From the Washington Post:
During the years when he commanded 30 men and killed more enemy soldiers than he can recall, Tyrese Nyekar said he was known as “War Face.” But in the newly democratic and largely peaceful Liberia, he has traded his machine gun for a shovel. And for $2 a day, he is working to rebuild this battered capital on a road repair crew.
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From the Washington Post:
Bush has been a major critic of leaks of classified information, and his aides have repeatedly said they want to “get to the bottom” of who leaked the name of Wilson’s wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, to the media, which touched off Fitzgerald’s investigation . But in the past 33 months the White House has never disclosed Bush’s apparent involvement in the deliberate disclosure of information meant to undermine Wilson.
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From the Mail & Guardian:
Jacob Zuma would have had his cows ready if his rape accuser had agreed to marry him, the Johannesburg High Court heard on Wednesday.
However, the former deputy president denied having any part in marriage negotiations, saying this was done by the woman’s two “aunts”.
“Yes, if we had reached an agreement with that, I would have had my cows ready,” Zuma told the court.
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From the Washington Post:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he did not know what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was talking about when she said last week that the United States had made thousands of “tactical errors” in handling the war in Iraq, a statement she later said was meant figuratively.
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From The Moscow Times:
John Malkovich is playing a gruesome NKVD colonel in a new British-Russian film currently being shot by Thema Productions at a glue factory in the St. Petersburg suburb of Pushkin.
Set in 1946, “In Transit” is based on real events that took place in Pushkin. A group of German prisoners of war is by accident sent to and held in a transit camp guarded by women immediately after the end of World War II. The location being used for the shoot is the Krasny Treugolnik, or Red Triangle, factory in the south of the city.
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From the New York Times:
The shifting priorities illustrate the trade-off between combat and reconstruction that the American military is still grappling with, but especially in remote regions like this one, where the Iraqi government is still almost nonexistent.
The Marines’ effort is also a test of the Bush administration’s declaration that it will focus this year on holding and rebuilding Iraqi towns, rather than departing after military operations and allowing insurgents to return.
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From the Washington Post:
The new Hamas-led government is broke and failed to pay tens of thousands of Palestinian public workers on Saturday, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday.
It was the first time the radical Islamic group had admitted that it would have difficulty running the West Bank and Gaza Strip without massive foreign aid.
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From the Washington Post:
Researchers said nearly two decades ago that this tiny country was part of an AIDS Belt stretching across the midsection of Africa, a place so infected with a new, incurable disease that, in the hardest-hit places, one in three working-age adults were already doomed to die of it.
But AIDS deaths on the predicted scale never arrived here, government health officials say. A new national study illustrates why: The rate of HIV infection among Rwandans ages 15 to 49 is 3 percent, according to the study, enough to qualify as a major health problem but not nearly the national catastrophe once predicted.
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From the Washington Post:
Two weeks later, Hansen suggested to an audience at the New School University in New York that his counterparts at NOAA were experiencing even more severe censorship. “It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States,” he told the crowd.
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From Reuters:
That was one of the few points of agreement between journalists, a professional blogger and a U.S. military spokesman gathered in New York to discuss media in Iraq.
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From the Atlantic, Mark Bowden’s article on the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran:
He calmly explained to the others what had happened. The men took in the awful news quietly. Then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had submitted his resignation earlier that day because he objected to the mission, said, “Mr. President, I’m very, very sorry.” Jordan ducked into the president’s bathroom and vomited.
America’s elite rescue force had lost eight men, seven helicopters, and a C-130, and had not even made contact with the enemy. It was a debacle. It defined the word “debacle.
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From the New York Times:
Mr. Hussein dodged questions, quoted from the Koran, and again repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the court.
Asked by the prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, how he could go through the evidence against the 148 in just two days before signing off on their execution orders, Mr. Hussein answered, according to a pool report: “That is the right of the head of state.”
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From the New York Times, more Liberia:
According to local legend, recounted by the Africa scholar Stephen Ellis in his book “The Mask of Anarchy,” a baby born in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, miraculously spoke English straight from the womb. It told its mother that a rain of death would fall Christmas Day, and that it did not want to live in such a vicious world, and promptly drew its last breath.
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From the New York Times, Helene Cooper recounts a Liberian story featuring Charles Taylor’s wigged thugs:
The group came upon a burning house. A female Taylor fighter walked up to Janice and admired Logosou. “Oh, what a fine baby!” she cooed. “I’ve killed two like him today.”
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From the International Crisis Group, the April edition of CrisisWatch:
Clashes in Pakistan’s North Waziristan killed over 200 and threatened to spread to neighbouring tribal regions. In Uzbekistan, the government intensified its campaign on opposition activists and international organisations, expelling the United Nations refugee agency and sentencing dissidents to long prison terms. The situation also deteriorated in the Central African Republic, Chad, Ecuador, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau/Senegal and Turkey.
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From the New York Times:
One elaborate tattoo posted shortly after his blog’s inception in late 2004 means “power piglet,” according to Mr. Tang’s translation. Another, on a woman’s lower back, says “motherly beast blessing.”
Marquis Daniels, of the Dallas Mavericks, thought he was getting his initials in Chinese characters but what his arm actually says is “healthy woman roof,” Mr. Tang said. Similarly, Shawn Marion of the Phoenix Suns was under the impression that his nickname, “the Matrix,” was tattooed on his leg, but Mr. Tang says the inscription translates as something like “demon bird moth balls.”
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From the BBC:
“He was wearing a white flowing robe,” said Babagana Alhaji Kata.
“He passed through immigration but when he reached customs they were suspicious and they insisted on searching the jeep, where they found a large amount of US dollars.
“After a further search they discovered he was Charles Taylor.”
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From the BBC:
Liberia’s ex-President Charles Taylor, wanted on war crimes charges, has disappeared from the villa where he lived in exile, Nigeria says.
All of those supposed to have been guarding him have been arrested.
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From the Washington Post:
The unwitting end of the hunt comes at a time when al-Qaeda sympathizers like Irhabi 007 are making explosive new use of the Internet. Countless Web sites and password-protected forums — most of which have sprung up in the last several years — now cater to would-be jihadists like Irhabi 007. The terrorists who congregate in those cybercommunities are rapidly becoming skilled in hacking, programming, executing online attacks and mastering digital and media design — and Irhabi was a master of all those arts.
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From the BBC:
Mr Taylor is accused of selling diamonds and buying weapons for Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front rebels, who were notorious for hacking off the hands and legs of civilians during a 10-year war.
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