After meeting with UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, Mexican President Felipe Calderón announced Feb. 6 that he would gradually remove army troops from drug enforcement duty, replacing them with newly-trained police units. Use of the military in Mexico's war on the drug cartels has been harshly criticized by rights groups, including the official National Human Rights Commission. However, the official plan still posted to the website of Mexico's Federal Registry says military forces will remain involved in drug enforcement through the end of Calderón's term in 2012. (Bloomberg, Feb. 6)

Jan Eliasson, UN special envoy for Darfur, warns that deployment of peacekeeping forces continues to be stalled and that rebel groups show little willingness to enter peace talks. (NYT, Feb. 9) Meanwhile, the ongoing carnage barely gets headlines anymore. This Feb. 8 Reuters account rated less than two column-inches at the bottom of page 5 in the following day's Times:

Sudanese government aircraft, army and militia attacked three towns in West Darfur state on Friday, causing heavy civilian casualties, Darfur rebels and witnesses said.

The New York Times reports Feb. 9 that military prosecutors are in the final phases of preparing a "sweeping" case against suspected conspirators in the 9-11 plot. The charges, to be filed in the military commission system at Guantánamo Bay, are said to involve six detainees at the camp, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, known as "KSM." However, KSM was subject to waterboarding while in CIA custody, the agency's director Gen. Michael V. Hayden confirmed this week—throwing into question his supposed confession that "I was responsible for the 9-11 operation, from A to Z."

Matthew Wald reported for the New York Times Feb. 6. that the US Energy Department is subsidizing two Russian nuclear institutes at Nizhny Novgorod that are building key parts of the Bushehr reactor in Iran that Washington has spent years trying to stop. One institute, the Scientific Research Institute of Measuring Systems, is providing control systems for the Iranian plant; the other is providing hundreds of pumps and ventilation fans. Russia has agreed to take back the spent fuel from the Bushehr plant, so the plutonium cannot be recovered by the Iranians. The Energy Department is subsidizing the institutes under the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, set up after the collapse of the USSR to maintain control of Soviet nuclear expertise and technology.

Clearing vast tracts of land for biofuels production would hinder—not help—the effort to slow global warming, according to two new studies published in the journal Science. Although such fuels emit less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, clearing forests and other native ecosystems releases carbon dioxide from plants and soil through fire or decomposition. Additionally, cropland absorbs less carbon than the native ecosystems it replaces.

Security sources in Cairo said Feb. 8 that hundreds of Egyptian nationals who have returned from the Gaza Strip over the past three days are under investigation following claims they were trying to join Hamas. The Egyptians were reportedly members of fundamentalist groups who entered the Palestinian territories after the toppling of the Gaza border fence on Jan. 23 to join Hamas and fight against the Israeli occupation. The sources said Hamas asked them to return to Egypt. The sources told Reuters news agency that 600 Egyptians were seized, but women and children were allowed to return to their homes. (Ma'an News Agency, Feb. 8)

British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith signed an order Feb. 7 for the extradition of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical cleric imprisoned in the UK who is wanted by federal prosecutors in New York. Al-Masri, the former imam of north London's Finsbury Park Mosque, has 14 days to lodge an appeal to the High Court against extradition and may also appeal to the House of Lords or the European Court. Al-Masri, who is blind in one eye and sometimes wears a hook in place of one of his missing hands, is currently serving a seven year sentence at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in southeast London. He denies US claims that he tried to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon and aided a 1998 hostage-taking raid in Yemen. (Bloomberg, Feb. 8)

Congolese forces arrested Col. Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, accused former leader of the rebel National Integrationist Front (FNI), and handed him over to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ngudjolo is alleged to have played a key role in a murderous attack on the village of Bogoro, Ituri province, in February 2003. He is facing three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of war crimes, including sexual slavery and the use of child soldiers. He is the third Congolese national sent to the ICC, after Thomas Lubanga Dyilo and Germain Katanga. (UN News Service via AllAfrica, Feb. 7)