Sunday Links about Horrible Things

In my first Sunday links roundup, I use LOLSpeak, double entendres and plenty of snark to summarize grim developments from Russia to Pakistan. Appreciate: this was compiled Saturday night --Halloween-- in my office, which the downstairs security guards accused me of trying to burglarize.

Work/life balance? What are you, European?

• SHUT UP, DORKS: Everyone, point and laugh! Two Canadian social scientists wasted a bunch of money running a statistical analysis of twenty years of reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to find out if those organizations have an ‘anti-Israel bias’ or focus their criticism disproportionately on democracies, as the Israeli government and right wing NGOs have alleged. The shut-in academics, who clearly don’t know how this game is played, found no evidence of a secret Jews-and-freedom-hating policy at either organization. Will this finally put the whole obnoxious matter to rest? Of course not!
• FACEPALM-WORTHY: Karzai challenger Abdullah Abdullah will probably withdraw his candidacy from the presidential runoff election scheduled for 7 Nov. No one is entirely sure what this means, but pretty much everyone is going crazy with worry.
• GET WELL SOON: The survivors of Wednesday’s attack on a UN-approved guesthouse in Kabul were flown to Dubai on Friday, after the UAE granted them special urgent-entry visas. The War and Peace team wishes everyone affected a full and peaceful recovery.
• BAD GUYS: Afghan authorities arrested eight people in connection with the attack, and the UN criticized NATO troops and the Afghan police for not responding to the attack faster.
• CRY INTO YOUR BEER: Since Wednesday, hundreds of foreign aid workers have been ordered to evacuate Afghanistan until after the scheduled runoff election. According to inside sources, hotel bars in Delhi and Dushanbe are raking it in.
• POLL DANCING: The Asia Foundation has released its 2009 report on Afghan public opinion. Go here for the key findings and here for all 231 pages.
• BRUTAL: Overshadowed in the international press by the Kabul attack, a car bomb ripped through a crowded market in Peshawar, Pakistan on Wednesday, killing at least 111 people, most of them women and children. Vendors believe the Taliban were behind the blast, and several traders received threats before the bombing because women were allowed to shop freely at the market.
• DIRTY WAR: The Washington Post published a must-read article about how escalating human rights abuses in Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria are fueling a regional insurgency that is destabilizing Russia’s south.
• YET AGAIN: A popular opposition activist and human rights campaigner was assassinated in Ingushetia on Tuesday. Maksharip Aushev was an outspoken opponent of abuses by state security forces and insurgent groups, in particular the pattern of kidnappings and enforced disappearances plaguing Ingushetia and the rest of the North Caucasus. Including Aushev, four human rights and civil society activists have been killed in the volatile region since July.
• GAMERS: I’m not sure what to say about the following tidbit from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting other than I love anything that involves complex, vaguely wrong role-playing games: “The plot of the movie Black Hawk Down was used by IWPR for an exercise to train journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgian in conflict reporting. The trainees divided into teams playing US troops and Somali militiamen. Some learned from their mistakes the risks involved, ending up being ‘killed’ because they took too many risks. Experts judged the trainees’ work and first place went to a crew from Georgian public television.”
• SO PROVOCATIVE: The lessons of IWPR’s journo bootcamp may come in handy unfortunately soon. Russia recently accused Georgia of allowing international terrorists to cross Georgian territory into the Russian Caucasus, and an insulted Georgia is now ‘bracing for Russian provocations.’ We’ve seen this episode before.

[Photo: Who embodies the concept of facepalm better than Qaddafi? Created at Pundit Kitchen]