"I ran away with about 20 others my age," said Christophe Maombi, 27, who fled his rebel-held village of Rugari when he said rebels tried to march him into the bush. "There are so many weapons there. If they see a young boy, they just give him a weapon and tell him to fight."
AP: UN reports that army troops are raping women
WP: displaced also dispossessed
"As panicked thousands have abandoned villages across eastern Congo in recent months, the scale of looting that has followed has been massive, a crime reflecting the predatory culture pervading Congo since the Belgian colonizers perfected it decades ago.
The millions of minor thefts may pale in comparison to the more professional looting of eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth, which is helping to finance the conflict. Collectively, though, the thieving soldiers have set back an already economically marginal population by years, if not decades, making it even harder to reverse the effects of a conflict that threatens to destabilize the entire Central African region."
CSM: Nkunda's goals
BBC: Rwanda agrees to send troops to fight Hutu militias
BBC: Obasanjo to mediate on UN behalf
AP: Islamist rebels seize port city in Somalia
"On Wednesday, al-Shabab added the town of Merka, 56 miles (90 kilometers) from the capital, to its list of conquests after poorly paid government fighters simply ran away.
The group now controls most of the country's south, with the crucial exceptions of Mogadishu and Baidoa, where the parliament sits...
Al-Shabab was part of the Islamic militia that controlled Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia for six months in 2006 before Ethiopian troops arrived to drive them out with the tacit support of the United States.
The group quickly fractured into hardline and more moderate factions. Al-Shabab's hard-liners are at the heart of the insurgency, which has killed thousands of civilians caught up in roadside bombs, grenade attacks and mortar fire."
WP: Shining Path reemerges, reformed, in Peru
"After years in relative obscurity, the Shining Path, one of Latin America's most notorious guerrilla groups, is fighting the Peruvian military with renewed vigor, feeding on the profits of the cocaine trade and trying to win support from the Andean villagers it once terrorized, according to residents and Peruvian officials....
Experts said the guerrillas have renounced the brutal tactics espoused by their original leader, Abimael Guzmán, who was captured in 1992. Unlike Guzmán, who said 10 percent of the Peruvian population had to be assassinated for the Shining Path to take power, the new leaders tell their followers they must protect the villagers and instead target the military and anti-drug authorities.
In numbers, the guerrillas' ranks remain a fraction of their former size: 400 to 700 full-time fighters in the branch that insists on armed struggle, according to various estimates; in the low thousands if offshoots that call for more-peaceful political revolution are included. In ideology, they appear to have abandoned the strict Maoism that Guzmán preached and to have adopted a muddled form of communism that welcomes foreign investment and large international mining companies, among others, provided they treat their workers well."
WP: interesting side-report by the journalist looking for them
"The purpose of this excursion was to explore the territory of the Shining Path, the communist rebel group whose guerrillas have resumed fighting the Peruvian military. We would not find them. Neither, it seems, does anyone else who goes looking. Perhaps the most basic reason the Shining Path has been able to survive for 28 years and counting is that they are so hard to get to. Forget the mines and booby traps and tunnels, or the dense jungle or constant cloud-cover, there seems no better defense than these roads.
Road is not the right word. A few minutes outside of the Andean cities of central Peru, tires roll onto something closer to goat trails, shoulderless single-lane ruts of dirt and rock fragments hacked and blasted out of the near vertical mountain slopes...
Our ultimate destination was a place called Pukatoro, a copper mining camp of unknown size somewhere in the mountains. The maps we could find did not care to mark this settlement. But the Shining Path had found it, why couldn't we? At each cross-rut, or as close to it as we could find a shepherd or avocado farmer, we would stop and Willy would ask if we were on the right path. Most of them hadn't heard of Pukatoro."
LAT: fighting amnesty for those who killed priests in El Salvador in 1989
CSM: Brazil's anti-poverty program a success
"The world's first conditional cash transfer programs were introduced in Brazil in 1995 at the municipal level, and were implemented at a national level in Mexico the following year."
WP: tribal militias in Pakistan "between the devil and the deep sea"
"But, so far at least, the tribal militias have been no panacea. Instead, the use of the militias, known as lashkars, has set off a debate over whether such a strategy will contribute to a civil war in the northwest that could engulf all of Pakistan. Yet some tribal leaders say they have little choice but to fight their brothers, cousins and neighbors: The Pakistani military, they say, has threatened to bomb their villages if they do not battle the Taliban."
WP: more US troops requested for Afghanistan
CSM: changes in a Diyala town that switched sides from Al-Qaeda in Iraq to the US/Iraqi coalition
"In 2006 and 2007, no US or Iraqi troops made it along roads laced with bombs to this remote village of 300 Sunnis. AQI operated with impunity, publicly killing one man who opposed them, imposing strict new social rules, and forcing villagers into a pact to reject any US or Iraqi military presence.
When Sheikh Thamir returned with US and Iraqi forces in January, his neighbors at first rejected them, saying that AQI had warned days before that "collaborators" would die. After days of pushing – sometimes with tears in his eyes from fear – Sheikh Thamir prevailed, joyfully declaring that the "power [of the people] is bigger than what Al Qaeda was expecting."
When the men of Dulaim finally agreed to don fluorescent green reflective belts and man checkpoints, much of AQI's weapons and money traffic from the unruly east side of the Diyala River dried up.
It also turned Al Qaeda fully against the village.
"If we quit, Al Qaeda will kill us," says Talib Ali Hussein, an SOI guard with a rifle and sun-bleached sash at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Dulaim. The recent AQI ambush was "a message from Al Qaeda that 'We are still here.' The key thing is they want to kill us."
WP: draft terms of troop agreement between Iraq and US unacceptable to Sadr; he threatens to defect if approved
BBC: ceasefire hangs in the balance in Gaza
BBC: Burma imprisons more protesters from last year, total rises to 60
BBC: village remains contested in Georgia; after Russians pull out, South Ossetian militia enters
BBC: inmate in German jail mails himself to freedom; manhunt underway
retrospective
The Onion: 'Nation finally shitty enough to make social progress'
"Another contributing factor to Obama's victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American."
The Onion (2001): Bush's visionary leadership paved the way [comedy becomes tragedy]
"Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."...
During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"
On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further."
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