discrimination [for better or worse]

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

NYT: Mullahs in Punjab siding with landowners, status quo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

alternatives [packing heat]

NYT: updates on protests in Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The soldiers have turned back hundreds of protesters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

day of rage [rocks and rockets]

AFP: Hamas calls for "day of rage" in response to death of leader Nizar Rayyan, killed in a targeted airstrike Thursday; so far, mostly sporadic rock-throwing

NYT: Israeli military claims Rayyan was one of Hamas' "most extreme" leaders; that his house stored weapons, had a secret tunnel and served as a communications center. But what's next?
"Israel’s stated goal for its operation is to halt the rocket fire from Gaza and to create a new security situation in southern Israel, where three civilians and a soldier have been killed in rocket attacks in the past six days... But in including symbols of the government among its targets, Israel seemed to be blurring the lines. On Thursday, Israeli warplanes and naval forces bombed the legislative building — a Gaza landmark — and the Ministry of Justice, the Israeli military said."

In Paris, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni rejected a French proposal for a 48-hour ceasefire: “There is no humanitarian crisis in the strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce.”
Gdn: the UN would disagree
"Much of Gaza's public infrastructure has been destroyed and the territory is in a "critical emergency" after seven days of devastating bombing with air strikes averaging one every 20 minutes, the UN said yesterday... "By any definition this is a humanitarian crisis and more," said Max Gaylard, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for the Palestinians. He said there had been on average one air strike every 20 minutes since the bombing began, intensifying at night and covering the whole Gaza Strip."
NYT: more on Gaza's tunnels
Gdn: interactive overview of Israeli air attacks during the conflict's first days and Israel's main political and military options
"Israel says Hamas has been weakened and is facing popular discontent but does not claim it is about to be overthrown. Barring such a drastic development the most likely scenario for the end of this crisis remains a more sustainable ceasefire than the one that ended on December 19. But as Ma'ariv's Shelah put it: "Each side wants the other to reach that point on their knees."
Gdn: poll shows that 52% of Israelis support airstrikes, 19% back a land invasion, and only 20% want a ceasefire
WP: Israeli ground invasion seems more likely as weather clears up, troops amass on border
"Analysts expect Israel to seek a truce with Hamas on terms more favorable to the Jewish state than the ones under the six-month deal brokered by Egypt that expired in mid-December.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit on Thursday floated the idea of using international monitors, or even armed forces, to ensure that any future cease-fire holds. Israel has indicated it would welcome unarmed international observers...

But there is pressure within Israel for the government to continue its campaign, and perhaps topple Hamas altogether. That would almost certainly require a ground operation, which would be likely to raise the death toll substantially on both sides.

"There is no way to take Hamas out without going into Gaza. The problem is the price," said Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli major general..."
CNN: to protect against retaliatory violence, Israel closes West Bank entries, men under 50 prevented from entering Jerusalem mosques
CSM: conflict with Gaza may be shifting Israeli opinion leftward, before February's parliamentary elections
IHT: foreign journalists still not allowed into Gaza

WP: Iraqis take control of Green Zone as part of security handover; al-Maliki declares sovereignty restored, but uncertainty abounds
NYT: some violence during handover, including 24 Iraqi tribal leaders killed at a meeting to discuss national reconciliation efforts
LAT: what the transition looks like on the ground: "Sometimes the Americans lead, other times the Iraqis."

"With this relationship you have one battalion commander, an Iraqi battalion commander in the lead. He has an American commander to advise him," said U.S. Army Lt. Col. John Richardson...

U.S. officials say they need their own combat formations out with the Iraqis in order to help mentor them in all aspects of soldiering. They think such "partner units" will be necessary even after June 30, when the security accord calls for all U.S. forces to leave Iraq's cities."
BBC: US soldiers will be playing by new rules
"Iraqis now have the right to prosecute US soldiers for any crimes committed while off-base and off-duty..."
Gdn: Iraqis take over camp of Iranian dissidents, tell them it's time to go
"US troops disarmed the opposition group known as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) after the 2003 invasion. They removed hundreds of armoured vehicles donated by Saddam Hussein but kept the camp intact because some Bush administration officials allegedly saw the MEK as a potential tool for regime change in Iran."
WP: reflecting on the next steps

AP: US preparing for 20,000-strong troop surge in southern Afghanistan...
NYT: ...and seeking new supply routes through Central Asia, as alternatives to the Khyber Pass in Pakistan.
"More than 80 percent of the supplies for American and allied forces in Afghanistan now flow through Pakistan... Khyber and the narrow highway that winds through it were once relatively safe, guarded by tribes paid by the Pakistani government that were subject to collective punishment for crimes against travelers, no matter who committed them. But this year militants, including forces led by an upstart lieutenant to the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud, have largely taken over the area....

The officials said delicate negotiations were under way not only with the Central Asian states bordering Afghanistan but also with Russia, to work out the details of new supply routes... But the new supply arrangements could leave the United States more reliant on cooperation from authoritarian countries like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which have poor records on democracy and human rights."
NYT: the Taliban kills 20 Afghan police officers, targets high-profile defector in Musa Qala, Helmand Province.
"The attack on Mullah Salam was emblematic of the fight for Musa Qala, long a Taliban stronghold and a center for opium smuggling... [It] was precipitated by a last-minute switch of allegiance by one of the area’s police chiefs, Abdul Manan, who took 15 of his gunmen with him. Mr. Manan and his men joined the attack against his former boss."

Manan explained the reason for his shift in allegiance: "I saw the bad behavior of infidels, I saw the bad behavior of Afghan forces, so that’s why I joined the Taliban... It was a shame working with this government, which seeks the support of non-Muslims. I am a Muslim, and I should support Muslims. I will carry on jihad against them in the future."
NYT: corruption in Afghanistan worsening, "contributing to the collapse of public confidence in [the Karzai] government and to the resurgence of the Taliban"

NYT: Army-wide review possible of violence committed by soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan
"Focusing attention on soldiers charged with killings is a shift for the military, which since the start of the war in Iraq has largely deflected any suggestion that combat could be a factor in violent behavior among some returning service members..."

Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, responsible for a similar inquiry in Colorado, said the Army is "looking for a trend, something that happened through their life cycle that might have contributed to this, something we could have seen coming."

NYT: Sri Lankan military takes Kilinochchi, rebel capital; suicide attack killing 3 in Colombo is assumed retaliation
"Over the last several months, the military has advanced steadily into rebel-held territory, first sweeping the L.T.T.E. away from the northwestern coast and then pushing them further into the northeast.

As the fighting has spread, more and more civilians have been displaced from their homes, cornered deeper into rebel-held areas and forced to sleep in temples and schools and some only in makeshift lean-tos in paddy fields. The United Nations has been allowed to send food rations to what it estimates to be over 200,000 civilians displaced by the war...

The test now is whether the government, now that it seems to have cornered the rebels militarily, can deliver a political solution acceptable to its Tamil minority."
Reuters: possible effects for the future of the Tamil Tigers
"The diplomatic currency on which the Tigers had long traded -- that they are defending a minority -- suffered in December when Human Rights Watch accused them of mistreating and forcibly recruiting the Tamils they say they represent. Many analysts say Prabhakaran may order bombings or air raids in Colombo, but will not be able to reverse military gains as spectacularly as he did in the 1980s and 1990s. The military and analysts expect the Tigers to increasingly go underground as they lose turf, changing back into the guerrilla group they started as and away from the conventional force they have become. In a possible sign of things to come, a suspected rebel suicide bomber killed three airmen in Colombo hours after Kilinochchi fell."
Gdn: reminds us that the government captured Kilinochchi before and the Tigers took it back; suggests the military's next major target likely to be Mullaitivu port

CNN: terrorist attacks in India kill 5; United Liberation Front of Asom suspected author

NYT: after the resignation of Somalia's president, new opportunity or status quo?
"The scramble to succeed Mr. Yusuf could set off an ugly clan-based political melee. By contrast, the prime minister and other top Somali officials could give the post to a moderate Islamist leader, who might be the unifying figurehead that Somalia so desperately needs.

Or it may simply be too late because so much of the country has already fallen into the hands of powerful, hard-line Islamists who behead opponents and have, on at least one occasion, stoned to death a teenage girl who said she had been raped."
BBC: the International Maritime Bureau says anti-piracy efforts off Somalia are working...
LAT: ...as an Egyptian ship is seized and Malaysia comes to the rescue of an Indian tanker
CSM: China sees this as a chance to boost its naval power

NYT: the LRA massacres some 200 people in Congo
"[T]he rebels are known as excellent jungle fighters. They often carry solar panels on their backs to power their satellite phones and they can live on very little food and water. In the past several weeks, they seemed to have eluded the government troops and airstrikes.

In the process, they have raided several Congolese villages, possibly to signal that they are still a lethal force to be reckoned with. According to United Nations officials, the rebels struck a village called Faradje on Thursday, killing 40 people. Over the next two days, they attacked two more villages, Doruma and Gurba, killing 149 more people.

Ugandan military officials have said that most of the victims were women and children, who were cut into pieces. A rebel spokesman denied responsibility for the killings, telling Agence France-Presse that the rebels were not in the area."

LAT: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev eliminates jury trials for "crimes against the state"
"The law does away with jury trials for a range of offenses, leaving people accused of treason, revolt, sabotage, espionage or terrorism at the mercy of three judges rather than a panel of peers. Critics say the law is dangerous because judges in Russia are vulnerable to manipulation and intimidation by the government."

New Yorker: challenges facing aid workers in eastern Chad

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reuters: pirates demand $35 million ransom for Ukrainian ship

Gdn: bombs in Damascus and Delhi

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

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

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

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

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

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

NYT: test your specialty with squirt guns