Category: News

  • Shiite Militias Move into Oil-Rich Kirkuk, as Kurds Dig In

    From the Washington Post:

    Hundreds of Shiite Muslim militiamen have deployed in recent weeks to this restive city — widely considered the most likely flash point for an Iraqi civil war — vowing to fight any attempt to shift control over Kirkuk to the Kurdish-governed north, according to U.S. commanders and diplomats, local police and politicians.

    Until recently, the presence of the militias here was minimal. U.S. officials have called the Shiite armed groups the deadliest threat to security in much of the country. They have been blamed for hundreds of killings during mounting sectarian violence in central and southern Iraq since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in February.

    Here.

  • Untitled post 7560

    From the Washington Post:

    As he left, national intelligence director John Negroponte, surrounded by stiff-armed bodyguards, ignored a reporter’s shouted question about leaks. The closest the director got to controversy was when he was asked by an audience member (the questions were filtered by a moderator) about the warrantless wiretapping program.

    “Yes, well,” the director replied, then cleared his throat and started again. He assured his audience that “there are very, very rigorous safeguards and oversight that are built into the execution of these programs” — without mentioning that such safeguards did not include informing most members of Congress or the courts.

    Here.

  • Thrills and spills as Epic riders get down and dirty

    Thrills and spills as Epic riders get down and dirty

    From the Cape Times:

    Mossel Bay: The 1 046 cyclists in the 2006 Cape Epic had a baptism of rain, mud and more mud on the first day of their eight-day mountain bike race that started in Knysna on Saturday.

    They were so dirty I’m sure even their mothers wouldn’t have recognised them.

    Here.

  • Armenian Student Killed by Skinheads

    From The Moscow Times:

    “I was there yesterday and talked to the police chief,” Abramyan said. “I can’t understand how a group of people could simply stab a person in the metro in the very center of Moscow and get away. How did the police manage not to arrest anyone? What about their video cameras?”

    Two million Armenians live in Russia, Abramyan said. He added that Armenians have been advised against riding the metro in the evening and going out in the outlying districts of cities, where most racially motivated attacks occur.

    Here.

  • Google's China Problem

    Google's China Problem

    From the New York Times Magazine:

    When I spoke to Kai-Fu Lee in Google’s Beijing offices, there were moments that to me felt jarring. One minute he sounded like a freedom-loving Googler, arguing that the Internet inherently empowers its users. But the next minute he sounded more like Jack Ma of Alibaba — insisting that the Chinese have no interest in rocking the boat. It is a circular logic I encountered again and again while talking to China’s Internet executives: we don’t feel bad about filtering political results because our users aren’t looking for that stuff anyway.

    They may be right about their users’ behavior. But you could just as easily argue that their users are incurious because they’re cowed. Who would openly search for illegal content in a public Internet cafe — or even at home, since the government requires that every person with personal Internet access register his name and phone number with the government for tracking purposes? It is also possible that the government’s crackdown on the Internet could become more intense if the country’s huge population of poor farmers begins agitating online. The government is reasonably tolerant of well-educated professionals online. But the farmers, upset about corrupt local officials, are serious activists, and they pose a real threat to Beijing; they staged 70,000 demonstrations in 2004, many of which the government violently suppressed.

    Here.

  • Fast & Pray for Mr. Right?

    Fast & Pray for Mr. Right?

    From the Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

    Bimbo Akinyele
    If by age 29-32, I am still single? Then it must be a curse. Ehn! God forbid sha. That is not my portion. I know there are ladies who are in the habit of snubbing men. I am really sorry for them. They don’t realise that, unfortunately, we are just a seasonal merchandise. Once your season comes and goes, and you fail to grab it, you are likely to bite your fingers in regret. For me o, I will not wait until it is late before I start to pray and fast. It is very important and I know it.

    Here.

  • Somali Islamists declare jihad on warlords

    From the Mail & Guardian:

    “Let us eliminate these warlords and set up a peaceful administration supported by the vast majority of people in Mogadishu,” Sulley said, prompting the crowd to chant angry slogans denouncing the warlords.

    “Down with the agents of America and down with agents promoting Satanic teaching,” they yelled, according to an Agence France-Presse correspondent on the scene.

    Here.

  • Gang War Panics Mall

    From the Cape Argus:

    Shoppers ran for their lives when bloody warfare between two rival Cape Flats gangs spilled over into a crowded Wynberg shopping mall.

    The confrontation, between members of rival Hanover Park gangs the Ghetto Kids and the Americans, began outside the magistrate’s court where a gang leader was appearing yesterday.

    It then spilled into the streets and the busy Maynard Mall.

    Three men were stabbed.

    Here.

  • Bringing it all back home

    From the New York Times:

    A practiced escape artist, Charles Taylor knows he is better off in Europe than in Sierra Leone, where thousands of people would happily administer vigilante justice. Any escape from the protection of the United Nations detention center in Freetown would be a death sentence.
    Here.

  • The Armenian Genocide

    The Armenian Genocide

    From the New York Times:

    The documentary honors the victims of the Armenian genocide and also pays tribute to dissidents in Turkey who are brave enough to speak out despite government censorship. And that makes it all the odder that so many public television stations here censored the follow-up program as soon as a few lobby groups complained.

    Here.

  • 'Gotcha' Master Tastes His Own Medicine

    'Gotcha' Master Tastes His Own Medicine

    From the New York Times:

    But Mazher Mahmood, a reporter whose modus operandi is to dress up as a wealthy Arab businessman and secretly record conversations with his unwitting victims, recently met his match in George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament and frequent critic of Israel and the United States.

    Here.

  • Giant Mao statue erected in Tibet

    Giant Mao statue erected in Tibet

    From the BBC:

    “Many Tibetan people suggested we should have a statue of Chairman Mao to show our gratitude,” a local Communist Party official told Xinhua:

    Here.

  • Why the Secrecy? Only the Bureaucrats Know

    From the New York Times:

    Why do bureaucrats insist on spending the taxpayers’ money to keep aging government paperwork from the taxpayers?

    The question has arisen anew because of the discovery that military and intelligence agencies have pulled some 55,000 pages of decades-old documents from public access at the National Archives. Some documents were photocopied long ago by researchers. In the case of the redacted 1946 memorandum, the State Department had already published it in the multivolume history “Foreign Relations of the United States.”

    Here.

  • A General Misunderstanding

    Machael DeLong, from the New York Times:

    This is why the much-repeated claims that Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t “give us enough troops” in Iraq ring hollow. First, such criticisms ignore that the agreed-upon plan was for a lightning operation into Baghdad. In addition, logistically it would have been well nigh impossible to bring many more soldiers through the bottleneck in Kuwait. And doing so would have carried its own risk: you cannot sustain a fighting force of 300,000 or 500,000 men for long, and it would have left us with few reserves, putting our troops at risk in other parts of the world. Given our plan, we thought we had the right number of troops to accomplish our mission.

    The outcome and ramifications of a war, however, are impossible to predict. Saddam Hussein had twice opened his jails, flooding the streets with criminals. The Iraqi police walked out of their uniforms in the face of the invasion, compounding domestic chaos. We did not expect these developments.

    Here.

  • In Iraqi Divide, Echoes of Bosnia for U.S. Troops

    In Iraqi Divide, Echoes of Bosnia for U.S. Troops

    From the New York Times:

    “You talk to people here and it’s literally the same conversations I heard in Bosnia,” Colonel Donahoe said. “I had a police colonel tell me the other day that all the people in Jurf,” a predominantly Sunni town, “are evil, including the children.”

    Here.

  • Generals Break With Tradition Over Rumsfeld

    From the New York Times:

    Yet Mr. Kohn said he found the chorus of attacks disquieting. He was disturbed, he said, by an assertion made by Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who retired from the Marines, in an essay for Time magazine, that he was writing “with the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership.”

    “That’s a fairly chilling thought,” Mr. Kohn said. “Chilling because they’re not supposed to be undermining their civilian leadership.”

    “It’s not the military that holds the civilian leadership accountable,” he said. “It’s Congress, the voters, investigative journalists. Things have been turned upside down here.”

    Here.

  • Khat Trade Rules in Somalia

    Khat Trade Rules in Somalia

    From the Washington Post:

    “If the country was ever normal, I’d quit and return to teaching,” said Ali, 40, who guards her stash with an AK-47 and has a gold tooth that she says makes her appear “tough.” “What else can I do to survive?”

    Here.

  • Death, famine, drought: cost of 3C global rise in temperature

    From the Guardian:

    Global temperatures will rise by an average of 3C due to climate change and cause catastrophic damage around the world unless governments take urgent action, according to the UK government’s chief scientist.

    In a stark warning issued yesterday Sir David King said that a rise of this magnitude would cause famine and drought and threaten millions of lives.

    It would also cause a worldwide drop in cereal crops of between 20 and 400m tonnes, put 400 million more people at risk of hunger, and put up to 3 billion people at risk of flooding and without access to fresh water supplies.

    Here.

  • The Ruthless Truth

    The Ruthless Truth

    From The Moscow Times:

    The war on the Eastern Front remains largely “undiscovered country” for the Western reader despite the fact that the Red Army was responsible for nearly 75 percent of German military losses, including soldiers killed in battle, wounded, taken prisoner and otherwise unaccounted for. The best guide to this terrain is Vasily Grossman, who spent over 1,000 days at the front as a combat correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, the Soviet Army newspaper. A decorated lieutenant colonel by the end of the war, he fell afoul of the Soviet authorities and died in 1964 a non-person, his works swept from library shelves and bookshops.

    Here.

  • Dying for Water in Somalia's Drought

    Dying for Water in Somalia's Drought

    From the Washington Post:

    “Even when local people are good and plan out water catchment systems, warlords just take it over. That’s why we have so many people drinking horrible water with worms and dirt and getting very ill,” said Abdul Rashid, a Somali nurse in Rabdore who works with the International Medical Corps, a nonprofit relief group. “It’s like the start of the water wars right here in Somalia.”

    Here.