Category: News

NYT:

This spring and summer, the slow and methodical siege of this southern provincial capital intensified. The Taliban and their allies set up road checkpoints, burned 20 trucks and slowed the flow of supplies to reconstruction projects. All told, in surrounding Helmand Province, five teachers, one judge and scores of police officers have been killed. Dozens of schools and courts have been shuttered, according to Afghan officials.

“Our government is weak,” said Fowzea Olomi, a local women’s rights advocate whose driver was shot dead in May and who fears she is next. “Anarchy has come.”

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SL Trib:

Items in the vehicle when Jeffs was captured included: 27 stacks of $100 bills, worth $2,500 each; 14 cellular phones; a radar detector, two Global Positioning System units; two female wigs, one blonde and one brunette; several knives; several CDs; three watches; three Ipods; multiple credit cards; seven sets of keys; a photograph of Jeffs and his father; a Bible and a Book of Mormon.
The items were seen on pool video footage created with official permission.

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KSL:

FLDS prophet Warren Steed Jeffs, 50, was taken into custody after he and two other people were pulled over late Monday by a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper on Interstate 15 just north of Las Vegas, FBI spokesman David Staretz said.

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NYT:

But the case has since taken a surprising turn, even by the bizarre standards of violence, organized crime and police brutality that have accompanied Chechnya’s lingering war. It turns out Elina Ersenoyeva, 26, led two lives.

In addition to her public positions, she was a secret bride of Shamil Basayev, the one-footed Chechen terrorist leader and Russia’s most wanted man, who died in an explosion on July 11.

Ms. Ersenoyeva’s mother said her daughter had not voluntarily married Mr. Basayev, who remained unapologetic and defiant after sending female suicide bombers to Moscow and onto passenger jets, and who had planned the lethal hostage sieges in a Russian theater and a public school. She agreed to marry him, her mother said, only because the separatists had threatened to kill her two brothers if she did not do as they said.

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Washington Post:

A crowd of as many as 5,000 people, including hundreds armed with AK-47 assault rifles, attacked Camp Abu Naji and hauled away window and door frames, corrugated roofing and metal pipes, despite the presence of a 450-member Iraqi army brigade meant to guard the base.

“The looters stole everything — even the bricks,” said Ahmed Mohammed Abdul Latief, 20, a student at Maysan University. “They almost leveled the whole base to the ground.”

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Wired:

Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers’ perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they’ve succeeded.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that’s basically what’s happening right now.

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Washington Post:

ABC News’s Martha Raddatz was not satisfied. “The violence has gotten worse in certain areas,” she reminded him. “Is it not time for a new strategy?”

Bush acted as if Raddatz were Cindy Sheehan. “We’re not leaving (Iraq), so long as I’m the president,” he vowed. “That would be a huge mistake. It would send an unbelievably terrible signal to reformers across the region. It would say we’ve abandoned our desire to change the conditions that create terror. It would give the terrorists a safe haven from which to launch attacks. It would embolden Iran. It would embolden extremists.”

“Sir,” Raddatz pointed out, “that’s not really the question.”

Bush shook his head in disbelief. “Sounded like the question to me,” he said.

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NYT:

“The victory that Hezbollah achieved in Lebanon will have earthshaking regional consequences that will have an impact much beyond the borders of Lebanon itself,” Yasser Abuhilalah of Al Ghad, a Jordanian daily, wrote in Tuesday’s issue.

“The resistance celebrates the victory,” read the front-page headline in Al Wafd, an opposition daily in Egypt.

Hezbollah’s perceived triumph has propelled, and been propelled by, a wave already washing over the region. Political Islam was widely seen as the antidote to the failures of Arab nationalism, Communism, socialism and, most recently, what is seen as the false promise of American-style democracy. It was that wave that helped the banned but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood win 88 seats in Egypt’s Parliament last December despite the government’s violent efforts to stop voters from getting to the polls. It was that wave that swept Hamas into power in the Palestinian government in January, shocking Hamas itself.

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NYT:

The civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had “ripped off” urban communities for years, “selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables.”

In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart “should” displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

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Guardian:

Welcome to Eritrea, Africa’s most paranoid state. Talk about the football, talk about the 30p beer and 10p cappuccinos in the capital Asmara, but if you want to talk about the government, do it over the internet.

Behind locked doors, and in hushed tones, Asmarinos trace the beginning of real paranoia to 2001, when 15 senior politicians were jailed for suggesting that President Isaias Afewerki was not a democrat. Eleven of them have not been seen since. Shortly afterwards, the independent media was shut down. At least 13 journalists remain in prison. Only North Korea has a worse record on press freedom.

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The man behind the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman into his world, for
better or worse

LA Times:

Ignoring the two policemen who hovered a few yards away, he tiptoed past them to stand over me. He rubbed my shoulder. His gestures were oddly gentle—even fond. I felt sick.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching over to tousle my hair. “We love our little reporter. Don’t we guys? We love our little reporter.”

I stared down at the dirt as he whispered in my ear, “I’m sorry, baby, give me a kiss. Give me a kiss.”

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ICG:

July 2006 was the grimmest month for conflict prevention around the world in three years. In 36 months of publishing CrisisWatch, the International Crisis Group has not recorded such severe deteriorations in so many conflict situations as in the past month, and several have significant regional and global implications.

The Middle East erupted with full-scale conflict between Israel and Hizbollah in south Lebanon, and there was a major escalation in Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza – both fronts threatening further regional destabilisation. Insecurity and sectarian violence surged in Iraq, claiming over 100 civilian lives daily, as the U.S. military reported a 40% increase in major attacks in Baghdad.

The Horn of Africa also showed ominous signs of breakdown. Somalia sits on the brink of all-out civil war, which is drawing in the wider region: Ethiopian troops entered Somalia to support the transitional federal government, and Eritrea is arming the opposing Union of Islamic Courts. In Sudan, implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement was at a standstill, with rebels split, and fighting, over the agreement.

In South Asia, the 11 July Mumbai bombings that killed over 200 had wider implications for the normalisation process between India and Pakistan, with New Delhi accusing Islamabad of being soft on terrorism. Sri Lankan government troops launched a ground assault on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) after four days of air strikes, considered by the LTTE to be an “act of war”.

Tensions rose dramatically on the Korean Peninsula after Pyongyang fired seven test missiles, which received unanimous condemnation from the global community. The situation also deteriorated in Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire and Haiti.

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SportsShooter:

Months after my trip to El Salvador with Give a Kid a Backpack Foundation, images still keep me awake at night.

I can’t get rid of the passionate embrace those kids gave me on the last day. I can still feel the tight hugs they gave me as they uttered “Thank you” over and over again.

They didn’t let me go then and I know that I still haven’t let go of them.

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NYT:

A few moments later, Amuri’s eyes rolled back in his head, his chest stilled and he was dead.

“Bring something for us to wrap the boy,” a nurse called out.

His mother, Maria Cheusi, realized that her son’s life had slipped away. He was the third child she would bury.

“Mama, mama,” she cried, collapsing to her knees in a contorted pose. “My only son, my only son.”

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TMZ, via WMFU’s Beware the Blog:

Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Mel Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, “You mother f****r. I’m going to f*** you.” The report also says “Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he ‘owns Malibu’ and will spend all of his money to ‘get even’ with me.”

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?”

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Guardian:

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office seems determined to press ahead with courting radical Islamists. Just this month, the British government paid for Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey to discuss the future of European Islam. At home, it funded two Islamist youth organisations, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation, to help run a roadshow of Muslim scholars to tour the country. Fosis and YMO, while condemning violence, are ideological allies of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami. It is ironic that conservative thinkers categorise these organisations accurately as part of an Islamist extreme right, while many on the left continue, wrongly, to see them as part of some wider international Muslim liberation movement.

While this situation remains, there is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name.

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From SF Chronicle:

A jury convicted four leaders of a white-supremacist prison gang Friday on charges they used murder and intimidation to protect their drug-dealing operations behind bars.

The trial is part of one of the largest federal capital cases, with more than a dozen people potentially facing the death penalty. More defendants face trials in Los Angeles later this year.

Barry “The Baron” Mills, Tyler “The Hulk” Bingham, Edgar “The Snail” Hevle and Christopher Overton Gibson were the first defendants to stand trial in the federal racketeering case aimed at dismantling the feared Aryan Brotherhood.

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From the BBC:

Television journalists were travelling with Russian forces who captured a group of rebel fighters sheltering in the village of Alkhan-Kala.

Mr Yandiyev, dressed in camouflage, can be seen in the footage standing injured near a bus.

He is questioned by a Russian general who eventually shouts: “Take him away, finish him off, shoot him, damn it!”

Mr Yandiyev was then led away and has not been seen since.

General Alexander Baranov, who was seen on camera sending him off to be shot, has since been promoted and awarded a Hero of Russia medal.

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From the New York Times:

The crisis in Darfur, long neglected, finally burst into the world’s consciousness. Congo remains largely forgotten. It is hard to understand why. Four million people have died in Congo since 1998, half of them children under 5, according to the International Rescue Committee. Though the war in Congo officially ended in 2002, its deadly legacy of violence and decay will kill twice as many people this year as have died in the entire Darfur conflict, which began in 2003.

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