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

of state-building and service-providing [unlikely saboteurs]

WP: NATO devising 'surge' of state-building in Afghanistan
"NATO alliance troops facing ever more aggressive Taliban insurgents are planning a winter "development surge" of civil works projects in eastern Afghanistan designed to win over tribes in regions near the Pakistan border and to prevent their sons from joining the Taliban's ranks, according to military officials here."
Slate: but the current programs have some perverse problems
"This is a country in which all the best people are being hired away from the national government by the alphabet soup of aid agencies on the ground; in which the same alphabet soup of aid agencies is driving up real-estate and food prices; in which millions of dollars are squandered on dubious contractors, both local and foreign; in which the minister for rural development says he doesn't know what all the NATO reconstruction teams in rural districts do; in which the top U.N. official, given a mandate to coordinate the donors, says the donors don't respond to his attempts to coordinate them...
Conflicting agendas, overlapping projects, money badly spent. We've been here before, many times, and the conclusions are always the same. Some of them have been recently restated by a former Afghan minister of finance, Ashraf Ghani, and his co-author, Clare Lockhart, in their book Fixing Failed States. Its central argument: Well-meaning foreigners should not fix roads; they should teach the Afghan government how to fix roads, thus helping it acquire legitimacy. Foreigners shouldn't feed Afghans, either; rather, they should develop Afghan agriculture so the Afghans can feed themselves, export their surplus, and thus develop a stake in the rule of law."

WP: census of Baghdad enclave raises fears among residents
"The document asked for a copy of the deed to his house, his children's names and, most disturbing, the name of his tribe, which identifies his religion and ethnicity. In Iraq, such a request has often been the first step toward death...The forms were part of an effort to enhance the rule of law and encourage reconciliation by identifying residents living in houses that had been emptied by sectarian cleansing and prodding them to return to their own neighborhoods.

NYT: Burma increases security ahead of year anniversary of protests
BBC: has anything changed?
"Meanwhile the military appears to be continuing with its political plans as if the protests had never happened.

It is pressing ahead with its new constitution and so-called "roadmap for democracy", which promises an eventual elected government but has already been labeled a sham by the international community."

BBC: ICC chief prosecutor ignores criticism, remains steadfast on indictment of al-Bashir

Reuters: pirates demand $35 million ransom for Ukrainian ship

Gdn: bombs in Damascus and Delhi

BBC: Ecuadorans vote tomorrow on sweeping constitutional changes
"These are some of the more controversial proposals:

• The state to tighten control of vital industries such as oil, mining and telecommunications and reduce monopolies
• Some foreign loans to be declared illegitimate, which could allow the government to stop debt repayments
• The state allowed to expropriate and redistribute idle farm land and ban large land-holdings
• The president allowed to stand for a second four-year term in office
• Free health care for older citizens
• Civil marriage for gay partners"

BBC: Turkmenistan takes on constitutional reforms
"The measure was passed unanimously by the People's Council, a group of 2,500 tribal elders and local lawmakers...However, exiles and observers said the measures were superficial, leaving President Berdymukhamedov free to rule by decree."

Gdn: judge opens inquiry into Republican repression during Spanish Civil War
"The names of those killed on the orders of Republican tribunals or by leftwing or anarchist death squads are readily available as they were gathered during Franco's 36-year dictatorship. Franco's courts dealt with many of the perpetrators of those atrocities - often by sending them to the firing squad...Many campaigners say it is too late for the perpetrators of the repression carried out by Franco's side to be put on trial as the people involved are mostly dead and the crimes are covered by a 1977 amnesty law."

BBC: memoir of museum-based resistance in WWII France purchased on ebay
"With her artist's eye, her self-deprecating humour, her talent for spotting the absurd and her palpable sense of outrage, Humbert was an irresistible companion, who offered a riveting day-by-day account of the genesis of the Resistance...That stifling summer, in a leap of blind faith and reckless courage, she and a handful of her distinguished colleagues at the Musée de l'Homme - eminent ethnographers and Egyptologists, linguists and librarians - formed what was almost certainly the very first organized Resistance group. It was as though the upper echelons of the British Museum had turned to new careers as urban guerrillas and saboteurs."

WP: Zulu virginity testing continues despite ban in South Africa
"The debate over virginity testing is an example of the clash common throughout Africa as governments try to regulate traditional practices that have long held sway, particularly in rural areas. Legal experts say the topic is particularly complex in post-apartheid South Africa, where patriarchal tribal cultures have dusted off long-stifled traditions under one of the world's most progressive constitutions, which lauds diversity but requires cultural customs to bend to individual rights."

NYT: test your specialty with squirt guns

busy dying [not the change you deserve]

WP: Lebanon factions agree to talks in Qatar
BBC: interactive maps and photos of a Palestinian refugee camp set up in 1948, which still exists in southern suburbs of Beirut

BBC: on 20th anniversary of Soviet withdrawal from Kabul, is NATO making same mistakes?
AP: UN official says armed forces in Afghanistan allowing vigilante and militia groups to kill civilians

BBC: Pakistan and the Taliban exchange prisoners; Pakistani troops also withdrawn from some posts in tribal region

WP: Muslims, mostly Bangladeshi immigrants, fear retaliation after bombings in Jaipur
"Investigators say they believe that the attacks, which killed 80 and wounded 200, were the work of Harkat ul-Jihad-al-Islami, a Bangladeshi militant group...A previously unknown group, the Indian Mujaheddin, asserted responsibility for the attack via e-mail Thursday and threatened further violence in a letter. 'If you continue to arrest innocent Muslims, then we will slaughter you on the streets of Chennai, New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore,' the letter said."

Ind: dispatch from Beichuan county in Sichuan province, destroyed by the earthquake
"Reaching Beichuan is a long march into hell. When you finally emerge scrabbling through the dirt into the town, what lies before you is a breathtaking vision of horror."

WP: Interpol says Colombians didn't tamper with computer files suggesting that Chávez and Correa offering support to the FARC
Chávez discredits findings, calls lead investigator a "gringo policeman"
"Interpol said the amount of documentation recovered from the FARC camp was enormous.
The computer data totaled 610 gigabytes, including 210,888 images, 22,481 Web sites, hundreds of spreadsheets and thousands of video files. Noble also said his computer experts had decrypted 983 other files, which were turned over to Colombian investigators."

Reuters: SPLA and Sudanese armed forces fighting in oil-rich Abyei region
"Analysts say that Abyei, often called the "Kashmir" of Sudan's north-south conflict and coveted by both sides, could be the flash point to reignite civil war if its status is not resolved amicably and quickly."

NYT: Anglicans become targets of Zimbabwe police
"Anglican leaders and parishioners said in interviews that the church was not concerned with politics and that it counted people from both the ruling party and the opposition in its congregations. Yet the ruling party appears to have decided that only Anglicans who follow Nolbert Kunonga — a renegade bishop in Harare who is a staunch ally of President Robert Mugabe — are allowed to hold services."
Ind: run-off election scheduled for June 27

Gdn: in Rwanda, genocide survivors facing violence by gangs
WP: but in some decent news, women in one village are making decent livelihoods, helping to recuperate the Rwandan economy
"In the 14 years since the genocide, when 800,000 people died during three months of violence, this country has become perhaps the world's leading example of how empowering women can fundamentally transform post-conflict economies and fight the cycle of poverty. That is particularly clear here in Maraba, a southern village where a host of women -- largely relegated to backbreaking field work in the days before the genocide -- found unwanted opportunity in the fertile lands they would inherit from slaughtered husbands, fathers and brothers."

BBC: former Taylor deputy testifies in the Hague
says Sankoh, head of RUF in Sierra Leone, complained to Taylor about Liberian atrocities, but he threatened to withdraw.
he also discussed origins of armed groups in the region:
"They trained alongside rebels from The Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Philippines, all of them supported by the Libyan authorities.
He told the court that when the time came to invade Liberia, three truck loads of weapons were provided by the defence minister of Ivory Coast.
Within days of crossing into Liberia in 1990, Mr Blah says he was briefly detained by child rebel fighters recruited by his own side.
He said they were used because they took orders and were 'unreasonable and aggressive.'"

Gdn: decent recap of the wars in the Congo
Gdn: ongoing violence fueled by recruitment among Hutu children
Gdn: photos

BBC: Somali kids play "Islamists and Ethiopians"

WP: the US has detained 2,500 teenagers as illegal enemy combatants since 2002

NYT: gang violence, policing, and immigration in LA
"The Los Angeles Police Department was one of the first in the nation — nearly three decades ago — to institute a procedure that prohibits officers from initiating contact with people for the sole purpose of learning their immigration status. The procedure, known as Special Order 40, was designed in part to reassure illegal immigrants who historically had shied from reporting crimes and assisting police investigations.

But in the context of contemporary immigration politics, the procedure is now perceived in black neighborhoods and beyond as a roadblock to using immigration laws as a tool against Latino gang violence. A push to reverse the procedure, led by Mr. Shaw and viewed by many as a symbol of deeper racial conflicts in South Los Angeles, has inflamed tensions between many blacks and Hispanic immigrants, groups long resentful of each other as shifting demographics and a smattering of racially motivated killings have racked South Los Angeles."

McSweeney's: meet the marijuana lobby

WP: Republicans, nervous about November elections, try to capture electorate's mood with new motto: The Change You Deserve
in a twist of ironic genius that allows the Daily Show to actually report reality, it's a trademarked slogan of an anti-anxiety drug. "...the warning label...states that patients should be watched to see if they are 'becoming agitated, irritable, hostile, aggressive, impulsive, or restless.'"
WSJ: anti-anxiety meds may not be enough if Peggy Noonan's diagnosis is right - she says Republicans are "busy dying." also, they're stupid. (that's right, Peggy Noonan.)

McSweeney's: in case you should find yourself in one of the dangerous circumstances above, Borges has some advice for you

this announcement will self-destruct

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

New Yorker: wire-tapping gone haywire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBC: US announces new sanctions against Burma

BBC: sex workers in Calcutta get life insurance

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

let's share. or not.

BBC: Kenya MPs weigh making power-sharing deal between Odinga and Kibaki constitutional
BBC: Zanzibar and Tanzania reach power-sharing deal

BBC: after 9 months, Belgium reaches its own - you guessed it - power-sharing deal

BBC: OAS brokers truce among Ecuador, Colombia (and Venezuela)
Gdn: calls for UK Foreign Office minister to resign, after linking human rights and labor organization to FARC

Gdn: Mugabe bucks the trend, won't share: threatens to ban foreign press from upcoming election coverage, accusing them of spying

BBC: clashes in the Comoros with renegade leader of Anjouan, one of the islands in the federation
"Since gaining independence from France in 1975, the Union of Comoros - an impoverished three-island archipelago off Africa's east coast - has suffered 19 coups or coup attempts...Bacar unilaterally declared himself president of semi-autonomous Anjouan last July after winning an election which the central authorities declared illegal."

BBC: Liberian women in Ghana strip in protest of planned return and $100; they ask for $1000 and resettlement in West

LAT: not enough sharing: Tibetan grievances
Gdn: elsewhere in China, leading dissident goes on trial

IHT: no cross-class gym going for Haitians

BBC: attacks in Manipur, India continue: 11 killed

BBC: Joseph Kony, head of the LRA, moves from base in Uganda to Central African Republic, violating terms of cease-fire

BBC: Afghan inmates take over parts of prison in days-long, ongoing stand-off

LAT: Hamas gains popularity over Fatah

Gdn: (video) "killing fields" outside Sadr City
Gdn: Pentagon avoided brain screenings of veterans

IHT: US considers cold war tactics to fight terrorism
"After piecing together a more nuanced portrait of terrorist organizations, they say there is reason to believe that a combination of efforts could in fact establish something akin to the posture of deterrence, the strategy that helped protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear attack during the cold war." (sounds to SV like Shapiro's emphasis on containment)

Gdn: Turkish constitutional court considers banning ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP)
Chief prosecutor seeking ban because of "anti-secular" turn; AKP threatens to curb judiciary's power

Gdn: "Europe's last dictator," Belarus's Lukashenko hires Thatcher's old spin doctor to soften image

BBC: Somali pirates receive ransom for Dutch ship owner

Slate: did strategic, Rush-inspired voters give Clinton the edge in Texas?
NYT: they won't get the chance in Florida, and maybe not in Michigan either (even if there is a re-vote there)

USAT: Q&A on the financial crisis and Fed bailout
including: "What is an investment bank, and why should I care what happens to one?"