Atrocities

A "blood diamond" expert offered the first testimony in the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor on Monday, and a Sierra Leone miner said in videotaped evidence that laughing rebels hacked off his hands and burned his family. The trial before the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, set up to try those behind the 1991-2002 civil war, resumed after a six-month adjournment that began in June when Taylor boycotted proceedings and fired his lawyer.

Sudan's government said Monday that it had appointed a militia leader accused of atrocities in Darfur as the special advisor to its president, sparking outrage from human rights groups. Musa Hilal is under a Security Council travel ban for his alleged role in the two-year targeted attacks on civilians in Darfur, and his assets have been ordered frozen.

The legacy of Radovan Karadzic is etched here in unsmiling, mistrustful faces; on tombstones that march shoulder to shoulder for nearly a quarter-mile; in empty, scarred houses whose owners never returned. Karadzic's Bosnian Serb army rounded up thousands of Muslims living or sheltering in Srebrenica on a sweltering July day 13 years ago and separated males from the women.

He is said to love the ladies, fast horses and dissolving enemies in lye. Teodoro Garcia Simental is among the best known but least identifiable villains in Mexico's drug war, blamed for a trail of terror across Baja California. His heavily armed hit men, authorities say, have been leaving the gruesome displays of charred and decapitated bodies across the city, signed with the moniker "Tres Letras," for the three letters in "Teo."

John Dau doesn't mind being called a "Lost Boy," even though he is no longer either. Dau is 33, recently married (to a "Lost Girl") and a new father living in Syracuse, N.Y. He is, literally and figuratively, thousands of miles from the chaos of his youth in Sudan. "My organization is American Care for Sudan Foundation. We have raised $170,000 already for the Duk County Lost Boys Clinic.

Karen women are being raped, tortured, killed and used as forced labor as part of Myanmar's military offensive against the ethnic minority group, a report by an activist group says. The Karen Women's Organization details the cases of 959 women and girls in Karen state, which borders Thailand, from 1981 until 2006. Thousands of other lesser cases of abuse involving women are also noted.

The perpetrators of hundreds of thousands of cases of rape, torture and sexual abuse are living unpunished in Liberia more than three years after the end of a civil war, Amnesty International said today. The rights group said the government of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf must do more to bring those responsible to justice if the country was to recover.

The continuing genocide in Sudan's Darfur region was the world's worst human rights abuse last year, the United States said Tuesday. "Too often in the past year we received painful reminders that human rights, though self-evident, are not self-enforcing," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in presenting the State Department's annual survey of human rights practices.

THEY started leaving the stash houses at twilight, six, seven immigrants at a time, crammed into vans, sport utility vehicles, compact cars. The smugglers dropped them in a field by a Fruit of the Loom plant outside Harlingen, Texas, deep in the Rio Grande Valley, not far from the border. A stand of brush and scrub trees ran across the field. This was where the coyotes told them to hide and wait. In time, a truck would come along to carry them on the next leg of their journey.

Human smugglers sailing from Somalia to Yemen forced hundreds of illegal immigrants overboard in stormy seas in an effort to escape security forces quickly, officials said Monday. Thirty-one bodies were found, and nearly 90 people remained missing. Passengers who resisted the smugglers were stabbed or beaten with wooden and steel clubs, then thrown into the water, where some were attacked by sharks, the Office of the U.N.