One of the more interesting stories not reported since late 2008 has been the abduction of NYT reported and Pulitzer winner David Rohde while researching a book in Afghanistan. Rohde escaped from captivity yesterday, after being held for seven months. The NYT:

David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban, escaped Friday night and made his way to freedom after more than seven months of captivity in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Rohde, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, was abducted outside Kabul, Afghanistan, on Nov. 10 while he was researching a book.

All concerned kept quiet about this while Rohde was still captive. Echoing Ex here on kudos to the media. Looking forward – uncynically – to Rhode’s memoir of the ordeal.

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has just released a report on the Arabic blogosphere, as part of its Internet and Democracy project. There’s some funky visualization, and a full report. Abstract:

The project’s initial case studies investigated three frequently cited examples of the Internet’s influence on democracy. The first case looked at the user-generated news site OhmyNews and its impact on the 2002 elections in South Korea. The second documented the role of technology in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. The third analyzed the network composition and content of the Iranian blogosphere. Fall 2008 saw the release of a new series of case studies, which broadened the scope of our research and examined some less well-known parts of the research landscape. In a pair of studies, we reviewed the role of networked technologies in the 2007 civic crises of Burma’s Saffron Revolution and Kenya’s post-election turmoil. In April 2009, Urs Gasser’s three-part case study examined the role of technology in Switzerland’s semi-direct democracy. This case expands on our study of foreign blogospheres with an analysis of the Arabic language blogosphere.

Read the press release…

H/t MESH.

MADRID — Spanish authorities blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for a car bomb that killed a police inspector Friday when it exploded in a town near Bilbao, in northern Spain. The inspector, Eduardo Pueyes García, was in his car in a parking lot in the Santa Elena neighborhood of Arrigorriaga, about six miles south of Bilbao, when it blew up just after 9 a.m., a spokesman for the Basque regional police said. The spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity under police rules, said, “The characteristics of the attack pointed to it being the work of ETA.”

Read the full article...

The NYT has an interesting piece on “invisible refugees” in Pakistan, Pashtun families who’ve fled south to escape the fighting between Pakistani forces and militants. They’re “invisible” because instead of taking refuge in camps, they’re turning to their fellow Pashtun for support. The result is families of 10, 20, 40 and more cramped into unbelievably tight quarters, sometimes displacing their own hosts, and stretching the limits of both Pashtun hospitality and local infrastructure: 

Pakistan is experiencing its worst refugee crisis since partition from India in 1947, and while the world may be familiar with the tent camps that have rolled out like carpets since its operation against the Taliban started in April, the overwhelming majority of the nearly three million people who have fled live unseen in houses and schools, according to aid agencies.

They are the invisible refugees, and their numbers have swollen the populations of towns like this one northwest of the capital, Islamabad, multiplying burdens on already sagging roads, schools, sewers and water supplies, and, not least, on their host families.

I remember reading somewhere about Pashtun waging economic warfare on their own by resorting to squatting – taking advantage of codes of hospitality, essentially, thereby placing an untenable burden on their hosts. This is obviously different, but it’s also the same. The portrait it draws suggests – or at least insinuates – a point of cultural collapse and adaptation. I’ll probably get in trouble for a comment like that, but I’m curious what the experts have to say about it.

Some terrorists come up with the best names…

ATHENS — Masked gunmen on Wednesday ambushed and killed an undercover police officer who was guarding a key witness in a terror trial in what the authorities said was an escalation in attacks by domestic terrorists. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but the police said that some of the bullets used in the killing matched those used in a shooting carried out by a far-left militant group called the Sect of Revolutionaries.

Read the full report.