Six In The Morning

Under cover of darkness, Afghan women head to battle

By Mandy Clark, Correspondent, NBC News

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — Severely outgunned, the battle was going badly. It seemed like certain defeat. Then, from out of the crowd stepped a young girl of around 14. She grabbed the pole from the fallen flag-bearer, held it up, and called out to her brothers-in-arms to fight to the death.

Though she was shot dead, her rallying cry was seen as the turning point of the 1880 Battle of Maiwand; a triumph for the Afghans, and a devastating loss for British forces during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Her name was Malalai, Afghanistan’s Joan of Arc.

“If you go back into history, before we only had one female soldier named Malalai, but now I have a lot of Malalais in my Special Forces,” said Colonel Jalauddin Yaftaly, who heads the elite units. There are more than 1,000 women in the Afghan Army – and about two dozen have made it into Special Forces.

How a U.S. Citizen Came to Be in America’s Cross Hairs

 

By MARK MAZZETTI, CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE

Published: March 9, 2013

WASHINGTON – One morning in late September 2011, a group of American drones took off from an airstrip the C.I.A. had built in the remote southern expanse of Saudi Arabia. The drones crossed the border into Yemen, and were soon hovering over a group of trucks clustered in a desert patch of Jawf Province, a region of the impoverished country once renowned for breeding Arabian horses.

A group of men who had just finished breakfast scrambled to get to their trucks. One was Anwar al-Awlaki, the firebrand preacher, born in New Mexico, who had evolved from a peddler of Internet hatred to a senior operative in Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Another was Samir Khan, another American citizen who had moved to Yemen from North Carolina and was the creative force behind Inspire, the militant group’s English-language Internet magazine.

Letters and secret files reveal the tormented life of Lina Prokofiev

New book on Soviet composer’s family will show how his wife was abandoned, tortured by Stalin’s police and sent to the gulag

  Dalya Alberge

The Observer, Sunday 10 March 2013

She endured an abusive husband who likened her to “an infected tooth”, and torture by Stalin’s secret police, who stuck needles in her, threatened her children and drove her to the brink of madness. The tragic life of the wife of Sergei Prokofiev, one of the 20th century’s greatest composers, is now revealed in hundreds of previously unpublished letters, as well as secret Soviet files.

The cruelty suffered by Lina Prokofiev at home paled against her later torture, but she never stopped loving her husband – even when he abandoned her for another woman – and she never spoke publicly of her suffering during eight years in a Siberian prison camp.

Argentina’s worry over Falklands

 

TERRITORIAL DISPUTES

Residents of the Falkland Islands this weekend vote in a referendum on whether they want to belong to Great Britain. Argentina, which claims the islands, is trying to ignore the vote – but it fears the result.

Argentine historian Luis Alberto Romero is happy. This weekend, a dream will come true for him – one of direct democracy, as once proposed by the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The residents of the Falkland Islands have the chance to vote whether or not they wish to continue belonging to Britain. It is the first time for them that they have the opportunity to have an input in the conflict surrounding the rocky isles of the South Atlantic.

Can Nicaragua protect the waters it won?

A ruling at the UN’s highest court redrew maritime boundaries around the Colombian island of San Andrés and Nicaragua. Security analysts say it could lead to unintended consequences like increased trafficking.

 By Seth Robbins, Contributor / March 9, 2013

SAN ANDRÉS, COLOMBIA

On a gusty afternoon, dozens of moored fishing boats rock in the surf as their captains play dominoes in the shade of palms.

The fishermen have been largely out of work since November, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague redrew the maritime border around this Colombian island in the Caribbean, extending Nicaragua’s exclusive economic zone north and south of San Andrés by about 30,000 square miles.

This means that fishing waters have been slashed for Colombian fisherman, says Denny Fox Biscaino, treasurer of the Artisanal Fisherman’s Collective of San Andrés. But security experts in both countries agree that the ruling could have an unintended consequence: increasing drug trafficking in these blue-green seas.

 Kazakhstan’s independent media under fire

 10 March 2013 Last updated at 03:16 GMT

By Rayhan Demytrie

BBC News, Almaty, Kazhakstan

More than a year since the worst political violence in Kazakhstan’s modern history, social tensions continue to rise and independent media are under fire from the government.

“We want the authorities to pay attention to the issue of corruption in our town,” Berik Zhagiparov recently told journalists.

The Youth Gazette editor travelled to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s commercial capital, to draw attention to the situation in his native Zhezkazgan.