discrimination [for better or worse]

NYT: Pakistani Army undertakes extra-judicial killings in Swat, uses indiscriminate violence
Beneath the surface of relative calm, there is the sense that a new and more insidious conflict may be afoot, one that could take many months to play out before the fate of this once-prosperous region is ultimately decided.

NYT: Mullahs in Punjab siding with landowners, status quo

Pakistan encompasses four provinces — Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province (which includes the Swat Valley) — each with its own languages and culture. The western mountains are tribal and so remote that in some areas, Pakistan’s Constitution does not even apply. It is from those badlands that the Taliban swept outward to neighboring Swat, itself a multi-ethnic patchwork. Baluchistan, another border area, has its own struggle for national autonomy. Sindh is mostly agrarian, with Karachi, an economic hub, at its southern tip.

Punjab, the fourth and most strategic province, is the country’s heart — home to the powerful military as well as much of Pakistan’s governing class; social upheaval here would drag the whole country with it. In my travels in this province, none of the mullahs were talking about revolution. In fact, the social justice discussions that have driven political movements in the wider Islamic world — Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Sadr Army of Iraq’s Moktada al-Sadr, for example — were notably absent.

Instead, I have found a surprisingly comfortable coexistence between the mullahs, the landlords and the political elite (the latter two are often one and the same). Even the harder-line preachers, among the sternly traditional Muslims known as Deobandis, have stuck to a bland, nonconfrontational line.

One leader of a Deobandi seminary in Kabirwala, a town in southern Punjab, told me that the land was distributed as God had intended, and that the only problem with the landlords was that some were insufficiently Islamic, though now that was improving.

History explains much of the feudal outlook of the clerics in Punjab. They tend not to oppose the establishment in part because the state itself made them powerful. In the 1980s, the military dictator Zia ul-Haq gave land and money to Deobandis, a policy the United States supported because it needed both Mr. Zia and fervent jihadists in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Mr. Zia also crushed social ferment throughout Pakistan, and the debate on class and social justice that went with it, stifling political growth. To this day, Pakistan retains a colonial-style system of patronage: I-will-vote-for you-because-you-are-important-and-I-think-you-might-be-able-to-help-me-in-my-time-of-need.

At the same time, the Zia government elevated the mullahs, once unimportant men seen mostly at weddings and funerals. They became powerful players with their own political space — a kind of middleman between state and populace, not breaking their ties to the elite that had empowered them...

This is not to say that all are nonviolent, just that their violence does not challenge the state or the social order. The leader of Sipah-e-Sohaba, an ultra-orthodox Sunni political party, whose military wing believes Shiites to be apostates and has been killing them since the 1990s, was allowed to contest an election from a prison cell in 2002. (He won.) Another militant group, Jesh Muhammed, which supports Pakistani claims to Kashmir, operates unhindered in the city of Bahawalpur. And Hafez Saeed, a cleric whose associates are believed to have carried out the attack on Mumbai, India, last year, gives weekly sermons here in Lahore...

Even in Swat, the Taliban’s takeover didn’t happen overnight. At first, some landlords lent tacit (if worried) support, donating food and money to the seminary where Fazlullah, the main Taliban leader, began his political movement. The government itself made peace deals with the Taliban. Only later did conditions worsen, with militants seizing ever more power, and eventually overrunning the landlords. The military has since fought to eject them, but it is not clear how effectively.

NYT: Christians targeted by mob violence
The attack in this shabby town in central Pakistan — the culmination of several days of rioting over a claim that a Koran had been defiled — shows how precarious life is for the tiny Christian minority in Pakistan.

More than 100 Christian houses were burned and looted on Saturday in a rampage that lasted about eight hours by a crowd the authorities estimate was as large as 20,000 strong. In addition to the seven members of the Hameed family who were killed, about 20 people were wounded.

The authorities, who said the Koran accusation was spurious, filed criminal charges in the case late Sunday and apprehended at least 12 people. Officials said a banned Sunni militant group, Sipah-e-Sohaba, was among those responsible for the attacks, the third convulsion of anti-Christian mob violence in the region in the past four weeks...

While some Christians rise to become government officials or run businesses, the poorest work the country’s worst jobs, as toilet cleaners and street sweepers.

It was the poorest class who lived in Christian Colony, a small enclave of bare brick houses where the mob struck Saturday. Its residents work as day laborers and peddlers in the market, often earning far less than the minimum wage, $75 a month...

The Hameeds were having breakfast when the mob descended, wielding guns, hurling stones and shouting insults (“Dogs!” “American agents!”) through their window. The Hameeds did not appear to have been singled out but had the misfortune of living where the mob entered the neighborhood and happened to be home at the time...

The rampage began Thursday in a nearby village when Christians at a wedding party were accused of burning a Koran. Few here believed that, and state and federal officials who looked into the case said it was false. Still, local mullahs seized on the news, filing a blasphemy case against the Christian family...

Pakistan’s blasphemy law has been criticized as too broad, and many legal experts say it has been badly misused since its introduction in the 1980s by the military dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Anyone can file a charge, which is then often used to stir hatred and to justify sectarian violence.

“The blasphemy law is being used to terrorize minorities in Pakistan,” said Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minister of minority affairs, in an interview in Gojra on Sunday...

Christians here protested all day on Sunday, blocking the roads and refusing to bury the Hameeds until the authorities filed a criminal case. Late Sunday the authorities did, and the bodies were buried. That was little comfort to the Hameeds.


USAT: COIN in Afghanistan
A few miles away, but seemingly a world apart, sits another walled cluster of homes. Here, the Marines arrive the next day to a reception that may not be warm, but isn't lethal. Afghans talk with Marines; children beg them for sweets. A villager notices Marines hoisting themselves over a wall, gets their attention, and points out a shortcut.

The contrast between the two housing compounds in Afghanistan's Helmand River valley, a longtime stronghold of the Taliban militant group, illustrates the challenges facing Marines as they implement a new strategy that emphasizes winning the trust of the local population...

By providing security, rather than just focusing on killing insurgents, the Marines hope to convince locals to turn on the Taliban and eventually hand control over to the Afghan army and police — mirroring the tactics that helped turn the war in Iraq a few years ago.

"We win when the people really believe that the government is here to help them," says Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss, the battalion commander. "We can't kill our way out of an insurgency. All security does is create a vacuum. It takes the Taliban out. We'll show them that our brand of security is a lot nicer than the Taliban's."...

Trouble spots can be especially hard for the Marines to identify because they often co-exist with relatively peaceful areas — as happened with the two unnamed compounds that Garrett's unit encountered near the village of Hassan Abad, about 400 miles southwest of Kabul.

In an insurgency, "every village has its own microclimate," says John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.

Nagl says control of a particular area — "even (a) neighborhood or street," he says — can hinge on a variety of factors including how long Afghan security forces have been there, whether there are any insurgent bases nearby, and even what tribe the local population belongs to.

WP: Congo conflict morphs as it drags on
For the most part, though, people in eastern Congo have not died in a blaze of bullets or in large-scale massacres. More often, the conflict has set off a chain reaction of less spectacular consequences that begins with fleeing through an unforgiving jungle and ends with a death such as Mihigo's. In eastern Congo, people die from malaria and diarrhea, from untreated infections and measles, from falling off rickety bridges and slipping down slopes, from hunger and from drinking dirty water in the hope of surviving one more day.

Arguably, people die because of the wider social impact of the conflict. Entire villages have been scattered across hundreds of miles, atomizing extended family networks that people depend upon in difficult times. The conflict has overwhelmed already-dysfunctional government hospitals and left roads rutted and overgrown, isolating people in villages like Walikale from help.

At the moment, the conflict in eastern Congo is surging once again. Since January, at least half a million people have fled a U.N.-backed Congolese army operation targeting Rwandan rebels, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to discuss in a visit to Congo this month. The rebels are retaliating against villagers with whom they have lived for years.

BBC: Somali refugees suffering in Kenyan camp
CSM: Rwandan refugees must return from Uganda

AP: internally displaced living, demonstrating in Bogota park
Since March, more than 2,000 people displaced by violence in rural Colombia have occupied the green hillocks and red-brick squares of Third Millennium Park, which was to be a jewel of Bogota's urban renaissance as a military crackdown on leftist rebels brought greater safety to the nation's main cities.

Instead, the park and its tent city are a reminder that the five-decade-long conflict still afflicts the countryside, causing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes and generating the world's worst internal refugee problem, according to United Nations statistics.

The occupants of Third Millennium Park are demanding that President Alvaro Uribe's government heed a court order to provide them with food, education and jobs...

The Bogota tent city, because it's so public, offers a certain comfort, he said.

"Here, we are safer than anywhere else."
NYT: captured FARC computer files implicate Venezuelan government aiding and abetting
Econ: Afro-Colombians fight racism

NYT: the crime rate is down in the US, defying explanation
No single lens — sociological, econometrical, liberal or conservative — seems an adequate one through which to view crime. The economy, which seems as if it should be fundamental, has never been a good predictor; the Prohibition era was far more violent than the Great Depression. Adding prison beds has not helped; the incarceration rate has marched grimly upward for decades, while the crime rate has zigzagged up and down, seemingly oblivious. Years ago, criminologists thought demographics explained a lot — remember the warnings about thousands of cold-blooded, teenage “superpredators” in the mid-1990s? — but demographics cannot shed light on what is happening now. Improved policing deserves credit for bigger declines in certain cities, but not the overall national trend...

While the decline may not have taken hold in the minds of the public, it has undermined a cherished belief, particularly among liberals, in root causes — that criminals are born of misery and the limited options of poverty. “There are people that are putting up with an awful lot of suffering, and they’re not complaining all that much,” said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
USAT: yet surge in concealed weapons permits applications 'in anticipation of crime increase'
if crime does go up, SV urges us to remember the sequence of events.


NYT: Iran takes 3 hikers into custody
SV hoping for the quick release of Josh, Sarah, and Shane

alternatives [packing heat]

NYT: updates on protests in Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The soldiers have turned back hundreds of protesters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

untold horror [only the beginning]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBC: violence in the Northern Caucuses

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

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

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

LAT: contemporary child slavery in Ghana


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AJE: Naxalites attack police in Chhattisgarh, India

constitutions and crises [instigators]

AJE: Micheletti, military-backed leader of Honduras, quits crisis talks in Costa Rica
Zelaya told Al Jazeera on Wednesday that he was confident that the country's military-backed interim government would be dismantled as a result of the talks...

Meanwhile, after nearly two weeks of mostly muted response from the US, Washington said on Wednesday that it had suspended $16.5m in military assistance programmes and development assistance programmes to the Honduran interim government.
CSM: Hondurans divided over coup
NYT: and the constitution
Many abroad are obsessing over the question of whether Mr. Zelaya’s ouster was legal, or a classic military coup. But this debate obscures the fact that for many years, Honduras has just been one big crisis waiting to happen.

NYT: Iranians mark 10th anniversary of student protests with another round of demonstrations: ...there have been almost four weeks of defiance [since the elections], in the face of the government’s repeated, uncompromising and violent efforts to restore the status quo. The government did succeed in keeping people off the streets in the previous 11 days, leaving many to simmer on their own as political insiders and clerical heavyweights slugged it out behind the scenes.

But there was an opening to take to the streets again on Thursday in a collective show of defiance, and many protesters seized it, even though the principal opposition leaders stayed away. Mir Hussein Moussavi, who claims he won the election; another candidate, Mehdi Karroubi; and former President Mohammad Khatami have agreed to pursue their complaints through the legal system and to protest only when a permit is issued.

But the mood of the street never calmed. One witness said that had it not been for the overwhelming show of force, it appeared, tens of thousands would have turned out.
NYT: eyewitness accounts of the mobilization and state crackdown

WP: bombings in Iraq seem to be targeting Shiites
But the nature of the attacks Wednesday and Thursday is likely to raise people's fears about further bloodshed. The bombings seem to be targeting Shiite Muslims, in what many worry is an attempt to renew the sectarian strife of 2006 and 2007 that brought the country to the verge of collapse.

There were no signs of Shiite retaliation so far, but angry residents of Sadr City inspecting the damage left by two improvised mines Thursday said it would only be a matter of time.

"They want to instigate strife, and the Shiites will not remain silent," said Kazem Zayer, a 30-year-old unemployed laborer. "They are killing us one after the other."
LAT: or Kurds? either way, further rounds of sectarian violence feared
The worst attack Thursday occurred in Tall Afar in Nineveh province in the north, where a double suicide bombing killed 34 people, prompting a senior Iraqi official to express concern that the country's security forces, now fully responsible for protecting the cities, had been penetrated by armed groups...

Militants appear focused on the north, where Arabs and Kurds are locked in a dispute over a 300-mile stretch of land where Saddam Hussein's regime expelled Kurds and settled Arabs in their place. Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region wants to annex those areas, an idea Arabs oppose...

Provincial council member Yahya Abed Majoub, a member of the Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party, blamed the attack in Tall Afar on political factions as well as neighboring countries.

"There are groups who want to ignite sectarian and ethnic tensions all over Iraq. Nineveh is just the starting point," Majoub said. "There is a political agenda from inside and outside related to the election."
NYT: Kurdistan creates its own constitution
The proposed constitution enshrines Kurdish claims to territories and the oil and gas beneath them. But these claims are disputed by both the federal government in Baghdad and ethnic groups on the ground, and were supposed to be resolved in talks begun quietly last month between the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, sponsored by the United Nations and backed by the United States. Instead, the Kurdish parliament pushed ahead and passed the constitution, partly as a message that it would resist pressure from the American and Iraqi governments to make concessions.

CSM: the US military in Afghanistan trying to convert southern push into extended presence
In particular, [troops] say they are caught in a vicious circle: To win over the locals, the troops must bring development, security, and economic prospects. To do this, they have to diminish the presence of the insurgency. But this, in turn, requires that the troops win support of the population...

the clearing phase of the strategy may be the easiest. Soldiers say they will need patiently to build rapport, something that might take months or years, if at all.

"We just have to earn their trust," says Staff Sgt. Adam Kapchus of the 10th Mountain Division. "We need to support clinics and support their economy."

To do so, the troops have been making an effort to visit villages.

"How is traffic? Have cars been coming through here and bringing business?" a soldier on a typical patrol asks one merchant, who says business is "OK."

"Have you seen any bad guys here?" the soldier continues.

"No sir. The bad people stay in the mountains," the merchant says, pointing to the purple peaks in the distance.

"That's good. Is there any way we can help you?" the soldier asks.

"Your helicopters fly overhead all night," the merchant says. "No one in our village can sleep. Please stop this – it is causing major problems."

The soldier promises to tell his superiors.

Despite such patrols, the troops generally don't have enough contact with the locals to convince them that they are here for their good, says Habibullah Rafeh, policy analyst with the Kabul Academy of Sciences. Most of the troops live in small, heavily fortified outposts near urban centers. Most Afghans, however, live in rural areas – only 0.5 percent of Wardak's population is urban, for example...

In Jaghatu District, Taliban forces had run the area as a fiefdom, complete with a court and administrative apparatus. The district government had fled, leaving a cluster of four ramshackle buildings that makes up the capital, called the district "center."

In mid-May, American forces entered and occupied the district center, displacing the insurgents. They set up a makeshift camp among the devastated buildings – one pockmarked structure, ravaged by frequent mortar fire, is an abandoned school, while another is an empty office. A small contingent of Afghan police and Army took up residence in the other buildings.

Together, this combined force is able to maintain control of the district center, but the Taliban still enjoy sovereignty in the surrounding countryside, according to residents. When an American patrol visits these areas, the insurgents melt into the surroundings, sometimes waiting to ambush the soldiers, other times waiting to fight another day.
CSM: local and regional alliances complicate the effort
In one recent ‌shura held in Sayadabad district, elders asked the Americans to leave, saying that they were happy with Taliban rule, which limits crime, and complaining that the troops "cause the price of everything to increase," according to one participant of the meeting.

But such sentiments may not be universal, says Habibullah Rafeh, policy analyst with the Kabul Academy of Sciences.

"The Taliban's appeal is limited to their own ethnic group, and also has a strong tribal dimension," he says.

In some areas in the east, for example, there are anti-Taliban tribes that regularly cooperate with Western forces. Parts of Wardak made up of the Hazara minority, for example, are strongly in favor of the troops. And most in urban areas such as Kabul don't identify with the rurally based insurgents.
CSM: ...which are also perceived to affect Afghan police allegiances and efficacy
Unlike the [Afghan National Army], the ANP here tend to be drawn mostly from the southern regions, so the likelihood of Taliban sympathizers in the force is higher. In many cases, according to members of the Wardak Provincial Council, the ANP works out arrangements with the insurgents so that they won't be attacked, and in return they allow the militants to operate unmolested.

Gdn: Karzai reelection could generate more violence
Although the Taliban have threatened to disrupt polling day itself, David Haight, the US colonel who is in charge of pacifying two strategically vital provinces on the southern doorstep of the capital, Kabul, says he is far more concerned about the aftermath of the election...

"I think that apathy is going to turn into some anger because when the administration doesn't change, and I don't think anyone believes now that Karzai is going to lose ... I think there is going to be frustration from people who realise there is not going to be a change. The bottom line is they are going to be thinking: 'four more years of this crap?'" Haight said...

Widely blamed for much of the corruption in modern Afghanistan, Karzai has nonetheless succeeded in gaining the support of most of the country's most important ethnic and tribal power-brokers, including a number of unsavoury characters accused of human rights violations.

The only doubt is whether Afghanistan's tribal warlords can deliver the necessary votes to Karzai, or whether the widespread disillusion with the corrupt state of the regime will lead voters to defy tribal and clan lines and back one of the opposition candidates.

AJE: displaced civilians from Swat begin return

WP: ethnic violence in China provoking exodus
Ye's family is among the many in Urumqi that find themselves at an unexpected crossroads in the aftermath of this week's violence, which has claimed at least 156 lives. Terrified of their Han neighbors, but accustomed to the comforts of the city they have made their home, they must weigh the benefits of staying in a place where they no longer feel welcome or returning to a countryside where their salaries will probably be reduced by half. On Wednesday, Ye and his wife, Mu Heti, made the painful decision to go back to the countryside of Ili in northern Xinjiang, joining an exodus of ethnic minorities out of Urumqi that has overwhelmed bus and train stations in recent days.

Before Tuesday night, Ye said, he thought that the violence would pass quickly and that life in Urumqi would return to normal. Ye, 40, who is Kazakh, and Mu, 36, who is Uighur, and their extended families have been in the city for eight years while he worked as a Chinese-Russian translator. The family members had settled into a life they loved...

But all that now seemed distant, Ye and Mu said, in light of the violence. Tensions between China's dominant Han population and people native to Xinjiang -- mostly Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking group, and Kazakhs, who are concentrated on the border with Kazakhstan, are mostly Muslim and speak their own Turkic language -- have existed since Chinese troops rolled into Xinjiang 60 years ago.

China has repeatedly said that it "liberated" the population, but many Uighurs and Kazakhs complain of government policies that they say are meant to wipe out their language, culture and religion in the name of assimilation...

The Xinjiang region in recent years has experienced a large influx of Han Chinese lured by the government's ambitious Develop the West program, which seeks to duplicate the success of the wealthier coastal areas. As a result, the region's Han population has jumped from 6 percent in 1949 to more than 40 percent in 2000, according to the last census. The initiative has boosted incomes all around, but it has also set up an uncomfortable hierarchy. Many of the new bosses are Han, while the workers are from minority groups.

The bloody riots on Sunday show just how deep the mistrust between Han Chinese and other ethnic groups runs, and how quickly a seemingly minor disagreement can escalate. The violence began with a false Internet rumor about the rape of two Han women by Uighur workers. That led to a fight in a toy factory in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan that left two Uighurs dead.

The investigation into the workers' deaths, which some Uighurs felt was inadequate, sparked a demonstration in Urumqi on Sunday. The protest spun out of control as paramilitary troops fired on protesters and rioters torched cars and businesses. A number of Han bystanders said they were attacked without provocation. Two days later, violence broke out as vigilante Han groups launched retaliatory attacks on Uighurs...

"It isn't just us who are scared of what's going on. Hans are also scared," Ye said. On Tuesday night, he said, he welcomed several Han women who needed refuge from the mob-fueled violence. As it turned out, everyone inside got lucky. The attackers moved on.
BBC: curfew reimposed in Urumqi

NYT: Al-Qaeda increasing activity in northern Africa

Gdn: Annan submits list of suspects involved in post-election violence in Kenya to ICC
The list of about a dozen people includes at least two senior cabinet ministers and will increase the pressure on Kenya's coalition government to establish a special local tribunal. Annan, who brokered an end to the crisis last year, had pledged to hand over the names if the government failed to hold accountable those most responsible for orchestrating the violence.

many thousands of words [in place of]

NYT: speaking louder

NYT: and quicker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CSM: new leader of Kashmir faces troubles with new ideas

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

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

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

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

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

++++

CB: on political violence and transactional sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBC: ICRC study finds civilians bear major costs of war

guinness book of world suffering [hard nut to crack]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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