peaceful satellite launch preparations [into the sea]

NYT: North Korea threatens to shoot down US planes "spying" on its rocket launch...
“If the brigandish U.S. imperialists dare to infiltrate spy planes into our airspace to interfere with our peaceful satellite launch preparations, our revolutionary armed forces will mercilessly shoot them down,” the North’s state-run Korea Central Radio said...

The United States, South Korea and Japan say that North Korea is using the launching to test its long-range missile technology, a violation of a 2006 United Nations resolution banning the country from all ballistic missile tests.

They warned that if North Korea presses ahead with it, they will seek punishment for the North at the Security Council.
LAT: ...which is considered a failure outside North Korea

NYT: Filipino militants kidnap, threaten to behead Red Cross workers
Abu Sayyaf head demanded that the military pull its soldiers out of an island province in the south, warning that it would behead one of the three Red Cross workers if the demand were not met by 2 p.m. Tuesday.

Abu Sayyaf, responsible for many of the deadliest terror attacks in the Philippines, has a grim record of following through on threats to behead its captives. Guillermo Sobero, an American from Corona, California, was decapitated by the group in 2001. Abu Sayyaf guerrillas also beheaded two Filipino teachers in 2000 as a “birthday gift” to President Joseph Estrada.

LAT: #2 in the Juárez drug cartel, son of the "Lord of the Skies," captured in Mexico City
Mexico is seeing a crop of younger, university-educated narcojuniors emerging as leaders of drug-trafficking organizations that are bound primarily by family ties. Carrillo Leyva was paraded before news cameras in a white Abercrombie & Fitch sweatsuit and stylish glasses -- a far cry from the narco archetype decked out in cowboy boots and oversized jewel-studded belt buckles...

The Juarez gang has been locked in a vicious turf war with a band of traffickers based in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and led by Joaquin Guzman, the country's most wanted fugitive.

The bloodletting left about 1,600 people dead in Ciudad Juarez last year. Violence continued in the border city during the first two months of 2009 but has dipped since Calderon sent 5,000 more troops and hundreds of additional federal police there in recent weeks.
CSM: just as Holder and Napolitano arrive in Mexico to discuss the southward gun flow
WP: and complaints rise about delays on Mérida Initiative aid

NYT: peace semi-secured, Haiti now needs jobs
The [UN] has spent some $5 billion on peacekeeping operations here since 2004, when the government of the still popular President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was toppled — many say with a shove from the Bush administration.

The peacekeeping force declared war against the gangs that plague Haiti, with some success. Kidnappings dropped to 258 victims last year from 722 in 2006, according to United Nations figures...

It required five months to seat a new government after the April 2008 food riots, and United Nations officials say development is stymied by a corrupt judicial system, weak land tenure laws and wildly inefficient ports. The roads are such moonscapes that some 40 percent of the mango crop gets too bruised to be sold abroad, said Jean M. Buteau, a leading exporter.

CSM: Binghamton shootings put into question role of the economic downturn
That event, as well as three policemen wounded in a Pittsburgh shooting after responding to a domestic disturbance call – friends said that gunman was also upset about his recent firing – fit a larger pattern of mass killings which have seemed to proliferate since America's economic downturn, experts say. Forty-four people have died in a string of five such incidents in the past month, from Oakland, California to Alabama to North Carolina.
LAT: database on killings by long-haul truckers in US reveals patterns
But the pattern in roadside body dumps and other evidence has prompted many investigators to speculate that the mobility, lack of supervision and access to potential victims that come with the job make it a good cover for someone inclined to kill...

Michael Harrigan, who oversees the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, said the program helps local police "connect the dots" to slayings outside their jurisdictions. He said most of the victims led high-risk lifestyles that left them particularly vulnerable.

NYT: new Israeli foreign minister: “those who wish for peace should prepare for war”
The aim of the Annapolis process, as it became known, was to agree on the framework for a Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2008, a goal that was not achieved.

Mr. Lieberman said that the Israeli government “never ratified Annapolis, nor did Parliament,” and that it therefore “has no validity.”...

As the new prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu has tried to strike a more conciliatory tone, promising to hold negotiations with the Palestinian Authority toward a permanent accord. But he has also stopped short of endorsing the two-state solution, putting the new government at odds with the United States and the European Union.
NYT: Israeli advocate general closes investigation into military abuses in Gaza

NYT: new face/phase of insurgency in Iraq
Most of the latest attacks, at a time when overall violence is at its lowest level since the beginning of the war in 2003, have singled out Iraqis, but one development affects the Americans. A new weapon has appeared in Iraq: Russian-made RKG-3 grenades, which weigh just five pounds and, attached to parachutes, can be lobbed by a teenager but can penetrate the American military’s latest heavily armored vehicle, the MRAP. The grenades cost as little as $10, according to American military officials, who would not say how often they have killed soldiers...

Military officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the news media, say they have reduced the number of jihadi militants to under 2,000, from about 3,800. “In most places there isn’t an insurgency in Iraq anymore,” said an American military intelligence officer in Washington, who was not authorized to be quoted by name. “What we have now is a terrorism problem, and there is going to be a terrorism problem in Iraq for a long time.”

Other officials, Iraqi and American, are more worried. They observe jihadi and other insurgent groups activating networks of sleeper cells, which are already striking government and civilian targets. Insurgent groups linked to the rule of Mr. Hussein are also reviving.
NYT: along with the end of blackwater?
CSM: all under a new US commander

NYT: Taliban militants attack government office in Kandahar, during democracy seminar
The assault by multiple gunmen followed a pattern of militant attacks across the region recently, from Kabul, the Afghan capital, to Lahore in Pakistan and Mumbai in India...

The attack, in daylight in the center of the city, was the second in the past year in which Taliban fighters infiltrated Kandahar, an important city in the south, in such a brazen manner.

Hajji Agha Lalai, a provincial council member who attended the institute’s seminar, said the attackers were dressed in Afghan National Army uniforms.
NYT: European role in Afghanistan conflict uncertain, but probably a "civilian surge"
[Obama's] increasing American troops in Afghanistan to some 68,000 by the end of the year, from 38,000 today, is also likely to significantly Americanize an operation that in recent years had been divided equally between American troops and allied forces. By year’s end, American troops will outnumber allied forces by at least two to one.

His NATO allies are giving the president considerable vocal support for the newly integrated strategy. But they are giving him very few new troops on the ground, underlining the fundamental strains in the alliance.

The war in Afghanistan was the first time that NATO had ever invoked its Article 5, which requires collective defense of a member under attack... What Afghanistan needs, a senior German official said, is not more foreign soldiers but more Afghan troops and police officers. Germany is sending in new police mentoring teams, and several hundred more police officers and gendarmes will come from France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Spain, according to the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner. France is trying to coordinate a second pillar of the European police force in Afghanistan to do training in the countryside for periods of up to 11 months. That project, which European officials say is more efficient than trying to bring local police officers to Kabul for mass training, can have a European label.

Europeans will also concentrate on the “civilian surge” to help create functioning Afghan political, judicial and security structures in the countryside.
LAT: ...comes down to 5,000 combat troops and trainers

NYT: DoD officials testify before Senate: Pakistani intelligence agency a "problem"; benchmarks for success are coming
...Ms. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, acknowledged the administration’s concerns about a wing of the ISI, which American intelligence officials say is providing money and military assistance to the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan...

Senators on the panel expressed some impatience with the Obama administration’s failure so far to articulate benchmarks for judging progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although Ms. Flournoy promised that they would be ready soon...

Ms. Flournoy responded that “a key point of defining success is when both the Afghans and the Pakistanis have both the capability and the will to deal with the remaining threat themselves.”
NYT: US drone aims for Taliban leader in Pakistani tribal region, kills at least 12
The attack was the first of its kind in the Orakzai region, which lies southwest of Peshawar and close to the border with Afghanistan, residents said. The region is strategically important because it borders other areas in Pakistan known for widespread Taliban activity.

Mr. [Hakimullah] Mehsud is a prominent lieutenant of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who claimed responsibility for an assault this week on police cadets in Lahore, Pakistan.
NYT: militants attack police training center in Punjab, resulting in 8 hour siege...
The attackers issued no demands but went on a rampage, killing at least eight recruits and instructors. One attacker was killed in the siege that followed and, in a gory finale, three detonated suicide belts, killing themselves. More than 100 people were wounded.

“They were barbaric,” a senior trainer at the center said. “They had no demands. We didn’t understand what they wanted. They just kept killing.”...

Some at the police academy believed that the attackers had come from Afghanistan, or at least were Pashtun, an ethnicity indigenous to tribal areas in western Pakistan...

The attackers had more sophisticated weaponry than in past attacks, said Mr. Sukhera, the police official. A factory-made antipersonnel explosive that bore the markings Claymore Mark 5 was found near one of the dead attackers in a plastic box, said Zulifkar Hameed, an elite force member who was among the first inside.
Gdn: ...and a few days later, 22 killed in suicide attack on mosque
LAT: video released on public flogging of a 17-year old girl by the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley causes outrage
Jahangir said the girl was believed to have been punished after refusing to marry a Taliban commander in the Swat Valley, where the government in February struck a truce with Islamic militants to stem violence. The militants then accused her of immoral behavior and ordered 34 lashes, Pakistani news reports said...

The Swat accord was reached between the North-West Frontier Province government and a cleric named Sufi Muhammad, whose son-in-law Maulana Qazi Fazlullah leads a Taliban army that for nearly two years held off army and paramilitary troops seeking to regain control of Swat.

The alpine valley was once a tourist haven, with stunning mountain scenery and a ski resort, which the militants burned down.

Over the last two years, they also burned down nearly 200 schools that provided education to girls and beheaded dozens of local officials and paramilitary troops, terrorizing anyone who dared speak against them.

The central government was not a party to the peace accord but signaled its approval and pulled back army troops.
CSM: ...and could threaten peace deal
In Swat's main town of Mingora, however, anger is overridden by a practical desire to maintain good relations with the Taliban whom residents say are in de- facto control of the region. The consensus is that the video, which was shot with a cellphone camera, took place in January – before the peace accord – and that the Taliban has done nothing as controversial since that time...

The much-vaunted Islamic courts are partly operational, hearing mainly financial or land disputes that are settled through a quick verdict by Qazis (religious scholars, who were already in place and working as magistrates before the peace-deal). Opposing parties describe their disputes, which could center around a bounced check or a defaulted loan, to the Qazi who in turn makes a swift decision and orders the families to come together and shake hands. There are few documents involved and no lawyers. One hundred and fifteen new cases have been heard since the peace deal, of which 50 have been resolved. "People seem to prefer it this way," says court clerk Zafar Ali. "Things are done a lot sooner."

NYT: human rights activist beaten in Russia...
NYT: ...as former Chechen general turned opposition leader is assassinated in Dubai
The attack evokes others on Chechens, in Russia and abroad, who ran afoul of President Ramzan A. Kadyrov.

The Kremlin has invested Mr. Kadyrov with almost unchecked authority in a bid to return stability to Chechnya after nearly a decade of bloody war and political turmoil. With Moscow’s blessing, Mr. Kadyrov has created a personality cult and imposed his own interpretation of Islamic morality in Chechnya, whose population is predominately Muslim.

He has also built a powerful security force that has all but crushed Chechnya’s separatist movement, often, rights groups say, with the help of torture and extrajudicial killings.

In January, a Chechen hit man tracked down and killed Umar S. Israilov, a former bodyguard of Mr. Kadyrov, who had received asylum in Austria after accusing the president, and officials in his circle, of kidnapping, torture and murder. Ruslan Yamadayev, one of Sulim’s brothers, was shot dead in his car last September as he waited in a traffic jam in Moscow just outside the White House, the government building where the offices of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin are situated.
NYT: firebombing anarchists in Athens attack banks and cars

NYT: Guinea-Bissau needs help to assure post-coup on-time elections
The tiny West African country, which is used by Latin American drug-smuggling gangs as a transit point to Europe, has said it will hold elections in June to replace the president who was assassinated last month.

Soldiers killed President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira on March 2 in a revenge attack after an explosion killed his rival, General Batista Tagme Na Wai, the military chief... The deaths of Vieira and Na Wai ended a long-running and violent feud between the two men.

But it left a power vacuum which analysts say could lead to greater instability and allow Latin American cocaine smuggling gangs, already active in Bissau, to extend their influence.
NYT: trial highlights crime, insecurity in South Africa; some clamor for reintroducing the death penalty
The nation’s homicide rate, while declining, is among the worst. In 2006, it was about eight times more than the United States’ and 20 times higher than Western Europe’s, according to Antony Altbeker, a criminologist. Electrified barbed wire surrounds many of the finest homes in Johannesburg. South Africa exceeds international norms in its number of police officers, and by some estimates there are more than four times as many private security guards as police officers, with most companies promising their clients “armed response.”

Criminologists have long puzzled over not only the nation’s high crime rate but also the unusual amount of homicide and torture that accompanies burglaries and carjackings...

The three men [on trial] did not realize that they had killed someone both famous and widely beloved until they read the newspapers the next day. They had thought their victim “was a Nigerian,” Ms. Maruping said.

Gdn: human rights case against Shell goes to court
In a New York federal court, Shell and one of its senior executives are to face charges that in the early 1990s in Nigeria they were complicit in human rights abuses, including summary execution and torture.

The Anglo-Dutch company, if found liable, could be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. No multinational has ever been found guilty of human rights abuses, although two previous cases saw major claims settled outside court...

Lawyers in New York will allege that Shell actively subsidised a campaign of terror by security forces in the Niger Delta and attempted to influence the trial that led to Saro-Wiwa's execution. The lawsuit alleges that the company attempted to bribe two witnesses in his trial to testify against him.
NYT: Arab leaders band together to back Sudan's Bashir
NYT: Fujimori, on trial for massacres during Peru's civil war, defends himself
Mr. Fujimori is believed to be the world’s first democratically elected former president to be tried for human rights violations in his own country...

None of the 80 witnesses and nearly two dozen outside experts who testified during the trial have directly linked Mr. Fujimori to two deadly operations by the Colina group, a special military unit. Rather, prosecutors have argued that as commander in chief and leader, he did nothing to try to stop the killings of guerrilla suspects and their supporters. He is charged with failing to stop the Colina group from massacring 15 people, including an 8-year-old boy, in 1991 at a barbecue in Lima, Peru’s capital.

He is also charged with human rights violations related to a raid at La Cantuta University in 1992 that left nine students and a professor dead. Their incinerated bodies were found a year later.
NYT: first defendant in Khmer Rouge trial tries the chain of command defense
One of five defendants in the United Nations-backed trial, [Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch] faces a life sentence on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, as well as homicide and torture...

Duch’s lawyers presented a vigorous defense of a man who has admitted to overseeing the torture and execution of at least 14,000 people, portraying him as someone trapped in a giant killing machine who now finds himself singled out for prosecution.

Asserting that Tuol Sleng was just one of 196 similar institutions — and far from the worst of them — one of his lawyers, Kar Savuth, asked: “Is it fair? Is this called justice?

“Each prison had the same orders from Angkar,” he said, referring to the Khmer Rouge leadership, “all conducted torture and execution. Why is only Duch brought to trial? He is only a scapegoat.”

NYT: fate of Tamil leader central to outcome of Sri Lankan civil war
A pioneer in the tactic of suicide bombings, Mr. [Velupillai] Prabhakaran created a squad called the Black Tigers — up to 40 percent of its members women — that carried out scores of attacks over the years, both targeted assassinations and mass terrorist killings.

Many of his regular fighters have taken their own lives as well rather than surrender, biting into cyanide tablets that they often carry on strings like small memento mori around their necks.

This dedication is part of a cult-like devotion to Mr. Prabhakaran — a chubby man with a thick mustache whose charisma is not always evident to outsiders — and nobody knows what will come of his mission once he is gone.

Without Mr. Prabhakaran, some analysts say, his rebellion may collapse. Or perhaps he might be seen as a martyr and a rallying cry for further insurgency.
Gdn: while civilian suffering unlikely to decline soon

deconstruction [shiva clocks overtime]

NYT: burning out insurgents in Chechnya
"In a campaign to punish families with sons suspected of supporting the insurgency, at least a dozen homes have been set ablaze since midsummer, residents and a local human rights organization said.

The burnings have been accompanied by a program, embraced by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, Chechnya’s president, that has forced visibly frightened parents of insurgents to appear on television and beg their sons to return home...

The burnings have occurred in several districts or towns — including Alleroi, Geldagan, Khidi-Khutor, Kurchaloi, Samashki, Shali, Shatoi, Nikikhita and Tsenteroi — suggesting that the arsonists have been operating with precise information and with a degree of impunity in a republic that is crowded with police and military units.

Residents and the human rights organization said that the impunity was unsurprising, because the arsonists appeared to be members of the police...

In a series of state-run news programs this summer in Chechnya, senior officials spoke openly of the collective responsibility of people whose relatives have joined the insurgency, and of collective punishment."

WP: Chechen refugees in Georgia fear Russians again
"[Pankisi Gorge, with its] fruit orchards and towering mountains has not been stable for long. During the Chechen war, it became a base for fighters making excursions into Chechnya and attracted a stream of money and fighters from Muslim nations. For years, it was a lawless pocket where men strode through villages with automatic weapons strapped to their bodies and where street shootings were common. At one point, Russia dropped bombs here to wipe out the fighters.

Then, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States began a $64 million program to train and equip Georgian forces to help root out suspected al-Qaeda agents -- a program that eventually expanded into a general training program for the Georgian army. The valley is now under the Georgian police's control, and locals say the "Arabians" who had settled here have melted away.

The war last month did not reach the valley, and Georgian officials say the helicopters spotted by the locals were most likely Georgian, conducting routine border patrols. But for Chechens living here, seeing Russian tanks cross into Georgia reawakened old fears. It also brought surprise. Some recalled watching TV reports of Russian tanks near the capital and finding it strange to see no resistance from the Georgians, not even a rock thrown.

Chechens would never have let that happen, said Lia Margoshvili, a Georgian Chechen who works with refugees here. "Chechen kids, when they're in fifth or sixth grade, they learn that they have to kill Russians -- but the Georgian kids, they learn, I don't know, books or something."

BBC: opposition in Belarus does not win one parliamentary seat in "election"
BBC: Lukashenko's days on the farm prepared him to be dictator
"His experience at the farm is what keeps him in power today," Mr Gulyaev says.

"Under that system, the director of the collective farm was equal to God, the tsar and the commander-in-chief. His word is the law, and no-one can argue with him."

NYT: policewoman killed by Taliban in Afghanistan
"Ms. Kakar, with the rank of captain, was head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women. She joined the police in the city in 1982, following in the footsteps of her father and brothers, but was forced out after the Taliban captured Kandahar in the mid-1990s and barred all women from working.

She was the first female police officer in the country to return to work after the Taliban were ousted. Her commitment was particularly notable for the fact that it took place in Kandahar, which became the headquarters for the Taliban soon after the movement was formed in the early 1990s."

BBC: forming self-defense militias in Pakistani villages
"Tribal elders gather in a mammoth meeting place, or jirga hall, to tell us why they support the military offensive.

They accuse the Pakistani Taleban of setting up a parallel state in Bajaur, undermining the traditional tribal leadership. They say they've exhausted all attempts at negotiating a peaceful solution to the problem."

WP: several attacks in Baghdad leave 27 dead

Reuters: car bomb in Tripoli kills 5

LAT: code of honor survives in Albania
"Many still live at least in part by the Kanun, a code handed down through the centuries in which "besa" -- loosely translated as word of honor or sacred promise -- is paramount. The code was adhered to by Albania's Muslim majority and Catholic and Orthodox Christian minorities.

The code covers everything from inheritances and the rights of the church to the treatment of livestock. Disobeying the Kanun could lead to harsh penalties that might include banishment or the transgressor's household being burned. A slight could lead to a blood feud that lasted for generations.

In Theth, nobody will sell land to an outsider, or even to another villager. Brides must come from outside the valley, a tradition that follows along the lines of the Kanun's rule that marriage within the same clan is forbidden.

"The Kanun is the law. Just like the state law," explains Gjovalin Lokthi, 39, a gruff "kryeplak," or elected chief of the village...

The Kanun has survived despite four decades of communist rule after World War II, with hardships such as mass imprisonment in labor camps and attempts to stamp out tribal practices."

WP: 52 Somalis die at sea trying to reach Yemen

Econ: whites leaving South Africa's violent crime

NYT: hurricane recovery as opportunity in Cuba

WP: Ecuadorans approve new constitution

NYT: conflict lingers in Bolivia
"Increasingly, the question confronting Bolivia, a country of deep ethnic and geographical divisions, is how they will wield that power, and whether Mr. Morales can redress the historical grievances of Bolivia’s indigenous majority while keeping his country from descending into chaos...

As violent as his opponents have sometimes been, they charge that Mr. Morales is achieving much of this by running roughshod over them. They say he has ignored court rulings that challenge his policies and used some of the same intimidation tactics he honed as a leader of the powerful coca growers unions before he was elected president.

As such tactics spread on both sides, fears are growing throughout the region that Bolivia’s crisis could produce, if not civil war, then pockets of fierce conflict across its rebellious tropical lowlands, which are an important source of natural gas and food for neighboring countries."

Slate: the history (and future?) of humanitarian intervention

LAT: decoding men's headbands in Iraq
"Like the people who wear the agal and for whom it is a crucial part of daily dress -- everyone from rural farmers to Arab kings -- the headband's history is intriguing for its mix of tragedy and toughness. Some say it evolved from the collapse of Islamic rule in Andalusia. One version says the caliph ordered men to wear black headbands in mourning. Another says that distraught women tore their hair out and hurled it at men to show their rage at the men's inability to protect Islam. The men then wrapped the locks of black hair around their heads in shame and sorrow.

In the most practical version, Bedouins carried the black bands on their heads in case ropes were needed to secure their camels."

BBC: Maoists cancel Ms. Nepal pageant

NYT mag: deconstructing my city (literally - Clevelanders are not postmodern)

NYT: maybe McCain should use his own height logic to support universal health care in the US

dissemination and defamation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WP: judges still not reinstated in Pakistan

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

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

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

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

BBC: LTTE launches air attacks in northeastern Sri Lanka

the Basra bungle

NYT: confusion reigns over what happened in Basra, starting with Maliki's orders to launch assault...
"But the Iraqi operation was not what the United States expected. Instead of methodically building up their combat power and gradually stepping up operations against renegade militias, Mr. Maliki’s forces lunged into the city, attacking before all of the Iraqi reinforcements had even arrived. By the following Tuesday, a major fight was on.
'The sense we had was that this would be a long-term effort: increased pressure gradually squeezing the Special Groups,' Mr. Crocker said in an interview, using the American term for Iranian-backed militias. 'That is not what kind of emerged.'
'Nothing was in place from our side,' he added. 'It all had to be put together.' "
NYT: ...and continuing with how many Iraqis deserted during the fight. NYT combines police and army, cites an estimate at 4%
"The crisis created by the desertions and other problems with the Basra operation was serious enough that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki hastily began funneling some 10,000 recruits from local Shiite tribes into his armed forces. That move has already generated anger among Sunni tribesmen whom Mr. Maliki has been much less eager to recruit despite their cooperation with the government in its fight against Sunni insurgents and criminal gangs."
WP: meanwhile, the Post cites an Iraqi source who says 30% left. the estimate for total fighters involved was about half of NYT's. maybe they didn't include the police?
LAT: then there's this evaluation of the police from yesterday's LAT
"'Police work where they live and are inherently influenced by the politics of their community,' said a Western security official, who estimated police desertions at more than 50% in Mahdi Army strongholds such as Baghdad's Sadr City and parts of Basra...
Like many soldiers in this area, Hussein has friends and relatives in Shula who faced repercussions if the military confronted the militias there.
'People were calling me on my cellphone, threatening to kill my kids,' said Hussein, a husky man with a gray-flecked mustache and a red beret perched on his head. He commands the 4th Battalion of the 22nd Brigade in the Iraqi army's 6th Division."
USAT: Ambassador Cocker says "Thousands of tribesmen in the southern city of Basra have volunteered to join Iraqi security forces since al-Sadr agreed to a cease-fire on Sunday."
NYT: (op-ed) the US should train more military advisers for Iraq and Afghanistan
NYT: rumor has it that the NIE's report is rosy, but critics of the classified doc say it reads like a summary of press reports. this installment has no public version, which some Dems are criticizing.
IHT: no wonder the humor is black

Slate: a photo-journalist's view of war in Chechnya and Iraq

NYT: rising star of Al-Qaeda

WP: the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan complicates US operations
Ind: warlords funneling cash from heroin sales into weapons acquisition

WP: former KLA commander, former prime minister of Kosovo, acquitted of war crimes

WP: still unclear what Mugabe will do; "inner circle" appears to be fracturing
Gdn: he may step down in exchange for immunity from prosecution for past crimes

Gdn: Kenyan officials reach deal, will announce 40-member cabinet Sunday

Gdn: Sarkozy will travel to Colombia to receive Betancourt if released; France will take in freed FARC prisoners

WP: Uighurs protested during Tibet crackdown
"Like the Tibetans, Xinjiang's approximately 16 million Uighur Muslims speak their own language, have their own customs and, at one point in history, set up their own government. They have long chafed under the Han Chinese-dominated government in Beijing and in the 1990s mounted a series of attacks against Chinese officials and institutions during which Beijing says more than 150 people died."

Ind: (Raul) Castro increasing Cubans' freedoms: now they can watch Seinfeld re-runs

Gdn: Cyprus removes barriers between Greek and Turkish sides, compares coffee

Slate: accountability for the lawyers who gave the green light? nah.
"Lawfare was described by Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles Dunlap as 'the strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective.' Ordinary acts of foreign policy become bogged down in a maze of after-the-fact legal consequences. Donald Rumsfeld saw this form of warfare as a limit on American military authority. He was determined to find a solution to what he called 'the judicialization of international politics.'...As we are beginning to learn, the growing tendency to conduct wars in the courtroom hasn't actually constrained anyone at all over the past seven years. The expanded role of all these laws and lawyers in the war on terror has had the opposite effect: The Bush administration has proven time and again that the Rule of Law is only as definitive as its most inventive lawyers.
In short, the Bush solution to the paralysis of lawfare seems to be to hire lawyers who don't believe in the law. "

LAT: arithmetic of Aztec land surveys finally understood

the Root: daily drug war dose: 5 things to know about crack

judgments

middle east
BBC: new flag over Baghdad
LAT: Diyala valley claimed by militant group
"The invaders pinned notices on the walls of mosques informing residents that they now lived in the Islamic State of Iraq."
LAT: Iraqi army and police rivalries slow handover
"Separated by tribal and regional differences, and a personality clash between top officers, the two branches of the Iraqi security forces have largely refused to coordinate their activities."
LAT: focus on professionalizing the police, an enormous challenge
WP: US troops kill 3 more civilians in another raid

WP: Hamas claims responsibility for suicide bomb in Israel; Israel retaliates with missile attacks, killing 9
New Yorker: why did Israel bomb Syria in Sept?
BBC: HRW calls for release of activist in Syria, opposition members

Gdn: Iranian missile test makes Russia nervous

LAT: Christians in Pakistan
WP: Mormons in the world
WP: Islamists in Chechnya
LAT: (liberal) Shiites in Lebanon

SWJ: link to full Afghanistan Study Group report
"It is time to re-vitalize and re-double our efforts toward stabilizing Afghanistan and re-think our economic and military strategies to ensure that the level of our commitment is commensurate with the threat posed by possible failure in Afghanistan."
SWJ: summaries of, links to other assessments

BBC: Poland chastises NATO allies for not sending enough troops, support to Afghanistan
Gdn: UK will deploy paratroopers to Helmand in April
BBC: announcement comes during Sec Rice visit to London

BBC: alternative development needed to reduce Afghan farmers' incentives to grow poppy
"Britain plays the lead role in coordinating counter narcotics policy in Afghanistan and six years on the failure in this area makes for grim reading...There have been some successes - half as many provinces grow opium poppies this year as last - but the report says there are ominous signs that the drugs business is increasingly linked to insecurity."
BBC: UNODC releases report estimating higher poppy growth in south

americas
LAT: Hayden acknowledges that only (at least?) 3 Al-Qaeda suspects were waterboarded
NYT: (despite the torture) Al-Qaeda is a growing threat. and more on those tricky guidelines:
"[director of national intelligence] Mr. McConnell said that a future C.I.A. request to use waterboarding on a detainee would need to be approved both by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and by President Bush...

Both Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers that their agencies had successfully obtained valuable intelligence from terrorism suspects without using what Mr. Mueller called the “coercive” methods of the C.I.A.

But General Hayden bristled when asked about Congressional attempts to mandate that C.I.A. interrogators be required to use the more limited set of interrogation methods contained in the Army Field Manual, which is used by military interrogators.

'It would make no more sense to apply the Army’s field manual to C.I.A.,' General Hayden said, 'than it would to take the Army Field Manual on grooming and apply it to my agency, or the Army Field Manual on recruiting and apply it to my agency. Or, for that matter, the Army Field Manual on sexual orientation and apply it to my agency [???!!!].'"

(does this mean we can trust gays to gather important intelligence?! i'll keep watch for conservative reaction to such risky policy)

SWJ: preparing soldiers for deployment - using Habermas's 'communicative action'?

NYT: upcoming detainee hearings in the Supreme Court
"Cases that have been proceeding on completely separate judicial tracks may be about to converge."

WP: Bush tries to sap new ombudsman post of power to implement more transparency, faster response to FOIA requests
"By law, agencies must respond within 20 days to FOIA requests, but in practice the process can take months or years. Delays grew after the terrorist attacks in 2001 as agencies began to favor nondisclosure in the name of national security.
Under the new law, requests will be assigned public tracking numbers. Agencies that exceed the 20-day deadline for responses will be denied the right to charge requesters for research or copying costs." [But Bush wants to move the position from the non-partisan National Archives dept to the Justice Dept, notoriously evasive when it comes to FOIA requests.]

WP: DC gun ban challenged by those who argue against militia interpretation of 2nd amendment
"It has been 70 years since the [Supreme Court's] last substantive review of the Second Amendment, and supporters and opponents of gun control remain adamantly divided on whether it protects an individual's right to possess guns or only provides a "collective" right of citizens related to military service.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last spring became the first appeals court to use the individual-rights interpretation of the amendment to strike a gun-control law. Most of the courts that have examined the issue have ruled that it protects only the collective right."

IHT: millions march against the FARC in Colombia, across the world
LAT: the marches became politicized, but many participated despite misgivings
"We're not talking about politics, just a condemnation of what the FARC does. We're tired of it."
BBC: Colombian cocaine capo sentenced to 30 years in NY court

Slate: series on visiting Venezuela
"Another time, I caught Chávez at a new hospital pledging to build or modernize hundreds more. He earnestly whipped out pencil and paper to make a list of all the things a great hospital needs. "Let's see," he told the assembled group of medical workers, "You need an X-ray unit with all the latest equipment, and what else, let's see …" On and on he went. It makes for seductive television, a bit like watching your Uncle Fred run the country from a reality TV show."

africa
NYT: rebellion in Chad on pause; bodies collected in the capital and opposition politicians arrested
BBC: Deby received pledged support from France, actual support from Darfur rebel group
AP: rebels agree to Libya-brokered cease fire

BBC: explosions kill at least 20 in Ethiopian migrant housing on Somali coast

BBC: Annan wants truth and reconciliation commission in Kenya
BBC: opposition threatens more rallies if regional meeting goes ahead

asia
BBC: speaker de Venecia ousted in Phillipines, after launching accusations of corruption against president Arroyo

BBC: UN hands off power to Timorese police

BBC: US approves more sanctions on Burma

europe
BBC: EU approves Kosovo mission,
BBC: delays deal with Serbia
BBC: because the PM has denounced the plan

BBC: Spanish judge issues arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan soldiers; charged with mass killing, genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity

NYT: elections set for April in Italy

misc
The Onion: Bob Seger tries to get Cleveland to open up, share its feelings and fears
"Maybe you can all just start by telling me a little about yourself. What do you do for fun, for example? I know you enjoy that old-time rock and roll, but what else? What is it like living in Cleveland? I have heard that the subprime mortgage crisis has hit Cleveland especially hard. That sucks."