Sudanese government planes bombed a key town in south Darfur Jan. 24, a week after its seizure by the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), peacekeepers and insurgents said. Bombs landed close to a base run by the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force, UNAMID, in the town of Muhajiriya and destroyed houses, a UN official said. A senior JEM commander told Reuters 16 civilians were killed in the raid, including a young child. Air attacks in Darfur are forbidden under a 2006 peace deal and UN Security Council resolutions.

President Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali vowed a harsh crackdown on the Tuareg guerillas Jan. 20. "All the means, I repeat, all the operational means will be mobilized because we cannot put a price on the securing our country," said Toure, in a speech broadcast to mark the army's 48th anniversary celebrations. Two days later, the Malian government said its forces had routed Tuareg rebels from a base in the north of the country. "Following an offensive by the Malian army, the base of Ibrahim Ag Bahanga located in Boureissa was destroyed. The toll on the side of the armed groups [Tuaregs] was 31 dead... [O]n the side of the national army, no losses," the statement said.

In his unlikely New York Times op-ed of Jan. 22, "The One-State Solution," plugging his utopian scheme for a single country uniting Israel and Palestine as "Isratine," Muammar Qaddafi (this appears to be the Colonel's preferred spelling), the one-time bad boy of intransigent Arab nationalism, actually mimics Zionist revisionism on the 1948 Nakba. To wit:

Pope Benedict Jan. 24 rehabilitated a breakaway "traditionalist" bishop who denies the Holocaust—ignoring warnings from Jewish leaders that it would seriously harm relations with the Catholic church and foment anti-Semitism. The Vatican said the pope issued a decree lifting the 1988 excommunication of four traditionalist bishops for being ordained by the late "traditionalist" Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre without Vatican consent. The four bishops lead the ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), which has about 600,000 members and rejected modernizations of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine. The Vatican said the excommunications were lifted after the bishops affirmed their acceptance of Church doctrine and papal authority.

Hundreds in Moscow attended the funeral Jan. 23 of Anastasia Baburova, the 25-year-old journalist killed as she tried to defend human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov when a masked gunman shot him at point-blank range in broad daylight on a busy Moscow street this week. The two had just emerged from a press conference, in which Markelov had said he would appeal the early release of the killer of a Chechen girl, raped and murdered by a Russian army colonel during the war in Chechnya. (RFE/RL, Reuters, Jan. 23)

Both Russia and Georgia share blame for an "indiscriminate and disproportionate" use of force that violated humanitarian law during their August 2008 war, Human Rights Watch announced on Jan. 23. In a 200-page report, the watchdog group also took South Ossetian separatist forces to task for allegedly attempting to "ethnically cleanse" ethnic Georgian villages within the enclave. The report calls for individual "prosecution of war crimes where appropriate." "The violations by one side of the laws of war do not justify or excuse violations by the other side," said Human Rights Watch director Carroll Bogert said at a Tbilisi press conference.

Village elders in Mehtar Lam district of Afghanistan's Laghman province say that as many as 22 noncombatants were killed in a Jan. 25 US air-raid, in the fist controversy over civilian casualties since Barack Obama took office. US military officials insisting only 15 were killed, all Taliban fighters. An official statement said the strike targeted a Taliban commander "known to traffic foreign fighters and weapons into the region" after coalition ground troops came under fire in the village. Village elders said there were no Taliban in the area, wand said the hamlet was populated mainly by shepherds. They said women and children were among the 22 civilian dead, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, head of the provincial council. (LAT, Jan. 25)

Details are emerging on the victims in the Jan. 23 US air-strikes on Pakistan—the first since President Barack Obama took office. In the first strike on Zeraki village near Mir Ali in North Waziristan, three missiles hit a compound of tribal elder Khalil Khan Dawar, killing him and eight others on the spot. Khalil Dawar was reported to be associated with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan militia of Baitullah Mehsud, and four Arab militants were said to be among the dead. But in the other attack, in the Gangikhel area of South Waziristan, two missiles hit the house of pro-government tribal elder Malik Deen Faraz, killing him, his three sons and a grandson.