WSJ: Pakistan conflict, now in third week, creating fastest civilian displacement since Rwandan genocide
The U.N. believes around 15 to 20% of the displaced are in camps at the moment around 250,000 in some 24 camps, U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said, "which means most people are either with host families, communities, in rented accommodation or somewhere else."...
Holmes said the U.N. had previously asked for an extra $150 million and had only received $50 million in firm contributions as of last week, but since then a number of countries have made pledges...
He said the U.N. is also reminding all sides to "make sure that civilians are protected insofar as is possible, that they're not targeted, that areas where they're known to be are avoided, that people are not using civilians as protection or human shields."
WT: Taliban flee from government attacks toward Pakistani capital
As the Pakistan military intensifies its attacks in the northwest and the U.S. keeps launching missiles there, more insurgents are seeking safety in Karachi and other urban areas, militants said.
"We come in different batches to Karachi to rest and if needed, get medical treatment, and stay with many of our brothers who are living here in large numbers," militant Omar Gul Mehsud, 32, told the Associated Press while strolling along the beach, astonished at the vastness of the sea, which he'd never seen before...
On the outskirts of Karachi, large settlements of Afghan and Pakistani refugees have swelled over the past year by as many as 200,000 people. These refugees are mostly Pashtun, the ethnic group that dominates the militancy. An intelligence report obtained by the AP warns that such neighborhoods have become favored hideouts for militants linked to Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan's top Taliban commander.
AP: more concern that offensive may turn conflict into urban warfare
CSM: from clearing to holding in Pakistan's strategy
Pakistan is trying to wrest control of Buner from the Taliban, who seized the district – just 60 miles from the capital, Islamabad – last month. But the military Pakistan has a poor track record of holding cleared territory, leaving many experts and refugees skeptical about the long-term gains from this operation.
"The Army can clear if by clearing it means utter devastation, but it certainly doesn't seem able to hold," says Christine Fair, an analyst with RAND Corporation in Washington. "Partly they have a doctrinal problem. They don't have a lot of institutions you'd expect them to have, because they are not a counterinsurgency military."...
Pakistan does have some institutions valuable for this transition, however. One is the district coordination officer, or DCO, who acts as a bridge between military and civilian administration in a given region. It's a role that gained more power under the former military dictatorship of President Pervez Musharraf.
The DCO for Buner, Yahya Akhunzada, says he has been meeting nearly every day with the military to coordinate the return of people, police, and administration to cleared areas. Police are starting to return to Daggar and Totalai, two regions in lower Buner. Within a week, 200 police will be sent from the provincial capital of Peshawar as reinforcements, allowing routine policing to restart in these areas.... And until the police have regained their footing, it's unlikely judges will return to their courts, teachers to their classrooms, and residents such as Qamar to their homes.
Backstopping the police is where a good paramilitary force ought to step in to relieve the Army – and where Pakistan admits it has a problem.
BBC: US to give $110 million in emergency aid
The money will be used to provide generators, tents, water trucks and food to some of those forced to flee. An initial $26m will go towards the immediate purchase of wheat and other food produced in Pakistan itself...
"One of our guiding principles is that this should be more than just the delivery of supplies," Mrs Clinton said. "It should be an investment in the people of Pakistan, so we will buy locally from the bumper crop of wheat and we'll work to help create quick impact job programs that will put Pakistanis to work making goods for their fellow citizens."
NYT: Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, to become country's "chief executive officer"?
Such an alliance would benefit Mr. Karzai by co-opting a potential rival. For its part, the White House has made no secret of its growing disenchantment with Mr. Karzai, and some Afghanistan experts said that enlisting Mr. Khalilzad would have the virtue of bringing a strong, competent leader into an increasingly dysfunctional Afghan government.
The position would allow Mr. Khalilzad to serve as “a prime minister, except not prime minister because he wouldn’t be responsible to a parliamentary system,” a senior Obama administration official said... Administration officials insisted that the United States was not behind the idea of enlisting Mr. Khalilzad to serve in the Afghan government, and they gave no further details on what his duties might be.
They said that Mr. Karzai had sought out Mr. Khalilzad, but that the idea of enlisting a chief executive had also been raised by Gordon Brown, the British prime minister.
NYT: US says Afghans killed in last week's airstrike mostly Taliban
NYT: Iraqi government arrests two influential Sunni leaders for "committing crimes against civilians" in potentially destabilizing move
The Awakening movement played a crucial role in reducing the violence in Iraq over the past two years, but some Sunni leaders have complained that the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has broken its promise to integrate their members in the country’s security forces. They also have expressed concern that the government regards them as a threat, and that it is planning attacks on Awakening members as the American military reduces its activities in Iraq.
CSM: implementing the US-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) requires reimaginging Iraq's city limits
WP: Kurd-Arab conflicts continue in the north
For a few frantic minutes, Iraq's most dangerous fault line came perilously close to becoming a battlefield. As with another standoff last fall between the pesh merga [a detachment of the Kurdish government militia] and the Iraqi army in the dusty border town of Khanaqin, Bashika has emerged as a flash point in a growing test of wills over who will control land claimed by Arabs and the Kurdish autonomous government in the north of Iraq that many fear may be resolved only through violence...
In the contested region, running along a crescent in northwestern Nineveh, offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the two main parties of the Kurdish autonomous government, have sprouted in almost every village in the four years of Kurdish rule... Together, the two parties control a variety of functions, including security, intelligence gathering and issuance of motor vehicle license plates. Mail from the Arab-controlled provincial council is often sent back, unopened, Kurdish officials said. Orders are ignored.
NYT: Obama says his Guantánamo plan “will begin to restore the [military] commissions as a legitimate forum,” amidst criticism
“I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference,” said Cmdr. Suzanne M. Lachelier of the Navy, the military lawyer for one of the detainees charged with coordinating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “We’re going to end up with trials with evidence that is the product of coercion and secret hearings.”...
The filing [to military judges]... said the revisions would involve the rules for the treatment of classified evidence, one of the most contentious issues at the prison at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But the filing did provide details of several changes Mr. Obama outlined on Friday. He said, for example, that “the accused will have greater latitude in selecting their counsel.”... It said that a detainee would be permitted a lawyer “of the accused’s own choosing.” But it added that the requested lawyer must be assigned to the Pentagon’s office of military defense lawyers for Guantánamo.
Maj. David J. R. Frakt of the Air Force, another defense lawyer for a Guantánamo detainee who is facing charges, said that change indicated that several of the Obama administration’s alterations to the Bush administration’s system were what he called “minor cosmetic changes.”...
The filing was part of a package of materials provided to the military judges at Guantánamo asking them to suspend cases until Sept. 17. The documents indicated that the administration had concluded that to win convictions it might need to retain the advantages the commissions were intended to give military prosecutors.
NYT: Senate rejects Obama's request for $80 million to close Guantánamo
Administration officials have indicated that if the Guantánamo camp closes as scheduled more than 100 prisoners may need to be moved to the United States, including 50 to 100 who have been described as too dangerous to release.
Of the 240 detainees, 30 have been cleared for release. Some are likely to be transferred to foreign countries, though other governments have been reluctant to take them. Britain and France have each accepted one former detainee. And while as many as 80 of the detainees will be prosecuted, it remains unclear what will happen to those who are convicted and sentenced to prison...
The House last week overwhelmingly approved the $96.7 billion spending measure after stripping the money for closing Guantánamo and inserting language barring Mr. Obama from transferring any detainees to the United States without first presenting a detailed plan to Congress, and giving lawmakers a chance to review it.
CSM: Supreme Court suit lets Mueller and Ashcroft off the hook for violating constitutional rights of Pakistani detainee, makes future cases more difficult
US Supreme Court handed a major victory to FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft on Monday when it dismissed a lawsuit that sought to hold both men personally responsible for allegedly violating the constitutional rights of post-911 detainees wrongly suspected of involvement in terrorism...
"A plaintiff must plead that each government-official defendant, through the official's own individual actions, has violated the Constitution," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. A plaintiff must "plead sufficient factual matter to show that [government officials] adopted and implemented the detention policies at issue not for a neutral, investigative reason but for the purpose of discriminating on account of race, religion, or national origin."
In a dissent, Justice David Souter said he would allow the suit to move forward. "[The complaint] does not say merely that Ashcroft was the architect of some amorphous discrimination, or that Mueller was instrumental in an ill-defined constitutional violation; [the complaint] alleges that they helped to create the discriminatory policy."
The high court decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal will help insulate high-level government officials – and former Bush administration officials – from similar war-on-terror lawsuits. At the same time, it will make it significantly more difficult for current or former terror suspects and their lawyers to obtain judicial oversight of their treatment by the US government. Similar civil lawsuits are pending in the federal courts against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Justice Department legal advisor John Yoo, among others.
In his dissent, Justice Souter said the majority decision undercuts the possibility of suing government supervisors for the unconstitutional actions of their subordinates. Such suits were authorized in a 1971 Supreme Court case called Bivens. "Lest there be any mistake," Souter wrote, "the majority is not narrowing the scope of supervisory liability; it is eliminating Bivens supervisory liability entirely."...
Many of the allegations in Iqbal's suit are consistent with the findings of an April 2003 report by the Department of Justice's Inspector General. The report criticized officials for establishing a system that punished detainees and treated them as guilty until proven innocent. The report said that many Muslim men were held under harsh conditions on baseless leads that the FBI took months to investigate and disprove.
The suit alleges systematic mistreatment, including being held 23 hours-a-day in a solitary-confinement cell with the windows painted over and the lights always on. Iqbal was given minimal bedding. The air conditioning was run in the winter, the heat turned on in the summer. He was subject to daily strip and body-cavity searches. The guards once forced him to submit to three consecutive body-cavity searches in a row. When he protested a fourth search, he was punched and kicked by the guards. By the time he was released, he'd lost 40 pounds.
WP: CIA concerned about losing right to use certain clandestine activities
Harsh interrogations were only one part of its clandestine activities against al-Qaeda and other enemies, and agency members are worried that other operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan will come under review, the officials said...
Agency officials said they will carry out any future debriefings or interrogations under provisions of the 2006 version of the Army Field Manual... But according to several past agency and military officials, the Field Manual is sometimes so broad as to be unclear...
The special task force set up by Obama in January will determine whether the Field Manual interrogation guidelines are too narrow and whether "additional guidance is necessary for CIA," according to a White House statement. A report on that study is not expected before July.
LAT: the story behind the US-led rendition and torture of an Egyptian from Italy
Lady seems a rather tragic figure at the heart of the case: a veteran spy who, after the Sept. 11 attacks, established himself as a point man in the shadows of the battle against the Islamic extremist underworld. Although he took risks to try to stop the abduction, in the end he allegedly became one of its dutiful architects.
The bearded, curly-haired Lady, now 55, spoke excellent Italian. He thrived in the convivial culture of Italian law enforcement, doing business over espresso and long lunches, hosting barbecues. He cultivated bonds with anti-terrorism units of agencies that are wary of one another: the SISMI spy service, the paramilitary Carabinieri and the national police. He passed along valuable leads from U.S. intercepts and offered cash and high-tech equipment for costly stakeouts...
Lady also developed his own agents at a mosque that was a European hub for Al Qaeda, targeting a network suspected of sending militants to training camps in northern Iraq. He helped Milan anti-terrorism police build a case against the rendition target, Abu Omar, regarded as a vehement ideologue in the group.
At a discreet sit-down with D'Ambrosio in October 2002, however, Lady said that his CIA bosses had decided to circumvent the police and abduct Abu Omar, supposedly hoping to force him to become an informant. As a result, Lady was embroiled in a feud in his own agency. The American told D'Ambrosio that he had an "awful" relationship with the CIA's Rome station chief, who resented Lady's criticisms of the planned rendition and had sent a tough deputy to Milan to make sure he followed orders...
The U.S. government has refused to comment. The Italian government has tried to scuttle the prosecution in the name of state secrecy laws. Responding to a high court decision on a government appeal, the judge here will decide Wednesday whether the trial can continue and what evidence can be used...
On the witness stand in October, D'Ambrosio summed it up: "We were between the tragic and the ridiculous."
NYT: Spanish lawmakers seek to limit judges' use of universal jurisdiction to only cases involving Spanish victims or on Spanish territory
As for universal jurisdiction laws, Belgium’s case may be instructive. Israel protested to Belgium in 2003 after survivors of the 1982 attacks on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut filed a complaint in Belgium against Ariel Sharon, who was defense minister at the time of the attacks.
But it was American pressure that made Belgium retract its law in 2003, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld threatened Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it did not rescind the law.
If Spain restricts its current broad law, it will fall in line with most European countries. Germany also has a broad form of universal jurisdiction, but the state prosecutor must approve any criminal case before it can proceed. In Spain, an investigating judge can ignore the opinion of the state prosecutor.
LAT: major figure in "the Camorra," or Naples mafia, captured in Spain
The nickname of purported boss Raffaele Amato is "the Spaniard." He partied in Marbella, a beachfront refuge of high-rolling international desperadoes and dubious fortunes. Investigators say he set up multinational cocaine deals in Barcelona...
Amato's capture Saturday was a major victory for Italian investigators. The balding 44-year-old gained notoriety for allegedly setting off a turf war with a rival clan between 2004 and 2007 that littered the high-rise slums of Naples with 70 bodies...
The Camorra's intense activity in Spain reveals evolving alliances and shifting global crime networks, investigators say... "They reorganized the routes," Laudati said. "One important route for cocaine into Spain went through North Africa. Another crossed the Balkans into Italy. And Barcelona became a hub for a land route for cocaine to Italy through France, where the Marseilles underworld has always had close ties to the Camorra. So you had a mixed operational group of bosses base itself in Spain."
WSJ: prison break in Mexico sees more than 50 cartel enforcers released in inside job
PCB: Colombian defense minister resigns in bid to seek presidency
CSM: stronger NRA as anti-Obama hysteria grows; GOP seeks to tap in
Despite these successes, Mr. Lapierre, the NRA CEO, spoke almost in doomsday terms this weekend about opponents of the Second Amendment. "The bomb is armed and the fuse is lit," he said. "They are going to come at us with everything they've got, and we are going to be ready for them. If they want to fight, we will fight."
To critics, it is rhetoric completely out of proportion to the current threat. "Despite the fact that they won their Supreme Court case, they act as if they lost," says Josh Sugarmann, founder of the Violence Policy Center in Washington... The concern is that the amplitude of the rhetoric on the issue of gun rights is creating a certain hysteria. At a major gun show in Phoenix two weeks ago, Daniel Guier, a gun owner from Chandler, Ariz., witnessed an entry queue that snaked around an entire coliseum, people standing five abreast.
"There's a paranoia now that I've never seen before due to the unpredictability of Washington and the idea that, sooner or later, Obama will put up the fight," says Mr. Guier. "Unfortunately, that means that a lot of people who probably shouldn't be owning guns are buying guns."
WSJ: Tamil Tigers' leader is dead, but is the insurgency?
The rebel defeat echoes the experiences of other nations, from Colombia to Russia, where hard-fisted tactics defeated extremist foes. Yet as those nations also found, the political and economic turbulence left by decades of fighting suggests the limitations of such a victory.
Mr. Prabhakaran was the heart and soul of the Tamil Tigers, and security experts say he has left a profound and lasting influence on global terrorism. "The Tamil Tigers were the most creative terrorist group in the world," said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore. "And they shared their expertise."
The 54-year-old Mr. Prabhakaran was shot with other senior leaders as they attempted to drive through a government security cordon in an ambulance, according to military and government officials. Troops had surrounded the last of the Tiger rebels in a slice of territory about the size of a football field, and were closing in.
LAT: Prabhakaran's innovations, and legacy
At its peak, the group controlled one-third of Sri Lanka, had its own sizable army and navy, a nascent air force, courts, tax collectors, hospitals, smuggling operations and liaison offices in 54 countries. Its innovations included the use of suicide vests lined with C-4 plastic explosives, recruiting female suicide bombers and perfecting political terror.
Tiger naval operations reportedly inspired Al Qaeda's 2000 attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole. Until the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Tigers, known formally as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, reportedly carried out two-thirds of all suicide attacks in the world...
But even as other militant groups such as the Irish Republican Army turned in their guns for a place at the negotiating table, his refusal to compromise ultimately left Tamils with little in the way of a lasting political legacy.
CSM: Nepalese peace on shaky ground as Maoists take on opposition role
Prachanda, a former rebel leader whose name means "the fierce one," quit [as caretaker Prime Minister] following a dispute with the Army over integrating his former fighters into the military as part of a 2006 peace accord that ended the insurgency. His resignation, ostensibly in "defense of civilian control over the Army" after the country's president countermanded his decision to sack the army chief on May 3, failed to ignite mass protests as the Maoists had hoped.
Instead, the Maoists find themselves increasingly isolated, with most rival parties joining hands to form a new government. Now the party looks set to take up the role of the country's main opposition, something new for the former rebels who were fighting a guerrilla war against government forces until 2006. Analysts say that the army chief row could effectively put an end to the politics of consensus that was the foundation of peace agreements signed after Maoists officially ended their war in November 2006... There are 19,702 Maoist fighters living in cantonments across Nepal monitored by the United Nations. Unless they are resettled into society, lasting peace is hard for most Nepalis to imagine.
LAT: Israeli prime minister meets with Obama, lays out his conditions for Palestinian statehood
Netanyahu has long contended that any Palestinian state would have to cede traditional sovereign powers to have a military and to control its borders and electronic communications, steps he said are necessary to give Israel "the means to defend itself."...
Though the two leaders exchanged praise and insisted they shared many goals, it was clear after the four-hour meeting that they remained separated by a wide distance on key issues. Where Obama emphasized that Israel must halt growth of Jewish settlements, Netanyahu said nothing on the subject in an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office.
BBC: Israel's security leader says West Bank barrier wall not needed for security
The UN has criticised Israel, citing an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice that parts of the barrier built inside Palestinian territory in the West Bank - 90% of the route - are contrary to international law... Meanwhile, Israeli police say a rocket fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza has landed in the town of Sderot, causing damage but no casualties... It was one of very few rockets launched from Gaza in recent weeks. Israeli security officials have said the Hamas movement, which controls Gaza, is trying to maintain a truce so it can re-arm following Israel's offensive earlier this year.
CSM: for Netanyahu, concessions re. Palestine risk fragmenting his coalition; Iran a priority
WT: RAND suggests change in rhetoric toward Iran
CSM: Islamists in Somalia near capital, throwing a wrench into Western stabilization plans
After a week of heavy mortar and rocket attacks that have left at least 135 people dead and sent tens of thousands fleeing, the insurgents have moved to within a half-mile of the hilltop presidential palace in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, which is being guarded by African Union peacekeepers with tanks and armored vehicles...
Despite a beefed-up African Union peacekeeping force and a UN-backed reconciliation effort, the moderate president, Sheik Sharif Ahmed, has failed to win the support of hard-liners such as Aweys or the powerful insurgent group Al Shabab, which the State Department has labeled a terrorist organization...
The top UN diplomat for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, said Friday that 280 to 300 foreigners were fighting alongside the insurgents. Somali government officials say the foreigners come from countries such as Afghanistan and Chechnya and have trained local fighters in explosives and tactics.
BBC: guess who's baaaack? Ethiopia!
On Sunday, fighters from the al-Shabab group, which is linked to al-Qaeda, took the key town of Jowhar from government forces. This is the home town of President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and now that the country's rainy season has arrived, Jowhar is the only passable route into central Somalia from the capital.
Since withdrawing at the beginning of the year, Ethiopian troops have kept up a strong presence along the Somali border... About 4,300 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers from the African Union have arrived in Mogadishu, where they have taken up positions vacated by the Ethiopians in January.
But analysts say they are only in effective control of the presidential palace, airport and seaport in Mogadishu, while the Islamist guerrillas control chunks of the capital, along with swathes of central and southern Somalia.
BBC: East Africa's Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) asks for port and air blockades
WP: Sudanese rebels to be brought before the ICC on war crimes charges
It is the first time that Darfur's rebels have been charged with war crimes since the court began investigating mass violence in that Sudanese region in 2005. Until now, the court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has focused on the Sudanese government's role in atrocities, and has issued arrest warrants for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a top aide and an allied militia leader...
While Darfur's rebel factions are believed to be responsible for a small portion of the killings in the region, they have frequently targeted foreign peacekeepers and aid workers, and have stolen vehicles, communications equipment and other items that they have used to bolster their capacity to fight the government.
Moreno-Ocampo wrote in November that he decided to prosecute the rebels because attacks on peacekeepers and aid workers constitute an "exceptionally serious offense" that strikes at the heart of the international community's ability to maintain peace and security in conflict zones such as Darfur.
WP: unstable power-sharing deal in Kenya, and remembering post-election violence
The gangs that carried out the massacre had come marching in a military formation, locked the church doors and shoved gasoline-soaked mattresses against the outside walls, hacking to death people who tried to escape the flames through windows.
But what newspapers and angry letters to the editors have focused on in the days since the memorial service is who did not attend the ceremony, billed by hopeful organizers as one of "healing, forgiveness and reconciliation."
Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the former opposition leader in whose name the violence was carried out -- some of the gangs called themselves "Raila's Army" -- didn't show up. Not a single leader from the local Kalenjin community, whose members made up those machete-wielding, torch-bearing gangs, came to the ceremony, a deliberate boycott. Instead, some local Kalenjin residents said that if a monument to the victims were built, as has been proposed, they would destroy it.
Showing posts with label mafia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mafia. Show all posts
13 January 2009
targeting and tax breaks [wishing you all the best in your upcoming attack]
WP: negotiating in Cairo with no end game in Gaza
"The talks in Egypt center on the question of how to keep Hamas from smuggling weapons across the Egypt-Gaza border. A senior Israeli official said Israel and Egypt are in basic agreement on a plan that would allow the European Union and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority to share responsibility for monitoring the border and the crossing point at Rafah...
On Monday, Israel carried out more than 60 airstrikes, continuing to bomb tunnels along the border, as well as homes of Hamas leaders. There was intense fighting reported around Gaza City as Israel tightened its cordon on Gaza's largest population center, home to 400,000 of Gaza's 1.5 million residents...
Officials and analysts say Israel's top three political leaders disagree over how the remainder of the war should play out. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is said to favor an expansion, while Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are believed to be more hesitant. Barak has aggressively pushed the talks in Egypt; Livni has said that Israel can soon declare victory and withdraw. The three run the country together and must achieve consensus before Israel can act...
Hamas and its allies continued to fire rockets into southern Israel on Monday, launching more than 20. There were no reports of major injuries, and the number was significantly down from earlier in the war, when Hamas was launching 40 per day or more."
Slate: how rockets are aimed
NYT: ...and warfare waged in urban areas
Gdn: displacement continues
Salon: Waltz with Bashir won best foreign film at the globes
BBC: Obama to sign order to close Guántanamo; stop torture
WP: ...and will double troops in Afghanistan
LAT: but debate about how they should be deployed: to control the Pakistan border, or to protect civilians?
"Officers agree that any strategy will have to include a mix of population security and border control, in addition to training the Afghan police and army. But the question for the new administration will be: What should get top priority?
There are about 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with an additional 20,000 scheduled to deploy this year. Current plans call for sending some of the additional forces to the border, but to use the majority of the new troops to safeguard villages and cities.
"There is a primacy on securing the population," said Army Maj. Gen. Michael S. Tucker, director of operations for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. "The approach is to reach out to the population, get into the villages, and separate them from the insurgency."
But behind the scenes, not everyone agrees. Experts with opposing views spoke on condition of anonymity, citing their lack of authority to publicly address an internal debate. Obama advisors also spoke on condition of anonymity because he doesn't take office until Jan. 20.
Some of those skeptical of the focus on securing towns and villages note that even with the planned buildup, there will be far fewer U.S. and local forces in Afghanistan than there were in Iraq during the 2007 troop surge, covering a much larger territory. Afghanistan's population is more rural and dispersed, making local security improvements more challenging."
LAT: indeed, Taliban launches brazen attack against Pakistani military post
but: "While stepping up their campaign against government troops, the insurgents also employ methods of baroque cruelty to intimidate civilians in the tribal areas. Hospital authorities in Khar, the main town in the Bajaur region, said over the weekend that militants had chopped off the ears of five captured members of a local committee organized to keep the Taliban out of town."
LAT: embed with the Taliban on the Afghan side
"Some Taliban commanders considered The Times' request for safe passage into their territory, only to reject a visit as too risky. But the Ghazni Talibs, eager to show the extent of their control, finally agreed...
In Ghazni province, at least, the Taliban militants are not frightened fighters skulking in caves, sneaking out to ambush and then scurrying off to another mountain hide-out. They live comfortably in the farming villages where many of them were born, holding territory, recruiting and training new troops, reveling in what they see as God's gift of inevitable victory against heathen foreign occupiers.
"In the early days, there were many spies, so we had to move around in small groups," Ahmadi said. "But now we are in groups of 300 or 400. We have no problems."...
Some accuse the Taliban of press-ganging villagers into the fight. But the Ghazni Talibs claim that eager volunteers swell their ranks by 10% a month, and insist that they turn many away...
Despite efforts by the U.S.-led military coalition to disrupt Taliban commanders' ability to direct military operations from a distance, the guerrillas appeared to be in regular contact with their leaders, and acted on their orders...
One Talib showed a voter registration card with his photo on it. Another said he used to work as a laborer for the American military in Ghazni on a Provincial Reconstruction Team."
WP: new rules lead US troops to shift tactics, coordinate with 'unreliable' locals
LAT: Sunni block in Iraq parliament splits over selecting new speaker
LAT: new political candidates campaign
"As Iraq nears its provincial elections day, Jan. 31, residents are faced with ballots that could make even a seasoned voter's head spin. In total across the country, 14,400 candidates representing 407 political entities are vying for 440 seats.
Fourteen of Iraq's 18 provinces are holding elections, and the crowded field in some of them -- in Baghdad alone, there are more than 2,400 candidates -- is only one of the challenges facing those seeking office. They also must deal with security concerns and questionable campaign tactics of some contenders who are giving away cooking oil, blankets and cash."
WP: not everyone gains political power through elections: the trajectory of one insurgent to local authority
"Khalil's ascent here is a legacy of the war that has all but ended and the struggle that has begun in Iraq, shaped by the expediency of American tactics to quell the insurgency and the combustible, shifting landscape those choices have left behind. War and occupation shattered old notions of power here, embedded in patronage and tradition. In places like Thuluyah, new leaders and forces are emerging, redrawing the maps of towns and regions that, in quick succession, have passed from the hands of Saddam Hussein, through the throes of the insurgency and into today's far murkier contest. Fierce in its customs, Thuluyah is a microcosm of Sunni Muslim regions of the country, residents like to say. If so, the town is a sober harbinger."
WP: ...included imposing brutal justice
"During the military operation, in which three Iraqis were killed, the soldiers relied on a Thuluyah resident as an informer, a young man named Sabah. In the aftermath, as tribal law filled an anarchic void, villagers declared that the informer's father had to kill his son, or they would kill the entire family. He and another son did."
LAT: Kurdish leader accuses Maliki of accumulating too much power
BBC: Ethiopian troops out of Mogadishu
BBC: ...while Islamists clash 500km north
HuffPo: interview with Nkunda
"Q. There have been terrible stories about how women are treated in Congo, especially how there have been mass rapes.
NYT: unclear what the state of the CNDP is
"Mr. Ntaganda declared himself the leader of the C.N.D.P. last Monday and claims to have taken a significant portion of the group’s fighters with him. General Nkunda insists that he remains in control and has tried to play down the disagreement. He told Reuters in an interview that Mr. Ntaganda had been “disrespectful” but remained a member of the rebel group, and that a commission of rebel leaders had been sent “to listen to him, to bring him back to his senses.”
"By the time the rampage ended, 254 people were dead in nine villages in a string of attacks that lasted several days, officials in Doruma estimate.
This troubled area of northeastern Congo, where regional conflicts have left 5 million people dead over 12 years, is now home base for one of Africa's longest-running and most insidious rebel movements: the Lord's Resistance Army, a fearsome group from neighboring Uganda that claims to demand strict adherence to the Ten Commandments.
A surprise joint offensive last month by the armies of Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo had sought to crush the rebel militia, notorious for preying on children, in its Congo hide-out.
But rather than kill the LRA's elusive leader, Joseph Kony, airstrikes against half a dozen rebel camps in the dense forests here appear to have only given new life to an old conflict, turning Uganda's civil war into a growing regional crisis.
After a lull in attacks over the last two years, the rebel army -- estimated at 600 fighters -- has split into small bands, scattering in different directions and terrorizing civilian populations with the most brutal massacres by the militia since 2004."
BBC: now the LRA has called for a ceasefire
"The LRA insists the International Criminal Court must drop warrants of arrest for Mr Kony and his top commanders before they can sign the peace deal."
Ind: ICC pre-trial of Bemba for atrocities in the CAR
"He is accused of leading his militia, the Congolese Liberation Movement, on a campaign of rape, murder and torture in neighbouring Central African Republic in 2002. Mr Bemba's forces went on the rampage after answering an appeal from then president of CAR Ange-Félix Patassé, who was threatened by a coup."
wronging rights: other ongoing investigations and upcoming trials
"Serbia would like everyone to know that the million euro reward it is offering for information leading to the arrest of Ratko Mladic (pictured above left) is tax free. So if you're holding onto information about the whereabouts of ICTY-indicted Mladic because of concerns about the tax implications, you can go right ahead and notify the authorities."
LAT: Colombian indigenous communities resist armed groups' presence
"After word spread across this Indian reservation that seven people had been kidnapped by leftist rebels, the community's unarmed "indigenous guard" sprang into action.
Within minutes, hundreds of men, women and children were out on roads and pathways searching for the hostages, communicating by radio, cellphone and shouts. Many held lanterns that, as the search continued after nightfall, made the rescue party seem an eerily glowing centipede snaking up and down hillsides.
Soon, the guards had found the hostages. The rebels were holding them in a school, which was quickly surrounded by hundreds of Indians, who, lanterns held high, kept a silent vigil. A guerrilla leader threatened violence and fired his weapon into the air, but no one budged.
After a brief standoff, the unarmed Indians secured the hostages' release.
The incident in November was a dramatic example of how many of Colombia's 92 indigenous communities use a common front and an almost Gandhian stance of nonviolence to coexist with, and sometimes prevail over, the rebels, drug traffickers, paramilitary fighters and government soldiers who for decades have battled one another in the country...
After the hostages were released, the guerrillas were allowed to flee. All except for one: a member of the Jambalo community who was a FARC collaborator. In a subsequent trial, he was banished from the reservation for 15 years as punishment, said Dagua, the tribe's leader."
BBC: Sri Lankan journalist assassinated
The Sunday Leader: he wrote his own obituary (via Paul Staniland)
"In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last."
LAT: mafia competition in Italy
The killings in September, recounted in interviews by senior antimafia officials, were gory evidence of conflict between the Neapolitan mafia, known as the Camorra, and Nigerian gangsters who play a growing role in Italy's drug and prostitution rackets.
This landscape of change and fear has been shaped by a singular juxtaposition: One of Europe's biggest concentrations of African immigrants has risen in the heart of Camorra turf.
Nigerian gangsters have made Castel Volturno a European headquarters. In the 1990s, demand boomed here for African prostitutes -- prosecutors call it "the Naomi Campbell phenomenon." Camorra clans "rented" turf to Nigerian pimps, a line of work that Neapolitan gangsters disdain.
And as cocaine flows increasingly to Europe through West Africa, Nigerians have graduated from their previous role as smuggling "mules" and pay the Camorra for a cut of street trafficking action.
'The Camorra worked well with the Nigerians at first,' said Antonio Laudati, a top Justice Ministry official who led a major prosecution of the Nigerian mafia last year. 'They were low-cost labor. They were well-received because they were cheap and very loyal. But then the Nigerians started to rise to a new level.'
That coincided with the disarray of the region's dominant clan from the nearby town of Casal di Principe. As older Casalesi bosses went to prison, a new generation of swaggering, hard-partying gunslingers stepped up. During the last year, they embarked on a punitive campaign against Italian turncoats and foreign rivals, killing nine people..."
LAT: Vatican floats excommunication as possible punishment for drug traffickers
"But the Roman Catholic Church's severest form of rebuke would probably have little effect on traffickers and killers who lack a religious conscience, the Vatican's No. 2 official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, acknowledged."
NYT (dated): homicides by black teens has increased since 2000
NYT (freakonomics blog): but, beware the graphics
"1) Compared to the early 1990’s, what is happening now is much smaller in scale.
NYT: sex work near the US military base in South Korea
"Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops."
Gdn: mass grave of Red Army victims uncovered in Poland
"A mass grave dating from the second world war and containing the bodies of at least 1,800 German men, women and children has been unearthed by construction workers in northern Poland.
"The poster collection in “Off the Wall”, comes from the 20-odd factions of Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war and shows that the shifting alliance of leftists and other radicals had artistic flair from the outset. Hizbullah, the Communists, the Syrian nationalists and the PLO, among others, harnessed contemporary graphic design and made it their own: Jerusalem in glowing colours features alongside clenched fists and AK-47s; the four-sided Syrian symbol rises like a sun; car bombs go bang like Roy Lichtenstein paintings."
++
preparing for transition:
Slate: looking back at the top 25 Bushisms
WP: from his final press conference, in which he acknowledges 'disappointments,' here's a late entry:
"In attempting to wish successor Barack Obama well, he found himself saying: 'I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best.' "
Slate: how does Obama's moving day work, anyhow?
"The talks in Egypt center on the question of how to keep Hamas from smuggling weapons across the Egypt-Gaza border. A senior Israeli official said Israel and Egypt are in basic agreement on a plan that would allow the European Union and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority to share responsibility for monitoring the border and the crossing point at Rafah...
On Monday, Israel carried out more than 60 airstrikes, continuing to bomb tunnels along the border, as well as homes of Hamas leaders. There was intense fighting reported around Gaza City as Israel tightened its cordon on Gaza's largest population center, home to 400,000 of Gaza's 1.5 million residents...
Officials and analysts say Israel's top three political leaders disagree over how the remainder of the war should play out. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is said to favor an expansion, while Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are believed to be more hesitant. Barak has aggressively pushed the talks in Egypt; Livni has said that Israel can soon declare victory and withdraw. The three run the country together and must achieve consensus before Israel can act...
Hamas and its allies continued to fire rockets into southern Israel on Monday, launching more than 20. There were no reports of major injuries, and the number was significantly down from earlier in the war, when Hamas was launching 40 per day or more."
Slate: how rockets are aimed
NYT: ...and warfare waged in urban areas
Gdn: displacement continues
Salon: Waltz with Bashir won best foreign film at the globes
BBC: Obama to sign order to close Guántanamo; stop torture
WP: ...and will double troops in Afghanistan
LAT: but debate about how they should be deployed: to control the Pakistan border, or to protect civilians?
"Officers agree that any strategy will have to include a mix of population security and border control, in addition to training the Afghan police and army. But the question for the new administration will be: What should get top priority?
There are about 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with an additional 20,000 scheduled to deploy this year. Current plans call for sending some of the additional forces to the border, but to use the majority of the new troops to safeguard villages and cities.
"There is a primacy on securing the population," said Army Maj. Gen. Michael S. Tucker, director of operations for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. "The approach is to reach out to the population, get into the villages, and separate them from the insurgency."
But behind the scenes, not everyone agrees. Experts with opposing views spoke on condition of anonymity, citing their lack of authority to publicly address an internal debate. Obama advisors also spoke on condition of anonymity because he doesn't take office until Jan. 20.
Some of those skeptical of the focus on securing towns and villages note that even with the planned buildup, there will be far fewer U.S. and local forces in Afghanistan than there were in Iraq during the 2007 troop surge, covering a much larger territory. Afghanistan's population is more rural and dispersed, making local security improvements more challenging."
LAT: indeed, Taliban launches brazen attack against Pakistani military post
but: "While stepping up their campaign against government troops, the insurgents also employ methods of baroque cruelty to intimidate civilians in the tribal areas. Hospital authorities in Khar, the main town in the Bajaur region, said over the weekend that militants had chopped off the ears of five captured members of a local committee organized to keep the Taliban out of town."
LAT: embed with the Taliban on the Afghan side
"Some Taliban commanders considered The Times' request for safe passage into their territory, only to reject a visit as too risky. But the Ghazni Talibs, eager to show the extent of their control, finally agreed...
In Ghazni province, at least, the Taliban militants are not frightened fighters skulking in caves, sneaking out to ambush and then scurrying off to another mountain hide-out. They live comfortably in the farming villages where many of them were born, holding territory, recruiting and training new troops, reveling in what they see as God's gift of inevitable victory against heathen foreign occupiers.
"In the early days, there were many spies, so we had to move around in small groups," Ahmadi said. "But now we are in groups of 300 or 400. We have no problems."...
Some accuse the Taliban of press-ganging villagers into the fight. But the Ghazni Talibs claim that eager volunteers swell their ranks by 10% a month, and insist that they turn many away...
Despite efforts by the U.S.-led military coalition to disrupt Taliban commanders' ability to direct military operations from a distance, the guerrillas appeared to be in regular contact with their leaders, and acted on their orders...
One Talib showed a voter registration card with his photo on it. Another said he used to work as a laborer for the American military in Ghazni on a Provincial Reconstruction Team."
WP: new rules lead US troops to shift tactics, coordinate with 'unreliable' locals
LAT: Sunni block in Iraq parliament splits over selecting new speaker
LAT: new political candidates campaign
"As Iraq nears its provincial elections day, Jan. 31, residents are faced with ballots that could make even a seasoned voter's head spin. In total across the country, 14,400 candidates representing 407 political entities are vying for 440 seats.
Fourteen of Iraq's 18 provinces are holding elections, and the crowded field in some of them -- in Baghdad alone, there are more than 2,400 candidates -- is only one of the challenges facing those seeking office. They also must deal with security concerns and questionable campaign tactics of some contenders who are giving away cooking oil, blankets and cash."
WP: not everyone gains political power through elections: the trajectory of one insurgent to local authority
"Khalil's ascent here is a legacy of the war that has all but ended and the struggle that has begun in Iraq, shaped by the expediency of American tactics to quell the insurgency and the combustible, shifting landscape those choices have left behind. War and occupation shattered old notions of power here, embedded in patronage and tradition. In places like Thuluyah, new leaders and forces are emerging, redrawing the maps of towns and regions that, in quick succession, have passed from the hands of Saddam Hussein, through the throes of the insurgency and into today's far murkier contest. Fierce in its customs, Thuluyah is a microcosm of Sunni Muslim regions of the country, residents like to say. If so, the town is a sober harbinger."
WP: ...included imposing brutal justice
"During the military operation, in which three Iraqis were killed, the soldiers relied on a Thuluyah resident as an informer, a young man named Sabah. In the aftermath, as tribal law filled an anarchic void, villagers declared that the informer's father had to kill his son, or they would kill the entire family. He and another son did."
LAT: Kurdish leader accuses Maliki of accumulating too much power
BBC: Ethiopian troops out of Mogadishu
BBC: ...while Islamists clash 500km north
HuffPo: interview with Nkunda
"Q. There have been terrible stories about how women are treated in Congo, especially how there have been mass rapes.
N. You are in the area under CNDP control. Ask the women who have been raped.
I cannot believe that they are raped here and then going to be treated in Goma or Bukavu. But if you go to Goma or Bukavu [under FARDC control] you are going to see hospitals full of women raped. Go to Rumangabo and they will tell you that the area under CNDP control is the most secure area in Congo.
They say that we massacre Hutu tribes. The executive secretary of CNDP is a Hutu."NYT: unclear what the state of the CNDP is
"Mr. Ntaganda declared himself the leader of the C.N.D.P. last Monday and claims to have taken a significant portion of the group’s fighters with him. General Nkunda insists that he remains in control and has tried to play down the disagreement. He told Reuters in an interview that Mr. Ntaganda had been “disrespectful” but remained a member of the rebel group, and that a commission of rebel leaders had been sent “to listen to him, to bring him back to his senses.”
The fracture seems to have been building for some time as the two men disagreed over how far the rebellion should go to achieve its aims — and in some ways over what those aims actually were, according to diplomats and analysts in the region. Mr. Ntaganda wanted to push harder and overrun Goma last year, and he told some of the rebellion’s backers that he was disappointed when General Nkunda heeded United Nations demands to hold back, according to human rights investigators.
General Nkunda, meanwhile, was dismayed by the barrage of international criticism that came after a massacre by his troops in November that was led by Mr. Ntaganda, according to a close ally of the general who spoke on condition of anonymity.
At least 150 people were killed in about 24 hours in the town of Kiwanja in early November. A report in The New York Times and an investigation by Human Rights Watch based on witnesses’ accounts found that fighters went door to door, killing mostly unarmed boys and young men, accusing them of being enemy fighters."
LAT: meanwhile, further north, LRA on killing spree"By the time the rampage ended, 254 people were dead in nine villages in a string of attacks that lasted several days, officials in Doruma estimate.
This troubled area of northeastern Congo, where regional conflicts have left 5 million people dead over 12 years, is now home base for one of Africa's longest-running and most insidious rebel movements: the Lord's Resistance Army, a fearsome group from neighboring Uganda that claims to demand strict adherence to the Ten Commandments.
A surprise joint offensive last month by the armies of Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo had sought to crush the rebel militia, notorious for preying on children, in its Congo hide-out.
But rather than kill the LRA's elusive leader, Joseph Kony, airstrikes against half a dozen rebel camps in the dense forests here appear to have only given new life to an old conflict, turning Uganda's civil war into a growing regional crisis.
After a lull in attacks over the last two years, the rebel army -- estimated at 600 fighters -- has split into small bands, scattering in different directions and terrorizing civilian populations with the most brutal massacres by the militia since 2004."
BBC: now the LRA has called for a ceasefire
"The LRA insists the International Criminal Court must drop warrants of arrest for Mr Kony and his top commanders before they can sign the peace deal."
Ind: ICC pre-trial of Bemba for atrocities in the CAR
"He is accused of leading his militia, the Congolese Liberation Movement, on a campaign of rape, murder and torture in neighbouring Central African Republic in 2002. Mr Bemba's forces went on the rampage after answering an appeal from then president of CAR Ange-Félix Patassé, who was threatened by a coup."
wronging rights: other ongoing investigations and upcoming trials
"Serbia would like everyone to know that the million euro reward it is offering for information leading to the arrest of Ratko Mladic (pictured above left) is tax free. So if you're holding onto information about the whereabouts of ICTY-indicted Mladic because of concerns about the tax implications, you can go right ahead and notify the authorities."
LAT: Colombian indigenous communities resist armed groups' presence
"After word spread across this Indian reservation that seven people had been kidnapped by leftist rebels, the community's unarmed "indigenous guard" sprang into action.
Within minutes, hundreds of men, women and children were out on roads and pathways searching for the hostages, communicating by radio, cellphone and shouts. Many held lanterns that, as the search continued after nightfall, made the rescue party seem an eerily glowing centipede snaking up and down hillsides.
Soon, the guards had found the hostages. The rebels were holding them in a school, which was quickly surrounded by hundreds of Indians, who, lanterns held high, kept a silent vigil. A guerrilla leader threatened violence and fired his weapon into the air, but no one budged.
After a brief standoff, the unarmed Indians secured the hostages' release.
The incident in November was a dramatic example of how many of Colombia's 92 indigenous communities use a common front and an almost Gandhian stance of nonviolence to coexist with, and sometimes prevail over, the rebels, drug traffickers, paramilitary fighters and government soldiers who for decades have battled one another in the country...
After the hostages were released, the guerrillas were allowed to flee. All except for one: a member of the Jambalo community who was a FARC collaborator. In a subsequent trial, he was banished from the reservation for 15 years as punishment, said Dagua, the tribe's leader."
BBC: Sri Lankan journalist assassinated
The Sunday Leader: he wrote his own obituary (via Paul Staniland)
"In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last."
LAT: mafia competition in Italy
The killings in September, recounted in interviews by senior antimafia officials, were gory evidence of conflict between the Neapolitan mafia, known as the Camorra, and Nigerian gangsters who play a growing role in Italy's drug and prostitution rackets.
This landscape of change and fear has been shaped by a singular juxtaposition: One of Europe's biggest concentrations of African immigrants has risen in the heart of Camorra turf.
Nigerian gangsters have made Castel Volturno a European headquarters. In the 1990s, demand boomed here for African prostitutes -- prosecutors call it "the Naomi Campbell phenomenon." Camorra clans "rented" turf to Nigerian pimps, a line of work that Neapolitan gangsters disdain.
And as cocaine flows increasingly to Europe through West Africa, Nigerians have graduated from their previous role as smuggling "mules" and pay the Camorra for a cut of street trafficking action.
'The Camorra worked well with the Nigerians at first,' said Antonio Laudati, a top Justice Ministry official who led a major prosecution of the Nigerian mafia last year. 'They were low-cost labor. They were well-received because they were cheap and very loyal. But then the Nigerians started to rise to a new level.'
That coincided with the disarray of the region's dominant clan from the nearby town of Casal di Principe. As older Casalesi bosses went to prison, a new generation of swaggering, hard-partying gunslingers stepped up. During the last year, they embarked on a punitive campaign against Italian turncoats and foreign rivals, killing nine people..."
LAT: Vatican floats excommunication as possible punishment for drug traffickers
"But the Roman Catholic Church's severest form of rebuke would probably have little effect on traffickers and killers who lack a religious conscience, the Vatican's No. 2 official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, acknowledged."
NYT (dated): homicides by black teens has increased since 2000
NYT (freakonomics blog): but, beware the graphics
"1) Compared to the early 1990’s, what is happening now is much smaller in scale.
2) When put side-by-side with no trend in the homicide rates of blacks aged 18 to 24 (the gray circles in the graph), the blip by 14- to 17-year-olds doesn’t seem so frightening.
And the most important (and I would say devious) difference between the two figures:
3) The numbers in The New York Times graphic and most of the James Alan Fox report fail to control for the change in the population of young black males over this time period."NYT: sex work near the US military base in South Korea
"Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops."
Gdn: mass grave of Red Army victims uncovered in Poland
"A mass grave dating from the second world war and containing the bodies of at least 1,800 German men, women and children has been unearthed by construction workers in northern Poland.
The discovery was made in the town of Malbork, which was called Marienburg and was part of Germany during the second world war, by workers building a luxury hotel at the foot of the town's 13th-century fortress.
The bodies are believed to be German civilians who disappeared after the Soviet army captured the town as it marched on Berlin in 1945. Many skulls were found with bullet holes in them, suggesting executions had taken place, a local official said."
Econ: insurgent art"The poster collection in “Off the Wall”, comes from the 20-odd factions of Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war and shows that the shifting alliance of leftists and other radicals had artistic flair from the outset. Hizbullah, the Communists, the Syrian nationalists and the PLO, among others, harnessed contemporary graphic design and made it their own: Jerusalem in glowing colours features alongside clenched fists and AK-47s; the four-sided Syrian symbol rises like a sun; car bombs go bang like Roy Lichtenstein paintings."
++
preparing for transition:
Slate: looking back at the top 25 Bushisms
WP: from his final press conference, in which he acknowledges 'disappointments,' here's a late entry:
"In attempting to wish successor Barack Obama well, he found himself saying: 'I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best.' "
Slate: how does Obama's moving day work, anyhow?
21 November 2008
experimenting with order [try a little tenderness]
WP: US changing tactics in Iraq
"With violence down sharply this year, the U.S. military is broadening its efforts to reconcile Sunnis and Shiites, reintegrate former insurgents into society and repair the rift between residents and their government...The U.S. reconciliation campaign includes some major projects, but much of the American effort is decentralized, consisting of reconstruction programs, peace marches and meetings with rival tribal leaders over platters of rice and lamb. In many cases, soldiers are making up the details as they go along...
"A spokesman for Mr. Sadr in Baghdad said his followers opposed the security agreement because they did not believe assurances that the Americans would leave."
NYT: photos from the Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan
WP: UN security council approves immediate deployment of 3,100 peacekeepers to the Congo
"The 15-nation council urged the leadership of the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping mission -- which has faced criticism for failing to defend civilians -- to forcefully implement its mandate. But the council has ignored appeals by the U.N.'s special representative in Congo, Alan Doss, to send a heavily armed multinational force to help restore stability.
WP: NIC predicts rise of state-run capitalism in multipolar world
"It is not a prediction," [Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis] Fingar said. "Nothing that we have identified in this report is determinative. Nothing in it is inevitable or immutable. These are trends and developments and drivers that are subject to policy intervention and manipulation."
LAT: judge orders release of 5 Guantanamo prisoners
"A federal judge ruled here for the first time Thursday that the Bush administration had no basis for holding several of its long-term prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he ordered that five of the Algerian natives go free."
Gdn: tensions still high in Nicaragua over disputed election
"Sandinista supporters armed with machetes, rocks and home-made mortars snuffed out opposition protests earlier this week, leaving dozens injured. For much of the trouble police were notably absent.
"Sinaloa, a fertile state on the Pacific coast, has long been at the center of Mexico's drug trade. It has become a hub of violence since President Felipe Calderon dispatched an army of soldiers and federal police to take on some of the biggest drug lords.
The alarming level of violence -- shootouts and kidnappings almost every day -- has sown panic and fear among a normally resilient citizenry."
BBC: "Hindu terrorism" debate in India
WP: grenade kills protester in Bangkok; demonstrations continue
"The dispute between the predominantly urban, middle-class demonstrators and the government, which was voted into power last year with the backing of millions of Thailand's rural poor, has paralyzed the country's political process and gouged deep political divisions between the rural and urban populations.
The demonstrators have ruled out any compromise, vowing to maintain their protest until the government is forced out of office."
Econ: new UK law to punish johns attempts to tackle trafficking
"Most prostitution [in the UK], which is legal, is consensual. But worries about abuse are rising. Performed behind closed curtains and often by people who fear to seek help, prostitution has always been a job in which exploitation is possible. Now, like most unappealing, low-paid occupations, it is increasingly carried out by immigrants: eight out of ten London prostitutes are foreigners, police think. Isolated, lacking knowledge of English or the law and sometimes trafficked by criminal gangs, the new arrivals are especially vulnerable. In the past two years police have rescued 251 women whom they believe were trafficked to Britain for sexual slavery.
BBC: testifying against the Camorra
"The Camorra kills someone on average every three days, so I only have to stop a random person on the street to find someone who has witnessed a murder first hand and ask if they gave their testimony to the police.
Econ: experimenting with disorder and behavior
"The tendency for people to behave in a particular way can be strengthened or weakened depending on what they observe others to be doing. This does not necessarily mean that people will copy bad behaviour exactly, reaching for a spray can when they see graffiti. Rather, says Dr Keizer, it can foster the “violation” of other norms of behaviour...The researchers’ conclusion is that one example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing."
++
Slate: a new translation of the Quran
"The new crop of Quran translators are brushing aside centuries of traditionalist, male-dominated, and often misogynistic clerical interpretations in favor of a more contemporary, more individualized, and often more gender-friendly approach to the Quran. In the process, they are not only reshaping the way Islam's holy book is read; they are reinterpreting the way Islam itself is being understood in the modern world."
++
NYT (Brooks): Brooks tips off terrorists, Sarah Palin
"If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed." (ht: steve shewfelt)
"With violence down sharply this year, the U.S. military is broadening its efforts to reconcile Sunnis and Shiites, reintegrate former insurgents into society and repair the rift between residents and their government...The U.S. reconciliation campaign includes some major projects, but much of the American effort is decentralized, consisting of reconstruction programs, peace marches and meetings with rival tribal leaders over platters of rice and lamb. In many cases, soldiers are making up the details as they go along...
Lt. Col. Monty Willoughby, 42, has had to figure out how to keep the peace in an area of northwestern Baghdad that was previously a hotbed of Sunni insurgents. He became worried last spring when U.S. commanders announced a plan to release thousands of Iraqis detained for alleged ties to insurgents.
"We're like, man, how are we going to keep these guys from falling back into it?" asked Willoughby, an earnest, freckled officer from Clever, Mo., who commands the 4th Squadron of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, which is attached to the 101st Airborne.
Willoughby decided he needed someone to help the detainees reenter society. And that is how a squadron of macho U.S. infantrymen and gung-ho tankers came to hire their first professional nurturer...
[nuturer] Kashmoola and his fellow managers line up housing as well as jobs or training programs. Then the managers check up on the men to ensure they stay out of trouble.
On a recent sunny Thursday, Kashmoola and Willoughby attended a detainee release ceremony on the lawn of a blue-domed mosque. The U.S. military has made these into gala affairs, with flag-waving crowds and speeches from Muslim leaders and Iraqi army officers. The 48 newly freed men were handed gift-wrapped bags of chocolates by U.S. soldiers who a year ago might have flex-cuffed them...
The Army issued a field manual last month on "stability operations" to guide its troops in facilitating reconciliation and providing essential services. It was produced after the Department of Defense in 2005 elevated "stability operations" to the same level in its doctrine as offensive and defensive operations...
Building support for government institutions is a key part of the U.S. military's pacification effort in Iraq. In Willoughby's area of northwestern Baghdad, for example, American troops have cleaned out sewers, rebuilt schools and put in a swimming pool.
"As you, as a citizen, are looking on, you've got to say, 'It's nice to live here,' " Willoughby said. If insurgents return, the U.S. officers hope, Iraqis will consider what they have to lose.
It can be difficult to assess the effectiveness of some of the American programs. Hickman's soldiers, for example, have helped organize soccer games between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, providing the young players with T-shirts or uniforms.
The matches aren't billed as peace events, he said, but the parents mingle, re-creating an atmosphere that existed before the invasion. The games draw them from neighborhoods divided by giant blast walls and painful memories of sectarian warfare."
NYT: 10,000 Sadr supporters protest US-Iraqi troop agreement in Baghdad"A spokesman for Mr. Sadr in Baghdad said his followers opposed the security agreement because they did not believe assurances that the Americans would leave."
NYT: historical headlines on troop agreements past
"In a treaty signed on Oct. 10, 1922, Britain agreed to prepare the country for independence. But the treaty postponed discussion of exactly how this would happen, and effectively prolonged Britain’s mandate under another form for at least 20 years (a period later reduced)."
NYT: photos from the Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan
WP: UN security council approves immediate deployment of 3,100 peacekeepers to the Congo
"The 15-nation council urged the leadership of the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping mission -- which has faced criticism for failing to defend civilians -- to forcefully implement its mandate. But the council has ignored appeals by the U.N.'s special representative in Congo, Alan Doss, to send a heavily armed multinational force to help restore stability.
Doss cautioned this week that U.N. reinforcements, while welcome, would not be sufficient to restore peace in a region the size of France. He said any durable peace would have to be reached in political talks led by the U.N.'s special envoy, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, between the rebels and the Congolese government."
NYT: Mai Mai militias complicate the conflict
"The Mai Mai are the third piece to eastern Congo’s violent puzzle, with the rebels on one side, the government forces on the other and the Mai Mai often terrorizing the uncontrolled areas in between. With their guns, leaf headdresses and special potions that many fighters believe make bullets bounce off them, they are a surreal — but still deadly — dimension to Congo’s civil wars.
The Mai Mai insist that they are Congo’s true patriots, but it is questionable how much influence they wield — most villagers call them crooks and they tend to lose their battles. In the past few weeks, they have emerged as spoilers, fighting on when the other armed groups have agreed to stop. The Mai Mai now seem to have a beef with just about everybody: the rebels (whom they clashed with on Thursday); United Nations peacekeepers (whom they clashed with on Wednesday); and Congolese government troops (whom they clashed with on Tuesday)...
There are thousands of Mai Mai fighters in dozens of loosely connected Mai Mai groups scattered across Congo. The movement started decades ago when Congolese communities formed militias to protect themselves and tapped into local customs as a way to inspire the fighters. The term “mai mai” refers to maji, the Kiswahili word for water, because many of the Mai Mai fighters grease themselves up with a mixture of palm oil and holy water before stepping on the battlefield. Often the emollient — and some homemade necklaces — is all they wear...
Many of the Mai Mai militias in other parts of Congo have agreed to disarm. But in eastern Congo, the Mai Mai seem increasingly restless."
LAT: brief respite in Goma in history of hard times
"In a sign of how bad things are, Goma's residents now say that life under brutal Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko is seen as the "good old days."
Then, this eastern Congolese border town [of 600,000] was looked at as the Switzerland of Africa, envied for its natural beauty, stability and prosperity. A vast agricultural industry of coffee, tea, potatoes, beans and cheese fed not only Congo, but the entire region. Gold and tin mines pumped the local economy. Tourism flourished thanks to lush parks and a nearby population of several hundred mountain gorillas.
The relative idyll began unraveling with the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, when bodies clogged Lake Kivu and millions of refugees fled here, trampling Congolese farmland, depleting resources and bringing cholera and other epidemics.
Then Goma became a launching pad for two civil wars, one of which escalated into a regional conflict known as Africa's First World War. The most recent estimates put the war's death toll at 5 million, mostly due to disease and malnutrition, with many of the fatalities in Goma.
Finally, when peace seemed around the corner, Mt. Nyiragongo exploded in 2002, engulfing half the town in ash and lava and killing as many as 100 people.
Today farms lie fallow and 1 in 10 people rely on international food aid. Mines still thrive, but three-fourths of the profits line the pockets of rival militias and illicit foreign-owned businesses. Tourism long ago disappeared.
Surviving in Goma, residents say, requires a combination of fatalism and pragmatism, accepting that their future is largely out of their hands but keeping a suitcase packed...
An explosion in rapes is another side effect, Butsitsi said. Thousands of women have been sexually attacked in eastern Congo over the last five years, one of the worst records worldwide."
Ind: carving out a parallel state
"Inside General Nkunda's territory the markets are starting to operate again, there are uniformed police and there are plans for an anthem and a flag. There are also – officials insist – no refugees or displaced people. Around the town of Rutshuru that recently sheltered nearly 15,000 refugees, there is little or no sign that they were ever there. Dumes camp which housed 4,000 people last month has been razed, its clinics dismantled."
Econ: options for negotiation
"The simplest way forward would appear to be the reintegration of Mr Nkunda and his National Congress for the Defence of the People into Congo’s security structures. But the price would almost certainly be too high. Mr Nkunda wants the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to grant him a principality in eastern Congo, a sinecure in Kinshasa and the disarming of the Hutu militias he accuses of attacking Tutsis."
WP: NIC predicts rise of state-run capitalism in multipolar world
"It is not a prediction," [Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis] Fingar said. "Nothing that we have identified in this report is determinative. Nothing in it is inevitable or immutable. These are trends and developments and drivers that are subject to policy intervention and manipulation."
LAT: judge orders release of 5 Guantanamo prisoners
"A federal judge ruled here for the first time Thursday that the Bush administration had no basis for holding several of its long-term prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he ordered that five of the Algerian natives go free."
Gdn: tensions still high in Nicaragua over disputed election
"Sandinista supporters armed with machetes, rocks and home-made mortars snuffed out opposition protests earlier this week, leaving dozens injured. For much of the trouble police were notably absent.
A tense calm descended on the capital when the opposition withdrew from the fray and vowed to challenge the results in the national assembly, setting the scene for weeks of political wrangling and fears of renewed flare-ups."
LAT: drug violence flares in Sinaloa"Sinaloa, a fertile state on the Pacific coast, has long been at the center of Mexico's drug trade. It has become a hub of violence since President Felipe Calderon dispatched an army of soldiers and federal police to take on some of the biggest drug lords.
The alarming level of violence -- shootouts and kidnappings almost every day -- has sown panic and fear among a normally resilient citizenry."
BBC: Syrian weapons dealer convicted of trafficking arms to the FARC
BBC: "Hindu terrorism" debate in India
WP: grenade kills protester in Bangkok; demonstrations continue
"The dispute between the predominantly urban, middle-class demonstrators and the government, which was voted into power last year with the backing of millions of Thailand's rural poor, has paralyzed the country's political process and gouged deep political divisions between the rural and urban populations.
The demonstrators have ruled out any compromise, vowing to maintain their protest until the government is forced out of office."
Econ: new UK law to punish johns attempts to tackle trafficking
"Most prostitution [in the UK], which is legal, is consensual. But worries about abuse are rising. Performed behind closed curtains and often by people who fear to seek help, prostitution has always been a job in which exploitation is possible. Now, like most unappealing, low-paid occupations, it is increasingly carried out by immigrants: eight out of ten London prostitutes are foreigners, police think. Isolated, lacking knowledge of English or the law and sometimes trafficked by criminal gangs, the new arrivals are especially vulnerable. In the past two years police have rescued 251 women whom they believe were trafficked to Britain for sexual slavery.
The situation is shameful, but the proposal the government unveiled this week—to make those buying sex liable to criminal charges if it subsequently emerges that the prostitute was controlled for another person’s gain—is no way to remedy it. This newspaper tends toward a liberal view of these matters, but even those who do not will find this amber light a waste of space. Better by far either to criminalise outright the purchase of sex or to legalise it and regulate what ensues."
BBC: testifying against the Camorra
"The Camorra kills someone on average every three days, so I only have to stop a random person on the street to find someone who has witnessed a murder first hand and ask if they gave their testimony to the police.
"No, no, no," one woman tells me, "I would be afraid, no-one talks about this."
She tells me the murder she saw took place at nine in the morning in a crowded square, and no-one talked to the police."
Econ: experimenting with disorder and behavior
"The tendency for people to behave in a particular way can be strengthened or weakened depending on what they observe others to be doing. This does not necessarily mean that people will copy bad behaviour exactly, reaching for a spray can when they see graffiti. Rather, says Dr Keizer, it can foster the “violation” of other norms of behaviour...The researchers’ conclusion is that one example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing."
++
Slate: a new translation of the Quran
"The new crop of Quran translators are brushing aside centuries of traditionalist, male-dominated, and often misogynistic clerical interpretations in favor of a more contemporary, more individualized, and often more gender-friendly approach to the Quran. In the process, they are not only reshaping the way Islam's holy book is read; they are reinterpreting the way Islam itself is being understood in the modern world."
++
NYT (Brooks): Brooks tips off terrorists, Sarah Palin
"If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed." (ht: steve shewfelt)
04 October 2008
the all-of-the-above approach [past is prologue]
NYT: British diplomat predicts NATO defeat and recommends dictatorship for Afghanistan
NYT: three fronts in recently ramped-up war against the Taliban in Pakistan
"In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.
LAT: US cops advising Iraqis
"Acree is one of about 800 civilian police officers working under a military contract with DynCorp International. Unlike the thousands of civilian contractors who have come to Iraq to supplement the military, Acree and his colleagues don't provide security services. They're here to impart their experience in urban police work to a young and inadequately trained and equipped force.
The consultants, whose pay starts at $134,000 a year, are assigned to U.S. military police units and travel in convoys of Humvees."
LAT: more clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces
"The fighting, which represented Turkey's largest loss of troops this year in a single incident, was considered likely to spur Turkish military strikes at rebel hideouts across the border in northern Iraq. Within hours of the rebel attack, the Turkish military was already aiming artillery strikes across the frontier...The fighting came days before Turkish lawmakers are to take up a measure that would give the army continued authority in the coming year to stage strikes across the border in Iraq."
NYT: who will pay the pirate ransom?
"As if things were not complicated enough, one of the few people with experience in prickly pirate problems has been jailed by the Kenyan government on suspicion that he is a pirate himself...Many seamen in Kenya insist that Mr. Mwangura is a good man, and that his only fault may have been being outspoken. He was the first maritime official to say that the hijacked ship was part of a secret arms deal between Kenya and southern Sudan. Kenyan officials have denied this, saying the heavy weaponry, including battle tanks, is for their use. But Western diplomats have privately said this is a lie."
LAT: ANC factions may prove too difficult to keep together
LAT: bloggers expose dissent within the opposition in Egypt
"This Internet revolution strikes at the Muslim Brotherhood's identity. The organization, founded in 1928, has renounced violence and supports democratic change in Egypt, but it is allied with the militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of the banned party's members are arrested each year; human rights groups say Mubarak is portraying the brotherhood followers as terrorists in an effort to silence his most potent detractors.
The brotherhood is praised for its community outreach services, but often viewed as out of touch, too rooted in religious dogma and its quest for an Islamic state. This ideology and constant pressure from government security forces have left the organization unable to create a credible coalition with leftists, nationalists and others to seriously challenge the ruling National Democratic Party.
In one of his posts, Naggar urged the brotherhood to "question ourselves and admit our mistakes. It is not shameful to revise our ideas and change our positions. It is not shameful to be brave enough and say that we were mistaken. What is really shameful is not to speak about our mistakes and claim that our ideas are sacred."
Such soul-searching represents an unprecedented public criticism of the bureaucracy and thinking in a major Islamic movement and has shattered the secrecy prized by the brotherhood, said Khalil Anani, an expert on the group. He suggested that the brotherhood's leadership is threatened by the brashness of its young reformers, yet it needs these Web-savvy critics to reach new generations of Muslims."
LAT: Mexicans march on 40th anniversary of student massacre
"The killings -- official reports put the toll at 25 to 43 but human rights groups have long maintained that the number was closer to 350 -- started when government forces opened fire on a massive but peaceful student demonstration just days before the Olympic Games were to open in Mexico City. It was a time of political effervescence in the country and across the globe, and the Mexican government of the day was eager to conceal what had happened.
The incident in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, in the Tlatelolco zone of Mexico City, remained shrouded in secrecy for decades."
LAT: reassessing how many died in Dresden
"While estimates for the numbers killed in the attacks on the city have fluctuated wildly between 35,000 and half a million over the past six decades, the historians commissioned by the city say the figure was considerably lower.
"The women here have always had a complex role in the dynamics of an insular society that seems to exist at the margins of mainstream Italy. They are the mothers of the mobsters, their wives and, prosecutors say, often their accomplices. Fiercely protective of their brood, they can be as ruthless as their men. In the last year, it also appears that some San Luca women have served as a counterforce to the violence spiraling from internal feuds...San Luca is a town of interconnected clans, and there is no one who cannot claim a mobster among his or her relatives. In virtually every family, someone has been imprisoned or killed...
Calabria, the toe-of-the-boot region of Italy where San Luca is located, is the nation's poorest, on paper at least; the women complained that the only time they see an arm of the government it's in the form of police rounding up suspected gangsters...
San Luca sits on the edge of the densely forested Aspromonte mountain range, a favorite spot of the 'Ndrangheta for hiding its kidnapping victims in the 1970s and '80s. The organization has existed in some form for more than a century, evolving as a protection racket after World War II and then graduating to drug trafficking a decade or so ago. The 'Ndrangheta developed a multibillion-dollar enterprise in the last few years when it took over cocaine routes from Latin America to Europe, the fastest-growing market for illicit narcotics.
This region is like few others. The minute a stranger enters San Luca, a kind of silent alarm is sounded. Outsiders will be followed, their movements tracked. The people have their own body language, not to mention their own actual language: All speak a Calabrian dialect. An Italian speaker unfamiliar with the dialect will grasp only parts of a conversation.
San Luca gained international notoriety last year when six Italians were gunned down outside a pizzeria in Duisburg, Germany. Authorities called it a revenge hit in an escalating 'Ndrangheta feud. Three of the dead, including a 16-year-old boy, were from San Luca, and the others from nearby Calabrian towns.
The killings -- the most public evidence to date of the international reach of the 'Ndrangheta -- shocked Italians and unleashed fears of further violence. But more than a year later, no one else has been killed, and the credit, at least partially, goes to a woman...
At a tense funeral for the Duisburg dead in San Luca in August 2007, instead of demanding revenge, as many mothers and wives had, Strangio insisted on forgiveness...
Diego Trotta, a senior police investigator in Calabria who has led many operations against the 'Ndrangheta, thinks reprisals have only been delayed, not canceled. Any relative peace, he said, is thanks to scores of arrests in the last year...
The women of San Luca are for the most part locked into a certain fate. They are married off to other families within the clans to seal the impervious unity of the 'Ndrangheta. Only in the last decade or so did San Luca families allow their daughters to go to high school."
NYT: three fronts in recently ramped-up war against the Taliban in Pakistan
"In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.
Earlier this summer, the military became locked in an uphill fight against the militants in Swat, a more settled area of North-West Frontier Province that was once a middle-class ski resort. Today it is a maelstrom of killing...
At a third front, south of Peshawar, around the town of Dera Adam Khel, the army recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat tunnel, a road more than a mile long that carries NATO supplies from the port of Karachi to the American and coalition forces in Afghanistan."
NYT: rebuilding SamarraLAT: US cops advising Iraqis
"Acree is one of about 800 civilian police officers working under a military contract with DynCorp International. Unlike the thousands of civilian contractors who have come to Iraq to supplement the military, Acree and his colleagues don't provide security services. They're here to impart their experience in urban police work to a young and inadequately trained and equipped force.
The consultants, whose pay starts at $134,000 a year, are assigned to U.S. military police units and travel in convoys of Humvees."
LAT: more clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces
"The fighting, which represented Turkey's largest loss of troops this year in a single incident, was considered likely to spur Turkish military strikes at rebel hideouts across the border in northern Iraq. Within hours of the rebel attack, the Turkish military was already aiming artillery strikes across the frontier...The fighting came days before Turkish lawmakers are to take up a measure that would give the army continued authority in the coming year to stage strikes across the border in Iraq."
NYT: who will pay the pirate ransom?
"As if things were not complicated enough, one of the few people with experience in prickly pirate problems has been jailed by the Kenyan government on suspicion that he is a pirate himself...Many seamen in Kenya insist that Mr. Mwangura is a good man, and that his only fault may have been being outspoken. He was the first maritime official to say that the hijacked ship was part of a secret arms deal between Kenya and southern Sudan. Kenyan officials have denied this, saying the heavy weaponry, including battle tanks, is for their use. But Western diplomats have privately said this is a lie."
LAT: ANC factions may prove too difficult to keep together
LAT: bloggers expose dissent within the opposition in Egypt
"This Internet revolution strikes at the Muslim Brotherhood's identity. The organization, founded in 1928, has renounced violence and supports democratic change in Egypt, but it is allied with the militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of the banned party's members are arrested each year; human rights groups say Mubarak is portraying the brotherhood followers as terrorists in an effort to silence his most potent detractors.
The brotherhood is praised for its community outreach services, but often viewed as out of touch, too rooted in religious dogma and its quest for an Islamic state. This ideology and constant pressure from government security forces have left the organization unable to create a credible coalition with leftists, nationalists and others to seriously challenge the ruling National Democratic Party.
In one of his posts, Naggar urged the brotherhood to "question ourselves and admit our mistakes. It is not shameful to revise our ideas and change our positions. It is not shameful to be brave enough and say that we were mistaken. What is really shameful is not to speak about our mistakes and claim that our ideas are sacred."
Such soul-searching represents an unprecedented public criticism of the bureaucracy and thinking in a major Islamic movement and has shattered the secrecy prized by the brotherhood, said Khalil Anani, an expert on the group. He suggested that the brotherhood's leadership is threatened by the brashness of its young reformers, yet it needs these Web-savvy critics to reach new generations of Muslims."
LAT: Mexicans march on 40th anniversary of student massacre
"The killings -- official reports put the toll at 25 to 43 but human rights groups have long maintained that the number was closer to 350 -- started when government forces opened fire on a massive but peaceful student demonstration just days before the Olympic Games were to open in Mexico City. It was a time of political effervescence in the country and across the globe, and the Mexican government of the day was eager to conceal what had happened.
The incident in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, in the Tlatelolco zone of Mexico City, remained shrouded in secrecy for decades."
LAT: reassessing how many died in Dresden
"While estimates for the numbers killed in the attacks on the city have fluctuated wildly between 35,000 and half a million over the past six decades, the historians commissioned by the city say the figure was considerably lower.
"The results of the commission conclude that 18,000 to 25,000 people died in Dresden from the air raids," an official said yesterday. The figure has long been a matter of dispute, heightened by the entry into the regional parliament of Saxony in Dresden of the NPD, a far-right political party, who called the February 1945 raids a "bombing holocaust", and claimed they had killed half a million.
The bombing, which took place just 12 weeks before the surrender of Nazi Germany, remains one of the most controversial actions of the second world war. While the operation was defended by the allies as a justified attack on a vital transport hub, most of those who died were civilians and refugees. Many were said to have perished in the resulting firestorm.
The former mayor of Dresden, Ingold Rossberg, commissioned the 11-strong team of historians four years ago to try to establish a clear figure. The results were presented at Dresden's annual Conference of Historians.
While the figure is well below previous estimates, members of the conference were keen to stress that the report did not belittle the immensity of the act. Thousands of lives were claimed in just four US and UK raids, lasting 63 minutes. Almost 4,000 tonnes of high explosives and incendiary devices were dropped."
LAT: the women of San Luca and behind the 'Ndrangheta mafia"The women here have always had a complex role in the dynamics of an insular society that seems to exist at the margins of mainstream Italy. They are the mothers of the mobsters, their wives and, prosecutors say, often their accomplices. Fiercely protective of their brood, they can be as ruthless as their men. In the last year, it also appears that some San Luca women have served as a counterforce to the violence spiraling from internal feuds...San Luca is a town of interconnected clans, and there is no one who cannot claim a mobster among his or her relatives. In virtually every family, someone has been imprisoned or killed...
Calabria, the toe-of-the-boot region of Italy where San Luca is located, is the nation's poorest, on paper at least; the women complained that the only time they see an arm of the government it's in the form of police rounding up suspected gangsters...
San Luca sits on the edge of the densely forested Aspromonte mountain range, a favorite spot of the 'Ndrangheta for hiding its kidnapping victims in the 1970s and '80s. The organization has existed in some form for more than a century, evolving as a protection racket after World War II and then graduating to drug trafficking a decade or so ago. The 'Ndrangheta developed a multibillion-dollar enterprise in the last few years when it took over cocaine routes from Latin America to Europe, the fastest-growing market for illicit narcotics.
This region is like few others. The minute a stranger enters San Luca, a kind of silent alarm is sounded. Outsiders will be followed, their movements tracked. The people have their own body language, not to mention their own actual language: All speak a Calabrian dialect. An Italian speaker unfamiliar with the dialect will grasp only parts of a conversation.
San Luca gained international notoriety last year when six Italians were gunned down outside a pizzeria in Duisburg, Germany. Authorities called it a revenge hit in an escalating 'Ndrangheta feud. Three of the dead, including a 16-year-old boy, were from San Luca, and the others from nearby Calabrian towns.
The killings -- the most public evidence to date of the international reach of the 'Ndrangheta -- shocked Italians and unleashed fears of further violence. But more than a year later, no one else has been killed, and the credit, at least partially, goes to a woman...
At a tense funeral for the Duisburg dead in San Luca in August 2007, instead of demanding revenge, as many mothers and wives had, Strangio insisted on forgiveness...
Diego Trotta, a senior police investigator in Calabria who has led many operations against the 'Ndrangheta, thinks reprisals have only been delayed, not canceled. Any relative peace, he said, is thanks to scores of arrests in the last year...
The women of San Luca are for the most part locked into a certain fate. They are married off to other families within the clans to seal the impervious unity of the 'Ndrangheta. Only in the last decade or so did San Luca families allow their daughters to go to high school."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
