A brief world news roundup for 31 March 2008.

United States & the Americas

• Moscow Times – Winding down his presidency, George W. Bush is beginning his farewell tour on the world stage trailed by questions about how much clout he still wields. Air Force One will roar out of Andrews Air Force Base on Monday to whisk Bush to the first in a long-planned series of global goodbye events. After a brief stop in Ukraine, Bush stops in Romania to attend his last summit with NATO leaders.
• contentions – Abe: one wonders if Barack Obama is even absorbing minimal facts about the situation in Iraq.
• NY Times – Files provided by Colombian officials from computers they say were captured in a cross-border raid in Ecuador this month appear to tie Venezuela’s government to efforts to secure arms for Colombia’s largest insurgency.
• Washington Post – But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human rights groups say.
• France24 – A Falcon 900 sent to French Guyana to prepare for a possible evacuation of French-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt is heading back to France, according to local media reports, dampening hopes of her immediate release.
• IPS – The conflict with the rural associations has highlighted political weaknesses of the new Argentine government of President Cristina Fernández and shown that economic recovery is necessary but not sufficient to remedy latent social tensions.
• Maclean’s – A routine rescue operation that turned into disaster in the waters of the North Atlantic sparked anger and frustration Sunday as grieving families grappled with the loss of four of their men. Three men died and one remains lost at sea after L’Acadien II flipped over while it was under tow early Saturday.

Russia, Caucasus & Central Asia

• FT – Denying Georgia and Ukraine the right to move towards Nato membership this week would amount to appeasement of Russia, according to Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, who added that such a move would grant Moscow effective veto power over membership of the alliance.
• EuroNews – The Moscow public prosecutor says the identity of the murderer of Anna Politkovskaya is known, and that he is on the run. Nine people in all have been charged with implication in her killing in October 2006. Blurred security camera pictures are the only known ones of the suspected killer.
• Robert Amsterdam – Remember Sergei Storchak? The innocent civilian deputy finance minister who was sacrificed as a pawn in the Spy Wars? Today Reuters reports that the investigator on the case is facing a probe himself – something that is highly unlikely in any other country, but given the deteriorated status of the Russian justice system, I wouldn’t say this is a particularly surprising development.
• CRN – The searches underway in Tajikistan with the aim to find the suspects of murdering the journalist of Channel One Ilyas Shurpaev gave an unexpected result. Three persons are already figurants in the case.
• RIA Novosti – Police in Russia’s North Caucasus Republic of Chechnya are searching for a Chechen resident suspected of spreading calls for terrorist attacks through the Internet, a police source said on Sunday.
• IHT – Police say 12 people were wounded at a wedding in Chechnya when a guest threw a hand grenade. The blast took place Saturday in the village of Sari-Chu.
• Prague Watchdog – Two Chechen policemen have been killed as a result of a blast near the village of Alleroi in Chechnya’s Kurchaloysky district, Kavkazsky uzel reports.
• Payvand – Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan kicked off tripartite conference on railway cooperation in Tehran on Saturday. The conference is to conduct preliminary survey and studies on running an electronic trains connecting Tabriz, Azarshahr as well as construction of new rail track connecting Ghazvin, Rasht and Astara.
• Global Voices – Despite amendments to the law on public marches, rallies and demonstrations following the recently lifted state of emergency in Armenia, the opposition continues to hold meetings on the streets of the capital, Yerevan.

Middle East

• People’s Daily – Powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Sunday asked his followers to put weapons aside after days of fierce clashes have pushed the nation to the brink of even larger bloodshed.
• LA Times – Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr’s statement calling for an end to the ongoing clashes between the government and his Mahdi Army militia.
• Asharq Alawsat – Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on Arab leaders meeting in Syria to voice their support for Iraq’s “resistance” to what he calls foreign occupation.
• Khaleej Times – A U.S. warplane strafed snipers in the southern city of Basra, killing at least 16 suspected militants after Iraqi troops came under heavy fire, the American military said.
• AFPS – U.S. aircraft killed 14 terrorists during two anti-insurgent operations conducted in Baghdad today, and coalition forces killed or captured dozens of additional terrorists during other operations throughout Iraq over the past two days, military officials reported.
• Bill Roggio – Sadr’s call for an end to fighting by his followers comes as his Mahdi Army has taken high casualties over the past six days. Since the fighting began on Tuesday, 358 Mahdi Army fighters were killed, 531 were wounded, 343 were captured, and 30 surrendered. The US and Iraqi security forces have killed 125 Mahdi Army fighters in Baghdad alone, while Iraqi security forces have killed 140 Mahdi fighters in Basrah.
• OpFor – The infestation of Basra with Mahdi madmen shows what could happen throughout Iraq if American forces would draw down too quickly. It has not been long since British forces prematurely turned over Basra’s city streets to local police. Now, the Mahdi Army roams the streets with RPGs and RPK machine guns. Basra has become one of the last Iraqi havens for extremists. If we stop our chemotherapy early because it makes us sick, the cancer will return.
• AP – Iraqi soldiers uncovered a cache of Iranian-made rockets and armor-piercing roadside bombs Saturday in an apartment building occupied by Shiite militia members south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.
• NY Times – Cordesman: Even if American and Iraqi forces are able to eliminate Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are still three worrisome possibilities of new forms of fighting that could divide Iraq and deny the United States any form of “victory.”
• United Nations – Evidence shows that a criminal network was responsible for the massive car bombing that killed the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others in Beirut in February 2005, the International Independent Investigation Commission (IIIC) says in a new report to the Security Council.
• Al Arabiya – Arab leaders gathered in Damascus for an annual summit expressed concern on Sunday about what they said was rising Islamophobia around the world amid Muslim anger at a Dutch film linking Islam to terrorism.
• Bloomberg – Turkish jets and artillery fired on Kurdish rebel camps in neighboring northern Iraq, killing at least 15 separatists, the military General Staff said. The Turkish army used long-range missiles on March 27 to attack members of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, who were crossing the border from Iraq into Turkey.
• Haaretz – The Israel Defense Forces has been broadening its ground operations in Gaza in response to the increase in rocket fire on Israel since Wednesday. During the past three days, two Palestinian gunmen were killed in IDF operations in the Strip, and at least 10 Qassam rockets and 25 mortars were fired at Israel.
• Haaretz – Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal said Sunday that abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Palestinian militants in June 2006, was still alive.
• Jerusalem Post – Syria has confirmed the existence of a secret channel of communication with Israel which is mediated by Turkey. In an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper published Sunday, Syrian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Dr. Bushra Kanfani, denied that Syria and Israel were conducting secret negotiations though confirmed that “Turkey is used as a channel of communication” and “listens to both sides’ positions.”
• Daily Star – Hizbullah international relations officer Nawwaf Moussawi said Saturday that the coming months would witness the crash of the US administration and its allies in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon.

Iran

• Al Jazeera – Iran has summoned the Dutch ambassador to Tehran to protest about a film deemed insulting to Islam posted on the internet by a Dutch member of parliament.
• Jerusalem Post – CIA director General Michael Hayden said on Sunday he believed that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. In an interview to NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ Hayden said the CIA stood by November’s National Intelligence Estimate, which assessed that Teheran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. “We stand by the judgment,” he said, but added that the report “unfortunately, tends to get oversimplified in public discourse.”
• Abu Aardark – So you can add the ”Iran is liquidating its no longer useful proxies” theory (which would fit this general line of speculation about Iran’s doubts about Sadr and preference for the simultaneously-US backed ISCI) to the generally most prevalent…
• CSM – Portrait of a veteran Iranian revolutionary: For the past half century, Zabihollah Bakhshi – a religious militant – has been center stage in nearly every Iranian fight or street protest.
• Telegraph – Be it fighting the occupation, sectarian bloodletting, or internecine squabbling with his fellow Shia, the fiery cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has waged war on almost every front in Iraq’s turbulent past five years. Now, though, the leader of the Mehdi Army militia is far away from the battlefield, having swapped Iraq for the peace of a seminary in neighbouring Iran. Sadr, who at 35 is still a relative novice in clerical terms, has begun studying in the holy City of Qom.
• Iran Focus – Five people were killed as a helicopter belonging to Iran’s State Security Forces (SSF) crashed in north-west Iran, a senior police official said on Saturday.
• Press TV – The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps in a statement has commemorated the 29th anniversary of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s National Day. The IRGC congratulated the Iranian nation on the glorious occasion, praising the massive turnout in the 1979 referendum, which was held a mere 50 days after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, impressing the entire world, the West in particular.
• NCRI – Tabnak, a website close to Mohsen Rezaii, former commander of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and current Secretary of the powerful Exigency Council in mullahs’ regime lashed out at Muqtada al-Sadr on Sunday for what it called presumptuous statements directed at the mullahs’ supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

Southeast Asia

• BBC – A bomb explosion near a power plant in southern Afghanistan has killed two employees, police say.
  Helmand police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said eight people had been hurt in the blast in the Gereshk district of the troubled province.
• Afgha.com – Eight Taliban fighters were killed in an operation by Afghan and Western troops after the rebels ambushed a civilian supply convoy in troubled southern Afghanistan, police said Sunday.
• news.com.au – A Royal Marine has told how he threw himself in front of an exploding grenade to save his colleagues – and escaped with just a nose bleed. Lance Corporal Matt Croucher has been recommended for a Victoria Cross, Britain’s The Times newspaper reports. He and three other soldiers were on patrol in southern Afghanistan when Lance Corporal Croucher hit a tripwire attached to the grenade.
• UPI – After a sharpening of the U.N. mandate’s focus in Afghanistan, the new U.N. mission in the country arrived in Kabul Friday. U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan Kai Eide announced a pledge to boost assistance to the Afghanistan government to help stabilize the country.
• Dawn – The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has observed that violation of rights sharply increased in 2007 in the country, and urged the new government to improve governance and prioritise its targets to grasp the nettle. Releasing its annual report on the state of human rights in 2007 here at the Lahore Press Club, HRCP chairperson Asma Jahangir and director I.A. Rehman said the state of Pakistan was only half alive in 2007, naturally reducing its capacity to guarantee the people’s rights and proving to be one of the worst years in its history, if not the worst.
• IPS – With a democratically-elected government firmly in place, the United States is anxious to see that its ‘war-on-terror’, which depended heavily on cooperation from the erstwhile military regime run by President Pervez Musharraf, does not get derailed.
• Daily Times – Security forces have found fifty-eight bodies of people who died during six days of sectarian violence in Kohat district, as a temporary ceasefire between the Mishti and Kachai tribes was being observed, Online reported.
• GulfNews – The Pakistani Taliban welcomed on Sunday the new government’s readiness to negotiate an end to a spreading conflict in Pakistan, but vowed to carry on fighting American forces in neighbouring Afghanistan.
• BBC – Two people are killed after a mosque is bombed in Nepal’s second biggest city of Biratnagar.
• Independent – Tash does not look like a man who has just put his life in danger. But as he sits in a cosy editing suite in London, the images on the screens around him – a Tibetan political prisoner showing his scars, a still of Tash interviewing a Buddhist monk – prove the contrary. He has risked his life at least twice: the first time, 11 years ago, to escape his native Tibet; and then, as the screens document, when he went back with a hidden camera to expose what he felt were injustices perpetrated by the Chinese government.
• Times of India – Bhutan’s first week as the world’s newest democracy has been marred by the resignation of its opposition amid allegations of foul-play in historic elections.
• AFP – A Woman accused of being a witch was tied to a tree and badly beaten by villagers in eastern India in an incident broadcast on television.
• RTE – Fighting between Sri Lankan troops and Tamil Tiger rebels killed 36 combatants in the north, where soldiers were battling tropical illnesses brought on by heavy  rains.

Far East & Pacific

• BBC – The Olympic torch has arrived in Beijing aboard a special flight from Athens where it was handed over to the Chinese Olympic authorities. The torch will be taken to Tiananmen Square for a ceremony to welcome it to Beijing.
• Guardian – Thai farmers fall prey to rice rustlers as price of staple crop rockets: Asian countries curb exports to avoid shortfalls as ‘perfect storm’ nearly doubles price in three months.
• China Post – Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country’s murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film “The Killing Fields,” died Sunday, colleague Sydney Schanberg said. Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer.
• Radio Australia – China will sign its first free trade pact with a developed country on April 7 when it inks a deal with New Zealand.
• NY Times – On Monday, the prime ministers of Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam will officially inaugurate the former opium smuggling route as the final link of what they call the “north-south economic corridor,” a 1,150-mile network of roads linking the southern Chinese city of Kunming to Bangkok. The network, several sections of which were still unpaved as late as December, is a major milestone for China and its southern neighbors.
• Dawn – Suspected separatists shot dead three Muslim men in separate attacks across the insurgency-hit south of Thailand, police said Sunday.
• Pacific Magazine – The United States nuclear test legacy in the Marshall Islands and an impasse over future American use of Kwajalein Missile Testing Range were put in the spotlight this past week with the visit of a U.S. Congressman to the Marshall Islands.
• Jakarta Post – Former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad urged the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims to boycott Dutch products following the release of an anti-Islam movie.
• Japan Times – The recent anti-Chinese protests in Tibet and several surrounding provinces in China have been watched with concern by governments in nearby South and Southeast Asia, especially India. But unlike faraway Europe and the United States, their priority in Tibet is stability, not human rights.
• Nosint – Japan completed deploying a ballistic missile defence system in the Tokyo area on Saturday, a day after North Korea reportedly fired short-range missiles off its west coast, news reports said.
• The Interpreter – Prime Minister Rudd had an awkward moment at a press conference yesterday when a Japanese journalist asked him if he had spoken to his Japanese counterpart on the phone. Rudd’s answer was less than elegant.

Europe

• AFP – For Italian mozzarella producers, the European Commission’s decision to back off from a threatened import ban on the cheese prevented the crisis in the industry from becoming a real disaster.
• Breakingnews.ie – President George Bush has told Nato members he wants to expand the alliance to include three Balkan countries and put Ukraine and Georgia on track for membership. Speaking ahead of the Nato summit starting on Wednesday in Bucharest, Romania, President Bush may struggle to persuade European leaders about his hopes for expanding the organisation.
• Spiegel – Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero has never had an easy relationship with US President George W. Bush. Spain, though, is mulling an increase to its contribution in Afghanistan — but still refuses to fight in the dangerous south.
• Brussels Journal – The Dutch government has distanced itself from the strong condemnation issued by EU chair Slovenia of the anti-Qur’an film Fitna by far-right MP Geert Wilders.

Africa

• Press TV – A massive explosion has destroyed an Ethiopian military convoy in South Mogadishu, killing at least nine soldiers and wounding many others. The blast was triggered by a remote controlled device as the Ethiopian convoy passed along the Florenza Street.
• Reuters – At least 11 people were killed in Mogadishu on Saturday when troops at the Villa Somalia presidential palace returned fire against Islamist insurgents who attacked it with mortar bombs, witnesses said.
• Jihad Unspun – Somalia’s Youth Islamic Movement, who are engaging both the puppet government forces and the Ethiopian troops have now been added to the US list of “terrorist” organizations however they continue on defiantly, vowing to wage attacks against the US “it will not soon forget”.
• Magharebia – Algerian security forces recently foiled an al-Qaeda attempt to establish a base in the Jbel Assfour area near the Moroccan border, El Khabar reported on Sunday.
• AFP – Zimbabwe’s opposition accused authorities on Sunday of deliberately sitting on election results in a last-ditch bid to help Robert Mugabe cling to office as it claimed victory over the veteran president.
• Guardian – Robert Mugabe was desperately trying to cling to power last night, despite his clear defeat in Zimbabwe’s presidential election, by blocking the electoral commission from releasing official results and threatening to treat an opposition claim of victory as a coup. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said that what it regards as the overwhelming win by its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, is “under threat”.
• BBC – About 65 miners are feared dead after heavy rainfall triggers the collapse of gem mines in Tanzania.

The Global War

• Al Arabiya – CIA director Michael Hayden warned Sunday that al-Qaeda was training operatives who “look western” and could enter the United States undetected to conduct terrorist attacks.
• VOA – The head of the US Central Intelligence Agency says al-Qaida has established a safe haven in the tribal areas near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that it presents a “clear and present danger” to the West. VOA’s Kent Klein reports from Washington.
• CTB – Iraqi Shiites Copying From Their Hezbollah Cousins in Lebanon? In reviewing the action this week between Iraqi forces and Shiite militia, it’s instructive to compare press accounts of this conflict to reports from the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel conflict in Lebanon…
• Reuters – The largest summit in NATO’s history starting next Wednesday could mould the West’s relations with Russia for years to come and show whether the U.S.-led alliance has the resolve to win the war in Afghanistan.
• Russia Today – Missile defence is certain to dominate George Bush’s last meeting with Vladimir Putin, in his role as Russian President, in Sochi this week. Talks over the planned U.S. missile defence system in Europe have so far stalled and both men will no doubt be hoping their close personal relationship can make a difference.
• SMH – George Bush has praised Australia’s decision to withdraw its combat troops from Iraq as a sign of both military success and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s strength of character. Making the best of a diplomatic setback, Mr Bush said Mr Rudd was not abandoning Iraq, but simply changing mission.
• NZ Herald - Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said yesterday. Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican’s newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics 17.4 percent.
• FT – Russian arms exports to China dropped a dramatic 62 per cent last year, according to figures released on Monday, in a development described by one expert as potentially marking the beginning of the end of high volume arms transfers between the two countries.
• iol – If your grocery bill is going up, you’re not alone. From subsistence farmers to gourmets, consumers worldwide face rising food prices in what analysts call a perfect storm of conditions.
• State Failure – The Weekly Great Game #3 (March 24-30).
• Mudville Gazette – Dawn Patrol (for March 31, 2008).
• Thunder Run – Web Reconnaissance for 03/31/2008.

Sights & Sounds

Reuters on the latest in Iraq and al-Sadr’s statement

Hamas leader tells Sky he is offering Israel a deal to attack only military targets.

Sky News Foreign Matters Podcast – The Cost of Prostitution and War, Tim reports from Syria on the impact of the young victims of the Iraq War.

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