separating the sleepy heads from the killers [veiled reality]

WP: arrest of Sunni Awakening leader in Baghdad sparks clashes
The battles, the most ferocious in nearly a year in Baghdad, erupted minutes after the arrest of Adil Mashadani, the leader of the Fadhil Awakening Council, which is composed mostly of former Sunni insurgents who allied themselves with the U.S. military in exchange for monthly salaries that are now paid by Iraq's government.
WP: residents direct anger at Iraqi police for failing to dismantle car bomb that killed 16
Standing with his colleagues as residents cleaned the street, Abbas, the sergeant, teared up.

"As long as there is vengeance against you and vengeance against me, as long as there's blood between us, this isn't going to end," he said. "This isn't going to finish. Even if the government drafted half the people into the army and police, it won't end."

...Thursday's bombing was the fourth major attack in Baghdad and its outskirts this month, illustrating the resilient ability of insurgents to carry out devastating strikes in some of the country's most dangerous regions -- parts of Baghdad and its outskirts, Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and the region around the northern city of Mosul. Some police and Interior Ministry officials have warned that Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents are reorganizing in parts of Baghdad and its outskirts and in Basra.

"They're all waiting for the Americans to leave," Abbas said.
WP: Iraq to relocate members of Iranian dissident group

IHT: sectarian tensions in Bahrain
For years there have been tense relations between Bahrain's Sunni elite and the Shiite majority. That tension exploded into regular protests this year after the police arrested 23 opposition organizers, including two popular figures, Hassan Mushaima'a and a Shiite cleric, Sheik Mohammed Habib al-Moqdad. Prosecutors accused them of trying to destabilize the government and planning terrorist attacks.

...Compared with other places in the Persian Gulf, tiny Bahrain feels laid back and calm in the capital and the better neighborhoods. More than half the nation's one million residents are expatriate workers, giving the streets a relatively cosmopolitan feel. Bahrain also has a not-too-hidden seedy side. Prostitution is rampant in the hotels and nightclubs, and the streets are filled with "massage parlors." Bahrain is a destination for sex tourism.

Bahrain's politics are heated, too. The 40-member Parliament is controlled by religious parties, Sunnis and Shiites, who have turned it into a sectarian battleground. The country is run by a self-declared king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who presides over a police force staffed primarily by foreigners: Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians, almost anyone who happens to be a Sunni and is eager to earn a Bahraini passport.

Shiites are all but banned from the military and security forces — certainly from command positions — one of their primary grievances.

The Shiite majority complains that the government has a plan to naturalize as many Sunnis as possible, to change the demographic balance. The government and its supporters insist that is not true.

BBC: clashes in Yemen between security forces and al-Qaeda associates

Slate: The Art of Recruitment: al-Qaeda's training manual

Slate: assessing Obama's new strategy for Afghanistan
Gdn: identifying allies and enemies
"I can become someone's worst enemy in a second, but that is a short-term solution," said [Colonel David] Haight. "My aim here is governance, security and sustainability."...

"Sometimes we are talking to people then someone joins us and the villagers all go quiet," [Captain José] Vasquez said. "In one village there are three brothers who say they have no power but clearly run the place and clearly are not on our side. Another village is just plain bad. We got stones thrown at us there."

Interviews with MPs, officials and judges from Logar revealed a typically web of shifting loyalties, divided communities, inter-generational tensions and desperate bids by village elders to gauge who is the best guarantor of security and resources: the Americans who have guns and money but will eventually leave, or the insurgents who have less of both but are going nowhere.
Gdn: training the Afghan army (video): 'it's like having 26 kids'

NYT: segment of Pakistan's ISI aiding Taliban in Afghanistan
Support for the Taliban, as well as other militant groups, is coordinated by operatives inside the shadowy S Wing of Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the officials said. There is even evidence that ISI operatives meet regularly with Taliban commanders to discuss whether to intensify or scale back violence before the Afghan elections...

The ISI helped create and nurture the Taliban movement in the 1990s to bring stability to a nation that had been devastated by years of civil war between rival warlords, and one Pakistani official explained that Islamabad needed to use groups like the Taliban as “proxy forces to preserve our interests.”
NYT: factions of Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan try to solidify alliance in anticipation of US troop deployment
WP: village on border pays price for resisting

WP: torture yielded no actionable intel
Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
AP: Spanish court considers trying Bush administration officials for providing legal cover for torture
The ex-Bush officials are Gonzales; former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.

NYT: leaked accounts of Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza raise questions of war crimes
When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.”
Slate: why use white phosphorous?

Gdn: the Naxalite insurgency in India
The Naxalites - villagers call them dada, Hindi for older brother - get their name from an uprising in the Naxalbari area of West Bengal in 1967. Playing on the frustrations of India's hundreds of millions of rural poor, they have won support by redistributing the wealth of the landowners and opposing industrialisation. They are estimated to have a strong presence in at least 170 out of India's 602 districts and have warned that they will use violence to block the elections in those areas.

In Chhattisgarh alone, in the past two years, 578 civilians have died in Naxal-related violence. The police and special police officer death toll stands at 231, against 142 dead Naxalites. According to police figures, in the past eight years in the Dantewada district alone 72 roads have been destroyed, 18 banks, 291 public vehicles, 87 schools, two hospitals, 24 railway lines and 56 electricity stations.

To counter their influence, the Salwa Judum militia emerged in 2005, ostensibly out of the frustration of those who had suffered at the hands of the Naxalites. The result was more killing, as the SJ members turned on those they accused of harbouring and supporting the Naxalites. Caught in the middle are the tribal people who live in the forests. There was no voting in the state elections in November in once prosperous Nendra: it has been attacked three times; 145 houses have been burned down, 16 adults and nine children killed.

The few villagers who have since returned huddle together around the one building that still has a roof. Its pink walls are covered with neatly painted Hindi script. The message the Naxalites left would be unequivocal, were the villagers able to read Hindi: "Don't take part in elections. Don't listen to the Hindu fascist members of the BJP [the Hindu nationalist opposition party]. Throw away their leaflets, don't help the police."

Scared at first, they relax as night falls, the trees around come alive with fireflies and the local hooch emboldens them. Yes, the dadas come from time to time, they say, but what can they do? They feed them and send them on their way. Then the SJ comes and burns their houses and kills those who cannot run away. "We are just living and surviving," says a voice in the darkness.

...

• The Naxalites take their name from the Naxalbari district in West Bengal where the movement began in 1967.

• They started by organising uprisings among landless workers in West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh. They then moved into the mineral-rich areas of Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

• The movement, whose aim is violent revolution, has now spread to 170 of India's 602 administrative districts.

• The Naxalites consider themselves the heirs of Mao Zedong, although China has denounced the movement.

• With a force of up to 15,000 soldiers, it controls a fifth of India's forests.

• Two wings, People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre, combined several years ago to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

BBC: investigations of a weapons cache found in Bangladeshi madrassa

WP: Colombian gov't to return stolen land to internally displaced
Government investigators say that illegal, anti-guerrilla death squads that swarmed through in 1996 and 1997 worked with troops commanded by Gen. Rito Alejo del Rio, who is now in jail on charges that include murder and collaborating with paramilitary groups. More than 100 villagers were slain, and as many as 3,000 farmers were forced to abandon 247,000 acres, a swath about a third the size of Rhode Island.

The palm companies then built roads through the forest and planted nearly 15,000 acres with African palm, which is used as a biofuel and in many other products. The few farmers who had individual titles to land were forced to sell. "They would say, 'Sell, or your widow will,' " recalled one farmer, Eustaquio Polo Rivera, 40.

...Documents from the attorney general's office and the nation's controller obtained by The Washington Post show that state loans were used to bankroll the palm oil company operations. Urapalma received most of its start-up funding from the state, the controller's office said, and the company accounted for 89 percent of the incentives provided from 2002 to 2006 through a rural development fund to companies in Choco.

...Court documents and depositions show that some of the companies had close links to illegal paramilitary groups that massacred villagers in a dirty war against leftist rebels. The commanders of those groups have since disarmed their forces and are offering testimony about their alliances with military and government officials in exchange for leniency.
Miami Herald: one of them, Raul Hasbún, describes banana company payments to paramilitaries in the same region
The son of a former plantation owner, Hasbún took over the family banana plantation as guerrilla power hit its peak in Urabá, the heart of the Colombian banana-growing region.

At that time, it was the rebels who were extorting business owners, transportation companies and shopkeepers. They kidnapped the wealthy and middle class alike, using the ransom to finance their war against the government. Like nearly everyone else, Hasbún paid his quota to the guerrillas.

In 1994, Hasbún became fed up with the shakedowns. He said he approached the Castaño family, a powerful clan that was forming small paramilitary death squads to fight the rebels and assassinate their followers, and ultimately joined their cause.

Working closely with local military officials, paramilitaries spent the next 10 years killing hundreds of suspected rebel collaborators and sympathizers, former paramilitaries from the region have testified. Hasbún himself has confessed that he killed or ordered the deaths of hundreds across a 200-mile swath of coastal territory.
CSM: FARC targets Colombian cities
LAT: police foil plot to kill Defense Minister

WP: Clinton acknowledges failure of US drug war policies, US demand for cocaine driving violence in Mexico
LAT: drug cartels diversify trafficking operations to include humans
SlateV: meanwhile, gringo guns go south
NYT: violence also crossing the border
African Affairs: ...and the Atlantic: a history of drug trafficking in West Africa (via Chris Blattman)

CSM: policing Giuliani-style in Rio

LAT: political prisoners in Zimbabwe

WP: members of Georgian opposition party arrested
The arrests, some of which took place at the offices of Burjanadze's party, come just over two weeks before Georgia's main opposition parties plan mass demonstrations calling on Saakashvili to resign.

The opposition has accused Saakashvili of monopolizing power and betraying the democratic ideals of the Rose Revolution, the 2003 street protests that swept him into office. A favorite of the Bush administration, the U.S.-educated lawyer has come under increased pressure since Georgia's defeat in a war with Russia in August over two breakaway territories.
Gdn: ...while a protest singer imprisons himself

BBC: rural violence mars Turkish elections
CSM: hijab debate ignites in Norway

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urban ennui
NYT mag: the collapse of Cleveland
Time: reconstructing Detroit
NYT: ideas for the Bronx, LA, New Orleans, and Buffalo

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NYT Freakonomics: what the 'avatars of the underground' have to say about the bailout
“See, by the time there’s a crisis, the Sleepy Heads are already gone. They’re the ones who keep the books, so they know where the money is, and they know when trouble starts. So they usually get out first. But at this point, in most of these companies, all you got left is the Killers. They’re the ones who like hanging around, who ain’t got no home life, who just love the blood, and the guts, who love the pain!”

“Again,” I interrupted, “what does that have to do [with the financial crisis?]”

“Never lose your killers. Never let them go, because you’ll need them when things gets better. You can always get the Sleepy Heads back. They’re hiding under a rock anyway. But the Killers! Those folks are hard to find, so you got to give up the money. Pay the ones at the top, the one’s who like to smell blood. Let the Sleepy Heads go, but keep the Killers.”

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public intellectuals
NYT: John Hope Franklin

NYT magazine: on science and consensus
Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus...Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

New Scientist: truth and revelation: physicist wins religious prize (via Chris Blattman)
Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled. D'Espagnat subscribes to the third view. Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.

bad liars [caught on satellite]

WP: bombing reflects, deepens sectarian rift in northwest Pakistan, kills at least 30
The suicide bombing, which turned a solemn [Shia] mourning procession into a scene of strewed limbs and bloody clothing, provoked a frenzy of retaliatory violence against local Sunnis, police and witnesses said. Dozens of Sunni-owned houses and shops were burned, and security forces imposed a curfew on the area.
BBC: how the cleavage has changed over time
In Pakistan, the focus of the sectarian violence has arguably changed. In the 1980s and 1990s the problem was acute in Karachi and in the province of Sindh.

But tough policing - especially in Karachi - over this period meant that many militants were either killed or arrested.
Slate: more skepticism on the Swat Valley deal
...as respected journalist Ismail Khan notes in an article in today's Dawn, the country's most widely read English-language newspaper, the deal calls for Pakistan's secular criminal code to be observed, unless a council of sharia judges rules that some law or another is un-Islamic. The deal also calls for a halt in the fighting between the Pakistani army and the Taliban militias.

The key facts here are that, at the moment, there is no working judicial system of any sort in the Swat Valley—and that the Taliban militias have routed the numerically superior Pakistani army in their armed confrontations. So the deal imposes national secular authority even more than it legitimizes sharia justice. And given the balance of power, it's unclear why the Taliban would go along with that.

The deal was made not with "the Taliban" as a whole—the term implies a more cohesive entity than actually exists—but rather, specifically, with Maulana Sufi Muhammad, whom the Pakistanis arrested two years ago for leading jihadist raids across the border into Afghanistan. He was released from prison after agreeing to give up the struggle and to work for peace.

The hope is that he would strike a deal with his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, who is the deputy to a much more militant Taliban leader—or that, if he can't come to terms with his son-in-law, a wedge might be driven between various Islamist factions, peeling Sufi Muhammad and his followers away from the radicals and thus strengthening the hand of the central government.

This is why the deal is not only ill-fated but potentially disastrous: It reveals the severe weakness of the Pakistani state. The politicians pursued the deal only because the state cannot control its own territory. Unless Sufi Muhammad can convince his son-in-law to accept peace and obeisance to secular authority in exchange for a parcel of land where Islamic law carries some weight, the deal is more likely to convince the militant Taliban simply to press on for more favors still.
AP: ...but it appears that the Taliban have agreed to a cease-fire
Slate: technology and warfare: Google Earth pinpoints a US drone base in Pakistan
The picture, together with a second picture of the same site taken sometime this year and posted on Google Earth, destroys much of the political advantage of the U.S. drones. The drones aren't supposed to be a U.S. military presence in Pakistan. They're unmanned, and until now, they were thought to be flown exclusively from the Afghan border. The satellite images, backed by expert analysis, prove otherwise. The drones are on Pakistani soil. And if the drones are there, so are the U.S. personnel who physically manage them.

BBC: militias in Paktia, Afghanistan
The insurgency has raged and grown in this part of the country. Paktia borders Pakistan and is a route for insurgents coming into the country. The Taleban and al-Qaeda have a growing presence here and clashes between them and government and foreign forces have escalated.

But Ahmadabad district is an exception, thanks to the gunmen of the Arbakai, a tribal militia that has protected this area and its people for centuries, making it something of a safe-haven from the violence all around.

They are a volunteer force of men and boys, armed with old rifles and true grit. They are part of a traditional code of conduct and honour called Pashtunwali.

The tribal elder is Haji Gulam Khan. He tells us that the area is stable and that there is a good relationship between the people and the government.

He is in no doubt who to thank: "If it weren't for the Arbakai, this area would've been controlled by the Taleban or mafia groups."
AJE: US acknowledges 13 civilians killed in missile strike in Herat earlier this week

AP: US Army medic sentenced to life in prison for executing four detainees in Iraq
NYT: another US soldier found not guilty in killings of 2 New York National Guard soldiers
AJE: Abu Ghraib re-opens as "Baghdad Central Prison"
NPR: how many have died in Iraq since the start of the war?
"By orders of minister's office, we cannot talk about the real numbers of deaths," says a man who works at the Baghdad central morgue statistics office, where all the deaths that take place in Baghdad get recorded. He doesn't want his name used because he's been told by his superiors at the Ministry of Health that he is not allowed to talk to the media. "That's been the case since 2004. When press comes to the morgue, they are taken to our boss's office and we have never been allowed to meet with them."

The reason, he says, is because the number of deaths the morgue registers never corresponds with numbers from the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Interior.

"They do it on purpose," he says. "I would go home and look at the news. The ministry would say 10 people got killed all over Iraq, while I had received in that day more than 50 dead bodies just in Baghdad. It's always been like that — they would say one thingm but the reality was much worse."...

Dougherty [of Iraq Body Count] estimates at least 20,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during U.S. military operations.

The military and human rights groups often disagree over whether victims were civilians or insurgents.

Econ: Turks and (Iraqi) Kurds getting along better for the moment
Turkish officials, who used to dismiss Iraq’s Kurdish leaders as “tribal upstarts”, privately concede that part of the solution is to co-opt Iraq’s Kurds. In the past year Turkish intelligence men and diplomats have held secret talks with Nechirvan Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish region’s prime minister, to get the PKK to call off its fight, even as Turkish aircraft continue, with America’s blessing, to pound rebel strongholds near Iraq’s mountain border with Iran. One idea is that rebels untainted by violence might be coaxed home and their leaders offered cash inducements to move to any European country that would take them in.

NYT: Netanyahu invites Kadima and Labor parties to form moderate coalition
Mr. Netanyahu and Ms. Livni have agreed to meet Sunday, but the negotiations are likely to be tough. Ms. Livni, his chief rival for the premiership, has said she would rather go into opposition than serve as a fig leaf for a coalition of the right.

Mr. Barak, whose Labor Party fared badly in the elections, has already said he would head into the opposition.

To many here, it is increasingly likely that Mr. Netanyahu’s government will consist exclusively of parties from the right, which oppose a Palestinian state and favor expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, making it much harder for him to exercise his pragmatic penchant.

NPR: Saudi religious police facing more constraints

NPR: Lebanon no longer requiring sect identification

WP: Calderón will not relent, despite demonstrations against militarization
Calderón, who has sent more than 45,000 troops to fight the cartels, said the military would remain on patrol until the government had control of the most violent parts of the country and civil authorities were fully able "to confront this evil."

Only then, he said, "will the army have completed its mission." Turf battles involving the drug traffickers, who are fighting the army, police and one another in order to secure billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States, took the lives of more than 6,000 people in Mexico last year. The pace of killing has continued in 2009, with more than 650 dead, most in the violent border cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. In the past few days, a running gun battle between soldiers and gunmen through the streets of the northern city of Reynosa, captured live on television, left five people dead.
LAT: Ciudad Juárez police chief opts out after threats, though
BBC: photos of the violence indicate why
SDT: lessons from Colombia's drug war (via Adam Isacson)
The drug-trafficking operation in Mexico is different than in Colombia. While there is some marijuana and opium grown in Mexico, as well as methamphetamine manufacturing, the cartels aren't fighting over production. They are battling to control the smuggling routes used to move drugs, including Colombian cocaine, into the United States...

The strategy of Mexico's leaders is to break the cartels into smaller pieces, as happened in Colombia, where local police in urban areas were better able to get a handle on street crime once the larger criminal organizations receded.

The assumption is that smaller drug operations would be better handled by state and local police, Shirk said. But it is not clear such a strategy will succeed, and institutional corruption presents a challenge...

But even if the Mexican government is successful in breaking up the big cartels, neither Mexican soldiers nor U.S. equipment and training are going to stop the demand for drugs, [former DEA regional director] Holifield said.

“The biggest lesson is for the U.S.,” he said. “And that is to stop using (drugs). Until that happens, nothing the U.S. does can prevent these people from doing this. There is absolutely no way to stop it.”
NPR: on top of that drug demand issue, US also arming Mexico, informally
The weapons and ammunition are being bought on the black market and at gun shows, but mostly from licensed dealers. Arizona and Texas make it especially easy to buy guns retail. Basically, any adult with a valid ID and no criminal record can buy as many as he or she wants...Authorities call the weapons smuggling trafico de la hormiga, or "ant traffic," because it's done in small steady shipments to avoid detection. And after all, the main mission of the customs service is not examining vehicles leaving the U.S....nearly 8,000 guns sold in America last year were traced to Mexico. That was more than double the number the year before.

Econ: Ortega as Somoza

WP: LTTE bomb Colombo, kill three and injure 48
The attack shows the apparent air power of the Tamil Tigers far from the northern war zone, where they are said to be boxed into a 34-square-mile sliver of the jungle, with government troops closing in.

AJE: riots claim lives in Bauchi, Nigeria
Several churches and mosques were set on fire in the violence on Saturday and at least 28 people were injured, but it was not immediately clear what triggered the unrest.

NYT: Latvian PM steps down, gov't dissolves over recession
BBC: 100,000 march in Dublin
Many are angry at plans to impose a pension levy on public sector workers.

Trade union organisers of the march said workers did not cause the economic crisis but were having to pay for it.

BBC: Bosnian Serbs ordered to pay for mosques destroyed between 1992-1995

Ind: German MP appointed to head new museum of expellees from Eastern Europe after WWII; Poland takes umbrage
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Poland’s special envoy on German affairs and a former foreign minister, summed up Warsaw’s objections to Mrs Steinbach’s planned appointment. “It is as if the Vatican had decided to give the Holocaust-denying Bishop [Richard] Williamson the task of overseeing its relations with Israel,” he said.

NYT: Guantánamo complies with Geneva Conventions, according to Pentagon report
Slate: (other) prison growth in the US
The United States has a prison population like nowhere else. With one out of every 100 adults behind bars, our incarceration rate is the highest in the entire world. Our inmates—1.5 million in prison, with another 800,000 in jail—comprise one-third of the world's total. This is a surprisingly recent development. After barely budging for 50 years, our incarceration rate increased sevenfold (to 738 per 100,000 people) between 1978 and 2008.

BBC: Italy implements new rape law
The decree sets a mandatory life sentence for the rape of minors or attacks where the victim is killed.

It also establishes rules for citizen street patrols to be conducted by unarmed and unpaid volunteers.

The number of sexual assaults fell last year, but three high-profile rapes last weekend sparked national outrage.

Many recent rapes have been blamed on foreigners, especially Romanians. Violent attacks on immigrants have since been reported.

Police say a mob of around 20 masked men beat up four Romanians outside a kebab restaurant in Rome on Sunday in an apparent vigilante attack.

The government has pointed to official statistics saying immigrants committed as many as 35% of crimes in Italy in 2007.

But analysts and opposition parties say many of these are related to breaches in immigration rules, and that foreigners have often been unfairly targeted amid a xenophobic backlash from right-wing politicians and the media.

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Slate: Q: does decapitation have a special meaning in Islam?
A: Yes, but it's important in other cultures, too. [eg, Mexican drug gang violence above.]

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Salon: Murakami accepts award in Israel
In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies...

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories -- stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

NYT: resisting North Korean propaganda by parody

war crimes [on the hook]

Al Jazeera (English): Israel destroys hospital, UN outpost in Gaza
"Officials said that a building of the UN relief agency in Gaza had been hit by Israeli shells and set ablaze.

"They are phosphorus fires so they are extremely difficult to put out because if you put water on it, it will just generate toxic fumes and do nothing to stop the burning," John Ging, the director of UN relief operations, said...

About 500 people were inside the hospital in Tal al-Hawa when it came under attack. Many had taken shelter in the hope of escaping the onslaught."
AJE: death toll has reached 1,000; civilians have nowhere to go
"More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip as Israeli ground forces pushed deeper into densely-populated urban areas.

Thousands of civilians fled their homes on Thursday as tank shells and missiles exploded causing black smoke to rise above the neighbourhoods of Tal al-Hawa, Zeitoun and Shujaiyeh in Gaza City.

Battles raged in the northern town of Jabaliya and Israeli ground troops backed by dozens of tanks pushed at least 1km into the southern town of Khan Yunis."

WP: civilians account for estimated half of deaths; almost any target is 'legitimate' for Israel, while Hamas fighters hide among civilians
"The Israeli military blames Hamas for using Gazans as human shields and for retreating to densely populated areas to fight the war. But Palestinians and human rights groups say that Israel has been reckless and that in pursuing Hamas, it has employed tactics that unnecessarily drive up the civilian toll...

Later in the week, Harb stood in the street of the southern town of Rafah with his wife and six children and looked on as his neighborhood was systematically turned to rubble. His family had been warned to leave, he said, but in Gaza there is nowhere to go. The street seemed the safest place to ride out the airstrikes that landed like an earthquake every five minutes, each one sending a thick black plume into the sky from the spot of ground where a house once stood.

Some of the houses, Harb acknowledged, had concealed tunnels used by Hamas to smuggle weapons from Egypt. But most, he said, did not...

The Geneva Conventions, an international agreement on a code of war, say civilians must be permitted to escape from fighting, but "the Gazans are not allowed to flee," Myers said. "That's a big problem." None of the border crossings is open. And no part of the strip -- which is about 25 miles long and five miles wide -- has been insulated from the fighting."
NYT: Israeli rights groups issue call for war crimes investigation
"Nine Israeli human rights groups called on Wednesday for an investigation into whether Israeli officials had committed war crimes in Gaza since tens of thousands of civilians there have nowhere to flee, the health system has collapsed, many are without electricity and running water, and some are beyond the reach of rescue teams."

NYT: the effect of the bombing on Palestinian cleavages
"The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas’s support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, already considered corrupt and distant from average Palestinians."
WP: polarization seems to favor Hamas
"Men who say they have never fought before or were not Hamas loyalists now vow to join the struggle against Israel when they return to Gaza. They include policemen and other professionals who form part of the backbone of Gazan society."
CSM: Fatah's (in)action drawing scrutiny
"Fatah is keeping a lid on protests, not letting West Bankers draw it into Israel's war on Hamas. Senior voices in the secular party that runs the Palestinian Authority (PA) see restraint as key to its quest for statehood. Getting entangled in Gaza, they say, would only embolden Hamas.

Others say Fatah is making a fatal mistake. Its inaction will irreparably damage its standing in the eyes of Palestinians and erode support for the group that both America and Israel view as peace partners."

CSM: violence down, but some Iraqis can't return home
"...after the US-led invasion, his Sunni neighbor began threatening Mr. Mohamed, a Shiite. When the neighbor killed four of Mohamed's cousins, Mohamed and his family fled, selling his home of more than 20 years for $126,000 – just half its market rate.

Now, with relative calm returning, Mohamed is trying to reconstruct his former life. But while he's happy about the greater security, he's confronting a troubling reality that underscores that recovery will take more than an end to fighting. Like many Iraqis, he can't afford his old neighborhood."
NYT blog: a peek at the (very confusing) ballots for next month's election

Slate: military lawyer says suspect was tortured; someone will have to stand trial
"What Crawford has done here is astounding. She has repudiated the formalistic (and perennially shifting) definitions of torture as whatever-it-is-we-don't-do. She has admitted that there is a medical and legal definition for torture and also that we have crossed the line into it.

The consequences go further. Crawford also told Woodward that the charges against al-Qahtani were dropped because he was tortured. This has devastating consequences for the Bush administration's entire rationale for the new techniques of interrogation: that they would make the United States safer by producing intelligence and keeping dangerous individuals off the streets. We now know they do neither. The torture produced no useful information from al-Qahtani, and the cruelty heaped upon him will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to justify his long-term incarceration.

There is a third major consequence to the Crawford interview: Her principle objection to detainee abuse is not ephemeral or spiritual, but a damning indictment of the impact it will have on American troops and the prospects for America's authority abroad: "If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it."...

Under the 1984 Torture Convention, its 146 state parties (including the United States) are under an obligation to "ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law." These states must take any person alleged to have committed torture (or been complicit or participated in an act of torture) who is present in their territories into custody. The convention allows no exceptions, as Gen. Pinochet discovered in 1998. The state party to the Torture Convention must then submit the case to its competent authorities for prosecution or extradition for prosecution in another country.

The former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces and general counsel for the Department of the Army has spoken. Her clear words have been picked up around the world. And that takes the prospects of accountability and criminal investigation onto another level. For the Obama administration, the door to the do-nothing option is now closed. That is why today may come to be seen as the turning point."
WP: 'trials' against Guantanamo inmates also undermined by basic incompetence
"[Former military prosecutor] Vandeveld said in a phone interview that the 'complete lack of organization' has affected nearly all cases at Guantanamo Bay. The evidence is often so disorganized, he said, 'it was like a stash of documents found in a village in a raid and just put on a plane to the U.S. Not even rudimentary organization by date or name.' ...

Military defense lawyers also said yesterday that the Office of Military Commissions may have accidentally withdrawn the charges against all defendants at Guantanamo Bay facing trial, including Jawad and even Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Defense lawyers said the Office of Military Commissions, while creating new jury panels, took the additional step of re-referring all charges, which, they said, would return all cases to square one and require new arraignments."
NYT blog: closing Gitmo is gonna be tough

CSM: discovered arms cache raises suspicion of secular coup plot in Turkey

NYT: riots in Latvia over economy
"In the wake of the demonstrations, President Valdis Zatlers threatened Wednesday to call for a referendum that would allow voters to dissolve Parliament, saying trust in the government, including in its ability to deal with growing economic problems, had “collapsed catastrophically.”

For years, Latvia boasted of double-digit economic growth rates, but it has been shaken by the global economic downturn. Its central bank has spent a fifth of its reserves to guard against a steep devaluation of its currency, the lat, and experts expect a 5 percent contraction of the country’s gross domestic product in 2009. Salaries are expected to fall substantially, and unemployment is expected to rise"

AP: fighting in Mogadishu: al-Shabab attacks presidential palace, says African Union forces next
"There are currently about 2,400 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers in Mogadishu whose mandate is restricted to guarding key government installations such as the port and airport. To date, they have rarely been the target of insurgent attacks...

The Ethiopian army, one of Africa's largest, was viewed by many Somalis as abusive and heavy-handed. But few expect the Somali government now can ensure security. It controls only pockets of the capital, Mogadishu, and Baidoa, where parliament sits -- and has tried to rule without a president for weeks.

Thousands of civilians have been killed in fighting in the past year, particularly in the capital, and hundreds of thousands have fled the violence...

Rival Islamic groups control other areas of southern and central Somalia, with the al-Shabab making the most dramatic gains in recent months. Al-Shabab, which denies it is a terrorist organization, says its goal is to establish an Islamic state in Somalia.

Also today, officials said gunmen had abducted an Egyptian teacher in Somalia's relatively peaceful northwestern breakaway republic where such kidnappings are rare...it is rare for abductions to take place in northwestern region of Somaliland, which declared its independence from Somalia in 1991 and has its own regularly elected government, parliament and judiciary. The breakaway republic has avoided much of the chaos and anarchy that exists in the rest of the country."

BBC: UN says Eritrea must pull out of Djibouti

AJE: Guinea names new gov't
"The 29-member government would comprise both civilians and military, coup leaders said in a statement aired on national radio and television on Thursday.

Members of the military were appointed to defence, security, justice and finance ministries.

No representatives of political parties, however, have been included in the new government."

AJE: reemergence of Shining Path, self defense forces in Peru

AP: Chávez wins constitutional amendment vote allowing him to run for office indefinitely; referendum to be held

Gdn: Rio police say City of God no longer ruled by gangs
"Until the success of Meirelles' film, which was nominated for four Oscars, City of God, or Cidade de Deus, was a little-known slum on the western outskirts of Rio. Based on a book of the same name published in 1997, the film documented the bloody struggle between cocaine traffickers that ravaged the community during the 1970s and 1980s, with many of the actors recruited from Rio's favelas.

Attempts to evict the real traffickers from the City of God, which is home to about 50,000 people, are part of a police initiative that authorities hope will help them regain control of the slums and serve as a blueprint for fighting urban crime across South America. "The state is going back to occupy territories from which it was absent, both in terms of public security and in terms of social investment," Rio's governor, Sérgio Cabral, said.

In their battle against the city's three drug factions, police have traditionally launched "hit and run" attacks on the favelas. The police kill more than 1,000 people each year, according to official figures, many during such raids.

Now the authorities plan to permanently station hundreds of military policemen inside three favelas as part of a pilot project to combat organised crime.

The police, who will spend 24 hours a day in the communities, aim to build trust, gather intelligence and help rebuild the slums. Millions of dollars will be invested in infrastructure and housing. City of God, where about 700 troops will be deployed, is the second favela in which the new "hearts and minds" policy will be tried...

The community policing scheme has not pleased everyone. Many predict the authorities will soon withdraw from places such as City of God and Dona Marta, allowing the traffickers to return. The government has also admitted its "policy of confrontation" will not end as a result of the community policing project.

Others view the initiative as little more than a marketing stunt by a media-savvy government, arguing that the City of God was only chosen because of its notoriety."

CSM: targeting gangs' assets in LA
"The city of Los Angeles, plagued by 23,000 violent gang crimes since 2004, including 784 murders and 12,000 felony assaults, announced Tuesday that it had won its first civil judgment, for $5 million, against a criminal gang that had dominated the heroin trade downtown for decades.

The verdict could bode well for another first-of-its-kind lawsuit the city filed last month that goes after all assets of gang leaders, not just those associated with their criminal activity. Both suits seek to plow the money back into improving the neighborhoods affected by the gangs through a fund..

The tactic of trying to cripple organizations by taking away their assets has been commonly used against the mafia. More recently, it has been used against white supremacist organizations. In 2000, the Southern Poverty Law Center won a $6.3 million verdict against the Aryan Nations that forced the organization to give up its 20-acre compound in Idaho...

The City Attorney's office says it is moving against the 18th Street gang on behalf of residents who can't file suit themselves because they can't afford the expenses and they fear retaliation. Gangs control certain neighborhoods by exacting so-called "street taxes" on home and business owners as well as street vendors.

The suit seeks compensation for property damage, emotional distress, personal injury, and intangibles such as residents not being able to use public parks because of gang activity...

The city currently has 463 known gangs with 26,000 members, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

But the use of injunctions has been controversial, Mr. Parrish says, because of "perceived selective enforcement and various civil rights issues."

The new law, too, "may raise significant civil rights issues depending on how it's used," Mr Parrish adds.

Unlike with organized groups, street gang members may be hard to identify."

++
more on the transition:
The Onion: luring Cheney out of his lair
NYT blog: while Bush declares national emergency

pay up [handsome boy ransoming school]

Salon: kidnapping on the rise in Afghanistan

"Kidnappers come either from the ranks of the Taliban, who target their ideological enemies, or from criminal gangs looking for victims with deep pockets or, sometimes, children to sell into prostitution or use as labor. The lines blur when criminal gangs sell their hostages to the Taliban, Kabul's police chief said in late November. The Taliban, who are closing in on the capital, already control much of southern Afghanistan, creating a sort of free zone to hold kidnap victims with impunity."

BBC: US employing COIN strategy, but it's slow going

"In Khost province, the US military insists it has hit upon a counter-insurgency model that is working. It has fanned out across the province, creating what it calls district centres, in effect, small military bases.

The idea is that you create a mesh - making it difficult for the insurgents to travel from area to area.

Rolling patrols are meant to reassure the local population that there is security and a permanent US presence.

Small reconstruction teams build projects that aid rural communities such as schools and health clinics. New roads are also being built.

These efforts are intended to pull the locals away from the insurgency and into the embrace of the Afghan government with a helping hand from Uncle Sam.

While it sounds entirely workable on paper, on ground, the difficulties of the process are laid bare.

Frequently patrols stop at local markets where an American officer wanders the streets speaking to shopkeepers who look decidedly uncomfortable with all the attention.

The officers' roll call of questions often has a just-out-of-Westpoint feel to it.

How are you? How's business? Have there being any attacks? Followed by the request: if you have any information please report it to the district centre. But not many Afghans ever do.

Many of them are fearful of insurgent reprisals if they are seen to be openly associating or passing on information to the US forces."
BBC: poppy farmers seeking alternative development

NYT: Hamas factions signaling opposite takes on whether truce will end Friday

LAT: recently freed Christian warlord in Lebanon apologizes for 'past mistakes'

"The war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, set the standard for a new kind of lawless, media-saturated civil conflict now common in desperate corners of the world. It left an estimated 100,000 people dead and nearly a million displaced. Palestinians, Shiites, Sunnis, Druze, Christians and their foreign backers were pitted against one another, and sometimes against their own kind.

Geagea's story illustrates the complexity of coming to terms with that dark past.

He was a year away from completing medical school at the American University of Beirut when he was sucked into the conflict's vortex as a member of a right-wing Christian militia eventually called the Lebanese Forces. He gained a reputation for no-holds-barred killing, including violence against rival Christians.

In 1990, Syrian troops occupied the country, ending a conflict already petering out. There would be no truth commission to examine who did what during the conflict.

All parties agreed to sweep the war's dirty business under the rug. The government offered amnesty to all fighters except those accused of killing foreign diplomats, high-ranking officials and religious leaders.

Geagea immediately alienated other Christian leaders and Syrian-backed authorities, who charged him with bombing a church and assassinating several officials during the war. After a trial that independent observers said was seriously flawed, he was thrown into prison in 1994, in the third basement level, with "no fresh air, no sun, no winter, no summer . . . nothing," he said."

BBC: LRA bases attacked in Congo; calls off peace process

Econ: the ICC and/or justice in Sudan, plus post-civil war trials in Lebanon, Cambodia, Uganda, and CAR 

"...Sudan’s most prominent opposition politician, Sadiq al-Mahdi, thinks he has an answer: what he calls a “third way” between hauling Mr Bashir to The Hague and doing nothing about crimes in Darfur. He suggests setting up an independent “hybrid” court for Darfur, which would have both Sudanese judges and international ones and sit in Sudan."

BBC: meanwhile, ongoing clashes between ethnic groups in Darfur 
"Unamid says 150 people died as hundreds of members of the Fallata and Salamat ethnic groups attacked the Habaniya in South Darfur.

About 100 more died in clashes between two groups from the Gimir group.

These clashes do not appear to be directly linked to the Darfur conflict between Arabs and black Africans.

But UN officials say ethnic relations have not been helped by the Darfur conflict, which started in 2003 when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the western region.

This has seen an increased flow of weapons to the region."
BBC: troops withdraw from Abyei after fighting with police

Econ: getting by in Sierra Leone

"Demobilisation has gone fairly well. Sierra Leone is a less violent place than it has been for a long time; by and large, the rule of law prevails. A special court set up to try the okadas’ former commanders, directly responsible for ordering much of the mayhem, is winding down; some are going to jail. Moreover, the country has had two peaceful elections in a region not famed for democracy. Yet in many ways, despite the relative peace, Sierra Leone’s problems remain as intractable as ever, leaving those responsible for keeping the country on life-support wondering what to do next...

Those who are trying to strengthen the country’s institutions and economy know they are in a race against time. The region’s warlords are being replaced by drug lords, many from Colombia. Circling like vultures around weak states, they are starting to use Sierra Leone as a base to ship drugs on to Europe and beyond, with all the corruption and violence that will come with it. A country like Guinea-Bissau, just up the coast, has already fallen prey; it is now almost a 'narco-state.'"

UN dispatch: counter-piracy (via Chris Blattman)

"There's a pirates nest, I guess; where are they? If you can separate them from their ports or wherever they hide out, then obviously you get them before they even come out. The difficulty you have there is what you have with most insurgent-type activities: sorting out the good from the bad."
NYT: undaunted at sea
"More than a dozen warships from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States have joined the hunt.

And yet, in the past two months alone, the pirates have attacked more than 30 vessels, eluding the naval patrols, going farther out to sea and seeking bigger, more lucrative game, including an American cruise ship and a 1,000-foot Saudi oil tanker.

The pirates are recalibrating their tactics, attacking ships in beelike swarms of 20 to 30 skiffs, and threatening to choke off one of the busiest shipping arteries in the world, at the mouth of the Red Sea."

WP: Somali PM fired by president
"Hours later, as the government veered toward collapse, Islamist insurgents held a brazen news conference in the capital and vowed never to negotiate with the leadership."

BBC: ...who is then sanctioned by Kenya

BBC: Tuaregs kidnap UN envoy to Niger
"The Tuaregs have traditionally been a nomadic people roaming across the Sahara Desert but some took up arms, saying the Niger government is not doing enough to improve their lives.

The FFR [Front des Forces de Redressement] broke away from the better known Tuareg MNJ rebels who are fighting for greater autonomy and a larger share of northern Niger's vast mineral wealth.

The MNJ has had frequent clashes with the country's army and has also kidnapped foreigners working in the uranium mines."

LAT: 22 activists disappeared in Zimbabwe over last 6 weeks

LAT: it's a tactic that allows Mugabe hangs on

"To help understand his staying power, one need only rewind to the 1980s and the massacres of his early years in power, when he was a conquering hero who had thrown out the white minority regime of Ian Smith.

The name of the murderous operation, Gukurahundi, was as lyrical as a haiku: the wind that blows away the chaff before the spring rains.

Mugabe's political opponents were the chaff. The spring rains were supposed to signify the golden era of a one-party state (or rather, a one-man state).

Western leaders and news media ignored the massacres of the "dissidents" by the army's crack Five Brigade in Matabeleland province in southern Zimbabwe. Some estimates put the dead at 20,000.

Mugabe drew his most important lesson from the West's blase reaction, analysts believe: that there's a level of "acceptable" violence that will escape international condemnation, but still destroy any threat to his power."

WP: dissident ANC members establish new political party in South Africa

"The new party, the Congress of the People, has been accused of offering little more than criticism and is not expected to topple the ANC in general elections next year. But the ANC is clearly worried about an exodus of members to the new party, and whether that might signal there is enough discontent among voters to seriously cut into its large parliamentary majority."  

NYT: signs of renewed conflict along ethnic lines in Bosnia

"The power-sharing agreement between former foes has always been tense. Now, however, the uneasy peace has been complicated by Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February, which many here worry could prompt the Serbian Republic to follow suit, tipping the region into a conflict that could fast turn deadly...

But the decentralized political system that Dayton engineered has entrenched rather than healed ethnic divisions. Even in communities where Serbs, Muslims and Croats live side by side, some opt to send their children to the same schools, but in different shifts."

AP: mass arrests at protest outside Kremlin

"The Other Russia movement organized the protest, in defiance of a ban, to draw attention to Russia's economic troubles and to protest Kremlin plans to extend the presidential term from four years to six. Critics say the constitutional change is part of a retreat from democracy and is aimed at strengthening the grip of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his allies.

News broadcasts on Russia's main television networks made no mention of the Moscow crackdown or of protests in St. Petersburg and Vladivostok.

Kasparov and other prominent liberals have just launched a new anti-Kremlin movement called Solidarity in a bid to unite Russia's liberal forces and encourage a popular revolution similar to those in Ukraine and Georgia."
BBC: Abkhazia wants in

BBC: Turkmenistan holds first parliamentary elections since adoption of new constitution

Ind: Turkish intellectuals issue apology to Armenians
"Turkey accepts that many Armenians were killed during the collapse of the Ottoman empire, but insists they were victims of civil strife and that Muslim Turks also died. Most Western historians agree that the ethnic cleansing that killed roughly 700,000 Armenians amounted to genocide...

The public apology coincides with a diplomatic rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia, whose shared border has been closed since the Nagorny-Karabakh war in 1993 and who have been locked in almost 100 years of hostility. President Abdullah Gul made history in September when he became the first Turkish leader to visit Armenia, and the two countries have been talking about restoring full diplomatic relations."

Obs: comparing ETA and Islamic terrorist groups 
"Personal networks are hugely important in recruiting. Islamic militant cells, especially in Europe, have often used outdoor adventure activities to bring otherwise disparate individuals together. As one British security source said last year: 'That moment when someone takes someone else's rucksack because they are exhausted is worth a decade of indoctrination in terms of preparing a group for violent action.'"

Ind: Italy arrests 100 alleged mafia associates  

BBC: Colombian NGO calls gov't data 'unbelievable'
"About 114,000 members of the warring factions were said to have been dealt with by the army in the last six years.

However, other estimates say there are only 30,000 in the warring factions.

Even allowing for recruiting to replenish depleted ranks, the government figures suggest that eight members of the warring factions are killed every single day in Colombia, something not substantiated by any other sources." 

BBC: museum dedicated to Pinochet opens in Santiago

WP: new leader for Thailand - 3rd in four months

WP: Secret Service slow to respond to shoe

BBC: journalist beaten, still in custody; supporters rally for 2nd day

++

wronging rights: charity porn / pornographic charity (via Chris Blattman)

alfa beto [change at an ass's pace]

Gdn: García Lorca's grave to be exhumed; Franco's repression ruled as crime against humanity
"Death squads, military courts and other tribunals sent 114,000 people to their deaths during and after a three-year civil war in the 1930s that traumatised Spain for generations, according to the judge.

Several thousand lie in unmarked mass graves, despite the attempts of volunteers over the past eight years to disinter corpses and hand them over to relatives for reburial. The judge ordered the digging up of 19 such graves, including one on a hillside overlooking the southern city of Granada where Lorca is thought to have been shot in 1936. Lorca's family do not want the poet exhumed, but recently promised not to oppose a petition from relatives of two men shot and buried alongside him for the grave to be dug up...

The judge explicitly said that his investigations included repression carried out until 1952, 17 years after Franco had won the civil war and established his dictatorship. Many Spaniards still find the period hard to talk about and some fear Garzón's investigation will reopen old wounds...
An unwritten "pact of forgetting" underpinned Spain's rapid transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975.

Garzón's critics claim that all civil war and Francoist repression is covered by a 1977 amnesty law and by rules which mean that most crimes lapse after 20 years. Garzón declared yesterday, however, that where a victim's body had not been found a crime of kidnapping was still being committed and had not lapsed."

CSM: peace movement emerges in Afghanistan
"In a musty room near the edge of town, a group of bearded men sit on the floor and heatedly discuss strategy. The men are in the planning stages of an event that they hope will impact Afghan politics – a peace jirga, or assembly, that will agitate for the end of the war between the Taliban and Afghan government by asking the two sides to come to a settlement."

LAT: Sadr mobilizes for rejection of troop agreement
NYT: Shiite party coalition has backed away as well

LAT: sectarian mistrust persists in Baghdad
WP: people still resettling into polarized neighborhoods
"The sectarian violence that raged in Baghdad during the past three years has left the city polarized, with mixed neighborhoods undergoing what amounts to sectarian cleansing. The few Sunni families in Shiite neighborhoods were forced to move to areas where Sunnis predominate, while Shiites in largely Sunni neighborhoods took the opposite path.
Sectarianism has taken hold, despite the government's efforts to undo the process by allowing the displaced families to return to their homes. A psychological barrier has been established that looks set to remain in force, maybe for several generations, no matter what the authorities do."
BBC: around Mosul, Christians clustering

NYT: contemplating 'cockamamie' federalism in Iraq
BBC: and in Belgium
"Some commentators believe that the dynamic of Belgian politics lead the French and Dutch speakers away from each other.
Following devolution reforms over the past 45 years, all parties are now either Dutch-speaking or French-speaking."

WP: ethnicity in Abkhazia
"For the 50,000 or so Georgians living in Gali district, the recent war between Russia and Georgia has cast new uncertainty over an already shaky existence. In August, ethnic Abkhaz celebrated when Russia recognized their land, along with South Ossetia, as independent countries. Tougher frontier controls are one sign of the sometimes triumphant confidence the Abkhazian authorities now display."
BBC: Russian troops come under attack in Ingushetia

BBC: elections set for Kashmir, met with ambivalence

BBC: 86 people on trial for coup plot in Turkey

LAT: the impact of the violence on children in Baghdad
NYT: and in Mexico
"Nowhere is the trauma greater than along the border with the United States, where drug cartels are battling one another for a growing domestic market and the lucrative transit routes north. In Tijuana alone, a wave of gangland killings has left at least 99 people dead since Sept. 26, a death toll that rivals, if not exceeds, that in Baghdad, a war-torn city that is four times as large, over the same period.

Across Mexico, the carnage is impossible to hide, with severed heads and decapitated bodies turning up, sometimes nearly a dozen at a time. There have been more than 3,700 killings related to drugs and organized crime this year, up from about 2,700 last year, the Mexican attorney general’s office said early last week, with Chihuahua the most violent state and the killings continuing in the days since.

Exchanging gruesome stories is nothing new for schoolchildren, who have a way of overstating their brushes with danger. But the 12 tortured, tongueless bodies that were the talk of the playground recently were no exaggeration. In the early hours of Sept. 29, the bodies of 11 men and one woman, bound and partly dressed, were found in an abandoned lot opposite the school."

NYT: one-man traveling library in Colombia describes institutional development
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”

Gdn: police fight police in Sao Paolo
"The detectives, who form a branch of the state police, were marching towards Palácio de los Bandeirantes, the headquarters of the city government, to demand to speak to the governor when they were blocked by barriers and lines of colleagues from the military police, who were decked out with riot shields and helmets. Shoving and tugging turned to punches and swiftly escalated into a battle."

NYT: Mugabe refuses to give Tsvangirai a passport; opposition not represented at talks in Swaziland
BBC: former president of Botswana wins good governance prize: $5 million and $200k/year for life
BBC: US imposes sanctions on Mauritania
Gdn: churches fill in for state in sub-Saharan Africa

BBC: Sri Lankan military closing in on Tamil stronghold
BBC: a doctor's account of the situation in the targeted town

LAT: on again: China outlines land reform plan

++
The Onion: Obama racially profiled

the all-of-the-above approach [past is prologue]

NYT: British diplomat predicts NATO defeat and recommends dictatorship for Afghanistan
NYT: three fronts in recently ramped-up war against the Taliban in Pakistan
"In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.

Earlier this summer, the military became locked in an uphill fight against the militants in Swat, a more settled area of North-West Frontier Province that was once a middle-class ski resort. Today it is a maelstrom of killing...

At a third front, south of Peshawar, around the town of Dera Adam Khel, the army recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat tunnel, a road more than a mile long that carries NATO supplies from the port of Karachi to the American and coalition forces in Afghanistan."

NYT: rebuilding Samarra
LAT: US cops advising Iraqis
"Acree is one of about 800 civilian police officers working under a military contract with DynCorp International. Unlike the thousands of civilian contractors who have come to Iraq to supplement the military, Acree and his colleagues don't provide security services. They're here to impart their experience in urban police work to a young and inadequately trained and equipped force.

The consultants, whose pay starts at $134,000 a year, are assigned to U.S. military police units and travel in convoys of Humvees."

LAT: more clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces
"The fighting, which represented Turkey's largest loss of troops this year in a single incident, was considered likely to spur Turkish military strikes at rebel hideouts across the border in northern Iraq. Within hours of the rebel attack, the Turkish military was already aiming artillery strikes across the frontier...The fighting came days before Turkish lawmakers are to take up a measure that would give the army continued authority in the coming year to stage strikes across the border in Iraq."

NYT: who will pay the pirate ransom?
"As if things were not complicated enough, one of the few people with experience in prickly pirate problems has been jailed by the Kenyan government on suspicion that he is a pirate himself...Many seamen in Kenya insist that Mr. Mwangura is a good man, and that his only fault may have been being outspoken. He was the first maritime official to say that the hijacked ship was part of a secret arms deal between Kenya and southern Sudan. Kenyan officials have denied this, saying the heavy weaponry, including battle tanks, is for their use. But Western diplomats have privately said this is a lie."

LAT: ANC factions may prove too difficult to keep together
LAT: bloggers expose dissent within the opposition in Egypt
"This Internet revolution strikes at the Muslim Brotherhood's identity. The organization, founded in 1928, has renounced violence and supports democratic change in Egypt, but it is allied with the militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of the banned party's members are arrested each year; human rights groups say Mubarak is portraying the brotherhood followers as terrorists in an effort to silence his most potent detractors.

The brotherhood is praised for its community outreach services, but often viewed as out of touch, too rooted in religious dogma and its quest for an Islamic state. This ideology and constant pressure from government security forces have left the organization unable to create a credible coalition with leftists, nationalists and others to seriously challenge the ruling National Democratic Party.

In one of his posts, Naggar urged the brotherhood to "question ourselves and admit our mistakes. It is not shameful to revise our ideas and change our positions. It is not shameful to be brave enough and say that we were mistaken. What is really shameful is not to speak about our mistakes and claim that our ideas are sacred."

Such soul-searching represents an unprecedented public criticism of the bureaucracy and thinking in a major Islamic movement and has shattered the secrecy prized by the brotherhood, said Khalil Anani, an expert on the group. He suggested that the brotherhood's leadership is threatened by the brashness of its young reformers, yet it needs these Web-savvy critics to reach new generations of Muslims."

LAT: Mexicans march on 40th anniversary of student massacre
"The killings -- official reports put the toll at 25 to 43 but human rights groups have long maintained that the number was closer to 350 -- started when government forces opened fire on a massive but peaceful student demonstration just days before the Olympic Games were to open in Mexico City. It was a time of political effervescence in the country and across the globe, and the Mexican government of the day was eager to conceal what had happened.

The incident in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, in the Tlatelolco zone of Mexico City, remained shrouded in secrecy for decades."

LAT: reassessing how many died in Dresden
"While estimates for the numbers killed in the attacks on the city have fluctuated wildly between 35,000 and half a million over the past six decades, the historians commissioned by the city say the figure was considerably lower.

"The results of the commission conclude that 18,000 to 25,000 people died in Dresden from the air raids," an official said yesterday. The figure has long been a matter of dispute, heightened by the entry into the regional parliament of Saxony in Dresden of the NPD, a far-right political party, who called the February 1945 raids a "bombing holocaust", and claimed they had killed half a million.

The bombing, which took place just 12 weeks before the surrender of Nazi Germany, remains one of the most controversial actions of the second world war. While the operation was defended by the allies as a justified attack on a vital transport hub, most of those who died were civilians and refugees. Many were said to have perished in the resulting firestorm.

The former mayor of Dresden, Ingold Rossberg, commissioned the 11-strong team of historians four years ago to try to establish a clear figure. The results were presented at Dresden's annual Conference of Historians.

While the figure is well below previous estimates, members of the conference were keen to stress that the report did not belittle the immensity of the act. Thousands of lives were claimed in just four US and UK raids, lasting 63 minutes. Almost 4,000 tonnes of high explosives and incendiary devices were dropped."

LAT: the women of San Luca and behind the 'Ndrangheta mafia
"The women here have always had a complex role in the dynamics of an insular society that seems to exist at the margins of mainstream Italy. They are the mothers of the mobsters, their wives and, prosecutors say, often their accomplices. Fiercely protective of their brood, they can be as ruthless as their men. In the last year, it also appears that some San Luca women have served as a counterforce to the violence spiraling from internal feuds...San Luca is a town of interconnected clans, and there is no one who cannot claim a mobster among his or her relatives. In virtually every family, someone has been imprisoned or killed...

Calabria, the toe-of-the-boot region of Italy where San Luca is located, is the nation's poorest, on paper at least; the women complained that the only time they see an arm of the government it's in the form of police rounding up suspected gangsters...

San Luca sits on the edge of the densely forested Aspromonte mountain range, a favorite spot of the 'Ndrangheta for hiding its kidnapping victims in the 1970s and '80s. The organization has existed in some form for more than a century, evolving as a protection racket after World War II and then graduating to drug trafficking a decade or so ago. The 'Ndrangheta developed a multibillion-dollar enterprise in the last few years when it took over cocaine routes from Latin America to Europe, the fastest-growing market for illicit narcotics.

This region is like few others. The minute a stranger enters San Luca, a kind of silent alarm is sounded. Outsiders will be followed, their movements tracked. The people have their own body language, not to mention their own actual language: All speak a Calabrian dialect. An Italian speaker unfamiliar with the dialect will grasp only parts of a conversation.

San Luca gained international notoriety last year when six Italians were gunned down outside a pizzeria in Duisburg, Germany. Authorities called it a revenge hit in an escalating 'Ndrangheta feud. Three of the dead, including a 16-year-old boy, were from San Luca, and the others from nearby Calabrian towns.

The killings -- the most public evidence to date of the international reach of the 'Ndrangheta -- shocked Italians and unleashed fears of further violence. But more than a year later, no one else has been killed, and the credit, at least partially, goes to a woman...

At a tense funeral for the Duisburg dead in San Luca in August 2007, instead of demanding revenge, as many mothers and wives had, Strangio insisted on forgiveness...

Diego Trotta, a senior police investigator in Calabria who has led many operations against the 'Ndrangheta, thinks reprisals have only been delayed, not canceled. Any relative peace, he said, is thanks to scores of arrests in the last year...

The women of San Luca are for the most part locked into a certain fate. They are married off to other families within the clans to seal the impervious unity of the 'Ndrangheta. Only in the last decade or so did San Luca families allow their daughters to go to high school."

collective (in)action [fire up the bat signal]

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