Churlish and cynical? Surely not

Tim Judah has an article in The New York Times about Serbia and its past:

The Serbian Parliament passed a resolution condemning the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in July of 1995, soon after Bosnian Serb forces conquered the town. The reactions to the resolution, however, have been shockingly churlish and cynical. Some, especially, but not only, Bosnian Muslims, have complained that the resolution was worthless because it talks only of a “crime” and a “tragedy”, not a “genocide”. Others say Serbia’s government pushed this resolution through merely to curry favor with the European Union, which it desperately wants to join.
Such responses, however, fail to account for the deep divisions in the Serbian Parliament and public, between the supporters of the resolution and those who deny any responsibility for the massacre. Indeed, in Serbia as anywhere else, politics is the art of the possible, and that the resolution was proposed at all is an achievement.
The Srebrenica massacre was the single worst crime of the Bosnian war; indeed, it was the single worst war crime in Europe since 1945. It was also one of the final acts of the conflict; four months later the leaders of the exhausted Muslims, Serbs, and Croats were corralled onto an airbase in Dayton, Ohio, where they signed a deal ending the fighting. Bosnia remains a deeply divided and dysfunctional country, but the peace has held.
The resolution is yet another step toward putting the ghosts of Srebrenica to rest. With two exceptions— Ratko Mladic, the commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the war, and Goran Hadzic, a leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia— every single person indicted by the United Nations’ war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, including those who carried out the massacre, has had to face justice in The Hague.
Moreover, the tribunal has ruled that the massacre at Srebrenica constituted genocide. In 2007 the International Court of Justice agreed; although, notably, it stopped short of blaming Serbia, saying instead that Belgrade’s responsibility lay in failing to prevent the killings by the Bosnian Serb forces which it supported and supplied.
The idea of passing a resolution in the Serbian Parliament on Srebrenica is not new, nor is the idea of recognizing the massacre. Five years ago Serbia’s president, Boris Tadic, went to Srebrenica to pay homage to the victims. He did not take responsibility for the killings in the name of Serbia, but the visit was nevertheless a brave act: many other Serbs either deny that a terrible crime was committed in their name at Srebrenica, or they shrug and say that horrible things were done during the conflict to Serbs as well, and that nobody talks of apologizing for them.
Tuesday’s resolution was hardly unanimous; it passed with just 127 votes in the 250-member Parliament, and many of its opponents stood fast to the nationalist rhetoric of the 1990s. Like many Serbs, they demanded a resolution condemning all crimes committed during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, especially those against Serbs. The resolution, therefore, is a political landmark. And even if it fails to mention “genocide”, it makes it still harder to insist that the massacre never happened or that the number of victims has been grossly inflated.
Yet the Serbian government finds itself caught in a position of 'damned if you do, damned if you don’t'. If Belgrade had done nothing, Serbs would continue to be accused of not facing up to the past. But now that it has done something, it is being accused of acting out of ulterior motives. That is a shame. This resolution is a lot better than nothing, and a lot more than other countries have offered for heinous crimes committed in their names.

Rico says okay, to help things along, he'll apologize in the name of the United States for all the massacres our troops perpetrated during the Indian Wars, plus My Lai and Nagasaki. Okay? All better now?

Next they'll be blaming the weather

William McCall has an article in The Huffington Post about the Boy Scouts and abuse:

The president of the Boy Scouts council for the Portland, Oregon metro area has testified he believes the parents of some Scouts were negligent and even criminal for allowing sleepovers that led to sex abuse. Eugene Grant told a jury, in a $29 million sex abuse lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America and its Cascade Pacific Council, that parents should not have allowed boys to stay overnight with a single man at his apartment. The man, Timur Dykes, has admitted molesting the victim who filed the lawsuit, and has been convicted of other sex abuse dating back to the early 1980s, when Dykes was an assistant Scoutmaster.
During cross-examination by Kelly Clark, an attorney for the victim, Grant said Thursday it was not Boy Scouts policy to allow sleepovers, especially when they were unsupervised. "His parents should have known better," Grant said, referring to the parents of the victim. "I think it was criminal." But, when Clark pressed Grant about whether he knew the Boy Scouts had any formal policy against sleepovers in the early 1980s, Grant replied, "At the time, no." Grant later said he believed that, at the very least, the parents were negligent. "I just find it almost incomprehensible to think their children were going to be safe in that type of environment," Grant said.
Clark had called Dykes a "pied piper" earlier in the trial, for filling his apartment in the early 80s with things such as exotic pets, an aquarium, and games to attract boys from a Scout troop organized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Grant, who is an attorney and church member, also said he did not know that lawyers for the council had denied there had been any abuse until shortly before the trial began. But Grant said he believed the council was not responsible for the abuse, even though he admitted that a Scoutmaster and a Mormon bishop who both knew Dykes made "bad decisions" if they had any role in allowing the sleepovers. Grant was Scoutmaster for another troop in the early 1980s and said he knew the victim when he was a Scout. But he denied knowing Dykes or ever receiving any reports of abuse at the time. In a separate line of questioning, Grant estimated that thirty to fifty percent of the Boy Scout troops across the nation in the mid-1980s were chartered by the Mormon Church, which has already settled its portion of the lawsuit. Grant compared it to a franchise arrangement, saying that allowed Mormon officials to manage the Scout troops. "They're not staffed by Boy Scouts officials or employees," Grant said.
Clark asked Grant whether that meant the Boy Scouts knew that disciplinary action taken against any adult volunteers suspected of abuse generally would be kept secret because the church considered such discipline a private matter. "They would know that, sometimes, results would be kept confidential," Grant said.
Clark began the trial last month by showing the jury six boxes packed with about 20,000 pages of files the Boy Scouts of America kept on about 1,000 Scout volunteers nationally, who abused boys from 1965 to mid-1984. Clark told the jury they would be the first to see the secret files, also called "perversion files" by the Scouts.
The trial began on 17 March and is expected to last about a month.

Rico says a good public beating or two, preferably televised, would go a long way toward slowing this shit down...

Eyeless in Gaza

Rico says the post title originates from a phrase in John Milton's Samson Agonistes:

...Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves...

While that's nicely poetic, the reality (as this Reuters article by Nidal al-Mughrabi from The New York Times) is different:

Israeli planes and helicopters mounted at least seven missile attacks on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Friday, destroying what a military spokesman described as Palestinian munitions sites. Four air strikes blew up two caravans near the town of Khan Younis, witnesses and Hamas officials said. There were no casualties.
A fifth missile hit a cheese factory in Gaza City, setting it on fire, witnesses and Hamas officials said. Hospital officials said two children were slightly wounded by flying debris.
Helicopters struck twice in the central refugee camp of Nusseirat, destroying a metal foundry. There were no casualties.
An Israeli military spokesman confirmed the attacks, saying they had targeted two weapons-manufacturing plants and two arms caches.
The air strikes were Israel's response to a Palestinian short-range rocket that was fired across the border into the Jewish state on Thursday, the spokesman said. The attack, which went unclaimed by any Palestinian faction, caused no damage.
An Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip early last year was designed to counter such salvoes. Rocket attacks have resumed sporadically in recent weeks and Israel has responded with air strikes.

Rico says he guesses the 'no casualties' on both sides is a nice quid pro quo, but he's also sure it was by accident, not intention...

Quick, what's five times 379?

Philippe Devos has an article in The Globe and Mail about money in Haiti:

The first arithmetic every Haitian learns are the five times tables. Not just the easy ones, such as one through 12, but more complex ones, like five times 379. Quick, how fast can you do it in your head?
If you don’t already know it’s 1,895, you’re slower than the average Haitian 8-year-old. And it all has to do with historical currency rates.
The prices of the smallest items are quoted in the local currency, the gourde (rhymes with food), which is about 2.5 cents Canadian, or 39 gourdes to a dollar. But just about everything is quoted in dollars, only it’s not Canadian dollars, or US dollars. It’s Haitian dollars, which are constantly spoken of, but never seen, as much a phantasm as the vodou spirits.
It’s a worn cliché that journalists ended up in the profession after failing math, and I’m a walking stereotype. I’d be an architect now, perhaps helping to rebuild Haiti instead of reporting on it, if I could have passed high school calculus any of the three times I tried.
Which means my numerical challenges are evident to every Haitian shopkeeper I’ve encountered.
Here’s why: Back in the day, the gourde was fixed to the U.S. currency at a rate of five gourdes to a buck, so people started calling five gourdes a dollar, and it stuck, even though it’s now about forty gourdes to buy a greenback.
So when I bought gas today for the little moped I’ve been riding around town, the pump read $26, and I handed over 130 gourdes, after the cashier waited patiently while I did the math on my fingers. A Haitian doesn’t see a 1,000-gourde bill for the one and three zeros printed on it, but recognized it as $200.
I wondered whether the practice came about to confuse foreigners like me into overpaying, but so far everyone to whom I've handed five times the asking price has politely returned the extra cash, and given me the same sympathetic look my math teacher had when she returned another test with a mark somewhere below 50 (or is that 250?).

Devotion to your cause

The Globe and Mail has an article about women fighting for their money:

Madrid Flight attendants owed up to nine months’ wages by a grounded Spanish airline have posed nude for a calendar to draw attention to their plight.
The calendar, numerous excerpts of which appeared in the Spanish media, shows the Air Comet attendants, all female, posing provocatively in and outside airline cabins, and in one case on top of a jet turbine. “We are just demanding our rights to receive what is ours, we each have eight or nine months of unpaid salaries,” said attendant Adriana Ricardo, who appears in the calendar.
Air Comet, run by the embattled chairman of Spain’s main employers’ association CEOE, Gerardo Ferran, filed for administration in December after a British court impounded nine of its aircraft at the request of German bank HSH Nordbank.
As the British news site The Register reports, “the women decided to disrobe to make as much noise as possible regarding their plight, and the Spanish press has enthusiastically given them extensive exposure.”
The English-language Spanish weekly Euro News reports Air Comet had tried and failed to create a niche in the market by offering cheap flights to South America, a strategy that was derailed by the global recession. "It is calculated that Air Comet’s owes it creditors an estimated 160 million euros, five of which are thought to be unpaid staff wages."

Rico says you can see a slideshow of all the photos (some of which are pretty hot) here.

Rico's new crop

Rico says the Anne Raver article in The New York Times is about a microcrop he could get into farming:

Our horseradish roots looked so innocent when they arrived in the mail last spring. Just little brown sticks, about eight inches long and as narrow as pencils. But, last weekend, when we harvested the year-old roots of one plant, they were on the atomic side of hot. “I can feel it burning all the way down,” my boyfriend, Rock, croaked, reaching into the fridge for his Gatorade. (The Rock gets heartburn from eating an orange.) “Now it’s a hot spot at the bottom of my stomach.”
My sinuses were clear for the first time in months. I couldn’t wait to mix huge dollops of this stuff with chili sauce to eat with steamed shrimp, or straight with rare roast beef.
And guess what? This root, when ground, produces isothiocyanates, chemical compounds that are studied for their anti-cancer properties.
“It would take about a tablespoon, on your steak, to give you that little anti-cancer shot,” said Mark E. Uchanski, an assistant professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, who did his doctoral thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on horseradish.
Horseradish (Armoracia rusticana) is in the brassica family, which includes turnips, kale, mustard greens, broccoli rabe, daikon radish, and many other plants with varying degrees of pungency and a similar taste. Native to the temperate regions of Europe and Asia, it is an ancient herb.
“The Oracle at Delphi told Apollo that the radish was worth its weight in lead, the beet its weight in silver, and the horseradish its weight in gold,” Arthur O. Tucker and Thomas DeBaggio wrote in The Big Book of Herbs (Interweave Press, 2000), my bible for growing everything from hot peppers to patchouli.
The Romans carried horseradish to Europe as a medicinal herb and as a flavoring. It was cultivated in Egypt before the exodus of the Hebrew slaves around 1500 B.C., and is often the symbolic bitter herb at the Passover Seder. By the 16th century, the pungent root was spreading throughout England. The Herbal or General History of Plants, by John Gerard, first published in 1597, describes its many uses, including as an aphrodisiac, a treatment for tuberculosis, a mustard plaster, and a dewormer. Pliny the Elder wrote about horseradish in his Natural History, an epic work of 37 volumes completed in A.D. 77, in which he observed that it healed sores, mange, and ulcers.
The common name, according to Mr. Tucker and Mr. DeBaggio, probably evolved from the German meerrettich, which means sea-radish (the plant grows wild in coastal areas), which was misunderstood by the English, who associated “meer” with “mahre,” an old horse.
Anyway, here’s what Rock and I have learned so far by growing this amazing root. Last April, Rock prepared the bed carefully, digging in plenty of compost and wood ash about a foot deep into the soil. Wood ash is rich in potassium and helps bring up the pH of our acidic soil to a more neutral 7, which is ideal for horseradish. (Horseradish will tolerate a pH range of 6 to 8, according to Johnny’s Selected Seeds, our mail-order supplier.) If you don’t have wood ash, you could use greensand, which is also rich in potassium, or lime.
After preparing the soil, Rock made a furrow with his hoe about six inches deep, and laid the root cuttings about 18 inches apart on a 45-degree slant in the soil. When they arrive from a supplier, cuttings have a thick, flat end that signifies the top of the mother root and a narrow end, cut on a slant, that indicates the bottom of the root. So if you set the thicker, flat end pointing up, you are mimicking the position of the original root.
Cover the root with about three inches of soil, pat it down, and water well. That’s about it, except for keeping the weeds out and watering if it doesn’t rain. Rock mulched with clean straw to keep the weeds down and the moisture in.
By midsummer, those little sticks produced tall, broad leaves, shooting up in a rosette from the crown. They reminded me of dock weed, only much more ornamental. Earlier, around mid-May, the plant had produced an array of tall stems with tiny white flowers, which were kind of a bonus. The root, after all, is the prize.
We waited a year before harvesting, as the experts advise, which meant an early spring dig. The trick is digging the root before it leafs out, so as not to lose any pungency to top growth.
Roots dug in the fall, after the first hard frost, are said to be the most flavorful. So we’ll dig some then too, and compare the taste. Meanwhile, we have plenty of side roots from the big one we dug up, which we will give to friends for planting or plant ourselves in new beds.
As the old saying goes, if you plant horseradish, make sure you never want to move it. Even the smallest piece of root left in the ground can re-sprout and form another hefty plant. Some people extend the bed into a border of handsome green leaves on one side of their herb or vegetable garden.
Whatever you do, don’t plant horseradish next to some polite plant that will be quickly muscled out of existence. Keep this ebullient root at a distance, like bamboo. And give it plenty of sun.
As for the harvest, we discovered how deep the root was and how easy it was to snap off with a spade. Rock got about ten inches of the thick central root before it broke; he had to dig out the rest of it in pieces. We washed the soil off, peeled the pieces and cut them into chunks. (We also cut the slender side shoots from the main root and stored them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, to plant later or give away.)
Tradition calls for grinding the root outside, because the chemical reaction triggered creates a gas that not only makes you weep, but can irritate lungs and nostrils. “It’s a defense mechanism for the plant if it’s wounded,” said Jennifer Schultz Nelson, a horticulture educator at the University of Illinois extension service in Decatur.
Undisturbed, the root doesn’t have a strong smell or flavor. But crushing or grinding it produces isothiocyanates, a kind of mustard oil, Ms. Schultz Nelson said, which is what gives horseradish its flavor and heat.
Adding vinegar stops the reaction because it’s an acid, Professor Uchanski said. “It also stabilizes the isothiocyanates, so you can still get that flavor a week later,” he said.
Ms. Schultz Nelson said her Polish-American father, Bill Schultz, makes horseradish every spring from roots in his garden in Burr Ridge, Illinois. “He’s never allowed to make it inside,” she said. To stop the chemical activity, he adds white vinegar. “Don’t wait too long,” she said. "It will get too bitter and turn a nasty brown.”
Ms. Schultz Nelson should know. About sixty percent of the world’s horseradish is produced in Illinois. Collinsville, near St. Louis, has proclaimed itself the horseradish capital of the world.
Back in Maryland, the Land of Pleasant Living, I carried my ancient food processor out to the deck and stood upwind as I pushed the button. Fumes shot out the top in a plume that made my nostrils flare. I backed off, more excited than repelled, and watched the chunks turn into snowy fluff that reminded me of chopped coconut. Only this snow wasn’t sweet and oily and good for cake. Scholar that he is, Rock divided our ground-up root into three little bowls. The first sat for one minute before we stirred in the vinegar, the second sat for three minutes, the third for six. Then we gave them the taste test. To tell the truth, we didn’t notice much difference. But it’s the best horseradish we’ve ever had.
Ms. Nelson’s family can’t eat Polish sausage, or beef, without horseradish. It is also delicious mixed with mashed potatoes. And some people mix a bit into vanilla ice cream. Which makes me wonder what a teaspoon, or even a tablespoon, might do for Grandmother’s coconut cake.

Rico says fuck it, he'll buy it in the store...

Tightening up

Jeff Zeleny has an article in The New York Times about flight security:

President Obama has signed off on new security protocols for people flying to the United States, establishing a system that uses intelligence information and assessment of threats to identify passengers who could have links to terrorism, a senior administration official said. The new approach will replace a broader layer of extra scrutiny that had been imposed recently on all passengers from fourteen countries, most of which are Muslim.
The change, which will be announced today by the Department of Homeland Security, is the result of a review of security at international airports ordered by Mr. Obama after the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit. The system, which will be put in place this month, applies only to travelers flying into the United States.
“It’s much more tailored to what intelligence is telling us and what the threat is telling us, as opposed to stopping all individuals from a particular nationality or all individuals using a particular passport,” the administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in advance of the formal announcement.
The intelligence-based security system is devised to raise flags about travelers whose names do not appear on no-fly watch lists, but whose travel patterns or personal traits create suspicions. The system is intended to pick up fragments of information— family name, nationality, age, or even partial passport number— and match them against intelligence reports to sound alarm bells before a passenger boards a plane.
The new security protocols will be built around present-day threat situations, officials said, where fragments of intelligence from various threat streams are considered. So, for example, if terrorist groups are recruiting college-age men who have spent time in Asia and have been to the Middle East, that type of travel pattern would raise a flag to officials at international airports.
“It is much more surgically targeting those individuals we are concerned about and have intelligence for,” the administration official said, speaking to a small group of reporters at a White House briefing. The official added: “This is not a system that can be called profiling in the traditional sense. It is intelligence-based.”
Officials said intelligence information from a variety of United States agencies would be made available to foreign airlines, whose employees and security officials would have wide latitude to stop passengers, or not.
If this system had been in place on 25 December, when a 23-year-old Nigerian man wearing explosives-lined underwear boarded a Northwest plane, the administration official said, “we would have had one more chance to stop him.” The bombing attempt exposed significant flaws in how the administration collected and shared intelligence reports. The president said the government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down the commercial jetliner, but had “failed to connect those dots”.
The system replaces the mandatory screening, including full-body pat downs, that was hastily set up in January. Citizens of Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria have also been subjected to extra checks of their carry-on baggage before boarding planes for the United States. While the United States has never formally confirmed the names of the fourteen countries where passport holders face automatic additional scrutiny, they have been widely reported. Administration officials said terrorist organizations had turned their recruiting efforts elsewhere.
For the last three months, thousands of people flying to the United States each day have faced additional security measures simply because they were from one of the fourteen countries. But officials said they feared such broad measures did not provide an adequate filter to identify people suspected of being involved in potential terror plots.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who will announce the new system, has traveled to several countries in recent months to enlist the cooperation of foreign airlines and governments. She presented her findings to Mr. Obama this week, administration officials said, and he approved the new system.
Security protocols from several countries were studied as officials from the United States put together this new system. But a senior administration official said it was not based on one specific system, but rather modified “to apply against the terrorism threat in the aviation sector.” Currently, the only information typically checked before a passenger boards an airplane is the name, date of birth and nationality— information found in a passport, which is compared against the terror watch lists. If a match is made between a passenger and the watch list, the passenger can be denied the right to board, or subjected to intense screening.
But the Homeland Security Department separately already collects much more information on the travel patterns of passengers headed to the United States, including other stops made on the way to an American airport and how the passenger paid for the ticket, as well as other details contained in the reservation, like what hotel a passenger might be staying in, or if he or she is traveling alone. This information is also sent to the United States before the flight takes off, often 48 hours in advance. But typically, this information, known as Passenger Name Record, is consulted only by Customs and Border Protection agency officials once the plane is in the air, as they weigh whether to allow the person to clear customs.
American security officials have sparred with their counterparts in Europe to protect their right to collect this data. The information that intelligence agencies will use could include the Passenger Name Record, officials said, as well as information collected from a visa application or previous visits to the United States. Yet, given the huge number of flights heading to the United States each day, handling each passenger on a case-by-case basis— rather than doing mandatory secondary screening for people from certain countries— will create logistical challenges and is likely to raise new questions about racial profiling.
The senior administration official dismissed suggestions that the intelligence-based system of extra security could be considered profiling. “We’re talking about different features, characteristics, or attributes of individuals who reportedly are trying to carry out terrorist attacks,” the official said. “We’re trying to match those intelligence indicators to the people who are trying to come to the United States.”

Rico says let's just shut off all travel from the outside for six months; people will be volunteering for strip and cavity searches in order to come here...

History for the day

On 2 April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, saying: "The world must be made safe for democracy."

Civil War for the day

At Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 2003.

Wisdom for the day

Courtesy of my friend Bob, the meaning of life in thirteen words:

Inside every older person is a younger person, wondering what the fuck happened.

Rico says he could not agree more...

We overpaid

The population, pre-quake, of Haiti was just over nine million. Gerard Aziakou has an AFP article on Yahoo!News that the 'global community' has pledged about ten billion dollars for Haitian relief. That's (of course it is; personal Rico joke) just over $1,111 per head. Given that the average annual income of a Haitian, pre-quake, is estimated at $730, that's giving every man, woman, and child almost two years' income. Not a bad deal, especially for those not directly affected by the quake.
Not that Rico begrudges them the money; they didn't have a very good situation before the quake, and even ten billion won't actually improve it much... (Nice beaches, though.)

More unhappiness in Moscow

Stuart Williams has the AFP story on Yahoo!News:

President Dmitry Medvedev urged tough anti-terror measures as he made a surprise visit to the North Caucasus region hit by a major suicide attack and linked to the Moscow bombings. His visit to the North Caucasus region of Dagestan came as the funerals of the 39 killed in Monday's metro suicide bombings were being held in the capital with shattered relatives clutching photographs of their dead loved ones.
The Moscow attacks, carried out by female suicide bombers and claimed by a North Caucasus Islamist militant group, were followed Wednesday by a double suicide strike in Dagestan that killed twelve.
"The list of anti-terror measures should be expanded, should be not only effective but also tough, severe if you will, with a preventative goal," Medvedev said in televised comments from the Dagestan capital Makhachkala. "We need to punish," added Medvedev, who was flown to the city centre from Dagestan's airport by helicopter for a meeting with regional and federal leaders on an unannounced visit. "In recent times we've screwed off the heads of the most odious bandits but it seems that's not enough," he added. But he also called on Russian tycoons, many of whom are from the region, to increase investment in the Caucasus.
Underlining the instability, two people were killed in the Khasavurtsky district of Dagestan during the night when their car suspected to have been packed with explosives blew up.
"According to preliminary information, the explosive materials that were in the car went off accidentally," the Interfax news agency quoted a security source as saying.
The Islamist group Emirate of the Caucasus, which is waging an insurgency to impose an Islamic state based on sharia law in the North Caucasus, claimed the Moscow attacks in a video message from its shadowy leader, Doku Umarov, who has been the target of several attempts to kill him by the Russian security forces, who said he personally gave the order for the strikes on the metro. "It is a legitimate act of revenge for the continued assassinations of civilians in the Caucasus," he said in the video posted on a website which is frequently used by militants to post messages.
Russia has for years battled Islamist insurgents in the North Caucasus Muslim regions of Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, but Monday's attacks were the first time in six years that such violence has spread to the capital.
Umarov, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Usman and had last month pledged a "holy war" of attacks throughout the country, chillingly warned Russians to expect more strikes. "The war is coming into your streets," warned the bearded militant, speaking in an unidentified forest location. The video was the first claim of responsibility for the metro bombings but its authenticity could not be independently confirmed. Funerals for many of the victims from the Moscow bombings, who ranged from a girl of just 17 to a woman of 64, were being held at nine cemeteries in Moscow as well as in the southern city of Krasnodar.
Russians were on edge after the Moscow suicide attacks, with hoax bomb alerts prompting the evacuation of thousands of people from public buildings in Saint Petersburg. A police spokesman said they had also received more alarm calls than usual from citizens, reflecting national nervousness as a result of the blasts in Moscow. "We had three anonymous calls saying bombs had been placed at the Moscow Station, the Finland Station, two Mega shopping centres, and the Kazan Cathedral," the spokesman said.
The main evidence in the investigation to the Moscow attacks is the two bombers' severed heads, which were recovered by police after the bombings. Their photographs, covered in blood, have been released in the media. Unconfirmed reports have said the bombers arrived in Moscow from the Caucasus by bus early Monday, accompanied by an unidentified male who is now the subject of a police search.

Rico asks is it just him, or does Medvedev not look happy? (And why should he be?)

Not nice, even for thugs

Yahoo!News has an AP article by Nafeesa Syeed about more gang violence in DC:

A possible feud among neighborhood 'crews', three shootings, and five fatalities, have authorities in the nation's capital trying to stop more paybacks in an area known for drugs and violence just seven miles from the White House. A crowd sprayed with bullets in a drive-by shooting that killed four and wounded five Tuesday night had just returned from the funeral of a man slain nearby. A 20-year-old man wounded in a third shooting is a suspect in the other two, authorities said Wednesday.
Police were trying to gather information to prevent possible retaliation, said Assistant Police Chief Peter Newsham, who said neighborhood crews are more loosely associated than gangs. Police Chief Cathy Lanier called the drive-by— the worst shooting in D.C. in at least sixteen years— an egregious type of retaliation. "It's ridiculous and the community is tired of it," she said. "There is no excuse for it."
Two men and a 14-year-old accused of driving the minivan the bullets were fired from were charged with first-degree murder. One of the suspects, Orlando Carter, also has been charged with second-degree murder in the 22 March shooting of Jordan Howe, whose funeral was earlier Tuesday. On March 23, Carter was shot in the head and shoulder hours after his brother was arrested in Howe's death, according to court documents.
Friends and relatives of the drive-by victims returned Wednesday to the scene, where a blood-covered gauze package lay on a sidewalk that smelled of bleach. Teddy bears and candles were by the steps leading to the apartment building where the crowd was gathered when the shooting broke out. The building's owner, William Cheek, said he had just walked across the street to buy a lottery ticket when he heard gunshots around 7:30 p.m., and saw many in the group on the ground. His grandson was among the six men and three women shot. "I saw him breathe his last breath," Cheek said, a tear running down his face. "He was shot in the head." Cheek didn't want to identify his grandson but said he was enrolled in a GED class, played basketball and hoped to become a long-distance bus driver. Court documents identified the victims as 17-year-old Tavon Nelson, 19-year-old William Jones III, 16-year-old Brishell Jones, and 18-year-old Devaughn Boyd. The wounded were not identified because they are witnesses, police said. "They got shot right on my porch," said Cheek, a case manager at a local community center with programs on substance abuse, job training, and anger management.
Carter and Nathaniel Simms, 26, were arraigned and ordered held without bail. The teen also faces a murder charge, and a family judge ordered him held at a juvenile facility, saying he was a danger and a risk for fleeing. He has nine convictions dating to 2005. Defense lawyers for Carter and Simms argued that court documents didn't list probable cause or what role the two are accused of in the latest shootings. Carter's brother, Sanquan Carter, was charged with murder in Howe's slaying. Court documents say Howe was killed over a missing gold-colored bracelet that apparently belonged to Sanquan Carter. A witness said Orlando Carter was with his brother and was seen shooting a gun at the time of Howe's death, according to court documents.
In Tuesday's shooting, police said they arrested the three after officers chased the silver van into Prince George's County in Maryland and back into Washington and saw an AK-47 type weapon thrown out. Other weapons were found inside.
Ross Rauls said he had been to Howe's funeral with his friends and later headed to the gym, while the others went to Cheek's building. "It's sad when the last thing you say to them is 'I'll see you later,'" he said. He said the young men shot were not gang members. "They weren't that type of people. It wasn't gang-related," Rauls said. "It's a classic case of the wrong place, the wrong time."
Rico Scott said one of those killed, DeVaughn Boyd, was his cousin. Boyd was a high school senior who liked to go to the mall and the movies with friends, as well as parties that featured go-go music, a mix of soul, funk and Latin styles, Scott said.
It was at least the worst shooting in D.C. since 1994, when four men fired into a crowd at the 'O' Street Market, killing a teenager and wounding eight other people. Washington reported 143 homicides last year, the fewest in nearly fifty years.
Mayor Adrian Fenty— who cut short a family vacation to return to the city— said he spoke with the mothers of three of the shooting victims and said that they were "deeply broken. Everybody knows what a tragedy this is in our city," he said.

Rico says the good news is the murder rate is the lowest in almost fifty years, but the bad news is it's still almost one every two days. And that 'anger management' class? Obviously not working... (And Mr. Scott? No Rico-relation whatsoever.)

Knowing what you don't know

Patricia Cohen has an article in The New York Times about the latest in brain science:

To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at Kentucky University, refers to an episode from the television series Friends.
(Follow closely now; this is about the science of English.) Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a joke on Monica and Chandler after they learn the two are secretly dating. The couple discover the prank and try to turn the tables, but Phoebe realizes this turnabout and once again tries to outwit them. As Phoebe tells Rachel, “They don’t know that we know they know we know.”
This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking— of mind reading— is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.
Now English professors and graduate students are asking them, too. They say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?
Ms. Zunshine, whose specialty is 18th-century British literature, became familiar with the work of evolutionary psychologists while she was a graduate student at Stanford in the 1990s. “I thought this could be the most exciting thing I could ever learn,” she said.
At a time when university literature departments are confronting budget cuts, a moribund job market, and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is a providing a revitalizing lift.
Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said “it’s a new moment of hope” in an era when everyone is talking about “the death of the humanities.” To Mr. Gottschall a scientific approach can rescue literature departments from the malaise that has embraced them over the last decade and a half. Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s— Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis— has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing.
The brain may be it. Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like “mapping wonderland". Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories. Interest has bloomed during the last decade. Elaine Scarry, a professor of English at Harvard, has, since 2000, hosted a seminar on cognitive theory and the arts. Over the years participants have explored, for example, how the visual cortex works in order to explain why Impressionist paintings give the appearance of shimmering. In a few weeks Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard, will give a talk about mental imagery and memory, both of which are invoked while reading.
Ms. Zunshine said that in 1999 she and about ten others won approval from the Modern Language Association to form a discussion group on cognitive approaches to literature. Last year their members numbered more than 1,200. Unlike Mr. Gottschall, however, Ms. Zunshine sees cognitive approaches as building on other literary theories rather than replacing them. Ms. Zunshine is particularly interested in what cognitive scientists call the theory of mind, which involves one person’s ability to interpret another person’s mental state and to pinpoint the source of a particular piece of information in order to assess its validity.
Jane Austen’s novels are frequently constructed around mistaken interpretations. In Emma, the eponymous heroine assumes Mr. Elton’s attentions signal a romantic interest in her friend Harriet, though he is actually intent on marrying Emma. She similarly misinterprets the behavior of Frank Churchill and Mr. Knightly, and misses the true objects of their affections.
Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s suddenly much more difficult. Experiments have shown that understanding drops off by sixty percent, Ms. Zunshine said. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or what the scholars call levels of intentionality.
Perhaps the human facility with three levels is related to the intrigues of sexual mating, Ms. Zunshine suggested. Do I think he is attracted to her or me? Whatever the root cause, Ms. Zunshine argues, people find the interaction of three minds compelling. “If I have some ideological agenda,” she said, “I would try to construct a narrative that involved a triangularization of minds, because that is something we find particularly satisfying.”
Ms. Zunshine is part of a research team composed of literary scholars and cognitive psychologists who are using snapshots of the brain at work to explore the mechanics of reading. The project, funded by the Teagle Foundation and hosted by the Haskins Laboratory in New Haven, is aimed at improving college-level reading skills.
“We begin by assuming that there is a difference between the kind of reading that people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a newspaper, that there is a value added cognitively when we read complex literary texts,” said Michael Holquist, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale, who is leading the project.
The team spent nearly a year figuring how one might test for complexity. What they came up with was mind reading— or how well an individual is able to track multiple sources. The pilot study, which he hopes will start later this spring, will involve twelve subjects. “Each will be put into an M.R.I. machine and given a set of texts of graduated complexity depending on the difficulty of source monitoring and we’ll watch what happens in the brain,” Mr. Holquist explained.
At the other end of the country, Blakey Vermeule, an associate professor of English at Stanford, is examining theory of mind from a different perspective. She starts from the assumption that evolution had a hand in our love of fiction, and then goes on to examine the narrative technique known as “free indirect style”, which mingles the character’s voice with the narrator’s. Indirect style enables readers to inhabit two or even three mind-sets at a time. This style, which became the hallmark of the novel beginning in the 19th century with Jane Austen, evolved because it satisfies our “intense interest in other people’s secret thoughts and motivations,” Ms. Vermeule said.
The road between the two cultures— science and literature— can go both ways. “Fiction provides a new perspective on what happens in evolution,” said William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University. To Mr. Flesch, fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls “altruistic punishers”, people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. “To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished, Mr. Flesch argues. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot. “It’s not that evolution gives us insight into fiction,” Mr. Flesch said, “but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.”

Rico says he's currently writing a book, Cowboys & Indian, about what he now knows are 'altruistic punishers'; great phrase.

More iPad news

David Pogue has a column in The New York Times:

In ten years of reviewing tech products for The New York Times, I’ve never seen a product as polarizing as Apple’s iPad, which arrives in stores on Saturday.
“This device is laughably absurd,” goes a typical remark on a tech blog’s comments board. “How can they expect anyone to get serious computer work done without a mouse?”
“This truly is a magical revolution,” goes another. “I can’t imagine why anyone will want to go back to using a mouse and keyboard once they’ve experienced Apple’s visionary user interface!”
Those are some pretty confident critiques of the iPad, considering that their authors have never even tried it.
In any case, there’s a pattern to these assessments.
The haters tend to be techies; the fans tend to be regular people. Therefore, no single write-up can serve both readerships adequately. There’s but one solution: write separate reviews for these two audiences.
Read the first one if you’re a techie. (How do you know? Take this simple test. Do you use BitTorrent? Do you run Linux? Do you have more e-mail addresses than pants? You’re a techie.) Read the second review if you’re anyone else.

Review for Techies
The Apple iPad is basically a gigantic iPod Touch.
It’s a half-inch-thick slab, all glass on top, aluminum on the back. Hardly any buttons at all, just a big Home button below the screen. It takes you to the Home screen full of apps, just as on an iPhone.
One model gets online only in Wi-Fi hot spots ($500 to $700, for storage capacities from 16 to 64 gigabytes). The other model can get online either using Wi-Fi or, when you’re out and about, using AT&T’s cellular network; that feature adds $130 to each price.
You operate the iPad by tapping and dragging on the glass with your fingers, just as on the iPhone. When the very glossy 9.7-inch screen is off, every fingerprint is grossly apparent.
There’s an ebook reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is ten ounces). And you can’t read books from the Apple bookstore on any other machine, not even a Mac or iPhone.
When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience; when the iPad is turned 90 degrees, the keyboard is just barely usable (because it’s bigger). A $70 keyboard dock will be available in April, but then you’re carting around two pieces.
At least Apple had the decency to give the iPad a really fast processor. Things open fast, scroll fast, load fast. Surfing the Web is a heck of a lot better than on the tiny iPhone screen; first, because it’s so fast, and second, because you don’t have to do nearly as much zooming and panning.
But,as any Slashdot reader can tell you, the iPad can’t play Flash video. Apple has this thing against Flash, the Web’s most popular video format; says it’s buggy, it’s not secure, and depletes the battery. Well, fine, but meanwhile, thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad, places where videos or animations are supposed to play.
YouTube, Vimeo, TED.com, CBS.com, and some other sites are converting their videos to iPad/iPhone/Touch-compatible formats. But all the news sites and game sites still use Flash. It will probably be years before the rest of the web’s videos become iPad-viewable.
There’s no multitasking, either. It’s one app at a time, just like on the iPhone. Plus no USB jacks and no camera. Bye-bye, Skype video chats. (You know Apple is just leaving stuff out for next year’s model.)
The bottom line is that you can get a laptop for much less money, with a full keyboard, DVD drive, USB jacks, camera-card slot, camera, the works. Besides, if you’ve already got a laptop and a smartphone, who’s going to carry around a third machine?

Review for Everyone Else
The Apple iPad is basically a gigantic iPod Touch.
The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience. Maps become real maps, like the paper ones. You see your email inbox and the open message simultaneously. Driving simulators fill more of your field of view, closer to a windshield than a keyhole.
The new iBooks ereader app is filled with endearing grace notes. For example, when you turn a page, the animated page edge actually follows your finger’s position and speed as it curls, just like a paper page. Font, size, and brightness controls appear when you tap. Tap a word to get a dictionary definition, bookmark your spot, or look it up on Google or Wikipedia. There’s even a rotation-lock switch on the edge of the iPad so you can read in bed on your side without fear that the image will rotate.
If you have the cellular model, you can buy AT&T service so you can get online anywhere. (Cellular iPads aren’t available until next month; I tested a Wi-Fi-only model.)
But how’s this for a rare deal from a cell company: there’s no contract. By tapping a button in Settings, you can order up a month of unlimited cellular Internet service for $30. Or pay $15 for 250 megabytes of internet data; when it runs out, you can either buy another 250 megs, or just upgrade to the unlimited plan for the month. Either way, you can cancel and rejoin as often as you want— just March, July, and November, for example— without penalty. The other carriers are probably cursing AT&T’s name for setting this precedent.
The iPad’s killer app, though, is killer apps. Apple says that 150,000 existing iPhone apps run on the iPad. They either appear actual size— small and dead center on the screen— or, with a tap, doubled to fill the screen, a little blurry. Still, all the greats work this way: Dragon Dictation, Skype (even voice calls, through its speaker and microphone), and those gazillion games.
But the real fun begins when you try the apps that were specially designed for the iPad’s bigger screen. (When the iPad section of the App Store opens Saturday, it will start with 1,000 of them.)
That Scrabble app shows the whole board without your zooming or panning: a free companion app for your iPhone or Touch is called Tile Rack; it lets you fiddle with your letters in private, then flick them wirelessly onto the iPad’s screen. Newspaper apps will reproduce the layout, photos, and colors of a real newspaper. The Marvel comic book app is brilliant in its vividness and panel-by-panel navigation. (Oops, maybe that app belongs in the review for techies.)
Hulu.com, the Web’s headquarters for free hit TV shows, won’t confirm the talk that it’s working on an iPad app but, wow, can you imagine? A thin, flat, cordless, bottomless source of free, great television shows, in your bag or on the bedside table?
Speaking of video: Apple asserts that the iPad runs ten hours on a charge of its nonremovable battery, but we all know you can’t trust the manufacturer. And sure enough, in my own test, the iPad played movies continuously from 7:30 a.m. to 7:53 p.m., more than 12 hours. That’s four times as long as a typical laptop or portable DVD player.
The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget. Some have suggested that it might make a good goof-proof computer for technophobes, the aged, and the young; they’re absolutely right.
And the techies are right about another thing: the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it— books, music, video, photos, Web, email and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience, and a deeply satisfying one.
The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine.
The only question is: Do you like the concept?

Rico says fuck the techies (including his Gates-machine-based father), he wants one...

Like you'd believe him

Rachel Donadio has an article in The New York Times about the latest 'defense' of the Papacy:

top Vatican official issued a detailed defense of Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of sexual abuse cases and extensively criticized The New York Times’s coverage, both in its news and editorial pages, as unfair to the pope and the church. In a rare interview and a 2,400-word statement posted on the Vatican web site, the official, Cardinal William J. Levada, an American who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, praised Pope Benedict for vigorously investigating and prosecuting sexual abuse cases. He said The Times’s coverage had been “deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness”.
Cardinal Levada singled out several Times reporters and columnists for criticism, focusing particularly on an article describing failed efforts by Wisconsin church officials to persuade the Vatican to defrock a priest who had abused as many as two hundred deaf boys from 1950 to 1974. The pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office when the case was referred there, in 1996.
He said the article wrongly “attributed the failure to accomplish this dismissal to Pope Benedict, instead of diocesan decisions at the time”. On Wednesday, the archbishop of Milwaukee said the pope should not be held responsible for mistakes that were made in Wisconsin.
The Times article drew on documents obtained from lawyers suing the church that showed that Vatican officials had at first ordered a secret canonical trial, then asked the archdiocese to suspend it after the priest pleaded for leniency to Cardinal Ratzinger. Wisconsin church officials protested the suspension, but followed it. The priest, the Reverend Lawrence C. Murphy, died a few months later.
News coverage of the abuse has clearly touched a nerve in the Vatican. As the church grapples with abuse cases that have come to light in several European countries, Benedict has come under scrutiny for how he and his subordinates handled sexual abuse allegations against priests while he served as an archbishop in Germany as well as when he was the Vatican’s top doctrinal enforcer. In 1980, when the pope was archbishop of Munich and Freising, he approved the transfer of a priest who had abused boys to therapy, and was copied on a memo saying that the priest had been allowed to resume pastoral duties shortly after his therapy began. The priest was later convicted of molesting other boys.
“This is different, because it’s the pope and because it’s a pope who is most self-evidently beyond accusation, particularly in this area,” said a senior Vatican official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.
Cardinal Levada said he believed that “the evidence is clear” that Father Murphy represented an “egregious case” and deserved to be defrocked. But he also said he was not second-guessing the decision to suspend the trial. He said a canonical trial would be “useless if the priest were dying. Have you ever been to a trial? Do you know how long they take?” he said. “If the man had had a miraculous recovery and doctors said he’d live another ten years, I’m sure a letter would say fine, ‘Start the trial.’”
Sitting in a receiving room at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with a view of Saint Peter’s out the window and an oil portrait of Cardinal Ratzinger on the wall, Cardinal Levada expressed pain at the case of Father Murphy. “I think the evidence is clear from the documents that he was a serial abuser of children, helpless children often times, he had no respect for the sacrament of confession, even using that to accomplish his abuse,” he said. “It’s one of the saddest and the most egregious cases I’ve seen.” At that point a canon lawyer, who sat in on the interview but declined to speak on the record, intervened about the nuances of the unfinished trial, effectively deflecting questions about why it had been suspended.
Cardinal Levada said that although Father Murphy never faced judgment in a criminal or canonical court, the priest had not evaded it altogether. “As a believer,” he wrote in his statement, “I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.”
Cardinal Levada said Benedict had played a “very significant role” as the “architect” of the Vatican’s 2001 norms that sent sexual abuse cases directly to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and streamlined procedures for bishops to report sexual abuse cases. Those norms ushered in a flood of abuse trials, many of which are still unresolved.
In a related letter in 2001, the future pope reminded bishops to adhere to secrecy in ecclesiastical trials, which caused some confusion about whether clerics should report abuse to the civil authorities. In recent weeks, Benedict and the Vatican have emphasized that the clergy should report evidence of crimes to the civil authorities. “He was prefect when the church put into place a very important standard and practice for helping bishops deal with these cases,” said Cardinal Levada.
In light of media reports that have questioned what Benedict knew about abuse cases, Cardinal Levada said, “Anyone can say, ‘Why didn’t you do this? You could have done this better.’ That’s part of life, but certainly it’s not the case to say that he is deficient,” Cardinal Levada said. “If anything, he was the architect of this step forward in the church and I think he deserves his credit.”
Benedict named Cardinal Levada, a theologian, a former archbishop of Portland and San Francisco, and a former chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, to succeed him as prefect after he became pope in 2005. A full eighty percent of the abuse cases to come through the congregation in the past decade are from the United States, according to the head of the internal tribunal that handles abuse cases, Charles Scicluna.
Cardinal Levada said that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had a staff of about 45 and devoted about a third of its time to disciplinary issues. “I would say it’s an increasing amount of the work of the congregation,” he said, adding that he anticipated having to expand its staff. He said it should not be seen as leniency that some sixty percent of the abuse cases that the congregation had considered since 2001 did not result in trials. In cases of “moral certitude” trials aren’t necessary, he said, and other disciplinary measures can be taken, while murkier cases requiring more evidence might require trials. “A canonical trial is an instrument appropriately used, but it would not be the normal procedure,” he said.
The senior Vatican official said that the pope himself was “serene” in the face of news reports, but probably upset on behalf of Catholics. “I can’t imagine he wouldn’t be troubled that the faithful are troubled,” he said.

Rico says 'serene'? Guy's obviously on some serious anti-depressants... And 'any reasonable standards of fairness'? Where was the 'fairness' when they let this guy Murphy get his hands on more innocent young boys?

Cowboy quote for the day

Charley Waite (Kevin Costner) to Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) in Open Range:

Why don't I hold your head underwater for just a little while?

Rico says he thinks he might use that one, occasionally..

He'll be dead soon

Ellen Barry has an article in The New York Times about Doku Umarov (who provided the Quote for the Day below):

A former Chechen separatist who reinvented himself as a proponent of global jihad stepped out of the shadows to take responsibility for two suicide bombings on Moscow’s subway, and to offer himself as the face of an increasingly lethal pan-Caucasus insurgency. The separatist, Doku Umarov, last year revived a suicide battalion believed to be behind some of the most notorious attacks of the past decade, and then issued a warning in February that he was planning attacks in central Russia. In a recording released Wednesday, Mr. Umarov seemed to take pleasure in thrusting the bloody violence of the Caucasus upon the comfortable residents of the capital. “You Russians hear about the war on television and the radio,” Mr. Umarov said on the video, apparently made hours after the subway blasts. “I promise you the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your own lives and on your own skin.”
In assuming a public role and taunting Russia with his pronouncements, Mr. Umarov seemingly played into the hands of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, offering evidence that the threat in the Caucasian republics was part of a broader Islamic insurgency that threatened Russia’s security. That may provide Mr. Putin with a fresh rationale to pursue a take-no-prisoners policy in the Caucasus. But the insurgents lacked a central figurehead, a role that Mr. Umarov now seems determined to seize for himself.
Grigory Shvedov, the editor of the web-based news service Caucasian Knot, said Mr. Umarov, 45, had long been influential as a guerrilla fighter but has traditionally depended on younger, more charismatic protégés to communicate with the public. “I don’t think he is going to be as popular as Osama bin Laden, but he is definitely raising his profile,” Mr. Shvedov said. Mr. Umarov’s statement came to light as another double bombing killed at least twelve people in Dagestan. Suicide bombing was nearly unheard of in the region until 2000 and subsided for years, before returning in 2009. The first bomb on Wednesday, in the town of Kizlyar, exploded in a parked car, killing two police officers who had pulled up in their vehicle. As rescue workers and police officials gathered, a man wearing a police uniform walked into the crowd and detonated explosives strapped to his body. The city’s police chief was killed and two dozen people were wounded.
President Dmitri A. Medvedev said the bombings on Monday and Wednesday were “links of the same chain. All this is the manifestation of the same terrorist activity which has recently started to resurface in the Caucasus,” he said.
In his four-minute video, Mr. Umarov railed against the federal antiterrorist operations that have become a central element of Moscow’s strategy in the region. He said he had planned Monday’s bombings as revenge for a recent operation that killed civilians near the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia.
“On the 11th of February, 2010, officers of the criminal formation known as the FSB carried out an operation to destroy peaceful citizens,” he said. “Any person who will condemn me for those operations, or who will accuse me of terrorism, I am laughing at those people. I can only grin, because I haven’t heard that Putin was accused of terrorism for the murder of civilians who were killed at his order.” The FSB is Russia’s security service.
Mr. Umarov’s career has tracked the southern Russian rebellion, which was once powerful enough to force the Russian Army from Grozny. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he left a career as a construction engineer to fight with Chechen separatists. In 1997, when Russian troops had withdrawn from Grozny, he was appointed the head of the fledging government’s Security Council. But, within ten years, Russia had crushed the separatist movement and killed its most charismatic leaders. In the process, human rights groups say, its brutal tactics alienated the population.
“The nationalists became despondent,” said Mark Galeotti, a specialist in Russian security issues who leads New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. “They realized that if they were going to keep fighting, they needed a bigger cause, something more grand, more heroic, so that they felt history would be on their side.”
In 2007, Mr. Umarov announced an ideological sea change, declaring himself the emir of the Caucasus Emirate, which aimed to establish a sharia-based state independent of Russia. With him came many of the former separatist fighters.
Last April, Mr. Umarov took another decisive step by announcing the revival of Riyadus-Salikhin, or the Garden of Martyrs, a suicide formation once led by Shamil Basayev that had lain dormant for five years. The battalion took responsibility for a 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theater. Since May, seventeen suicide bombings have been recorded, all but one in the Northern Caucasus, Mr. Shvedov said.
Mr. Umarov is a rough-hewn fighter who speaks accented Russian, and for outreach he seemed to rely heavily on his protégé Aleksandr Tikhomirov, a young convert whose videos promoting suicide operations have been widely disseminated.
But Mr. Tikhomirov was killed a month ago during a federal raid on the Ingush village of Ekazhevo. His death was followed, three weeks later, by the killing of another close associate, Anzor Astemirov. Both deaths seemed to force Mr. Umarov to adopt a more public role.
Some experts argue that the militant underground in the Caucasus has become so dispersed in recent years that neither Mr. Umarov nor anyone else could emerge as its leader. Sergei A. Arutyunov, a Caucasus expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences, called Mr. Umarov “yesterday’s man”. Mr. Galeotti said Mr. Umarov had “very, very little power” in a movement made up of widely dispersed warlords. “These Moscow attacks are significant precisely because they assert the notion that people should pay attention to him,” he said. “He needs spectaculars. What this will do is feed him a little more oxygen. It keeps him in play a while longer.”
Certainly, both officials and journalists have trained their attention on Mr. Umarov’s organization in recent days. A source in the General Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee told the newspaper Kommersant that Mr. Tikhomirov had recruited 30 potential suicide bombers, who were sent for training at a madrasa in Turkey and then returned to Mr. Tikhomirov’s authority. The investigator said according to his data, nine of those women had already carried out attacks.
Federal officials made no response to Mr. Umarov’s announcement, but Ziyad Sabsabi, who represents Chechnya in Russia’s upper house of Parliament, said he believed the fighter would not live long. “It doesn’t matter that he has claimed responsibility for these bestial murders,” Mr. Sabsabi said. “In any case, his days are numbered. He will be found, and so will his entourage.”

Not even Rico

Timothy Egan has a column in The New York Times about an extraordinary 'everyman':

My friend John Rudolf left for Mount Everest on Monday, off to clamber up toward the roof the world at an age, 62, when some people have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, or at least finding a motivation to greet the dawn.
He’s in great shape, full of the kind of energy that could keep a poker game going at 3:00 a.m., and I’m convinced if weather, luck, and logistics are on his side, John Rudolf will join a very small club of people who have climbed the highest point on each of the seven continents. For him, Everest is the last one left on this most rarified of bucket lists.
Oh, and he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer as well, though at this point it’s in a wait-and-watch stage. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning like that character in the Kafka novel, Metamorphosis. I look at myself and say, ‘How did I get old?’” he said. “Because I don’t feel like that guy.”
He is a divorced father of two grown children, a money manager with his own firm here in Seattle, who is most happy when pedaling his bike over the braid of roads at the punishing waist line of Mount Rainier. He describes himself, athletically, as “an average guy” who is as tough as a goat gnawing on a salad of tin.
I’ve known Rudolf for a long time. Our families are close, with shared interests in sports, argument, and the outdoors. I spent a morning with him just before he left, putting on my journalist’s hat for the first time in our relationship. I came away in awe, and mystified at his motive. Certainly, there’s a Walter Mitty quality to his quest. Who doesn’t dream, while feigning interest in price-to-earning ratios, of standing in the company of alpine gods like Reinhold Messner? No doubt he also hears “time’s winged chariot hurrying near”, to quote the poet, but he denies being in the grip of any kind of midlife crisis, and I believe him. He’s gone out of his way to make this vertical challenge less about him, donating large sums of money and dedicating the climbs to four worthy causes, which you can find on his blog.
Still, none of this adequately answers the question: Why?
To which George Leigh Mallory, having grown tired of struggling to find the words, famously snapped: “Because it’s there!”
At the beginning of Jon Krakauer’s book about the 1996 tragedy on Mount Everest, Into Thin Air, which is all the more extraordinary on a second read, he quotes the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset:

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilized world.

Rudolf says he never had a late middle-aged plan to top the tallest mountains. But after climbing Kilimanjaro in Africa, Aconcagua in South America and Elbrus in Europe, and gaining confidence with each peak, he started to think he could follow the Seven Summit goal first articulated by Dick Bass, another businessman who traded his loafers for boots.
Ascending Mount McKinley, also known as Denali, the Alaskan giant that is the highest peak in North America, Rudolf walked past a dead man on the summit— someone from another expedition who had collapsed on the top the day before.
While biking in the Pyrenees just a few years ago, following the Tour de France route of his hero Lance Armstrong, Rudolf took a high-velocity fall from his bike and shattered his shoulder, which gives him a bit of a slump to this day.
On Vinson Massif, at 16,000-plus feet the high point of Antarctica, Rudolf thought his body would never get warm, wrapped in the constant chill of forty-below-zero, the most inhospitable place on earth.
Risk, by its nature, enhances life. And in about month or more, he will face the two biggest obstacles that stand between him and the 29,028-foot apex of Everest. One is the Khumbu Icefall, a jumble of groaning, splitting frozen slabs, many of them bigger than a suburban house. Entering the maze of the Khumbu, which guards the entrance to higher country, is a kind of Russian roulette, Krakauer noted. The other is trying to stay alive in the Death Zone— that troposphere air above 25,000 feet, where the body breaks down and the mind is mush from trying to breath air with one-third of the oxygen at sea level.
All this is, as the philosopher says, is playing at tragedy. But I’ve known enough mountains and mountaineers that I understand the playing. Risk, by its nature, enhances life. That’s the allure of danger: walk up to the edge, take a deep inhalation, and walk away in triumph.
Most of us will never find a cure to cancer, or broker a Mideast peace deal, or even grow a truly great tomato. But, as John Rudolf says, he can put one foot ahead of the other, gutting it out, grinding ever-upward, even as he qualifies for early Social Security.
If he stands under cobalt blue sky on the frozen perch of Everest in mid-May, he will be one of about 110 people to make all seven summits. Death is not something he worries about. “If your time is up,” he says, “death will get you wherever you are.”
At the end of our chat, I walked outside with him in the bracing Seattle spring, thinking of the days ahead when he would not see anything green or blossoming, nor draw a bath or get into a fluffy bed. I gave him a hug. “I want to see you alive,” I said. “I don’t care if you make the summit.”
“Neither do I.”
“Seriously?”
“To summit is optional,” he said, paraphrasing the mountaineer Ed Viesturs, “to get back down is mandatory.” And, again, I chose to believe him.

Moving is hard when you're an army

Stephen Farrell and Elisabeth Bumiller have an article in The New York Times about logistics:

Early this year a “fob in a box”— military slang for eighty shipping containers, with all the tents, showers and construction material needed to set up a remote Forward Operating Base— was put on trucks here for the trip from one war to another. Left over and never used in Iraq, the FOB rumbled north to Turkey, east through Georgia and Azerbaijan, by ship across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, then south on the old Soviet rail lines of Uzbekistan into northern Afghanistan. There— the end of a seven-nation, 2,300-mile, two-and-a-half-month odyssey— it was assembled just weeks ago as home for several hundred of the thousands of American forces entering the country.
In trying to speed 30,000 reinforcements into Afghanistan while reducing American forces in Iraq by 50,000, American commanders are orchestrating one of the largest movements of troops and matériel since World War Two. Military officials say that transporting so many people and billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, weapons, housing, fuel, and food in and out of both countries between now and an August deadline is as critical and difficult as what is occurring on the battlefield.
Military officials, who called the start of the five-month logistics operation “March Madness”, say it is like trying to squeeze a basketball through a narrow pipe, particularly the supply route through the Khyber Pass linking Pakistan and Afghanistan.
So many convoys loaded with American supplies came under insurgent attack in Pakistan last year that the United States military now tags each truck with a GPS device and keeps 24-hour watch by video feed at a military base in the United States. Last year the Taliban blew up a bridge near the pass, temporarily suspending the convoys.
“Hannibal trying to move over the Alps had a tremendous logistics burden, but it was nothing like the complexity we are dealing with now,” said Lieutenant General William G. Webster, the commander of the United States Third Army, using one of the extravagant historical parallels that commanders have deployed for the occasion. He spoke at a military base in the Kuwaiti desert before a vast sandscape upon which were armored trucks that had been driven out of Iraq and were waiting to be junked, sent home, or taken on to Kabul, Afghanistan.
The general is not moving elephants, but the scale and intricacy of the operation are staggering. The military says there are 3.1 million pieces of equipment in Iraq, from tanks to coffee makers, two-thirds of which are to leave the country. Of that, about half will go on to Afghanistan, where there are already severe strains on the system.
Overcrowding at Bagram Air Base, the military’s main flight hub in Afghanistan, is so severe that beds are at a premium and troops are jammed into tents alongside runways. Cargo planes, bombers, jet fighters, helicopters, and drones are stacked up in the skies, waiting to land.
All lethal supplies— weapons, armored trucks, eight-wheeled Stryker troop carriers— come in by air to avoid attacks, but everything else goes by sea and land. The standard route from Iraq to Afghanistan is south from Baghdad and down through Kuwait, by ship through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to Karachi, Pakistan, then overland once again. The “fob in a box” went on an experimental and potentially less expensive journey through Turkey to link up with a new northern route through Central Asia, which was opened last year for supplies going to Afghanistan from Europe and the United States, as an alternative to the risky trip through Pakistan.
Both routes circle Iran, by far the most direct way to get from Baghdad to Kabul, but off-limits because of the country’s hostile relationship with the United States. “These are the cards that we’re dealt,” said General Duncan J. McNabb, who oversees all military logistics as the leader of the United States Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois.
Nonlethal supplies flowing into Afghanistan include cement, lumber, blast barriers, septic tanks, and rubberized matting, all to expand space at airfields and double, to forty, the number of forward operating bases in a country that has an infrastructure closer to the 14th century than the 21st.
General David H. Petraeus of the United States Central Command, in another grand historical parallel, recently called the construction under way “the largest building boom in Afghanistan since Alexander built Kandahar”, a reference to the conqueror of Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C.
Food shipments alone are enough to feed an army. The Defense Logistics Agency, which provides meals for 415,000 troops, contractors, and American civilians each day in both wars, shipped 1.1 million frozen hamburger patties to Afghanistan in March alone, compared with 663,000 burgers in March 2009. The agency also supplied 27 million gallons of fuel to forces in Afghanistan this month, compared with 15 million gallons a year ago.
Commanders say that their chief worry is that the equipment and supplies will not arrive in sync with the troops. Their biggest enemy, they say, is the short time between now and August, the deadline set in separate plans for each war.
Early last year, President Obama and military commanders agreed on a withdrawal plan to reduce United States forces in Iraq to 50,000 by 31 August ( 97,000 United States troops are there now), with all American forces out by 2011. Late last year, he pushed commanders to speed up the infusion of new troops into Afghanistan— military planners had originally said it would take eighteen months— so that 30,000 new troops would get there by August. So far, about 6,000 of those reinforcements have arrived. Once they all get there, there will be close to 100,000 United States troops in Afghanistan.
“There is a great sense of urgency in getting in and getting effective,” said Vice Admiral Alan S. Thompson, the director of the Defense Logistics Agency. “The administration is concerned about being able to show results quickly.” There are obvious strains, he said, but “I think it’s doable.”
In the meantime, General McNabb, in yet another reference to Alexander the Great, said that when he took over the transportation command in 2008, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reminded him of the well-known words attributed to the famous conqueror: My logisticians are a humorless lot; they know if my campaign fails they are the first ones I will slay. Mr. Gates had his own words of advice. “He just said, ‘Hey, it’s a tough job, better figure it out,’” General McNabb said.

iPad, iPad, wherefore art thou, iPad?

Marco Grob has an article at Time.com about the iPad:
It is a gorgeous spring day when I arrive at the coolest address in the universe: 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, where Apple has been headquartered since 1993. The campus, for such they call it, is enormous, yet not big enough to contain Apple's current rate of expansion. An additional site is being designed and built. After stocking up on I visited the mothership T-shirts at the company store (we fanboys are pathetic, I readily confess), I am shown around the canteen, lawns, and public spaces. It is right to call this a campus, for everyone looks and dresses like a student. I should imagine the only people ever caught wearing suits here have been visiting politicians.
Phil Schiller and Eddy Cue are suitably bejeaned and relaxed as they welcome me for a talk about the iPad, Apple's new product, which will be launched in a week and a half. Schiller is senior VP of worldwide product marketing, responsible for delivering Apple's latest baby. Cue is VP of Internet services, overseeing the iTunes, App, and iBook online stores.
I am here at Apple's invitation to try out the iPad, and later in my visit I will spend an hour with the company's boss, Steve Jobs; the first time I've ever spent any real time with him. But as I meet with Schiller and Cue, I feel it only fair to reel off the list of negatives the iPad will meet on its release. It falls between two stools: neither small enough to be truly portable nor big enough to be called a proper computer. Everything, I point out, is under Apple's control, as usual. No Adobe Flash capability, no multitasking, no camera. It's just a scaled-up iPhone or iPod Touch.
"There's a negative way of saying that," says Schiller, "and a positive. 'Oh, it's just a big iPhone... boo!' or 'Hey, it's like a big iPhone... cool!' Luckily, millions of people have those, so there is an instant ease and familiarity when they first encounter the iPad. As for everything else, it's not about the features, it's about the experience. You just have to try it to see what I mean."
I, of course, am itching to try it, but first Cue takes me through the iBook application and its online store. There has been much talk of the iPad's dealing a death blow to Amazon's Kindle reader; publishers, it seems, have long yearned to escape from Amazon's tough control over pricing. I asked John Makinson, chairman and chief executive of Penguin, why he's so keen on the iPad. He told me he likes the fact that "it gives control back to us and allows us to discover how the market is developing. Frankly, when I saw the iPad, it was like an epiphany... This has to be the future of publishing. You'll know if you've spent any time with one." "Yes," I say. "I hope to try one out soon." Tracy Futhey, of Duke University, is similarly optimistic about the iPad's potential in education. "The iPad is going to herald a revolution in mashing up text, video, course materials, student input... We are very excited," she says. "Have you tried it?" "Er... Not yet."
Then there's games. Many will see the iPad chiefly as a gaming platform. Michel Guillemot, founder of Gameloft, one of the most successful developers for the iPhone, is even more passionate about the iPad than Makinson and Futhey are. "I see this as the fourth step of the games evolution," he told me. "First the microcomputer, then the dedicated console, next the smart phone, and now the iPad. What do you think?" "I'll let you know," I say, "when I've actually played with one."
And soon, I would. I thought I knew what to expect. For I've been playing with Apple products for a long, long time.

There's four more pages of it; go here if you want to read it all.

Rico says he knows the guy went through a lot, but doesn't poor Steve look like hell?

Potheads the world over are gnashing their teeth

Time and CNN have an article by Nicolas Asfouri about the latest drug problem in Afghanistan (they have too much):

It's hardly news that Afghanistan's huge opium crops supply more than 90% of the world's heroin. But now U.N. officials say Afghanistan is also the world's biggest producer of another drug: hashish. In its first attempt to calculate how much cannabis is grown in the country, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime says in a report that Afghan farmers earned up to $94 million last year from selling between 1,500 and 3,500 tons of hash, the resin extracted from cannabis crops.
U.S. and NATO officials believe that at least part of this revenue goes to insurgent groups to finance their attacks against coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, where almost all of the 139 soldiers killed this year have died. The report found that farmers grow about 17,000 hectares (about 42,000 acres) of cannabis in half of the country's 34 provinces, largely in the south. That is where Afghanistan's most fertile land is, the report says, and its rich soil produces an "astonishing yield" of potent hashish of about 320 pounds per hectare, more than three times the yield from cannabis grown in Morocco, another big hash producer. "Afghanistan is using some of its best land to grow cannabis," says Antonia Maria Costa, director of the U.N. drug office in Vienna. "If they grew wheat instead, insurgents would not have money to buy weapons and the international community would not have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on food aid."
That might be true. But the U.N.'s findings show how daunting a task it is for Afghan and NATO officials to persuade thousands of farmers to switch from growing drugs to food. Farmers can earn nearly three times as much money growing cannabis than wheat: about $3,900 per hectare compared with $1,200 per hectare. What's more, cannabis is even more lucrative to grow than opium poppies, which yield about $3,600 a hectare. It's also far cheaper to grow cannabis than poppies, needing little sophisticated cultivation. The report says it is an almost ideal crop for desperately poor farmers, who lack fertilizers and tractors, and who need every penny they can squeeze from their land. Because of this, the farmers have not been deterred by a government ban against growing hash. "The high sale price of cannabis and the relatively low costs of cultivation were the most frequently mentioned reasons for cultivating cannabis," says the report.
Despite the new U.N. findings, Afghan and NATO forces are unlikely to start trying to eradicate the cannabis crops, in part because Western policies over the past several years aimed at eradicating Afghanistan's mammoth opium crops are widely regarded by U.S. officials to have failed miserably. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, told G-8 leaders in Italy last year that the anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan "did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work".
Worse, many believe the policies have helped to stoke the Taliban's war against the coalition by uniting residents against the Afghan soldiers who destroyed their opium crops. "Eradicating marijuana and opium fields can breed resentment by people and be destabilizing," says John Dempsey, a rule of law adviser to U.S. and Afghan officials for the U.S. Institute for Peace. He cites the town of Marjah in Helmand province, where U.S. forces rolled tanks over poppy fields in a major offensive in February, two years after Afghan forces destroyed the local farmers' opium crops. After those anti-drug offensives, Dempsey says, "local residents felt they preferred the Taliban, because they let them grow opium." About 70% of the farmers surveyed by local UN workers in twenty largely Taliban-controlled provinces said they paid about 10% of their earnings to the local forces that controlled their areas.
Dempsey believes farmers could be better persuaded to give up growing opium and cannabis if Western and Afghan officials introduce big incentives and subsidies for growing food crops, and help farmers to sell them. One crucial problem, he says, is that the roads in southern Afghanistan are too dangerous for farmers to drive their crops to local markets. Groups of armed drug traffickers, meanwhile, travel through the countryside, buying opium and cannabis at the farm gates for cash. For many farmers in the area, making a living and staying alive, sadly, go hand in hand.

History for the day

On 1 April 1945, American forces invaded Okinawa during World War Two.

Quote for the day

You Russians hear about the war on television and the radio. I promise you the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your own lives and on your own skin.

Doku Umarov, a Chechen rebel, claiming responsibility for terrorist attacks in Moscow.

Civil War for the day

At the 140th of Gettysburg, early one morning.