A brief world news roundup for 29 April 2008.

United States & the Americas

• CBS – Millions in lucrative Iraq reconstruction contracts were never finished because of excessive delays, poor performance or other factors, including failed projects that are being falsely described by the U.S. government, investigators say.
• SouthCom – Located in Mayport, Fla., and dual-hatted with Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command (COMUSNAVSO), U.S. 4th Fleet re-establishment addresses the increased role of maritime forces in the SOUTHCOM area of focus, and demonstrates U.S. commitment to regional partners. “Reconstituting the Fourth Fleet recognizes the immense importance of maritime security in the southern part of the Western Hemisphere, and sends a strong signal to all the civil and military maritime services in Central and Latin America,” said Roughead.
• Canada.com – The number of people arrested in connection with the riots that took over parts of downtown Montreal on April 21 has now risen to 45.
• Washington Post – When Colombian drug traffickers need to move cocaine out of the country, their first stop is often Venezuela. Short flights connecting remote jungle air strips in northern Colombia with Venezuelan destinations just miles across the border tripled between 2003 and 2006, according to the International Crisis Group.
• Reuters – Deep in Venezuela’s sweltering heartland, a gleaming dairy plant sits idle, a testament to missteps that slow President Hugo Chavez’s drive to make his oil nation self-sufficient in food.
• NY Times – The latest crime craze in Mexico relies on a variety of tricks to make people believe their loved ones are being held for ransom, when, in fact, they are not.

Russia, Caucasus & Central Asia

• Jamestown Foundation – Given such problems, experts both inside and outside Russia are skeptical that the goal of halting Russia’s population decline by 2011 is achievable.
• Javno – Georgia, angry about Moscow’s ties with its breakaway regions, moved on Monday to block talks on Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), but a Russian official said the obstruction had failed.
• RIA Novosti – The Georgian breakaway republic of Abkhazia is prepared to sign a military agreement with Russia, the Abkhaz foreign minister said Monday.
• RFERL – Just over one year after President Vladimir Putin handed him the Chechen leadership, Ramzan Kadyrov has taken innumerable steps to tighten his grip over the war-battered republic. But the recent standoff between his forces and a rival pro-Kremlin clan underscores the volatile situation in Chechnya as it rebuilds from more than a decade of war against separatist rebels.
• EurasiaNet – After enduring extreme cold this past winter, Central Asia is bracing for what some officials say will be a dry summer. Those predictions, in turn, are stirring fears of prolonged power shortages that seriously impair economic functions.

Middle East

• ABC – In Sadr City, the stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia, U.S. soldiers battled deeper into the district a day after fierce clashes that killed at least 38 suspected militants, the military said. U.S. soldiers killed seven more extremists Monday after coming under small-arms fire in Sadr City, the military said. Four of the suspects were killed in an airstrike and three others by an Abrams tank crew, according to a statement.
• MNF Iraq – Local citizens in the Diyala Province fended off an attack from al Qaeda in Iraq terrorists April 28. Coalition forces received information from local leaders that citizens and local Sons of Iraq fought against an enemy attack and killed 12 AQI terrorists.
• BBC – Iraq’s former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz is due on trial over the deaths of a group of merchants in 1992. Judge Rauf Rasheed Abdel Rahman, an Iraqi Kurd, will preside at the trial. He is the same judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death.
• CNN – We’re escorted through Camp Bucca, the United States’ biggest detention facility in Iraq, by Marine Gen. Douglas Stone, who runs the camp. “They’re hard to break,” he says of the suspected al Qaeda inmates. As Stone speaks, some inmates begin pointing up and we’re told to keep moving. We wear protective glasses to cover our eyes. Inmates here throw rocks from the dusty, gravel floor at visitors, sometimes using makeshift slingshots to hurl the pebbles at 100 mph. Several guards have been blinded by the projectiles.
• LA Times – Baghdad says it agrees that Iran has supplied militants with weapons, but the Iraqi government seems to want the U.S. to back off threats of military action and let it pursue diplomatic solutions. In echoing the Pentagon’s latest accusations of Iranian meddling, the Iraqi government has placed itself firmly where it has long said it does not want to be: caught in the middle between Washington and its neighbor to the east.
• Monitor – The killing of an Iraqi civilian by a Ugandan guard two weeks ago may have caused the abduction of two of his colleagues, sources in Iraq informed Daily Monitor on Monday.
• AKI – Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Monday launched at least seven home-made Qassam rockets and nine mortar shells at the Western Negev, after Israeli forces attacked a house in the northern town of Beit Hanoun.
• Jerusalem Post – Ten North Koreans were killed in an IAF air strike on a Syria installation September, Bloomberg reported Monday, quoting an NHK report that cited unidentified South Korean intelligence officials. According to the report, the Koreans’ remains were returned to North Korea after being cremated.
• Ya Libnan – Hezbollah fighters are under extremely strict instructions not to talk , but one unidentified fighter did reveal that the group is preparing for a major assault on Israel in coordination with Iran and Syria.
• AINA – The Lebanese political crisis has plunged the powerful Maronite Christian community into a crisis of its own, raising fears that the longer the presidential seat remains vacant, the greater the threat on the community’s political role.

Iran

• McClatchy – One of the most powerful men in Iraq isn’t an Iraqi government official, a militia leader, a senior cleric or a top U.S. military commander or diplomat. He’s an Iranian general, and at times he’s more influential than all of them. Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani commands the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
• NPR – The government of Iran is closely watching the fate of the Iranian opposition group living at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Although the government views the group as a threat, some Iranians see the situation differently. An Iranian NGO is trying to help them return to Iran.
• AP – A top Iranian judiciary official warned Monday against the “destructive” cultural and social consequences of importing Barbie dolls and other Western toys.
• AFP – An Iran-led radical front in the Middle East is becoming more powerful and weaknesses in it need to be found, Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz said Monday. “The radical group headed by Iran, including Syria, Hezbollah and the Hamas (are) gaining more and more power each year,” Mofaz told reporters following a meeting in Washington with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
• NCRI – On Saturday, clashes between the State Security Forces (SSF) -mullahs’ suppressive police- and local residents left 10 dead in the western city of Ivan north of the provincial capital of Elam, according to the Iranian Resistance’s sources in Iran.
• MEMRI - On April 16, rioting broke out in Ilam province, southeastern Iran, over fraud in the second round of Majlis elections and the preference for the conservative candidate over the reformist candidate. At least four were killed in the riots.
• Moscow Times – Iran dismissed objections from big Western consumer nations to setting up an OPEC-style gas body when officials from producer countries met in Tehran on Monday to discuss increased cooperation.

Southeast Asia

• Asharq Al-Awsat – U.S. and Afghan troops fought off coordinated insurgent attacks in eastern Afghanistan, leaving a dozen militants dead and a dozen more wounded, the U.S. military said Monday.
• MSNBC – U.S. Marines in helicopters and Humvees flooded into a Taliban-held town in southern Afghanistan’s most violent province early Tuesday in the first major American operation in the region in years.
• CSM – The attempted assassination of President Hamid Karzai Sunday came as the latest sign of a trend worrying Western officials: that the insurgency is spreading from the Taliban stronghold of the south to the central and northern regions of the country.
• CJTFA – Afghan National Army Commandos and Afghan National Police, assisted by Coalition forces, killed insurgents in Galuch Village, Laghman province April 27. Commandos from the 201st Commando Kandak were searching Galuch when, air-support elements identified insurgents on a nearby ridge with a rocket propelled grenade.
• Independent – The heroin flooding Britain’s streets is threatening the lives of UK troops in Afghanistan, an Independent investigation can reveal.
• Telegraph – The Nato mission in Afghanistan is “critically” short of key troops and equipment, Gordon Brown has told allies.
• Bakhtar – A spokesman for Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud’s political group, Tehreek-e-Taliban, told a news agency today (Monday) that Mehsud would no longer negotiate with the new government because it refuses to pull troops out of Pakistan’s tribal areas.
• AKI – Jailed cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz, one of two brothers who ran Islamabad’s radical Red Mosque, will soon be released, sources in Pakistan’s interior ministry have told AKI.
• ABC – Sri Lanka hailed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit Monday as an important step in cementing closer ties between the two nations. But the trip also highlights Sri Lanka’s slow turn from the West, which has expressed increasing concerns about Colombo’s human rights record and its embrace of donors less critical of its escalating war against ethnic Tamil rebels.
• CSM – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stops in India Tuesday after visiting Pakistan and Sri Lanka on a trip aimed at inking energy deals and curbing the West’s influence.
• UPI – India’s security agencies say they are worried over the emergence of a new armed insurgent outfit in militancy-hit Assam state. They said the Bodoland Royal Tiger Force has been procuring arms and ammunition in western Assam.

Far East & Pacific

• National Geographic – China’s Journey; The great nation is on the move. (China aerials video.)
• NY Times – A North Korean military officer defected to South Korea across its heavily armed border, the first Communist officer to do so in a decade, a South Korean military spokesman said on Monday.
• Turkish Daily News – Australia will withdraw 200 troops from East Timor, sent after the February assassination attempt on the country’s president and prime minister, as both countries now regard the security situation to be stable.
• The Australian – The revelations over the past week that Griffith University aggressively pursued funds from the Saudi Arabian embassy to finance its Islamic studies unit illustrates a major problem facing all liberal democracies confronted with the vast reservoir of petro-dollars controlled by the Saudi Government.

Europe

• Scotsman – The founder of Ineos was jeered by striking workers today as he visited the Grangemouth oil refinery on the second day of a bitter dispute over pensions. Workers will return to the plant at 6am tomorrow although it could take some time for normal operations to resume.
• BalkanInsight – The United States is increasingly concerned by corruption in Bulgaria’s law enforcement agencies, according to a report by the US Justice Department.
• BBC – A court in Spain has rejected a request from Buenos Aires to extradite former Argentine President Isabel Peron who is wanted for alleged human rights abuses.
• IHT – Italian news reports say police have arrested 16 suspects in a sweep against an organized crime syndicate. The arrests early Monday were made in Crotone, in the southern Calabria region where the powerful ‘ndrangheta mob group is based.
• The Strategist – Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA (2007) is less the story of one of the world’s most enduring guerrilla organizations. It is more an account of Gerry Adams, his rise to power in the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein (the political wing of Irish republicanism), and his secret negotiations with the British and Irish governments, which led to the Northern Ireland peace process and the Good Friday agreement of 1998.
• Javno – A Ukrainian helicopter crashed in the Black Sea on Monday killing 19 people, the state energy company Naftogaz said. One person on board survived the crash, which occurred when the helicopter hit part of an offshore platform operated by Naftogaz, a company spokesman said.
• Spiegel – An exhibition in Paris of color photographs of life under the German occupation has caused such a furore that it was nearly cancelled. The photographs, which were taken by an employee of a Nazi propaganda magazine, are now to be shown with new captions explaining their historical context.
• TIME – Rutka Laskier lived in Bedzin, Poland, with her parents, grandmother and brother. Her journal, covering four months in 1943, provides a rare glimpse of the daily life of Jews under Nazi rule. The diary was found after World War II by a friend–who kept it to herself for 60 years before allowing it to be published, initially in Polish, in 2006. A selection of entries…

Africa

• The Nation – Islamists led by the Union of Islamic Courts and its more  radical youth wing, Al-Shabaab, have gained substantial territorial control in south and central Somalia in the past 24 hours. Districts in Middle Shabelle, Bay and Middle Juba regions have fallen to the religious men after pro-government officials abandoned their stations.
• NY Sun – Somalia’s transitional federal government is looking to emulate the counterinsurgency model employed by General David Petraeus in Iraq in its fight against Islamic supremacists who have made a base in southern Somalia. In an interview with The New York Sun, the Somali foreign minister, Ali Ahmed Jama, said he was hoping to emulate “the Anbar model.”
• Shabelle – A remotely-controlled land mine blast was targeted on marching Ethiopian troop in Baidoa town the provincial capital of Bay region southwestern Somalia later on Monday-eyewitnesses said. Some eyewitnesses told Shabelle that four Ethiopian soldiers died at the scene the blast happened while others say that the death is too much than that. After the explosion the Ethiopian soldiers have uninterruptedly opened a fire and killed one civilian nearby while four others were wounded.
• Garowe – Police forces in the capital of Somalia’s separatist state of Somaliland clashed with hundreds of angry rioters on Sunday, prompting opposition parties to condemn the government for using “excessive force” against civilians.
• East Standard – Two top Mungiki leaders were killed on the Naivasha-Nairobi highway. Acting Mungiki chairman, Charles Ndung’u Wagacha, and treasurer, Naftali Irungu, were reportedly driving to Naivasha Prison yesterday to meet their chairman when they were killed.
• Sudan Tribune – The Sudanese government signed a contract with two Chinese firms worth 396 million U.S. dollars for the project to elevate Roseires Dam in eastern Sudan, funded by a number of Arab funds

The Global War

• Magharebia – Algerian terrorist leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar is said to be negotiating the terms of his surrender, a move expected to deal a major blow to al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb. The surrender confirms reports of deep internal divisions within the organisation following the decision to carry out suicide attacks against civilians.
• Pak Tribune – Pakistan and Iran on Monday resolved all issues regarding the US 7.5 billion dollars gas pipeline project and an agreement to this effect would be inked in Tehran by President Pervez Musharraf and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
• The Economist – India is vying for raw materials and more in Africa Like China, India is looking for raw materials and new markets for its goods. New Delhi hopes that a nuanced, south-south relationship will give it the edge.
• Air Force – May 2 marks 20 years since the last B-1B Lancer was delivered to the Air Force, and today commanders consider it one of the most valuable aircraft in Iraq. Since 2003, the once-nuclear-weapon-carrying bomber has maintained a continuous presence in Southwest Asia after the Air Force modified it to carry numerous conventional bombs.
• Chatham House – This month marks the centenary of a truly pivotal moment in the history of the Middle East, and indeed of the wider world. For in the early hours of May 26 1908, at a remote spot in the Persian mountains, a drilling team led by an intrepid British geologist, George Reynolds, suddenly felt the ground rumbling and then watched a stinking black torrent burst through.
• ubiwar – Bryan Finoki at Subtopia gives us his usual brilliant take on architecture and control in “Block D” Enters the Pantheon of GWOT Space…

Sights & Sounds

Stratfor Daily Podcast: The Taliban’s audacious attack against Afghanistan’s president highlights the difficulties NATO faces in beating the jihadists. Geography and difficulties in obtaining cooperation from neighboring Pakistan and Iran will make life difficult for Gen. David Petraeus as CENTCOM chief – as America’s ally, Australia’s Kevin Rudd, acknowledges. Colin Chapman reports.

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Douglas Feith’s remarkable War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism is the first book written by a former Bush Administration insider to offer a dispassionate and documented account of the reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. To explore Feith’s account, Hudson Institute held a discussion with three former officials who were active participants in the decisions of the day.

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CBC Dispatches – Much ado about Shakespeare’s birthday. England marks the latest anniversary in Stratford-upon Avon. France and the fiction of race. Will the government do what it said it would never do again – keep tabs on Jews, blacks, and all races and religions? Stories of India’s awakening from the author of a new book about its breathtaking transformation. Vukovar Revisited. Years after one of the most brutal seiges in the former Yugoslavia, a Croation-Canadian returns to find his people frozen in time.

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Economist podcast – The rise of the Gulf, Vietnam’s growth, the Democrats in Pennsylvania and a new study on human reproduction.

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