disorderly conduct [analog societies]

NYRB: Roger Cohen: Iran's past and future

I was still using a notebook then. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had not yet pronounced foreign correspondents "evil" agents, thus granting heavenly sanction to their manhandling, expulsion, or arrest, which duly followed. Like everyone that morning I was perplexed. The Iranian government proceeds with cautious calculation. The revolution's survival has not been based on caprice. Had this government really invited hundreds of journalists to a freedom fest only to change its mind? I lingered when I could, ran when I had to, bumping into another railing young woman in tears. As we stood talking, a middle-aged man approached. "Don't cry, be brave and be ready," he told her.

I will call him Mohsen. He showed me his ID card from the Interior Ministry, where he said he'd worked for thirty years. He'd been locked out, he said, as had other employees, many of whom had been fired in recent weeks. We ducked into a café, where patriotic songs droned from a TV over images of soldiers and devout women in black chadors—had we just witnessed an election or the imposition of martial law?—and Mohsen talked about his brother, a martyr of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war, and how he himself had not fought in that war, nor endured a sibling's loss, to see "this injustice against the Revolution, conscience, and humanity."

Iran's dignity had been flouted, he said, the alleged election results emerging from the Interior Ministry plucked from the summer air. Why, I asked, had he admonished the young woman? "Because the best decisions are needed in the worst of conditions and crying is not the answer." Mohsen told me he'd also admonished the police: "I asked them: if Ahmadinejad won, why is such oppression needed?"

LRB: Slavoj Žižek:...and what it portends for the future of democracy? (hint: Ahmadenijad = Berlusconi = Kung Fu Panda

What all this means is that there is a genuinely liberatory potential in Islam: we don’t have to go back to the tenth century to find a ‘good’ Islam, we have it right here, in front of us. The future is uncertain – the popular explosion has been contained, and the regime will regain ground. However, it will no longer be seen the same way: it will be just one more corrupt authoritarian government. Ayatollah Khamenei will lose whatever remained of his status as a principled spiritual leader elevated above the fray and appear as what he is – one opportunistic politician among many. But whatever the outcome, it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’
Gdn: speaking of Berlusconi, buried treasure on sexploit tape
The Silvio Berlusconi tapes released this week have focused, not surprisingly, on lurid discussions of threesomes, condoms and staying power. But today Italy's prime minister was facing the bizarre possibility that the most explosive secret in the recordings was neither sexual nor financial, but archaeological...After noting that the lake is adorned by a fossilised whale, Berlusconi purportedly adds: "Underneath here, we found 30 Phoenician tombs from 300BC."

Baltimore Sun: a feud that spawned a gang
Back one day in 1966, at a house party in North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood, two teenage boys asked the same girl to dance.

One boy lived on Old York Road, the other on McCabe Avenue.

The two fought, first inside, then on the street, and a feud began that turned two neighborhood groups into gangs that terrorized a collection of blighted blocks for more than three decades.

Street wars between the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys would become legendary and deadly. Corner disputes turned into drug disputes, and battles with knives, fists and bats turned into fights with rifles, revolvers and automatic handguns.

Police now say the two gangs are all but gone, their victims memorialized in a park, their leaders eviscerated by the law and their own hands, and residents living in the old turf proclaim a new day...

The recent violence brought back memories to a man who grew up on Old York Road in the 1960s and was one of the boys who had asked the girl to dance. He's 56 now, an Air Force veteran and a college graduate with an accounting degree. He has two children and runs his own consulting business.

Back in the day, he was an original lieutenant for the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys. He asked that his name not be used because he still has relatives in Pen Lucy and they fear for their safety...

He chose the suburbs over the inner city, but about a decade ago he took his 10- and 12-year-old sons to a family gathering in the old neighborhood.

There, he saw some men he used to hang with, now in their 40s but still strung out on the corners, still trapped in the old game, one that had long passed them by with violence and heroin. One son looked up incredulously and said, "Dad, do you know these bad people?"

Stunned, the man looked down and answered: "They're not bad people. They're people who made bad choices."

As he thinks back at the violence that engulfed Pen Lucy, he's sorry about the fight over the girl - she rejected both suitors, but that didn't seem to matter to boys fighting for honor - and wonders if any of the members of the gangs even know why they started fighting.

He suspects that the pattern in Pen Lucy was and is repeated all over the city. A simple dispute escalates, turns to drugs and guns, then jail and death.

Slate: race, racism, the law, and policing in the US
I know Gates and find it very hard to imagine him engaged in "disorderly conduct." But many police officers demand more than orderly conduct; they demand submission and deference. Given the difficult and dangerous jobs they do, they usually deserve it. But it would be naive to imagine that there are no power-hungry bigots wearing the uniform. Anyone, particularly a black person, needs only to encounter one such rogue officer to find himself in serious jeopardy—at that point a few hours in custody is about the best one can hope for. Maybe Gates, who is well-acquainted with the history of American racism, raised his voice in anger or fear. Maybe he even unfairly berated Crowley. But there's no way that the slight, 58-year-old Harvard scholar, with his cane, posed a threat to public order that justified his arrest.

Rather than improve those neighborhoods and help the people who live in them join the prosperous mainstream, we as a society have given police the dirty job of quarantining them. Frankly, we should expect that a disproportionate number of power-hungry bigots would find such a mandate attractive. And an otherwise decent and fair-minded officer, faced with the day-to-day task of controlling society's most isolated, desperate, and angry population, might develop some ugly racial generalizations and carry them even to plush and leafy neighborhoods such as those surrounding Harvard Yard. Yet when the inevitable racial scandal surfaces we, like Capt. Renault in Casablanca, are shocked, shocked to find racial bias in law enforcement and quick to blame individual police officers, rather than ourselves.
HuffPo: Brandon Terry: 'disorderly conduct' and vicious cycles
But if we can step back and see how easily this happened to someone like Gates, arguably the most famous academic in the country, it should encourage us to be more vigilant about the toll that continuing racial disparities in law enforcement are taking on blacks, particularly the working class and poor, in America. The disproportionate policing of amorphous criminal statutes like "disorderly conduct" and "disobeying the lawful order of a police officer" have served to introduce thousands of otherwise law-abiding people into the criminal justice system. This puts undue stress and costs on police forces and communities, undermining the capacity to stem crime at its roots. When applied to juveniles in particular, this type of policing only stigmatizes and alienates youth, exposing them further to deleterious influences that ultimately encourage them to turn away from school and legitimate employment.

NYT: Chavez's nepotism in Barinas; kidnappings skyrocket
Barinas offers a unique microcosm of Mr. Chávez’s rule. Many poor residents still revere the president, born here into poverty in 1954. But polarization in Barinas is growing more severe, with others chafing at his newly prosperous parents and siblings, who have governed the state since the 1990s. While Barinas is a laboratory for projects like land reform, urgent problems like violent crime go unmentioned in the many billboards here extolling the Chávez family’s ascendancy...

The governor of Barinas, Adán Chávez, the president’s eldest brother and a former ambassador to Cuba, said this month that many of the kidnappings might have been a result of destabilization efforts by the opposition or so-called self-kidnappings: orchestrated abductions to reveal weaknesses among security forces, or to extort money from one’s own family...

“In the meantime, while the family wraps itself in the rhetoric of socialism, we are descending into a neo-capitalist chaos where all that matters is money,” said Alberto Santelíz, the publisher of La Prensa, a small opposition newspaper.

One reason for the rise in kidnappings is the injection of oil money into the local economy, with some families reaping quick fortunes because of ties to large infrastructure projects...

More than a decade into the Chávez family’s rule in Barinas, the state remains Venezuela’s poorest, with average monthly household income of about $800, according to the National Statistics Institute. Kidnapping, once feared only by the wealthy, has spread in Barinas to include the poor. In one case this year of a 3-year-old girl kidnapped in the slum of Mi Jardín, the abductor, when told that the only thing of value owned by the girl’s mother was a refrigerator, instructed her to sell it to pay the ransom.

Kidnapping specialists here said the abductors were drawn from two Colombian rebel groups, a small Venezuelan guerrilla faction called the Bolivarian Liberation Front, other criminal gangs and corrupt police officers. Just a fraction of the kidnappings result in prison sentences.

Gdn: Rio's gangs treat members in makeshit medical clinics, to avoid hospitals and arrest

SWJ: SV defers to this extensive round-up on Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, and Honduras

Wired: Twitter, Google, YouTube execs deploy to Iraq

Cohen is a former Condoleezza Rice protégé now thriving under Hillary Clinton. Between puffs of flavored tobacco smoke drawn from a hookah, he explains that using technology to spread democracy has become a cornerstone of what diplo-nerds are calling 21st-century statecraft. Cohen chose this group for several reasons: to expose them to the changed reality of Iraq so they could spread the word back home, to inspire Iraqis to pursue capitalism with the fervor of a tech startup, and to initiate a few projects that will actually help Iraq rebuild. David Nassar, a VP at Blue State Digital—which handled online aspects of Barack Obama's campaign—is along to offer ideas on elections. Raanan Bar-Cohen, vice president of Automattic (the company behind WordPress), is an advocate for blogging and the open source movement. Richard Robbins, AT&T's "director of social innovation" (a title he invented), represents the big mobile firms. And there are three people from Google (including YouTube's Walk) because—well, because it's Google.

Cohen's fear is that taking a bunch of Web 2.0 suits into a nation shattered by war will be seen as an absurd boondoggle, mocked in the press as war tourism for Twittering geeks. The way to counter this, he says, is to produce "deliverables." In Cohen's personal word cloud, that's a noun set in 36-point type. "The technology that's second nature to you is going to be really important to countries like this," he tells the group. "You have a chance to contribute to this country in this early form of nation-building."

On one hand, it's ludicrous. What can makers of social networks and video sites do to fix an economy that's as broken as Saddam's statue? On the other hand, Silicon Valley types like to think they know how to make the world better. This trip isn't about profits or investing opportunities—as new markets go, Iraq falls somewhere between Antarctica and Somalia in desirability. They're motivated by a mix of curiosity and Obama-inspired patriotism. (If George Bush were still president, some of them might not have come.) There is also the guilt factor. "It's the least we can do for fucking up their country," Heiferman says.

Just how fucked up is Iraq? The executives get an overview in a series of briefings from State Department and military officials in embassy meeting rooms. Not all bad. Just mostly bad. Violence is down, but danger still lurks outside the Green Zone. The economy is a wreck. Electricity comes and goes.

"This is an analog society," says an Army major charged with expanding the communications infrastructure.

LAT: American Al-Qaeda recruit turns informant
His account highlights Al Qaeda's penchant for bureaucracy: personnel files, applications and evaluations. Over four months, Vinas took three courses from an Arab instructor, alongside 10 to 20 students. The curriculum encompassed the use of firearms such as the AK-47 rifle; explosives theory and the assembly of bombs and suicide vests; and the use of rocket-type weapons.

NYRB: Hochschild on the historical continuity of rape and enslavement in the Congo

WP: Aung San Suu Kyi could face 5 more years of detention because American broke into her property
Suu Kyi was charged in May after a U.S. citizen from Falcon, Mo., eluded the tight security surrounding the villa where she was detained in Rangoon by swimming across a lake to the house...

They say that despite 13 years of house arrest -- imposed by the military junta that rules Burma after Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won an overwhelming electoral victory in 1990 -- she remains the government's most formidable opponent.

++
NPR: (one of) Escobar's legacies: a theme park and hippos

writers and despots [like recognizes like*]

BBC: Chávez ends 4-day-long television broadcast to celebrate 10th anniversary of Alo Presidente, has spat with Vargas Llosa
The decision to suspend Alo Presidente comes after a series of challenges and counter-challenges about holding a televised debate with the Peruvian writer - and arch-critic of President Chavez - Mario Vargas Llosa.

Mr Vargas Llosa is currently in Venezuela to attend an opposition-led seminar about democracy and authoritarianism in Latin America...

The Venezuelan leader has described his four-day TV extravaganza as a "soap opera", promising that there would be singing, debate and "a little bit of everything".
NYT: while everyone's watching the telenovela, Chávez grabs more control of military
Since February, Mr. Chávez has moved against a wide range of domestic critics, and his efforts in recent weeks to strengthen his grip on the armed forces have led to high-profile arrests and a wave of reassignments.

These are seen here as part of a larger effort by Mr. Chávez to cement loyalty in the military, where some officers are growing resentful at what they see as his micromanagement and politicizing of a proud and relatively independent institution...

In March, Mr. Chávez replaced the chiefs of the army, the air force and the Bolivarian Militia, a Cuban-inspired reserve force created to repel what Mr. Chávez repeatedly raises as the threat of an invasion by the United States.

BBC: writers' glimpses of Nigeria, on 10th anniversary of democracy

BBC: after 100 days, still awaiting substantive change in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe's prime minister has set out a bleak assessment of the pace of democratic change in what was once one of Africa's most prosperous nations...Although his party is now part of the government, commentators have warned that the MDC has responsibility without authority.

BBC: Sudanese military takes Darfuri town back from JEM
An army spokesman said Jem had "completely evacuated" the area of Kornoi, 50km (31 miles) from Chad, and retreated towards the border, AFP news agency reports.

Jem seized Kornoi earlier this month and it tried to take an army base at nearby Umm Baru twice last week.

The rebels said they had withdrawn from the area for "humanitarian purposes" to protect the civilian population from air attacks.
WP: astounding one-third of refugees surveyed report or show signs of sexual violence
About half the rapes were carried out in Darfur by Janjaweed militiamen allied with the Sudanese government, and half were assaults by Chadian villagers near the U.N. refugee camp, usually when the women left to search for firewood or herd livestock, according to the report by the U.S.-based group Physicians for Human Rights.

The group reached the 88 women included in the survey through camp leaders and by word of mouth -- a sampling method the report said hinders drawing general conclusions about the prevalence of rape in Darfur or in the Farchana refugee camp in Chad...Further complicating the effort, women displaced inside Darfur live mostly in government-controlled areas and fear reprisal...

As many as 450,000 people have died as a result of the violence, mostly from disease, hunger and malnutrition, and more than 2.5 million have been forced from their homes. About 250,000 have fled into Chad, where they live in refugee camps.
AP: tribal clashes in Kordofan region leave hundreds dead
Tribal clashes over cattle grazing and water rights is common across Sudan, but the violence has grown worse over the years with the number of arms left over from the two-decade long civil war between the north and the south that ended in 2005.

The Messariah and Rezeigat tribes that clashed Tuesday and Wednesday straddle the border region between southern Kordofan and neighboring Darfur, where a separate conflict that has claimed 300,000 lives has raged for more than six years.

Interior Minister Hamed Ibrahim told the Cabinet on Thursday that in addition to the police, 169 tribesman were killed in the fighting, including 89 from the Messariah and 80 from the Rezeigat. Calm has now returned to the area, he was quoted as saying by the state news agency.

A previous round of fighting last year between the two tribes left over 70 from both sides dead, Messariah chief Babou Nimr Mukhtar told The Associated Press.

Mukhtar said fighting began Tuesday when 2,000 Rezeigat gunmen on horseback and in trucks attacked his tribe. Police were deployed to the area to prevent the fighting but were attacked by the Rezeigat, he said.

"Calm is restored. But there is no guarantee it will last," said Mukhtar. He stressed that tribal chiefs, not security forces, were the only ones who could end the rivalry...

Separate tribal clashes in the country's south over the last three months claimed the lives of some 900 people, mostly women and children.

Gdn: report from Mogadishu (spoiler alert: things aren't good)
After the parliament voted to introduce sharia I went back to visit the police officer. He shrugged and smiled when I told him about the debate. "We have always used sharia in our work," he said, handing me a cup of murky tea. "When the whole state is collapsing all that we have is our religion."

He told me he had joined the army in 1970 and then the police just before the collapse of Mogadishu 20 years ago. He had been wearing the same beige uniform ever since. "You are trying to impose law but where is the law when everyone is fighting? When the Ethiopians came those same Islamists that are in the government attacked us every day. They said we were supporting the invaders. In one day 15 shells fell on our police station. Now they are the government hopefully things will be better."...

"This how we establish sharia," the judge told me. "First we establish order and judgment in the middle of the chaos of war and destruction. When we started back in 1996 we were not a political movement. We started as judges to bring justice, then we became a political movement and then we became military." We crossed the basketball pitch of the compound that was once an army college. A lone boot sat in the middle of the pitch. The judge went on: "You know, sharia is fearing God and establishing religion. It's not about chopping hands off. First we establish security and then impose the rulings. It's the fear and hunger and chaos. If I cut the hands of hundreds of thieves I will not bring justice. Feed the hungry first and then punish them if they steal."...

After 20 years people had become used to life without a functioning state, explained one businessman with interests in fuel, mobile telephones and food. "Businessmen learned to do their work without a government. In the port the shipment is downloaded just as if there was a government – only you are the government, so if you have a ship you have to bring your men and your guards and do your work. Amongst the businessmen everything is run through trust – for example, when we need to buy fuel 20 merchants put money together, send it to Dubai, and our Somali friends send us a fuel tanker. Every merchant has his own militia and men who protect his interests. We do business with the government and the Shabaab. Our friends in Dubai are envious of us because we live without a state and we can do trade everywhere without control."

AJE: ongoing protests become clashes between civilians and police in south Yemen
Aden is the former capital of South Yemen, which was united with the north of the country in 1990.

Protesters carried banners with anti-government messages and posters of Ali Nasser Mohammed, the former president of South Yemen.

The death toll since protests started in the south in late April is now 16, including five security personnel.

Socialists, who formerly ruled the south, previously tried to gain secession in 1994, igniting a two-month civil war before the movement was crushed by forces loyal to the government.

Some southerners want independence because of alleged discrimination and neglect.

However, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has give warning that the nation could split up into several entities.


NYT: what unrequitted means during wartime
It goes like this: Boy meets girl. They exchange glances and text messages, the limit of respectable courting here. Then boy asks girl’s father for her hand. Dad turns him down. Boy goes to girl’s house and plants a bomb out front. The authorities call it a “love I.E.D.,” or improvised explosive device, and it is not just an isolated case.

WP: Pakistan military claims control of Mingora
Capturing Mingora, 80 miles north of Islamabad, the capital, has been one of the army's primary objectives. But Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, conceded that the Taliban had not put up a strong fight for the city and that many insurgents probably slipped away. Large parts of Swat remain beyond the government's grip.
LAT: in possible tactical shift, the Taliban targets Pakistan's cities
Only a week ago, the military said it was expecting a long, hard-fought battle with Pakistani Taliban militants who had fortified themselves in the city's hotels and buildings. It now appears that, after initially putting up stiff resistance, many militants chose to flee...

But the militants may have decided to fight another way: seeding fear in other parts of the country through well-coordinated bombing attacks.
WP: meanwhile, insurgent-linked groups offering humanitarian aid to some of the millions displaced from Swat
The government has been overwhelmed by the human tide that has washed over the northwest as about 2 million people have fled fierce clashes in Swat. With Pakistan experiencing its largest exodus since the nation's partition from India in 1947, only a fraction of the displaced civilians are receiving assistance in government-run camps. The rest are fending for themselves or getting help from private charities, including some that are allied with the very forces the Pakistani army is fighting in Swat.

Refugee camps in Pakistan have been prime recruiting grounds for militant groups ever since the Soviet invasion forced millions of Afghans to cross into Pakistan in the 1980s. Now, concern is growing that this latest wave of displacement will create a fresh crop of Pakistanis with grievances against the government and loyalty to groups that seek to undermine the state through violent insurgency.

AP: violence in Afghanistan's western Bala Murghab district; bomb detonated in Kunduz
Northern Afghanistan was once thought to be a peaceful enclave unaffected by rampant Taliban violence in the south and east. But militants have increased attacks in the area in the last two years as the insurgency has spread across the country.

LAT: Azerbaijan enters the fray
The case offers an inside look at one of the stealthy duels being fought by Israel on one side and Hezbollah and Iran on the other in remote locales, from Latin America to Central Asia...

Azerbaijan, a moderate Muslim nation of 8 million, finds itself in a delicate spot. It has strong commercial and diplomatic ties to Iran, on its southern border. About a quarter of Iran's population, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are ethnic Azeris.


AP: battle between Hamas, Palestinian police leave 6 dead
Despite Hamas' threats of reprisals, it was not immediately clear whether it would change its tactic of lying low in the West Bank while it weathers Abbas' crackdown. Since Hamas' Gaza takeover, Abbas' security forces have detained hundreds of Hamas supporters in the West Bank and closed the group's institutions and charities.

The Qalqiliya clash began late Saturday when Palestinian troops surrounded a hideout of Mohammed Samman, a leader of Hamas' military wing, and his assistant, Mohammed Yassin. Both had been on Israel's wanted list for six years, Palestinian security officials said..

Hamas officials in the West Bank said that some 40 loyalists of the group had been arrested in Qalqiliya in the past week as part of the search for the top two fugitives. Some 200 Hamas supporters are in Palestinian Authority custody...

But Abbas aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh said going after militants is key to one day setting up a Palestinian state. "To build our country and our state, we need to have one authority, one gun, one law," he said.
WP: Obama pushes Israel to stop settlements


BBC: contested statistics in Sri Lanka
The Sri Lankan government has strongly denied allegations that more than 20,000 civilians were killed during its recent onslaught against Tamil rebels.

The figures published in The Times newspaper in the UK - quoting official documents and witness accounts - is far higher than previously thought...

"I am bemused that The Times, like a jilted old woman, is continuing a bitter campaign against Sri Lanka based on unverified figures and unsubstantiated assertions," [Permanent Secretary to the Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr Palitha Kohona] said.

"The simple fact is that Sri Lanka eliminated a detestable terrorist group and in the process rescued over 250,000 hostages held as a human shield by the terrorists."
WP: satellite imagery seem to back the jilted old woman

WP: in Northern Ireland, eleven Protestants arrested in death of Catholic
Kevin McDaid, a plasterer who worked with youths in the community, was beaten to death by a large number of Protestants who drove into a Catholic neighborhood armed with bats and clubs after a soccer match. McDaid had gone into the street to make sure his four children were safe.

A 1998 peace accord known as the Good Friday agreement is often credited with ending the religious violence that had caused more than 3,600 deaths since 1969. But despite enormous political strides, an average of four incidents of sectarian violence or threats are reported to police each day in Northern Ireland. Now, instead of paramilitary groups using rifles and bombs, the incidents often involve youths armed with knives, bats and hate...

The mob Sunday night assembled after the Rangers, a soccer team with a long history of Protestant support, clinched the league championship over archrival Celtic, a team favored by Catholics. Both teams are Scottish, and many of their Northern Irish fans fly or take the boat over to Scotland for every game.

The rivalry between the two teams is a "proxy war" between the two long-feuding groups in Northern Ireland, Shirlow said. He said territorial conflicts continue in working-class neighborhoods where boundaries between Catholics and Protestants are clearly known and often marked by fluttering flags: the Union Jack or the Irish Republic's flag. The wearing of a blue-and-white Rangers scarf or the green-and-white Celtic shirt also distinguishes Catholics from Protestants.

After the championship match that the Rangers won Sunday, a group of fans, many of whom had been drinking, drove in several cars to a Catholic housing estate in Coleraine, a town of 24,000 people 55 miles northwest of Belfast. Witnesses told police they beat up the first people they came across.

McDaid had worked with youths in the community to ease sectarianism and had married a Protestant. His wife was severely beaten and suffered head injuries. Another man, Damien Fleming, was critically injured...

Between April 1, 2008, and March 31, 2009, police recorded 1,595 incidents of sectarian violence or threats, a slight rise over the year before. Most are not publicized, and few result in death. The largest category -- nearly 500 reports -- involved "criminal damage," and 287 were assaults...

Catholics accounted for 40 percent of Northern Ireland's 1.7 million people in the 2001 census, while 45 percent considered themselves Protestant. Bew said Protestants would probably remain in the majority for at least another generation. But in many areas, traditional working-class Catholic neighborhoods are expanding because of larger Catholic families and exiting Protestants. In the shrinking Protestant enclaves, some feel threatened and "left behind," Bew said.

LAT: La Familia penetrated state political institutions in Michoacan
A relatively new and particularly violent group, La Familia Michoacana, is undermining the electoral system and day-to-day governance of this south-central state, pushing an agenda that goes beyond the usual money-only interests of drug cartels...

Just last week it became clear how deeply embedded La Familia is. Federal authorities detained 10 mayors and 20 other local officials as part of a drug investigation, saying the organized-crime group has contaminated city halls across the state. The roundup comes at the height of the electoral season, as Michoacan and the rest of Mexico approach local and national contests July 5.

Dozens of mayors, city hall officials and politicians have been killed or abducted in Michoacan as La Familia has extended its control in the last couple of years...

Unlike some drug syndicates, La Familia goes beyond the production and transport of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine and seeks political and social standing. It has created a cult-like mystique and developed pseudo-evangelical recruitment techniques that experts and law enforcement authorities say are unique in Mexico.

No party has been spared its influence or interference, politicians of all stripes said in a series of interviews conducted before the arrests of the mayors...

La Familia emerged this decade as a local partner of the so-called Gulf cartel, whose operatives were moving into the region along with their ruthless paramilitary force, the Zetas. La Familia and the Zetas gradually muscled out most of the other gangs, and La Familia announced its dominance by tossing five severed heads onto the floor of a dance hall in the Michoacan city of Uruapan in September 2006. The gruesome calling card soon became all too common in areas where drug traffickers settle accounts...

Nonetheless, La Familia is stronger today than ever. It has expanded into the neighboring states of Guerrero, Queretaro and Mexico, which abuts the national capital, Mexico City, while battling remaining pockets of the Gulf cartel.

La Familia also has steadily diversified into counterfeiting, extortion, kidnapping, armed robbery, prostitution and car dealerships. The group offers money or demands bribes; increasingly, people in Michoacan pay protection money to La Familia in lieu of taxes to the government...

They recruit at drug rehab centers and indoctrinate followers with an ideology akin to religious fundamentalism, complete with group prayer sessions. Some armed guards wear uniforms with the FM logo, witnesses say. Failure by a recruit to live by the rules is said to be punishable by death.
NYT: being part of una familia has its pay-offs and consequences
NYT: Mexican cartels expanding business in US


Slate: there already are inmates convicted of terrorism in US jails

NYT: the NYC projects where Sotomayor (and Jay-Z, Wesley Snipes, and Marc Anthony) grew up
Slate: status question: can you immigrate from within the Commonwealth?
In the [2001] speech, Sotomayor called her parents "immigrants," but the island they departed has been an American territory for 111 years. Why it has remained so longer than any other overseas possession (save the odd atoll or guano deposit) is an enduring historic puzzle.

Puerto Rico is often described as the world's oldest colony, having recently entered its sixth century under off-island rule. Spanish settlers seized Puerto Rico from the Taíno Indians in 1508, a decade and a half after Christopher Columbus "discovered" it. It remained a Spanish colony until the United States chased Spain out of the neighborhood in the Spanish-American War. That was 1898, the same year the United States acquired the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaii became a state. Puerto Rico did not. (Another island acquired in 1898 is Guam, which would share Puerto Rico's 111-year record as a U.S. territory but for its seizure by Japan during World War II.)...

Debate now focuses on whether to continue commonwealth status or to make Puerto Rico a state. Commonwealth status has the advantage of sharply restricting island dwellers' exposure to federal taxation but the disadvantage of limiting their representation in Congress, excluding them from nonprimary presidential elections, and reducing their eligibility for Medicaid and other federal entitlements. Statehood would bring more taxes, more representation, more government benefits, and some loss of cultural identity (including, in all likelihood, additional pressure to make English the island's primary language). During the past 40 years, Puerto Rico has conducted four plebescites on the island's fate.

++
NYT: sv mournfully suggests new Cleveland slogan: 'better luck next year'

++
*sv has finally gotten to 'the brief wondrous life of oscar wao,' in which she currently delights, and from which this allusion comes: "What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Lke the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destind to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that's too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like" (p97, fn11). sidenote: he was referring to a dissertation writer in particular.
bonus sidenote: to wit, the ferocity of poets
triple bonus sidenote: Pinochet henchman arrested this week for murder of Jara 36 years ago
Jara, a political songwriter and poet and high-profile supporter of socialist President Salvador Allende, was among thousands swept up in the aftermath of Pinochet's CIA-backed coup in September 1973. The author of El cigarrito and Manifiesto was herded into Santiago's football stadium which was used as a mass jail.

Soldiers broke the musician's hands before shooting him in the head and riddling his body with bullets, one of 3,100 murders committed by Pinochet's forces during military rule which lasted until 1990, when democracy returned to the South American country.

selection and mutations [but the nation died]

AJE: campaigning in Israel
About 20 per cent of Israelis remain undecided on who they will vote for, polling organisations say, and the leading candidates in the election are focusing their efforts on winning them over.
Gdn: in Umm al-Fahm, conflict between far-right and Arab-Israelis
If Lieberman [head of the far-right Israel Our Homeland Party] has his way - and his party has surged ahead of Labour to push it to a humiliating fourth place - Umm al-Fahm may be transferred out of Israel into the Palestinian Authority, something its residents forcefully oppose in exchange for Israeli "villages", or settlements.

Its young people may be required to serve in the army, which they currently resist as they consider that army is fighting their own people in the Palestinian Territories. They would, all in all, be required to demonstrate - in Lieberman's own words - their loyalty to the state, both ordinary people and politicians, in exchange for citizenship.
LAT: Livni works women, leftists for their vote
Gdn: and everyone goes clubbing for the youth vote in Tel Aviv
BBC: where a new party has emerged, advocating reform of the closed-list PR electoral system
"Every day he changes his dirty underwear... This is the way also he votes in elections - when there is a dirty government, he replaces it with a clean one.

"And when the second government is more dirty than the first, we swap them back."

With this sales pitch, Haisraelim, a new, single issue party has entered the political fray ahead of Israel's 10 February elections, pushing for a change in the electoral system...

While rockets from Gaza and potential nuclear bombs from Iran are looming large in the minds of Israeli voters, the party's leader, political science Professor Gideon Doron, says the voting system itself is a "threat to Israel's existence".

"We can't make peace and we can barely make war," he says, as he fields phone calls about election billboards.

Econ: parsing the election results in Iraq
If confirmed—the final results are not expected for several weeks—Mr Maliki will be well placed to run for a second term in the general election due within a year. His success, though, did not reflect a trend towards voting along religious lines. Quite the opposite. The prime minister, who leads the Dawa Party, a Shia religious movement, seems to have benefited from his party’s decision to join with others to form the State of Law Coalition, which campaigned, in a non-religious way, on themes of national unity, law and order. Mr Maliki thus managed to profit from an apparent shift to secularism.
IHT: unlikely candidate, former Baathist, wins in Karbala
WP: how General Odierno shaped the surge
Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as "fairly desperate, frankly."

So that fall, he became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq, a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq and Odierno's immediate superior.

Communicating almost daily by phone with retired Gen. Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington, Odierno launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military. It would prove one of the most audacious moves of the Iraq war, and one that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy.
NYT: the state of Iraq, after the invasion, surge and elections (not so enlightening analysis)
WP: unclear why presence of mani/pedi salon for soldiers in Mosul not considered, for example
TAL: Americans talk to an Iraqi (part 1; part 2)
"I think people here want me to say yes, that things will get better, so you will feel better."
Reuters: Bush shoe-thrower trial set; if convicted, faces 15 years in prison

WSJ: the tedious and dangerous work sniffing out roadside bombs in Afghanistan

LAT: state courts in Mexico opening trials to public
Perhaps the most basic change is that suspects are presumed innocent, reversing the inquisitional system brought by Spanish colonizers. The arrested are no longer tossed straight into jail, but can remain free while prosecutors present evidence in hopes of winning an indictment.

Many residents question whether the reforms that include more rights for the accused may be to blame for a yearlong wave of killings in Chihuahua, especially in Ciudad Juarez. A little less than a year after the reforms debuted in the capital, lawmakers responded to public pressure and made more suspects subject to incarceration before appearing in court.

But killings tied to drug trafficking are federal offenses. Robberies, assaults and murders not linked to organized crime are handled in state courts.

LAT: witnesses are being killed in Colombian trial linked to former governor
Diaz, the reform-minded mayor of El Roble in northern Sucre state, had received death threats from paramilitary groups, and told [President] Uribe during a community meeting in February 2003 that he feared for his life.

The 47-year-old doctor had resisted the right-wing militias' efforts to take control of El Roble's treasury and health system for fear they would loot them, according to his son, Juan David.

Diaz had also denounced Arana at the 2003 meeting before Uribe, saying the then-governor backed paramilitary fighters.

Despite his warnings, two months later, in April, Diaz was kidnapped, tortured for five days and killed. The mayor had been on his way to a meeting supposedly to reconcile with Arana.
PCB: meanwhile, Uribe decries left-leaning leaders the 'intellectual bloc' of the FARC
CNN: ...as Colombians for Peace (the NGO organized by said leaders) negotiates release of politician kidnapped in 2002 by the FARC; he was the last politician held, though police officers and soldiers are still in captivity, as well as hundreds of civilians

BBC: reforms in Bolivia reveal regional divisions
There are two main areas where the opposition is likely to continue its fight.
The first is in Congress, where the ruling Movement to Socialism party (MAS) does not have a majority in the upper house.

It is likely that more than 100 new laws will need to be passed to make the constitution operational. Some members of Podemos, the main opposition party in Congress, are bound to try to block them.

The second area is how the various levels of autonomy will work.

AJE: opposition mounts massive demonstration against Chavez's proposed constitutional reforms
WP: Jews raise concerns about anti-Semitic attacks and rhetoric

Econ: contemporary clan politics in Brazil
Dominance by a single man or family was not uncommon in Brazil’s north-east. But it is fading away. The Sarney clan is becoming unusual. Mr Sarney’s daughter, Roseana, has been Maranhão’s governor and currently represents it in the Senate. His son was a minister in Brazil’s previous government. Other relatives are scattered in positions of authority in Maranhão’s courts and the civil service. One of his lieutenants, Edison Lobão, is Lula’s minister for mines and energy. When he took the job, Mr Lobão’s seat in the national Senate went to his son; his wife sits in the lower house. All three of Maranhão’s senators answer to Mr Sarney, as do his fellow senators from Amapá.
This control is aided by the Sarney family’s ownership of Maranhão’s biggest media company.

WP: economic downturn in Russia endangers immigrant laborers
Econ: the problem is likely under-reported, given the targeting of journalists
Both [human rights lawyer] Mr Markelov and [journalist] Ms Baburova were killed in broad daylight in the centre of Moscow. The next day, a party of Russian nationalists brought champagne to the murder scene to celebrate the “elimination” of their enemies. Her death was part of a continuing battle between fascists and anti-fascists in Russia, which is seldom so plainly revealed to the outside world...

[Baburova] and her friends rightly identified fascism as the biggest and most pressing threat to her country. She swore to fight it. She sensed accurately the social kinship between Stalinism and fascism: the link between attempts to portray Stalin as a “successful manager”, and the current upsurge of nationalism.

BBC: Poland, the Round Table Talks and communism's fall
Twenty years ago, Poland's communist government did something without precedent - it sat down with the banned Solidarity trade union to try to defuse growing social unrest.

What became known as the Round Table Talks led to the first multi-party elections in the Soviet bloc and a stunning victory by Solidarity, led by Lech Walesa, which heralded the collapse of communism across the eastern half of Europe.

NYT: the legacy of war in Bosnia
Today, the country known as Bosnia and Herzegovina has a new class of young entrepreneurs, a growing influx of tourists and new shopping malls selling everything from luxury ski equipment to mango bathing gel. But the country remains weighed down not just by a bloated bureaucracy, but also by a national brand inextricably linked with ethnic violence and an economy overly dependent on foreign aid.

BBC: technology and warfare: using cell phones to fight Maoists in India
The government in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has given free mobile phones to more than 200 village leaders to help fight Maoist rebels.

Police say the aim is to receive swift tip-offs about rebel movements...

Jharkhnd is under presidential rule, which ensures Delhi's direct control over its administration.

More than 6,000 people have died during the Maoists' 20-year fight for a communist state in parts of India.

The rebels say they are fighting for the rights of poor peasants and landless workers.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said the Maoist insurgency is the "single biggest threat" to India's security.

The rebels operate in 182 districts in India, mainly in the states of Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal.

Ind: Burmese seeking opportunities risk enslavement
It appears that the businesswoman's potential customers are middlemen, probably Chinese. Through a translator, they discuss placing the men on boats in the South China Sea, trawling for tuna. First, they will be flown to a Chinese city. In echoes of the slave trade, she describes a selection process worthy of a livestock market. In a 21st-century twist, she does so with the aid of pictures on her laptop.

"We make them stand in the sun for one hour," she says. "In the middle of the day when it is very hot. We see how they manage, if they look uncomfortable." The group leans in to see the pictures on her computer. "We make them carry 20 kilos, like this," she continues, showing them photographs I cannot see. "For deep-sea fishing, they may need to carry very big fish for long distances across the ship."

Then comes the seasickness test. "We put them in here," the woman says, but I can't see the picture. I think it must be an enclosed truck or some sort of container on water. "Then we start to move them around. If they are sick or find it hard to breathe we don't select them. This is how we select the best bodies."

The group nods. The images of Burma's Rohingya boat people, fleeing oppression only to be allegedly abused and cast adrift by the Thai military, has drawn international attention to the plight of one of the world's most downtrodden people. The Muslim Rohingyas face particular persecution in military-ruled Burma, but throughout the country, impoverished men and women who see no future at home are embarking on risky journeys abroad in search of an income for their families.

Econ: HRW accuses Ethiopia of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ogaden
[Human Rights Watch] says that Ethiopian troops burned down villages and killed, raped and tortured civilians in a counter-insurgency campaign against the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front after its fighters had killed 74 Ethiopian and Chinese oil-exploration workers in 2007. Ethiopia’s government was so incensed by the description of “systematic atrocities” in the Ogaden that it commissioned a report of its own that dismissed Human Rights Watch’s allegations as hearsay and its methods as slapdash.

AJE: opposition in Madagascar undeterred by state violence

LAT: the accord in Zimbabwe and power sharing in general
Critics argue that African-brokered power-sharing deals such as those signed after Kenya's violent 2007 elections and Zimbabwe's disputed vote last year have set a precedent that leaders in Africa can cling to power when voted out, just by refusing to leave office.

They say bodies such as SADC [the Southern African Development Community] and the African Union have done little to protect democracy or stop violence and human rights abuses, tending to side with incumbent leaders such as the long-ruling Mugabe, whose regime has been accused of unleashing violence to stay in power and denying food to opposition villagers.

BBC: water vendors in Abuja
The urban poor in developing world cities including Abuja pay much more for their water than citizens of rich cities such as New York or Tokyo, precisely because the poor have to depend on private providers rather a piped municipal supply.

++
NYT: satirizing politics in Lebanon
Although direct political satire is virtually impossible in most of the Arab world, the impulse has long thrived in more oblique and private forms. “Basmat Watan” draws on the live comedy and song performances known as chansonières, which started in Beirut theaters in the early 1960s and continue today. For centuries before that, villagers here would gather to sing “zajal” — an indigenous form of poetry that is partly improvisatory, a kind of ancient Levantine rap.

The actors in “Basmat Watan” often break into zajals, which by tradition often include satire and plays on words. The name “Basmat Watan” is itself a play on words, with the sounds meaning both “The Smile of the Nation” and “But the Nation Died.”...

Mr. Bou-Gedeon becomes grim when asked about the role of comedy, and dramatic art in general, in Lebanon. Only shallow work is possible, he said, because the Lebanese are always trying to escape themselves.

“Shakespeare said, ‘Show a mirror to the people,’ ” he said. “But people do not want to see themselves here. They want an image that is false, not the truth.”

Mr. Khalil, who cites Woody Allen and Mel Brooks as two of his chief influences, concedes that satire is not a very powerful weapon in a country where politics is still largely a matter of feudal allegiance. But he seems willing to settle for making people laugh.

LAT: celebrating Darwin, evolving faster than ever
As it happens, the pace of evolution has been speeding up -- not slowing down -- in the 40,000 years since our ancestors fanned out from Ethiopia to populate the globe.

And in the 5,000 to 10,000 years since agriculture triggered the growth of large societies, the pace has accelerated to 100 times historical levels.

"When there's more people, there are more mutations," [paleoanthropologist] Wolpoff said. "And when there are more mutations, there's more selection."

weak and moderately functional [beware of armed asses]

Econ: the meaning and implications of state collapse and weakness
But for al-Qaeda, remoteness alone is not enough. Terrorists need protection too, and that has to be secured from local populations as in Pakistan’s tribal belt. International terrorists, moreover, need to be able to travel, communicate and transfer funds; they need to be within reach of functioning population centres. Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank, argues in a forthcoming book that international terrorists do not find the most failed states particularly attractive; they prefer “weak but moderately functional” states. The shell of state sovereignty protects them from outside intervention, but state weakness gives them space to operate autonomously.
Econ: Yemen seems to fit the bill
With its rough terrain, weak central state and gun-slinging tribal culture, Yemen may prove a fairly secure redoubt for al-Qaeda. The group has suffered sharp setbacks in such places as Iraq, Lebanon and especially Saudi Arabia, where it has not mounted a serious attack since 2006. The relative quiet in Yemen, which some critics of its government ascribe to a secret amnesty whereby Sunni jihadists backed the state against a smouldering Shia insurrection in the country’s north, has been eroding. Waves of arrests, prompted partly by Western and Saudi pressure, have provoked an escalation of al-Qaeda attacks that culminated in a double car-bombing of America’s embassy in Sana’a last September; the attack failed to penetrate the fortified compound but left 16 people dead.

AJE: (video) Pakistan's military operations in the FATA region (ht: pstan)
AJE: police officers released by Taliban after promising to quit

WP: sheiks set to ignore election outcome in Anbar
"An honest dictatorship is better than a democracy won through fraud," Abu Risha said.

Here, in the cradle of the Sunni insurgency, tribal leaders nurtured and empowered by the United States appear ready to take control the old-fashioned way -- with guns and money -- if their political ambitions are frustrated...

Abu Risha and other leaders of the Awakening, the U.S.-backed Sunni sheiks who rose up to quell the insurgency, charge that Sunni politicians of the Iraqi Islamic Party have committed electoral fraud, which party officials deny...

Ever since they turned against the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq more than two years ago, a dozen of the sheiks who founded Awakening have considered themselves the saviors of Anbar. Enriched by U.S. contracts and courted by U.S. military commanders eager to preserve security gains, the tribes are more powerful than at any time since the demise of Iraq's monarchy half a century ago.

Now, they seek to transform their anti-insurgency credentials into political power. But democracy is a new concept for the Anbar sheiks, who are participating for the first time in elections. In 2005, they ordered their tribesmen to boycott the polls, allowing the Iraqi Islamic Party, a religious Sunni group, to take control of the province amid paltry voter turnout.

The tribal leaders' inexperience has shown. In a world of byzantine allegiances and fickle loyalties, the original Awakening leaders have split up, bickering over who has the authority to lead them. Several Awakening parties competed in the elections, dividing their vote. At least four founding sheiks were candidates...

The Awakening sheiks have a source of leverage in the police. An estimated 30,000 tribesmen have joined the provincial police, but most remain loyal to their tribes.
AJE: suicide bomber attacks in Diyala

AJE: Hamas seizes aid intended for civilians
AJE: and Israel follows suit
The Israeli military told Al Jazeera it had captured the Lebanese vessel and taken it to Ashdod, where authorities were examining its cargo. The passengers and crew, meanwhile, were being questioned by police.
LAT: ICC considers Gaza investigation
Now [Ocampo's] prosecutors must analyze three questions, [Ocampo] said: whether the Palestinian Authority has legal power to recognize the court's authority, whether war crimes occurred, and whether the governments involved conduct genuine investigations.
AJE: Abbas says 90,000 are homeless
Slate: finding humor in the tragedy
If tragedy and comedy are inseparable, as Eugène Ionesco believed, the Gazans are equipped to be among the world's funniest people. The strip is nowadays little more than a prison for its 1.5 million residents. The water is nearly poisonous, travel is restricted even for Fulbright scholars, and what remains of the civil infrastructure is administered by a mirthless set of militant Islamists.

And, weirdly, rage and sorrow often did give way to laughter among Jebalia's erstwhile residents. One man, a half-blind veteran of the British Mandate years, swung seamlessly from excoriating the U.S. government to weeping over his lost home to cackling about the death of his donkey. Why would Israel want the beast dead, he wondered—it couldn't even hold a gun.

AJE: Sudanese capture town in Darfur, defeating JEM fighters
Government forces have entered the city of Muhagiriya, 80km from Nyala, the south Darfur capital, and are pursuing Jem fighters, Sudan's army spokesman said on Wednesday.

The army started bombing the town earlier this week as the United Nations-African Union peacekeepers deployed in the area, refused to leave.

At least 30 people have been killed in the fighting and thousands of civilians have been forced to flee, a UN officials said...

Suleiman Sandal, the Jem commander, denied that the group had been pushed out of Muhagiriya, saying it had withdrawn voluntarily to spare the population from government air attacks...

There has been speculation that the increase in violence in Darfur is tied to a decision expected by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on whether to issue an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's president, for suspected war crimes.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN chief, warned in a report issued Wednesday that an arrest warrant by the ICC could have an adverse impact on UN personnel in Sudan.

NYT: Somali pirates have their ransom for the Ukrainian tanker

IHT: Madagascar coup leader relieved of mayoral post

BBC: Qaddafi says democracy in Africa causes bloodshed
BBC: run-down of upcoming elections around the world

Ind: bombing closes last hospital in region where Sri Lanka troops are pursuing Tamil Tigers
Consisting of a payload of small bombs that spread over a wide area, cluster bombs are notorious for their impact on civilians and are particularly difficult to find and remove after a conflict has ended. In May 2008, 107 nations adopted the international Convention on Cluster Munitions, but Sri Lanka was not among them.

While the hospital had been struck several times by artillery shells fired from positions occupied by both government troops and rebel fighters, Mr Weiss suggested that the cluster munitions – believed to have been used for the first time since a ceasefire between the two sides broke down two years ago – had been fired by the rebels. "The government has assured us that they do not have these munitions and we have accepted that," he added...

If anything, the fighting seems set to intensify as the government seeks to crush the separatist LTTE, which has have been using guerrilla tactics and suicide bombers to fight for an independent Tamil homeland for the past 30 years. At a speech to celebrate Sri Lanka's 61st Independence Day yesterday, President Mahinda Rajapaksa said soldiers had "defeated the cowardly forces of terror that had wrapped our entire nation in fear".

Mr Weiss said there was evidence that the LTTE, forced into an ever-diminishing area of jungle, had been preventing civilians from crossing the front lines and escaping the conflict. He said LTTE fighters had also tried to commandeer two UN vehicles, but desisted once the staff argued with them...

Uncertainty hangs over the fate of the LTTE's leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. Reports say the rebel commander may have tried to flee the country but there has been no evidence to confirm that. This week, however, government troops revealed what they said was his underground bunker, a "luxury" hideout complete with air-conditioning, sound-proof generators, a four-poster bed and CCTV.
AP: testimony from survivors
Econ: civilians caught in the crossfire all too common
Gdn: gov't rejects call for ceasefire
The government said it would offer a limited amnesty to rebel forces that were ready to lay down their arms as they were on the brink of defeat in their 25-year-old struggle for a Tamil homeland. But ministers refused to hold peace talks, saying they would accept nothing less than total surrender.

Apparently down to their last 600 fighters, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam appear to be approaching the final battle with the Sri Lankan army. The military has encircled the rebels and says the Tigers are close to collapse, having lost almost 99% of the territory under their control only a year ago.

Slate: the durability of the Burmese junta

New Yorker:Nigeriatown in China

BBC: Brazil's occupation strategy for the favelas
After an initial violent confrontation with the Red Command - a drug gang that once controlled this district - police have, for the moment at least, established a full-time presence. Normally, they leave the area, with the traffickers still in control.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC, President Lula said the state was making up for a time when it had abandoned its poorest citizens...

"In the past it was only the police intervening with lots of brutality which punished the guilty and the innocent - very often only the innocent. Now we have police there, who are becoming a community police force."

...with the traffickers gone and police maintaining a 24-hour presence, local commanders believe they can now win over hearts and minds.
AJE: police incursions still happen, though: at least 10 dead in Rio favelas

AP: in case you're keeping tabs, the Mexican gov't says the Gulf Cartel, with its Zeta hit squad, is the most violent - apparently based on the number of weapons captured

Plan Colombia & Beyond: former governor released by FARC after 7 1/2 years describes life in the jungle
“After being kidnapped for two days, they gave us a snack. It was Royal water and soda crackers. I put down the cup and put the soda crackers on top. I went out to “take care of business,” and when I came back, the crackers were folded over from the humidity. If that’s what it does to some crackers, imagine what it does to the people there. It kills and rots everything. That’s why the humanitarian exchange is urgent...

Around us, like planets orbiting, were many guerrillas of the vanguard and rearguard, who served as protection. On occasion they came close to us or we retreated. On one occasion when they came close, about 50 meters I think, the group that was in front encountered an Army patrol. We, who were a bit behind, heard the shots. They held me down on the ground, the shots continued. And so I didn’t know which bullets to protect myself from, those of the Army or those of the guerrillas. It was very tense, we stayed on the ground all afternoon until it got dark. Once it was night, we moved a bit backward. We had to walk in silence. I remembered Alan Felipe [his son] when he was 4 years old. One day he said to me, “Papi, I hate you,” and I thought that the world was backward. And that’s how it was that night, like the world backward: the guerrillas protecting me and the Army shooting. … In the past, on four occasions bombs and planes passed very close by. The guerrillas ran to get us out, to protect us.”

CSM: Venezuela plagued by inflation, ahead of referendum on whether Chávez can run for reelection indefintely

BBC: castration of sex offenders in the Czech Republic

BBC: demonstrations across Europe related to the economy
BBC: 'immigrant'-native conflicts in Italy also affecting Roma population
"A series of what appear to be racially motivated attacks and reprisals have contributed to concerns that a creeping xenophobia is infecting the country's social fabric, aided by a political discourse that often links Italy's social and economic woes to immigration."

Daily Beast: NYPD counterterrorism force
As I came back to New York from years in the Middle East and Europe, what fascinated me about the NYPD was that it offered an alternative to the dangerously ill-conceived, mismanaged, and highly militarized “global war on terror” that had pushed the United States into the gruesome occupation of Iraq and helped inspire a violent loathing for Americans around the world. When [NYPD Commissioner Ray] Kelly says the acronym as a single word, “the GWOT,” it’s with a twinge of irony that makes it sound almost obscene.

++
The Onion: Cheney dunk tank fundraiser the best stimulation package!
Organizers reported Sunday that the 44th White House Carnival was a rousing success, raising a record $800,000,066,845 for the federal government—$800 billion of which came from a dunk tank featuring former vice president Dick Cheney..."All right, you candy arms, let's go," Cheney shouted at the line of people, which consisted of Americans, non-Americans, out-of-work autoworkers, teachers, luminaries from the science community, gays, lesbians, military personnel, members of Congress, children, and the entire Arab-American population.

BBC: politics causing part of the increase in Indonesian divorce surge
But changes in lifestyle are not the only cause of marriage break-up, according to an official at the Religious Affairs Ministry, Nasaruddin Umar.

"Believe it or not," said Mr Umar, "some couples decide to divorce because the husband and wife have different takes on political issues. This has never happened before."

New Yorker: James Baldwin, Istanbul, and race in the US

border crossing [brief encounters of the worst kind]

WP: by way of explanation for lack of posts this week, SV temporarily overwhelmed by hope
Slate: - at least she wasn't alone -
Slate: and is still breaking out in occasional goosebumps
"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."

WP: Obama issues orders to close Gitmo and secret prisons, speed withdrawal of troops from Iraq
WP: outgoing ambassador to Iraq warns against pulling out too quickly
WP: ...as the country, and Basra, prepares for provincial elections this month
"Though the Supreme Council has matured, it still exudes the air of the clandestine organization it was in exile. While Sadr's men are often confident in a street-savvy way, and Dawa's are sometimes cerebral, even aloof, the Supreme Council's officials tend to look at any question with squinting suspicion. They still push an unabashedly Shiite message, even as Iraq haltingly recovers from sectarian war."

WP: atrocities coming to light, now that Israel out of Gaza (but article very short on details)
"Early Wednesday, Israel completed its pullout from the Gaza Strip after a military offensive that began Dec. 27. About 1,300 Palestinians were killed and the operation caused an estimated $2 billion in property damage to the already impoverished territory. Thirteen Israelis died during the offensive.

'We don't have any illusion. We know they will come back. But thank God they are finally gone,' said Adel Hamed, 34, of Gaza City. 'If they were trying to destroy us, they failed.' "
LAT: one family's horrific experience of being gunned down trying to escape, and left to die
" 'It was so terrifying,' Shurrab said the next day from his hospital bed in Khan Yunis. 'I shouted at the soldiers to help us, but no answer.'

With the body of [his son] Kassab lying in the street, Shurrab said, he and [his other son] Ibrahim sat bleeding in their car for 20 hours.

Shurrab called the local ambulance service and was told that they were waiting for coordination with the Israeli army so they could come safely to the scene. He phoned his relatives, who called the Red Cross and gave his number to local journalists.

As night approached and his bleeding son grew weaker, he spoke with Al Jazeera, BBC Arabic and several local radio stations, pleading to be rescued.

Ibrahim complained to his father that he felt cold.

"I could not do anything for my son," Shurrab said.

Around midnight, the cellphone battery died. Soon afterward, Ibrahim stopped responding.

"I waited for my fate," Shurrab said, crying.

Israeli troops allowed an ambulance through at 11 a.m. Saturday. Ambulance driver Mahmoud Heikal said he saw Israeli troops watching from a nearby house as he approached the red Land Rover. Kassab Shurrab lay dead in the street. Ibrahim had bled to death in the car."
Gdn: and this family lost 48 members
AJE: Amnesty Int'l joins other groups in denouncing Israeli gov't for white phosphorous weapon use in Gaza

NYT: Taliban rules everywhere NATO doesn't
"The commanders here call the current situation “stalemate,” meaning they can hold what they have but cannot do much else. Of the 20,000 British, American and other troops here, only roughly 300 — a group of British Royal Marines — can be moved around the region to strike the Taliban. All the other units must stay where they are, lest the area they hold slip from their grasp."
Gdn: US accused of killing 25 civilians after bombing called in

AJE: civilians trapped between LTTE and gov't forces in Sri Lanka
AJE: gov't trying to get 250,000 into a "safety zone"
"The Sri Lankan air force on Wednesday dropped leaflets in the region telling civilians to move to the 35sq km zone until the army can transport them to safer locations."

WP: Rwanda deploys troops into Congo
"On Tuesday morning, U.N. soldiers reported that 1,500 to 2,000 Rwandan troops entered eastern Congo around the village of Kibati, which is just north of the main eastern city of Goma, Dietrich said. They were headed north toward the town of Rutshuru, a stronghold of Nkunda's rebels."
wronging rights: there is cause for pessimism

WP: with Ethiopians out of Somalia, Islamists are in but fractured
"After the deaths of at least 10,000 people and the displacement of 1 million, Ethiopia and the United States are now supporting a political compromise that stands to return to power some of the same moderate Islamist leaders they originally ousted.

Those leaders...face an even worse version of the same problem they had when they first tried to govern: how to control the Shabab, which the United States has labeled a terrorist group. After fighting a two-year-long insurgency, the Shabab has split off from the core movement and become more radical and battle-hardened, with various factions controlling much of southern Somalia.

Militarily, the Shabab is now the biggest threat to the fragile transitional government and the moderate Islamists seeking to become part of it.

At the same time, the Shabab is showing signs of internal divisions. And with the Ethiopians' exit, it is facing an array of new challengers, including local militias and warlords with such nicknames as White-Eyed and Greasy who are restyling themselves as Islamists...

In the south, for instance, a group known as the Juba Valley Resistance Movement is marketing itself as an anti-Shabab militia allied with moderate Islamists. "The international community needs to support us," said Mohamed Amin Abdullahi Osman, its leader. "We are against Shabab and want to defeat it."

In the same region, a warlord named Barre Hiiraale who was ousted by the Shabab in October is attempting to revamp his image by associating himself with an old and widely respected moderate Muslim group, al-Sunna wal Gama'a. Hiiraale's militia has successfully fought the Shabab in several towns in southern Somalia in recent weeks...

Though Somalia's fundamental social structure is based on clan, Islamic scholars and charities representing a spectrum of beliefs have long played a respected and, until recently, apolitical role in society.

A more political version of Islam began to take hold after Somalia's last central government collapsed in 1991 and peaked with the Islamic Courts' brief takeover of Mogadishu.

The movement's leaders never settled on what version of Islam they represented -- some militiamen shut cinemas and frowned on music, for instance -- but the group still managed to open ports and get business going and to establish a measure of security in the capital for the first time in 15 years.

It also accomplished the minor miracle of uniting clans under a shared religious order, an idea that endures.

But the Ethiopian invasion fragmented the movement, scattering its leaders to Djibouti and Eritrea. The Shabab remained, gaining a kind of popularity by default among Somalis who did not necessarily care for its radical ideology but were glad someone was fighting Ethiopia."
LAT: militias may be recruiting as far away as Minnesota
"The youths, who have U.S. passports, followed a well-trod trail from Minneapolis to Mogadishu. Another group took off in August. The FBI believes that over the last two years, 12 to 20 Minnesotans have gone to Somalia.

As a result, a joint terrorism task force led by the FBI is scrambling to determine if extremist Islamic groups are seeking recruits here in the nation's largest Somali community -- as well as in San Diego, Seattle, Boston and other cities."

Gdn: talks fail in Zimbabwe
Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, described the failure of 12 hours of talks brokered by regional leaders as "probably the darkest day of our lives" for his Movement for Democratic Change and for the nation, which is hit by mass hunger, cholera and hyperinflation.

LAT: desertions up from the FARC
"Added patrols and checkpoints also created supply problems for the rebels, who depended on sympathetic farmers or rebel family members to bring food and clothing to drop points in the zone.

At the same time, the army stepped up its campaign to urge rebels to lay down their arms and join the demobilization program, promising cash for intelligence. The message was written on thousands of leaflets thrown from helicopters over the rugged mountains ringing this town, and read out regularly over the 6th Army Brigade's radio station in Ibague. The army says it even knows the decimated 25th Front's remaining soldiers and unit commanders: Accumulated intelligence has enabled it to re-create an organizational chart...

Ernesto was reluctant to dial the phone number given out over the radio, fearing that he could end up being killed in the process, a fear heightened by the recent scandal of "false positives," in which the Colombian army killed civilians and later claimed them as battle casualties.

But he called and agreed to meet an army patrol at a predetermined location. He later surrendered his machine gun and was promised a $500 reward. For providing intelligence that led to the capture of an extortion specialist known as Chucho, he was promised a second sum of $25,000. He said, smiling, that he was still "patiently waiting" for the government to pay up.

'The FARC treated its people well. They taught me how to read,' Ernesto said. 'But it was time to start a new life. I want to be an engineer.' "
LAT: but they seem to be doing well just over the Venezuelan borde
"Although the border area has long absorbed Colombian refugees fleeing decades of war, members of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia have become visible as never before in the last two or three years, buying supplies, looking for medical assistance and forging relationships with indigenous women, said Venezuelan Congressman Arcadio Montiel, a Wayuu Indian.

Leaders of several Indian communities clustered around this town in a wild rain forest area that forms the border with Colombia told The Times over the weekend that the FARC's presence is harming their culture and youth.

"They have replaced the caciques, or chiefs, as authority figures and so who do the youths now want to emulate? The rebels," said Javier Armato, a Yupa Indian who is a former Zulia state deputy and onetime Chavez supporter...

Montiel and several community leaders say the FARC operates camps in the Perija Mountains to the west, where they say the rebels rest and recruit and train Venezuelan Indian youths...

But Indian leaders here say the rebels are slowly corrupting their cultures with arms, drugs and values that are anathema to their ways. They are also slowly taking control of Indian lands by squatting and by marrying indigenous women

On many Saturdays, rebel mule trains descend from the rugged Perija Mountains through the two dozen Indian communities that surround this town, indigenous leaders said.

After parking their mules in foothill pastures, the rebels continue on by bus into Machiques, the nearest big city, to make telephone calls, run business errands and go to a market, they said. The supplies are taken back up into the mountains.

At other times, they suddenly appear at doorways, seeking food, clothing or medicines.

"They don't pay for anything, it's always for 'solidarity.' But you can't say no to them. Nor can you complain about them to others, because someone might inform on you," said one indigenous leader, who requested anonymity because of security concerns."

LAT: violence, tension surround approaching referendum for Chavez
"The fiery Chavez has at times used violent rhetoric, including the threat of "civil war," to warn of chaos if he loses the vote next month. In a speech Saturday in Carabobo state, he vowed to break up student protests with tear gas."

Gdn: protests in Iceland rattle coalition

++
Gdn: travel recommendation - next time you're in Mexico, don't miss the narco bling museum

The Onion: SV has an extra ticket for this show if you're interested

course of treatment [stuck on band-aids]

NYT: riots continue in Greece
"A march through downtown Athens on Monday night turned violent, as demonstrators threw concrete slabs, rocks and flaming gasoline bombs at the officers and smashed storefronts. A government Christmas tree along their path was set on fire.

Rioting also intensified in the country’s second largest city, Salonika, and spread to Trikala, a city in the agricultural heartland.

Schools were shut in Athens, the capital, and high school and university students spilled onto the streets, leading to scattered violence throughout the day.

But the evening demonstration, which had attracted thousands and was organized by the Communist Party, was accompanied by some of the worst of the violence of the past several days."
Gdn: timeline
Gdn: photos
BBC: more photos
BBC: cultural context

New Yorker: policing Pashmul with outsiders
Khan and his police officers are members of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, identifiable among Afghans because of their Asiatic features; the population they patrol is Pashtun. Hazaras are mostly Shia, with a history of ties to Iran, whereas most Pashtuns are Sunni and have turned to Pakistan for support. Over the past century, the two peoples have fought periodically, and the Hazaras, who are thought to make up between nine and nineteen per cent of Afghanistan’s population—the Pashtuns make up nearly half—have usually lost...

Units like Khan’s, made up of a despised minority with an unsparing attitude toward those they police, embody many of the paradoxes involved in trying to bring order to Afghanistan’s ethnically fissured society...

In July, I visited Pashmul’s police base, a small installation about twice as large as a tennis court and surrounded by ditches and razor wire. Nearby are crumbling Pashtun villages of mud-brick homes, sprinkled with trash and unexploded ordnance. Pashmul is ideal terrain for an insurgency. The main sources of livelihood, other than hemp and poppies, are grapes and pomegranates, and, during the summer fighting season, foliage in fields and orchards provides cover for insurgents. Because farmers are too poor to use wooden frames in their vineyards, their grapevines are supported by deep furrows cut in the earth; thus in an apparently empty field hundreds of Taliban may be hidden. Grape huts, scattered around the fields, have mud walls thick enough to stop bullets, and narrow ventilation slits that can accommodate rifle barrels. Fighting has caused many Pashmul residents to flee to a temporary camp in the desert, from which they trek several miles each morning to cultivate the fields.

Khan’s police unit patrols a war zone, and the men often do the work of soldiers rather than of normal beat police officers. Although the Army lends support when the police encounter armed resistance, the soldiers then retreat to a base outside Pashmul. On most days, the police patrol the alleys alone, except for a few Canadian soldiers whom NATO has assigned to train and mentor them...

At the command level, the decision to exploit one of Afghanistan’s least noted and most bitter ethnic rivalries seems to have been improvised rather than planned. I asked Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, the top Canadian commander, about Khan’s unit, and he emphasized the similarity between Hazaras and Pashtuns, rather than the differences. “The advantage of any Afghan, regardless of their ethnicity, is that they get a better measure of what’s going on on the ground than we could ever get,” he said. “They know when something is amiss in this district.” No NATO officer I met seemed to appreciate the full significance of the Hazara-Pashtun rivalry...

Two days earlier, NATO artillery strikes had destroyed a Taliban position. Footage from a Predator drone suggested that Taliban soldiers had suffered serious injuries and that, more interestingly, villagers had surrounded and stoned wounded Talibs as they tried to crawl away. Cox’s mission was to lead soldiers to the village to find out what had happened, and to see whether they could harness any anti-Taliban feeling. Some areas haven’t seen a patrol in years, so even farmers who might sympathize with the government lack any guarantee that the government will protect them if they oppose the Taliban. “How are these people supposed to know about their government and support it when there’s no police there?” Cox asked.

The men on duty were not inattentive, but they seemed fundamentally unserious. They lacked initiative, and sat back and murmured to one another while the Canadians interviewed a local farmer. The Canadians barely spoke with their A.N.A. contingent at all, and the Afghan soldiers seemed to regard it as their principal duty to stand in place while the Canadians conducted their search.

The team cornered a farmer, who confirmed that some villagers had persuaded the Taliban to set up their heavy machine gun in another area, in case the Canadians sent in artillery to destroy the position. The team seized on the disclosure as a sign that the villagers could rise up against the Taliban. The farmer shook his head. “No,” he said. “We can argue with you. Not with them. If we say just one thing against the insurgents, they will come and kill us.”

“Have the insurgents come back to say that to you?” the Canadian asked.

The farmer leaned in and looked around. “They always come here.”

Soon afterward, Cox received word that some insurgents were just a few hundred yards away. An unmanned aerial vehicle had spotted men clustering south of us, across a vineyard and near a suspected weapons cache. Cox summoned an A.N.A. quick-reaction force, to support an assault against the position. Half an hour later, no one had arrived, and Cox was furious. He yelled at his counterpart in the Afghan forces, stabbing his finger at the soldier, who was suppressing a laugh: “I’m asking you if they’re ready to come here and help us fight. If you want to take this job half-assed, then fucking get out of the Army.”

When the Afghan quick-response force arrived, its soldiers stood looking dazed. We started to move toward the insurgents’ position by fanning in two directions—one of the most basic tactical maneuvers an infantry unit can attempt. The Afghans now looked slightly frightened—less of the Taliban ambush than of their officer, an Afghan captain trained by Green Berets. As he issued commands through a radio, the soldiers moved down the road and into the vineyard, correctly enough but with uneasy attention to detail, like a troupe of dancers staring at their feet. When we had closed half the distance, I crouched in a furrow, amid grapevines, until a soldier ahead of me—a stubbly, spindly man with a backpack full of rocket-propelled grenade warheads—yelped “Gun!” and pointed at the ambush point.

Seeing a weapon triggered the rules of engagement, and we ran toward the position. I kept my head low, looking at the ground a few steps ahead of me to avoid I.E.D.s. We leaped over an irrigation ditch, and, when I looked up to make sure I was still running in the right direction, I saw the soldier again. He had his grenade-launcher in one hand and, in the other, a colossal bunch of grapes, which he had started to eat. By the time we arrived at the place where the surveillance had spotted the insurgents, the Taliban had long since vanished back into the surrounding villages. As we stood in the empty Taliban position, I noticed that most of the Afghan soldiers carried grapes that they had picked up during the maneuver, and that they looked pleased...

When the patrol encountered residents, [Hazara] Khan and [Canadian] Vollick asked them about Taliban in the area, and received jittery and unhelpful answers. Neither spoke Pashto, but through a translator they managed to perform a kind of good-cop, bad-cop act. Vollick approached two old men sitting outside a house, and asked about Taliban. The response was cordial but evasive. Vollick repeated a line, familiar by now to the villagers, about NATO’s desire to make sure the government could meet their needs for schools and wells. While the men spoke, Khan rolled his eyes in operatic boredom and instructed his men to search the building and to frisk every passerby. The villagers obviously regarded Khan and Vollick as equally foreign. They denied any knowledge of Taliban activity, but, as Khan’s aggressiveness and suspicion grew, they gave Vollick more and more desperate excuses for not coöperating—they were afraid, they said, and hadn’t seen any insurgents anyway. Two other men and a teen-ager looked at us over the walls, perhaps close enough to report back to insurgents on what was said."

LAT: sectarian polarization intense as violence subsides in Baqubah, Diyala
LAT: Tonga troops end deployment as 'coalition of the willing' members

WP (Eugene Robinson): the trial of Blackwater contractors is a whitewash by the White House et al
"There is a huge difference between self-defense and the kind of indiscriminate fusillade that the Blackwater team allegedly unleashed. Proper training and supervision -- which was the Blackwater firm's responsibility -- would have made it more likely for the guards to make the right split-second decisions amid the chaos of Nisoor Square. Rather than give Blackwater a free pass, the Justice Department ought to investigate the preparation these men were given before being sent onto Baghdad's dangerous streets...

But a real attempt to establish blame for this massacre should go beyond Blackwater. It was the Bush administration that decided to police the occupation of Iraq largely with private rather than regular troops.

There are an estimated 30,000 security "contractors" in Iraq, many of them there to protect U.S. State Department personnel. The presence of these heavily armed private soldiers has become a sore point between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. Until now, the mercenaries -- they object to that label, but it fits -- have been immune from prosecution by the Iraqi courts for any alleged crimes. This will change on Jan. 1, when the new U.S.-Iraqi security pact places them under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law. Blackwater and other firms are likely to have a harder time retaining and recruiting personnel, given the possibility of spending time in an Iraqi prison. Yet it is presumed that more private soldiers, rather than fewer, will be needed as the United States reduces troop levels...

Putting national security in the hands of private companies and private soldiers was bad practice from the start, and incidents such as what happened at Nisoor Square are the foreseeable result. The five Blackwater guards may have fired the weapons, but they were locked and loaded in Washington."
Slate: Gates should follow his own advice to change the Pentagon
WP: report offers recommendations to intervene and prevent genocide

Gdn: short list of 9/11 suspects
Slate: how to close Guantanamo

LAT: Pakistan raids Lakshar-e-Taiba; unclear if leader in custody
Ind: former militants describe schooling/ indoctrination
Gdn: tracking down the captured attacker's home in Punjab
NYT: in op-ed, Ali Zardari says that Mumbai terror attacks meant to target Pakistan too
WP: apparently no one told him that whole thing was just a prank

NYT: tribe in Brazil asks for state intervention as drug war encroaches
"For the Tikunas, these traumas represent the latest threat in a fight for tribal survival. With high unemployment and new challenges to its subsistence livelihood, the community is struggling to keep young people from losing themselves in the vices of the white man’s world and from destroying what is left of traditional Tikuna culture.

Like other Indian communities tucked close to growing urban areas, Tikunas are tempted by the consumerism on display and frustrated that it is beyond their means. To the youth especially, alcohol, drugs and drug money seem to offer a way out. They have also unleashed a surge of violence and disobedience.

Alarmed by these trends, Mariaçu’s two chiefs recently made an unusual and desperate appeal for help: they asked the Brazilian police, who generally do not have jurisdiction in Indian towns, to enter their community and crack down on traffickers and substance abusers, even if that would mean putting the Indians at the mercy of Brazilian laws.

“We want government officials to help us save our children, so they don’t take part in these ruinous practices,” said Oswaldo Honorato Mendes, a deep-voiced Mariaçu chief. “Every day the situation gets worse. The younger generation does not obey. They do not show respect for our authority as chiefs. They need to learn respect.”

Respect and obedience to the chiefs are the pillars of tribal law, which usually holds sway in Indian communities but has proved insufficient to cope with new challenges...

[The chiefs] pleaded for the police to do more to control drug traffickers and arrest lawbreakers in their communities. The police officials listened politely but walked away unconvinced they could help.

“It is a desperate request, but not one that we can legally respond to,” said Sergio Fontes, the superintendent of the federal police in the northern city of Manaus, which oversees Tabatinga. “The chiefs want to resolve a social problem with the police, and that is wrong.”

The police generally may not enter an Indian community to carry out investigations, and Indians generally enjoy immunity from Brazilian laws, Mr. Fontes said. In addition, Brazil treats drug users as victims who require treatment, not as criminals. They are usually sentenced to receiving drug-addiction treatment and performing community service in lieu of serving prison time...

But with the police rejecting the Indians’ plea, for now, at least, the Tikunas will have to find ways to cope with their own social problems and the swirling new influences."

LAT: slaying in Monterrey jewelry shop offers gruesome window into expanding drug war
CSM: the military has replaced the police in Tijuana

LAT: paramilitaries, new drug trafficking groups, and guerrillas fighting for control on Colombia's Pacific coast
"The reemerging armed gangs are wreaking havoc in Nariño state. They are vying with guerrillas and drug traffickers for control of a zone that boasts ideal coca growing conditions as well as a labyrinthine coastline offering hundreds of concealed, mangrove-studded inlets from which to ship drugs to U.S. markets.

The new paramilitary groups, like the rebels and traffickers, often force people such as Antonio from their homes and farms to take possession of land as war booty and to clear the area of potential enemy sympathizers. With an estimated 3 million people having been displaced, Colombia is second only to Sudan in the number of its internal refugees."

LAT: Brookings rept says US drug war has failed, should turn focus to treatment
Brookings: full rept here

NYT mag: the evolution of the revolution - change and stasis in Cuba
"The confining shadow of Fidel’s tropical curtain, on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, was captured in the emptiness before me — of the Malecón, but even more so of the sea. I noticed over subsequent days that Cubans perched on the seafront wall rarely looked outward. When I asked Yoani Sánchez, a dissident blogger (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony), about this, she told me: “We live turned away from the sea because it does not connect us, it encloses us. There is no movement on it. People are not allowed to buy boats because if they had boats, they would go to Florida. We are left, as one of our poets put it, with the unhappy circumstance of water at every turn.”

WP: speaking of unending terms, Chávez tries to extend his again


WP: turnout high in Ghana presidential election

LAT: Islamists poised to take control when Ethiopia withdraws from Mogadishu
"Although the movement is divided by competing ideologies and goals, it has nonetheless made many gains recently through a combination of brutal force and political dialogue.

The militant wing, Shabab, which claims affiliation to Al Qaeda, now controls 90% of southern Somalia, including parts of the capital, Mogadishu. The moderate faction signed a peace deal with Somalia's transitional government that could hand it half the seats in parliament.

Islamists who fled two years ago after their defeat by Ethiopian troops who had crossed the border to prop up Somalia's government are reemerging to assert their authority in several cities, often imposing strict Islamic laws against dancing, drinking or conducting business during prayer time. They're even starting to flex their muscles again to halt piracy offshore...

The other main faction, led by former Islamic Courts chairman Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, is working to reconcile with the transitional government in a power-sharing agreement. Ahmed is viewed as a possible new prime minister, but Shabab commanders accused him of betrayal.

A third Islamist faction falls somewhere between the other two. Rivalries are so bitter that fighting among groups recently broke out south of Mogadishu."

CSM: discontent in the Zimbabwe army leads to looting in Harare
LAT: Zimbabwe has bloody diamonds too
"The prison official said the real aim of the recent crackdown was to give the syndicates operated by top ruling party figures free rein.

"In effect, these operations are not to restore order but to make sure [the syndicates] can take the diamonds," the official says. "But what is devastating us is that they're actually killing people. They're shooting to kill."

Political violence and power struggles in Manicaland province, where the Marange diamonds are found, suggest how important the area is to Mugabe and ZANU-PF. Manicaland was one of the areas most severely hit by political violence after the elections in March, which saw ZANU-PF lose the Mutare council, the mayoral post and 20 parliamentary seats there to the Movement for Democratic Change.

Although Zimbabwe's diamonds are not technically "blood diamonds," or ones that fuel wars, they are bloody in nature."

CSM: talks to end violence in eastern Congo began Monday, already in jeopardy
"A last-minute glitch in the talks between General Nkunda's representatives and the Congolese government still could bring the talks to a precipitous halt. Congo's government announced this weekend that it had invited more than 20 other rebel groups to the talks, a move that Nkunda's spokesman called "impossible" and likely to scupper the talks altogether."
Econ: mapping the wars in the Congo over the last 15 years
Gdn: gendered violence: women and girls are raped, while men are killed
Gdn: people taking on risks to shelter the displaced
"The people who had set up home in the open fields of Nyabirehe had fled fighting between government troops and the rebels in their village of Kiwanja, some 15 miles (24km) north, where more than 50 people had been killed.

'The rebel captain came to Nyabirehe and told everyone to leave, that it was shameful to live in camps,' said Nyanzira Vitwaiki, 14. 'He said they are places where spies and enemies hide. They opened fire because people didn't run fast enough. Five people were hurt.'

With her mother and crippled brother, she was taken in by a family of strangers in Kalengera, a sprawling village that sits midway along what is now a rebel-controlled stretch of line that leans out into a semi-circle from a point just outside Goma in the south, up to Ishasa, some 100 miles north, on the Ugandan border. Hundreds of people displaced by the violence of the past month have been taken in by people here."

Ind: albinos hunted in Tanzania
"There is similar violence throughout east and central Africa. And even in west and southern Africa, albinos face persecution and discrimination. The campaign is being orchestrated by witch doctors who claim they can make people rich using limbs and blood from their white-skinned neighbours. In some areas, albino children go to school with bodyguards, others hide at home, and distraught relatives pile rocks on their dead loved ones to deter grave-robbers."

Slate: Canada's constitutional crisis?!


NYT: Chinese officials sending detractors to mental hospitals
"In an investigative report published Monday by a state-owned newspaper, public security officials in the city of Xintai in Shandong Province were said to have been institutionalizing residents who persist in their personal campaigns to expose corruption or the unfair seizure of their property. Some people said they were committed for up to two years, and several of those interviewed said they were forcibly medicated."

++
history lessons
Gdn: genes reveal forced conversions of Sephardic Jews in 15th and 16th century Spain and Portugal
LAT: Museum of the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea
Slate: inside the Stalin archives
"All of this gave a new lease on life to the incestuous world of Soviet studies, which had been divided for decades into historians who preferred the triumphant version of Soviet history, accessible in official documents like newspapers, and those who listened to the very different story told by witnesses, refugees, and dissidents. This essentially ideological argument ended forever with the publication of archival information by Yale and others, replacing it, for the first time, with real history—and proving, among other things, that the witnesses, refugees, and dissidents had largely been right.

Although he discusses some of the academic issues that lay at the heart of the Yale project, the point of Inside the Stalin Archives is somewhat different: Brent is less interested in what his series meant for Western academics and more interested in explaining the strange atmosphere of post-Soviet Moscow, and in particular the ways in which Russia's twisted past continued to shape its present."

++
NYT: praying for a bailout at the auto altar