasingly overrun by glue-sniffing, car-stealing teens. Such behavior was once brutally suppressed by IRA "kneecapping" squads. But the group has been keeping its 2005 promise to renounce bloodshed, and that means no more vigilante violence.

'The hoods have taken over. There's no telling them what to do. It's the Wild West,' she said.

Quinn says she has never called the cops to prevent a crime and doesn't think she ever will. Her attitude illustrates the other daunting task of peacemaking -- to build Catholic trust in what was once an overwhelmingly Protestant police force.

A sweeping reform program with affirmative-action recruitment over the last seven years has dramatically reshaped the police, with the goal of a 30% Catholic force. But many Catholics remain hostile to the police -- or fearful of being labeled collaborators.

So does she think the IRA should resume shooting teens in the legs? An uncomfortable silence follows.

'Well, I don't know. But the current situation is out of control,' she says finally...

"'I've really no problems with Roman Catholics,' Young said with a wry smile. 'It's my own kind that cause me the headaches. Maybe I need another peace line!'"

NYT: Lebanon faces sectarian violence
"He returned to this northern village only after family members won his release just over a week ago by threatening the kidnappers with retaliation. By that time Mr. Obaid, a Sunni Muslim, had gained a whole new way of seeing his Shiite countrymen and his native land.
'We cannot go back to how we lived with them before,' he said as he sat with relatives and friends at home here. 'The blood is boiling here. Every boy here, his blood is boiling. They push us, they push us, they push us.'"

LAT: rumors in China fuel panic
"Rumors are an integral part of Chinese folk history, songs and poetry. Last year, authorities drained a reservoir in central Sichuan province to dispel rumors that a growling water beast lived there. In 2006 a rumor spread in Anhui province that the virus that causes AIDS was being injected into watermelons, devastating sales.
Chinese emperors long sought to halt the spread across their far-flung empire, with the first recorded anti-hearsay campaign launched by King Li nearly 3,000 years ago, despite a proverb: 'Trying to stop people's mouths is like trying to stop a flood.'"

NYT: meanwhile, US downturn in economy means boon in denunciations for reward money
"Some coordinators suggest that rising crime rates might be driving up the number of tips. But in Jackson, Tenn., Sgt. Mike Johnson said his call volume had gone from two or three a day to eight or nine. He theorized that rising crime there was not a factor because the program advertises steadily regardless of trends. “People just need money,” Sergeant Johnson said...In some cases, the quality of the tips is lagging as people grasp for any shred of information that might result in an arrest. A woman in Macon, for example, recently called to report that a family member — who was wanted for burglary and whose name and address were already known to the police — was at home. His home. Such a tip might seem worthless on its face, said Jean Davis, who took the call. But many police departments do not have the personnel to watch a suspect’s comings and going. In that case, the young man was arrested."
(SV wonders if hotlines will disrupt the relationship between economic downturns and increased crime. Or if the denunciations are mostly useless.)

LAT: food prices offer opportunity for Islamic groups to give gifts, gain support

WP: pro-democracy protest organized on facebook in Egypt falls apart

WP: hundreds captured in Mosul sweep, just after Maliki offered amnesty
"[Al-Qaeda spokesman for Anbar] Janabi said that most fighters were warned in advance of the operation because the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government had trumpeted its plans for the offensive for weeks. The fighters, Janabi added, had moved their heavy weapons, along with "our explosives experts" and "engineers of our missile attacks," to other areas, while a small group of volunteers stayed behind to fight "a war of exhaustion" against Iraqi and U.S. forces."
LAT: US sniper uses the Koran for target practice; commanders pull him from duty, apologize

NYT: Chávez consolidates power, nationalizing private enterprises
McClatchy: meanwhile, his relationship with the FARC indicated by the guerrillas' communications, may not be enough to warrant sanctions

LAT: the crackdown on cartels in Mexico continues
"Pressured by the government, they say, the Sinaloa cartel is in retreat and disarray, split into factions that have turned on each other. Several mid- and high-ranking members of the gang have been arrested, and army troops already deployed in the region have seized drug shipments, destroyed opium poppy fields and seized more than 100 airplanes believed to be used by traffickers...The Sinaloa cartel is one of the oldest in Mexico. Founded by a few close-knit families and once dominant in Mexico's drug trade, it has been challenged over the last decade by the so-called Gulf cartel, based in the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas. But the Sinaloa traffickers still control Pacific smuggling routes that U.S. officials say have become the most popular for shipment of Colombian cocaine to the United States."

Gdn: Icelanders curiously happy
"Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy - in terms of wealth, health and education - they are champions of the world."

campaigns and last chances

LAT: opposition says 24 of its members have been killed in Zimbabwe, 5 after beatings on Mon
"During the Monday beating incident, about 100 ruling party supporters arrived at dawn, ordering people from their houses in Dakudzwa and about seven other nearby villages to a central point near a Catholic church, according to witnesses interviewed by The Times by phone. About 400 villagers were gathered outside the church.
'They started telling us, 'We're not going to do anything, we're just campaigning. You're not supposed to vote for the opposition party. If you are opposed to the ruling party you should come up and confess and we won't do anything to you,' said Rebecca Vela. 'More than 10 confessed; they all got beaten. The women were beaten naked.'"
NYT: many schools have been closed and 121 have been taken over by militias linked to ruling party as a base of operations to give opposition backers a second chance to "mend their ways" in the run-off elections
"A member of ZANU-PF’s Politburo, speaking anonymously about its secret deliberations, said in an interview that the party had no intention of giving up power through the ballot box.
'We’re giving the people of Zimbabwe another opportunity to mend their ways, to vote properly,' the Politburo member said. 'This is their last chance.'
If voters fail to return Mr. Mugabe to office, the Politburo member told a Zimbabwean journalist working with The New York Times, 'Prepare to be a war correspondent.'"

BBC: "armed men" in Casamance region of Senegal cut off left ears of cashew harvesters
"The cashew-nut harvest time has regularly seen as upsurge in violence and armed attacks.
The Gambia lies between Casamance and the rest of Senegal and the MFDC rebels started a war for independence in 1982.
A peace deal was signed in 2004 but the armed robbery remains common in the area, badly hitting its once vibrant tourist industry."

WP: Ahmadinejad's claims draw ire of clerics
"Several clerics in the Iranian parliament accused Ahmadinejad of implying that Imam Mahdi or Imam Zaman (Imam of the Age), as the Shiite messiah is also called, supports his government. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran's government has been overseen by Shiite clerics, but religious leaders here have resisted Ahmadinejad's frequent hints that his government's actions are guided by the Mahdi."

Gdn: Whitehouse says it "lost" 5 million emails from early days of Iraq invasion
(didn't find this in any major US outlet)

USAT: 43,000 troops deployed, even though they had been declared medically "unfit for combat"

Gdn: former Guantánamo prisoner detonated suicide bomb in Iraq last month

BBC: US soldier accidentally calls home while in Afghanistan battle, leaves message on answering machine
"When he was played back the message, he said was embarrassed by all the swearing. 'He said, 'Don't let Grandma hear it',' Mrs Petee said."

BBC: the legacy of war and resettlement in Palestine and Israel 60 years later

Gdn: fighting between Hezbollah and gov't backers spreads beyond Beirut
"This morning, the rival sides exchanged gunfire in two villages in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa valley, with three people reported injured, according to security forces...'Beirut relives the chapters of sectarian and militia horror,' the pro-government An-Nahar newspaper said on its front page today. The opposition al-Akhbar newspaper said: 'Lebanon in the mouth of the dragon.'"

WP: paramilitary leader 'Macaco' extradited to US from Colombia
"Prosecutors in Colombia consider Jiménez one of the three most brutal warlords to have formed the directorate of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a coalition of paramilitary groups. The AUC, as the group was known, was assembled to fight rebels but morphed into Colombia's top drug-trafficking cartel while carrying out massacres and illegally seizing land."
Victims' advocate Ivan Cépeda lost a motion to block extradition to allow victims to confront him and seek reparations. "Cepeda's organization has estimated that Jiménez's paramilitary bloc killed and disappeared as many as 10,000 people. 'This superimposes drug trafficking over crimes against humanity,' he said."
BBC: Colombian military officer and troops sentenced to 50+ years for massacre of anti-narcotics police force in 2006

LAT: dual currency in Cuba punishes the poorest
"Those with jobs in hotels, airlines and shops and on the thriving black market earn CUCs, referred to as "the dollar" and worth about 25 times the peso. The peso is the currency given to all state workers and pensioners, which must be converted to CUCs to purchase most goods. The Cuban government retains the peso because it lacks sufficient foreign reserves to back and circulate only CUCs.
The U.S. dollar, which circulated in Cuba from the mid-1990s to late 2004, was removed by then-President Fidel Castro and now is subject to a 10% tax whenever it is converted to CUCs -- in effect a devaluation by the state. The tax is felt most by tourists and the estimated 10% of Cuban households receiving money from relatives abroad.
Those like Rosa, who have neither foreign benefactors nor the vigor to run their own dollar-earning schemes, watch the buying power of their moneda nacional recede each month as more goods become available only for 'dollars.'"

BBC: Germany bans two right-wing groups that deny Holocaust happened

WP: Bush's astute assessment of world food prices offends Indians
"'[W]hen you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food,' [Bush] said. 'And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.'
In the days since, Indian newspapers have published articles citing comparative food consumption statistics for the United States and India. One headline said, 'U.S. eats 5 times more than India per capita,' and quoted data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
A cartoon in the Times of India on Tuesday showed a couple of overweight American tourists looking at emaciated Indian men rummaging for leftover food in a trash heap. 'No wonder we're having food shortages back home in the States -- these guys in India have started eating way too much,' they say.
'Bush is shifting the blame to hide the truth. We all know that the food crisis is an outcome of the American policy of diverting huge land area from food to fuel production,' said Devinder Sharma, a food policy analyst and chair at the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security. 'America has the largest land for ethanol production in the world.'
'If Indians start eating like Americans, the world would have to grow food on the moon,' he said."

The Caucus: Hillary's campaign will continue to offer citizens chance to mend their ways, even though it won't make a difference
"...the campaign advisers acknowledged some hard truths. Even if the Florida and Michigan delegations were seated, it would not be enough for a win. The financial health of the campaign appeared grim — Mrs. Clinton loaned herself $6 million last month, and she is prepared to donate more. And if there was good news to share about overnight on-line fund-raising totals, Mr. Wolfson did not mention it."