• NYT:

    I have experienced nearly all of these threats firsthand. In May 2004, a Canadian journalist and I were seized by insurgents inside Falluja. I was able to convince our captors that the Canadian, who spoke no Arabic, was not a Westerner but my older brother, and that he had suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak.

    A month later, National Public Radio sent me to Najaf to report on a protest against the fighting between the Americans and the Mahdi Army. Iraqi police officers handcuffed me, beat me and dragged me into the main government building. The governor’s deputy released me on the condition that I not take Mr. Sadr’s side in my reporting.

    The Mahdi Army then arrested me that September, in the Sadr City slum of northeastern Baghdad. I had been reporting from the hospital, where I was interviewing injured civilians. The militia men took me to a mosque, where a very young sheik questioned me. I lied about my employer, which was still National Public Radio, saying instead that I worked for a German station. He told me that I had better not be a spy, or else. My identity papers were copied and returned to me.

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  • International Crisis Group:

    Eight actual or potential conflict situations around the world deteriorated in August 2006, according to the new issue of CrisisWatch,* released today. Sri Lanka saw full-scale military clashes in eastern and northern regions kill hundreds and displace some 200,000. Sudan’s Darfur region continued its slide, with the government launching a new offensive and the World Food Programme estimating that 500,000 people are now cut off from emergency food aid. After security forces killed a key Balochistan leader, Pakistan experienced violent protests and province-wide strikes. International tensions over nuclear programs in both Iran and North Korea worsened. The situation also deteriorated in Burundi, Kuril Islands/Northern Territories (Russia/Japan) and the Taiwan Strait.

    Four conflict situations showed improvement in August 2006. Following 34 days of war between Israel and Hizbollah, a UN-brokered ceasefire commenced on 14 August. In Uganda, the government and rebel Lord’s Resistance Army signed a truce, though significant barriers to peace remain. The situation also improved in Angola and Togo.

    For September 2006, CrisisWatch identifies Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan as Conflict Risk Alerts, or situations at particular risk of new or significantly escalated conflict in the coming month. A Conflict Resolution Opportunity has been identified for Uganda.

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  • 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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  • NYT:

    IF P. T. Barnum had hired Breughel or Bosch to paint sideshow banners, they might have resembled the art of Joe Coleman. Obsessively depicting a grim moral universe of transgression and retribution, Mr. Coleman paints grotesque images of murderers and victims, freaks and monsters, disease, depravity and perversities of every kind.

    In his painstakingly detailed paintings, Charles Manson leers, JonBenet Ramsey pouts, pinheads dance, drunkards lie with poxied whores, and corpses display their wounds like obscene stigmata. Drug addicts loll in ruined cityscapes under boiling H-bomb skies, 1930’s gangsters grin on their way to the gallows, and Mr. Coleman and his wife, Whitney Ward, reign over the apocalypse, enthroned on the head of a giant Satan. In a startlingly prophetic vision of his from 2000, the twin towers burn.
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  • I’ve been in Vegas photographing Warren Jeffs and my Powerbook is in the shop. I’ll post something about photographing Jeffs once I get a minute or two.

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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.”

    Here.

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  • Wooster:

    Made with 323 Rubiks cubes. Lovely.

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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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  • NYT:

    In Capcom’s action game Dead Rising, almost everything is a weapon, including mall benches, mannequin arms, stuffed animals and wire hangers. Not that beating a zombie with a stuffed animal is very effective, but you can do it.

    The game begins as Frank West, a photojournalist, arrives by helicopter in a small town that has been sealed off by the National Guard. The game begins, not with killing zombies, but with photographing them; one can unlock new skills through points awarded for photos of zombie hordes, imperiled humans or the cleavage of scantily clad female zombies.

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  • Roy Gutman, DART, via Romenesko:
    For example: a deportation of Bosnian Muslims from a village on the Drina by the Serbian state railways in sealed passenger cars—which could only have happened on the orders of the top officials in the state. Upon hearing about the existence of concentration camps, I made an enormous effort to put together a complete picture of what went on in one place—I chose Omarska. It was not just because of the atrocity, but because in a fixed location under state control, any crime can be attributed to the state.

    After reporting that there was a string of concentration camps throughout Bosnia, I had a rather rude awakening. What I discovered was that I was not just up against the rump Yugoslav state and its criminal leadership, but the US and nearly every other western government as well, who had every ability to find out the facts on their own but chose not to. The US government response to my initial stories on Omarska—confirmation, denial, and then after several weeks of supposed careful collation of intelligence, a more considered denial—spoke volumes about the West’s overall attitude toward Bosnia, toward European Muslims, toward war crimes, and toward genocide.

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  • WoosterCollective:

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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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  • CJR:

    On July 25, Fox News reporter Bill Hemmer stood on a balcony and pointed to a hilltop on the Lebanon side of Israel’s border. The camera zoomed in. “It’s possible the latest Katushya rocket round left that high point,” Hemmer said, the camera following his sweeping hand over the hazy landscape, “and went down valley to the lower point of the Golan Heights.”

    Later, Fox News reporter Greg Palkot provided an update: Hezbollah had issued a directive to “the American media,” starting with Fox. “We have been advised by the Hezbollah militia here not to show the exact positions where those rockets are launched from.” Under Palkot’s long face, a graphic read, “Hezbollah’s Request.”

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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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  • Wired:

    “It was a time where, for a while, the top-selling interactive games in the world were essentially books,” said Jason Scott, a Boston filmmaker and Unix system administrator who is shooting a documentary called Get Lamp about text adventure pioneers. As with his last film — a five-and-a-half-hour documentary about bulletin boards called BBS: The Documentary — Scott’s plan is to archive a period in computing history that’s at risk of drifting into obscurity.

    Text-based games faded from popular culture in the late 1980s as personal computers became advanced enough to process detailed graphics and sound. But early favorites, like the underground adventure series Zork created by MIT students in the late 1970s, still have a cult following. Online repositories like The Interactive Fiction Archive and the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games also maintain access to early works.

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