viral violence

NYT magazine: interrupting cycles of violence in Chicago

"So in 2004, [CeaseFire co-founder Tio] Hardiman suggested that, in addition to outreach workers, they also hire men and women who had been deep into street life, and he began recruiting people even while they were still in prison. Hardiman told me he was looking for those “right there on the edge.” (The interrupters are paid roughly $15 an hour, and those working full time receive benefits from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where CeaseFire is housed.) The new recruits, with strong connections to the toughest communities, would focus solely on sniffing out clashes that had the potential to escalate. They would intervene in potential acts of retribution — as well as try to defuse seemingly minor spats that might erupt into something bigger, like disputes over women or insulting remarks....

Daniel Webster, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University who has looked closely at CeaseFire, told me, “The guys out there doing the interruption have some prestige and reputation, and I think the hope is that they start to change a culture so that you can retain your status, retain your manliness and be able to walk away from events where all expectations were that you were supposed to respond with lethal force.” As a result, the interrupters operate in a netherworld between upholding the law and upholding the logic of the streets...

Most of the police officials I spoke with, in both Chicago and Baltimore, were grateful for the interrupters. James B. Jackson, now the first deputy superintendent in Chicago, was once the commander of the 11th district, which has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the city. Jackson told me that after his officers investigated an incident, he would ask the police to pull back so the interrupters could mediate. He understood that if the interrupters were associated with the police, it would jeopardize their standing among gang members. “If you look at how segments of the population view the police department, it makes some of our efforts problematic,” Baltimore’s police commissioner, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, told me. “It takes someone who knows these guys to go in and say, ‘Hey, lay off.’ We can’t do that.”...

It’s like cholera: you may cure everyone, you may contain the epidemic, but if you don’t clean up the water supply, people will soon get sick again.

[CeaseFire founder Gary] Slutkin says that it makes sense to purify the water supply if — and only if — you acknowledge and treat the epidemic at hand. In other words, antipoverty measures will work only if you treat violence. It would seem intuitive that violence is a result of economic deprivation, but the relationship between the two is not static. People who have little expectation for the future live recklessly. On the other side of the coin, a community in which arguments are settled by gunshots is unlikely to experience economic growth and opportunity. In his book “The Bottom Billion,” Paul Collier argues that one of the characteristics of many developing countries that suffer from entrenched poverty is what he calls the conflict trap, the inability to escape a cycle of violence, usually in the guise of civil wars. Could the same be true in our inner cities, where the ubiquity of guns and gunplay pushes businesses and residents out and leaves behind those who can’t leave, the most impoverished?

In this, Slutkin sees a direct parallel to the early history of seemingly incurable infectious diseases. “Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1880s,” Slutkin says. “Three ghosts: malaria, smallpox and leprosy. No one wanted to go there. Everybody blamed the people. Dirty. Bad habits. Something about their race. Not only is everybody afraid to go there, but the people there themselves are afraid at all times because people are dying a lot and nobody really knows what to do about it. And people come up with all kinds of other ideas that are not scientifically grounded — like putting people away, closing the place down, pushing the people out of town. Sound familiar?”

Psephos: global elections tracker (albeit in an unpleasing aesthetic package)

this announcement will self-destruct

WP: the 5-year anniversary of the accomplished mission (for some sailors on a ship at that moment not really the war in general and the whole thing has been taken out of context and the president really was aware that a strategy for occupying Iraq and preventing insurgency and sectarian warfare was essential, so when he said "end of combat operations," he meant for a small group of people on that particular deployment. on that day. sheesh.)
"Now, after half a trillion dollars and the deaths of 4,000 troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the president's spin doctors have waved the white flag of surrender over the USS Abraham Lincoln episode. "President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific, and said mission accomplished for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters this week."
WP: The problem, sources tell us, is that White House planners couldn't figure out how to get all that on the sign in letters large enough for people to read on television.
Gdn: British don't think mission is accomplished yet in Basra, or will be anytime soon
Gdn: Turkey bombs Kurdish targets in Iraq

New Yorker: wire-tapping gone haywire

BBC: press freedom in the world, touch and go
Gdn: freedom gained for one Al-Jazeera camerman, after imprisonment for 6 years without charges in Guantánamo

CSM: building the police force in Afghanistan
"Unlike the Army, in which the public has much confidence, the police have been seen as weak, ineffectual, and corrupt."

Ind: Gaza in the line of fire
Gdn: and under blockade; Israel pressured to ease up

Ind: car bomber in Yemen kills 6 outside mosque in Saada
"It was not known who planted the bomb near the door of the mosque, but the northwestern province has been rocked by sporadic violence since a conflict broke out in 2004 between government forces and rebels loyal to Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.
Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands have fled their homes in Saada since the conflict began.
Seven Yemeni troops were killed late on Tuesday in an ambush by the rebels, who often clash with troops of the U.S.-allied Yemeni government and tribes loyal to it.
Yemeni officials say the rebels, from the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam, want to return to a form of clerical rule prevalent in the country until the 1960s. The rebels say they are defending their villages against what they call government aggression.
Sunni Muslims form a majority of Yemen's 19 million population, while most of the rest, including Houthi and his supporters, are Zaydis."

LAT: Ecuador overhauls military
"Correa is expected to appoint a seven-member commission in the next several days to look into what he says is possible CIA infiltration of his military's intelligence.
The military's exalted status under Ecuadorean law is expected to change with the new constitution that Correa's legislative allies are drafting in a special assembly, which will be put to a national vote...
After Ecuador emerged from military dictatorships in 1979, defense ministers were either active-duty or retired military commanders. That changed under Correa; since taking office last year, he has named only civilian defense ministers."

BBC: Santa Cruz moving forward with referendum on autonomy from Bolivia

BBC: Taylor had $5 billion in US banks during rule

BBC: US announces new sanctions against Burma

BBC: sex workers in Calcutta get life insurance

LAT: gay rights in Nepal
"In less than a decade, [activist] Pant's Blue Diamond Society has scaled massive heights in a nation known mostly as the home of Mt. Everest. Despite deep-seated social conservatism, the group has won a landmark Supreme Court anti-discrimination ruling, chalked up support for gay rights from two of the biggest political parties and garnered international accolades...An extraordinary week in 2004 catapulted his cause to the center of public attention. Even conservative Nepalese who don't approve of homosexuality were horrified by the actions of a policeman who slit the throat of a transgendered person after forcing her to perform oral sex. When 39 members of the Blue Diamond Society were arrested at a protest a few days later, sympathetic media coverage and international outrage stung the government."
BBC: residents of Lesbos, in Greece, take gay rights group to court over word lesbian
"The islanders say that if they are successful they may then start to fight the word lesbian internationally.
The issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians. Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece's third biggest island - plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?"

mayday, mayday: slavery still exists

New Yorker: fighting trafficking (of people)
NYT: slavery in China

WP: CIA head claims that global demographic changes, immigration threaten stability
LAT: 3 Uzbek immigrants killed in Moscow, part of "ultra-nationalist" trend
"This year has seen a dramatic increase in skinhead and neo-Nazi attacks, human rights groups say, many of them aimed at Caucasian and Central Asian immigrants from hardscrabble former Soviet republics who flock to Russia to eke out a living. The bodies turn up beaten, bruised and stabbed, sometimes mutilated or bearing signs of torture."

WP: US deepens role in Sadr City, where 500 were killed last month
LAT: civilian deaths in April - 969 - reach highest level since August
"The number of civilian deaths reported by the Iraqi government for April was 969, the highest since August, when 1,773 were recorded killed. At least 28 Iraqi soldiers and 69 policemen also were reported killed. Officials at two hospitals in Sadr City alone said they had received 321 bodies in the last month."

WP: army medic who earned silver star - the 2nd woman since WWII - removed from her post because women can't serve in combat
"Pfc. Monica Brown cracked open the door of her Humvee outside a remote village in eastern Afghanistan to the pop of bullets shot by Taliban fighters. But instead of taking cover, the 18-year-old medic grabbed her bag and ran through gunfire toward fellow soldiers in a crippled and burning vehicle...'We weren't supposed to take her out' on missions 'but we had to because there was no other medic,' said Lt. Martin Robbins, a platoon leader with Charlie Troop, 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, whose men Brown saved...Military personnel experts say that...the 1992 rules are vague, ill defined, and based on an outmoded concept of wars with clear front lines that rarely exist in today's counterinsurgencies."
Gdn: embedded journalist reports from Afghanistan
CSM: an Afghan officer leads NATO forces
"'The [Afghan National Army] has potential to face the challenges of face-to-face war if the spring offensive happens to have the form of conventional war,' says Ahmad Idrees Rahmani, a cofounder of Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies in Kabul. 'The problem of the war against the Taliban is that [conventional warfare] is not their fighting strategy. Each time they take over a district, the ANA and other forces can easily take them out in a few days.'
Trouble begins, he adds, 'when they retreat and attack in the form of guerrilla fighters. Then it becomes hard to find a fish in the sea of people.'"
LAT: attack on drug eradication forces kills 19, wounds 40
CSM: insurgency moving north

LAT: Mexico deploys troops to Tijuana

BBC: Algeria and terrorism

Gdn: US kills "top Al-Qaeda militant" in Somalia

LAT: Mugabe concedes election, calls for run-off
Chris Blattman: summary of coverage
"It's a matter of hours before the South African government says something disappointingly conciliatory, and the Brits and Americans make ridiculous and empty threats."

LAT: El Fasher, Darfur "humanitarian boomtown"
"In stark contrast to the burned-out villages and squalid displacement camps that characterize much of Darfur, this dust-choked city is booming, thanks largely to an influx of scores of United Nations agencies and private charities, as well as the newly deployed U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission...Retail sales are soaring thanks to the comparatively high salaries paid to international staffers, though foreign demand is also driving up prices on everything from real estate to bottled water. 'It's a war economy,' said Abduljabber Abdellah Fadul, rural planning professor at El Fasher University."
WP: refugees unable to return to southern Sudan

BBC: the high cost of peace deals and coalition politics in Kenya
"Finance Minister Amos Kimunya says he may be forced to shift funding from vital programmes like resettling the displaced to pay for new ministries...Kenyan politicians are among the world's best paid MPs - each taking home about $17,000 in salaries and allowances each month."

BBC: contesting Obasanjo's legacy

BBC: ICC indicts Congo's warlord "the Terminator"

BBC: report says Mozambique police kill with impunity

BBC: Spain denies extradition request for Isabel Peron, accused of crimes during her 1974-76 rule of Argentina

Gdn: photos from a prison in Northern Ireland

LAT: the 33rd anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam, remembered in Little Saigon, Orange County

The Hoya: Georgetown exhibits shame, does not renew Feith's contract

made in china

LAT: Marines move into Helmand, Taliban-dominated region in Afghanistan
"Several hundred Marines, many of them veterans of the Iraq war, pushed into the town of Garmser in an operation to drive out militants, stretching NATO's presence into an area littered with poppy fields."
Ind: those poppy fields fund the insurgency
"Russian gangsters who smuggle drugs into Britain are buying cheap heroin from Afghanistan and paying for it with guns. Smugglers told The Independent how Russian arms dealers meet Taliban drug lords at a bazaar near the old Afghan-Soviet border, deep in Tajikistan's desert. The bazaar exists solely to trade Afghan drugs for Russian guns – and sometimes a bit of sex on the side...The drugs come mostly from Helmand, where most of Britain's 7,800 troops are based. The opium grown there is turned into heroin at factories inside Afghanistan, sold into Tajikistan and smuggled to Europe. The guns are broken down into parts, smuggled back into Afghanistan and delivered to the Taliban. One kilogram of heroin can buy about 30 AK-47 assault rifles at the bazaar."
Econ: Taliban forces increasingly avoiding direct confrontations in favor of indirect assaults
"Overall Taliban violence is rising. The nature of confrontations is changing too. Casualties among Western forces are increasingly caused by 'asymmetric warfare', such as roadside bombs and suicide attacks, rather than by conventional battles."


NYT: non-violent protests, street battles, and a dust storm in Sadr City
The mix of peaceful protest and armed attacks is characteristic of the many levels on which the Sadr movement and the government are locked in an all-out fight for political advantage. At stake is the outcome of October provincial elections in which other Shiite parties in the government stand to lose seats to Mr. Sadr’s supporters...The residents of Sadr City 'are Iraqis,' [a parliament member from Anbar province] said, 'they are very poor people with very few services, and the military action has caused so much loss of life.'
Mr. Maliki has said that, before the government will stop its fight, Mr. Sadr must comply with four conditions: hand over heavy weapons; stop fighting the security forces; stop menacing government workers; and hand over outlaws sought by the government.
But on Sunday, an aide to Mr. Sadr in Najaf rejected those terms, accusing the government of trying to resolve political differences by force."
USAT: US drone attacks in Iraq rise in April
Newsweek: Libyan town exporter of jihadists

Gdn: Cheney's lawyer says Congress has no authority over him; rejects requests by Democrats to interview his chief of staff over involvement in approving interrogation/torture methods for Guantánamo

BBC: BBC alleges UN cover-up in investigation of its troops trading in arms, gold and ivory in the Congo
UN operation there largest in the world, with 18,000 troops

• "Pakistani peacekeepers in the eastern town of Mongbwalu were involved in the illegal trade in gold with the FNI militia, providing them with weapons to guard the perimeter of the mines
• Indian peacekeepers operating around the town of Goma had direct dealings with the militia responsible for the Rwandan genocide, now living in eastern DR Congo.
• The Indians traded gold, bought drugs from the militias and flew a UN helicopter into the Virunga National Park, where they exchanged ammunition for ivory"
  

BBC: political leader of banned Mungiki gang shot dead in Kenya
BBC: central gov't tries to broker deal to end prison guards' strike

NYT: violence against opposition and suspected opposition voters in Zimbabwe
"Villagers from Manicaland said they were roused from sleep around midnight one night this month by young marauders who had come to punish them for voting against Mr. Mugabe. They said the gangs pelted them with stones fired from slingshots and dragged some from their homes.
The next day, rather than protecting them, police officers ordered them to empty their small huts of their meager possessions, witnesses said. Then the young thugs returned to the small settlement just north of the city of Mutare, bashing down people’s homes with iron bars or setting them ablaze."
LAT: two factions of the opposition have agreed to set aside differences to create parliamentary coalition; some ruling party members rumored to be defecting

BBC: an interview with a Somali al-Shabab militant
"...it has become clear there are deep divisions within the insurgency over which direction it should take, with many of the recent attacks attributed to one group - a radical Islamist organisation called al-Shabab, meaning 'The Youth.'
'We are killing the enemy of Allah, and until we get them out of the country we will continue doing so... those people who are telling you their people have been killed they are wrong.
They are working for the Ethiopians, we never kill ordinary people.'"

BBC: mosque of minority sect in Indonesia set ablaze

AP: Colombian congress at impasse over scandal linking lawmakers to paramilitaries
"Sen. Jorge Enrique Gomez replaced a jailed senator, who had replaced a senator who resigned under criminal investigation, who had replaced a jailed senator. But the evangelical preacher's lack of legislative experience hardly matters — Congress doesn't do much these days anyway...
The scandal broke in late 2006 after political analyst Claudia Lopez found what she called massive vote-rigging in areas controlled by the paramilitaries..."
Miami Herald: arrest of Uribe's cousin may link him to paramilitaries
"With his cousin in the presidential palace, Mario Uribe was a proponent within Congress of the original law regulating the 2003 demobilization of 30,000 paramilitary fighters that would have granted the leaders near-amnesty for their crimes, some of the most atrocious in Colombia's four-decade-old war. The Constitutional Court later imposed harsher sentences of up to eight years for the top leaders.
Mario Uribe also led the push in Congress for the constitutional reform that allowed President Uribe to seek a second term, which he won in 2006."

CSM: Uighurs in western China live under "colonial-like" system
"Since the Communist government took over Xinjiang in 1949 from a warlord allied with the Nationalist Army, the proportion of Han Chinese (China's dominant ethnic group) in the province has shot up from 6.7 percent to 40.6 percent, according to official figures. The Han population now almost matches the Uighur population, after a six decades-long campaign by Beijing to settle Han in the remote region...Uighurs are resentful at the way Han Chinese monopolize the best jobs and the top political posts, even though Xinjiang is theoretically an autonomous province. Han residents routinely complain that Uighurs are dirty, lazy, and dishonest."
BBC: globalization, conflict, and irony: "Free Tibet" flags made in China

dissemination and defamation

NYT: international law more like guidelines for CIA
"The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees."
NYT: US Army reviewing arms supply contract

WP: the food crisis linked to violence in 14 countries
WP: the politics and legacy of another food crisis, the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine
"'There is now a wealth of historical material detailing the specific features of Stalin's forced collectivization and terror famine policies against Ukraine,' [President] Yushchenko wrote in the Wall Street Journal late last year. 'Other parts of the Soviet Union suffered terribly as well. But in the minds of the Soviet leadership there was a dual purpose in persecuting and starving the Ukrainian peasantry. It was part of a campaign to crush Ukraine's national identity and its desire for self-determination.'"

LAT: Colombia alleges that the FARC launched mortar rounds from Ecuador
"Colombia's army commander, Gen. Mario Montoya, cited press reports quoting demobilized rebels who said that the FARC maintained 60 to 80 camps on the Ecuadorean side of the border. Ecuador said it was waiting to receive the protest note to formally respond. But Undersecretary of Defense Miguel Carvajal said in a telephone interview Saturday night that the claim was part of a 'defamation campaign' to divert attention from Colombia's internal problems."
LAT: Richardson holds meeting with Chávez to try to restart negotiations for release of 3 Americans held by the FARC since 2003
Adam Isacson: report on state of civil society, and military, paramilitary, and guerrilla presence in Guaviare, Colombia - part I; part II

LAT: homicides in Recife receive little attention
"Although Rio de Janeiro's bloody drug war makes international headlines, the homicide rate in this balmy city of 1.5 million is 90.9 per 100,000, more than twice that of Rio, according to the Latin American Technological Network's Map of Violence."

LAT: shootout in Tijuana between drug gangs leaves at least 13 dead
"The shootout is just the latest in a spasm of drug-related violence that has gripped the border town this year. In the first four months of 2008, Tijuana has seen dozens of kidnappings, assaults and homicides, including children gunned down in the mayhem...The motive for Saturday's bloodshed was unclear. Police said it could have been a falling-out between factions of the Arellano Felix narcotics cartel, which has long controlled the drug trade in the city. Or it could be another cartel trying to move in on its turf.
Some speculate that the killings may have been revenge by traffickers against suspected informants.
Still, experts said the recent surge in violence undoubtedly is linked to a major offensive by authorities against organized-crime drug traffickers, an operation that has strained delicate alliances between traffickers who had previously cooperated with one another in the lucrative narcotics trade."

NYT: a Times reporter's week in a Harare jail for "committing journalism"

LAT: the challenges of establishing a UN-AU peace keeping force in Darfur
"The mission, with an estimated annual budget of $2.5 billion, has arrived as the Darfur conflict has grown more complicated. Though frequently described as a genocide that pits an Arab-dominated government and its allied militias against non-Arab rebels and villagers, the conflict today defies easy labels. Arabs are killing Arabs. Africans are killing Africans. Some former rebels have joined the government and some Arab militias, known as janjaweed, now fight against it.
At the same time, general lawlessness and proliferation of arms have fueled widespread banditry, carjacking and rape. Most recently, Chad and Sudan have contributed to the violence through a proxy war in the Darfur region, where they are arming and funding insurgencies to attack one another.
For the moment, the mission's most pressing challenge is getting boots on the ground. Fewer than 300 additional U.N. troops, from nations such as Bangladesh and China, have arrived in Darfur. The rest of the nearly 9,000 peacekeepers here are African Union holdovers who just replaced their green AU berets with blue U.N. helmets."

BBC: report from Chechnya
"I did not feel that the north Caucasus was about to explode again. People are exhausted and the rebels are now thought to number only a few hundred.
But the missing and the dead have relatives and Chechnya has a long tradition of blood feuds.
There are countless unemployed young men.
Moscow must persuade them and their younger brothers that they have a future. If not, joining the militants may appeal more than joining the police."

WP: judges still not reinstated in Pakistan

NYT: Karzai survives assassination attempt at Sunday parade
Gdn: after recently strongly criticizing US and NATO tactics

Obs: Iraqi girl killed by her father, allegedly for falling in love with a British soldier in Basra

Obs: Hezbollah build up in Lebanon
"But what is becoming more obvious, even as Hizbollah tries to hide it, is that the group has embarked on an unprecedented build-up of men, equipment and bunker-building in preparation for the war that almost everyone - Lebanese and Israeli - considers inevitable. 'The villages in the south are empty of men,' said one international official. 'They are all gone, training in Bekaa, Syria and Iran.' A trip by The Observer through villages in the Hizbollah heartland confirmed a conspicuous lack of fighting-age men."

BBC: Algeria military raids Al-Qaeda hideouts, kills 10

BBC: LTTE launches air attacks in northeastern Sri Lanka