Guerrillas

The guerrilla swung the boy up on his shoulders in the cold mountain air. "Come on," he said, looking up at the child. "There's a big animal in the woods that gives presents to children." Then the guerrilla and 3-year-old Oscar Ricaurte disappeared into the fog. The boy's mother, Leticia, could not speak. She could not move. Her arms hung limp. When will I next hold my son? she thought. A female guerrilla commander barked an order: "It's time to go. Move it." Leticia climbed in the back of a four-wheel-drive jeep.

If you haven't already watched renegade gardener Ron Finley' s TEDTalk, given at last month's TEDActive  conference in Palm Springs, do yourself a favor, Angeleno, and check out this video .  (The video has some salty language in it.)  The Los Angeles artist has taken up urban gardening in hopes of making changes to South-Central L.A.'s food system by transforming food deserts, where "the drive-throughs are killing more people than the drive-bys," into food forests. And, no, he doesn't just want to talk about making changes, as you'll come to understand during his talk.

The Guatemala National Revolutionary Unity brings together four rebel forces that have been fighting a series of right-wing governments for more than three decades. The Marxist guerrillas originally sought to topple the government and replace it with their own. But the struggle's ideological tint has faded in recent years since the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Estimates on the number of guerrillas still hiding in the mountains range from 1,000 to 2,000.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - A suicide bomber blew himself up at a military checkpoint outside the northern Mali city of Gao on Friday, in the first sign that Al Qaeda-linked militias may be adopting new tactics since being driven back by a French-led invasion. A man on a motorcycle approached a group of soldiers at a military checkpoint and detonated explosives, according to a military officer contacted by The Times. The attack was confirmed by Gao Mayor Sadou Diallo in a telephone interview.

In his Nov. 19 column, "Maria's Story: The Saga Continues," Howard Rosenberg complained that the El Salvador guerrillas do not get enough favorable TV attention. He evidently hasn't been paying attention to KCET, the Los Angeles public television station. It has repeatedly broadcast a show, "Stories From El Salvador," which smears the government, presents the rebels as innocent agrarians and is so confused that it does not tell who is who or what the issues are. For example: It shows a so-called cooperative of farmers who moved into "vacant" land to cultivate it, without explaining how it happened to be vacant--undoubtedly because those who owned and farmed it had been murdered or driven off by the guerrillas.

Suspected Kurdish guerrillas detonated an explosive-laden minibus across from a police guest house in the eastern city of Igdir on the Armenian border, injuring 17 people, the governor's office said. The explosion coincided with complaints by jailed rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan about his prison conditions. The attack also came after a recent declaration of cooperation among Turkey, the United States and Iraq in fighting the guerrillas, who are based in northern Iraq.

Communist guerrillas, disguised as anti-narcotics agents, barged into an underguarded provincial prison southeast of Manila and freed seven of their comrades in a daring 15-minute operation completed without firing a shot, officials said. The 30 New People's Army guerrillas, mostly armed with machine guns, fled in four vans with the freed inmates late Saturday in Quezon province. They later clashed with police at a checkpoint.

Left-wing rebels dismissed as a farce Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's release of about 200 jailed guerrillas, a gesture he had hoped would persuade guerrillas to free hostages they have held for years. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia demanded a demilitarized zone as a condition for any talks on freeing hostages, who include three Americans and a French-Colombian politician.

Taliban guerrillas attacked a truck carrying government soldiers in southern Afghanistan, killing at least five of them. The Taliban attack in Zabol province was the latest in a rash of assaults against government forces in the south and east. Taliban spokesman Mohammed Hanif said that 12 soldiers were killed. But provincial Gov. Hafizullah Khan said five soldiers were killed in the ambush and that three Taliban fighters were killed in a gun battle.

Shiite Muslim guerrillas attacked an Israeli army outpost in southern Lebanon with a rocket and machine guns Wednesday, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding at least two others. Israeli artillery gunners retaliated for the attack on the outpost in the western sector of the Israeli-occupied border zone. One guerrilla was wounded in the shelling, Lebanese security sources said.

BEIRUT - Syria's armed opposition, driven back from Damascus in a fierce government counteroffensive last summer, appears to be responding with a revamped strategy that runs through some of the capital's most explosive sectarian and ethnic fault lines. A pair of bombings this week struck districts that are strongholds of President Bashar Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam whose adherents are generally hostile to the Sunni-led uprising. Trusted Alawite commanders run much of Assad's security apparatus.

Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous women's political art collective that often appears in gorilla masks, has lent its talents  to the bid to defeat a proposed amendment that would write a ban on same-sex marriage into Minnesota's state constitution. Its artwork for the cause is a 14-foot-high by 40-foot-wide billboard image of Minnesota's conservative Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann, no friend to the gay rights movement. The sign, high above a busy intersection in downtown Minneapolis, deploys a fragmentary quote from Bachmann - “we all have the same civil rights” - to unwillingly enlist her as a spokeswoman for the side she opposes.

MOGADISHU, Somalia - The guerrilla artists come out in the darkness of the Mogadishu night. Three of them are old hands with a brush, but they've never been out on such a crazy mission at a time when sensible people stay indoors. They gather for work in a converted garage, with a wildly paved floor and clutter of paint pots dribbling gaudy colors. Muhiyidin Sharif Ibrahim, 62, uses an old car seat as a chair, reflectively sharpening a pencil with a razor, then honing it to a perfect point by scraping it on the stone floor.

SAN FRANCISCO - All Tara Hui wanted to do was plant some pears and plums and cherries for the residents of her sunny, working-class neighborhood, a place with no grocery stores and limited access to fresh produce. But officials in this arboreally challenged city, which rose from beneath a blanket of sand dunes, don't allow fruit trees along San Francisco's sidewalks, fearing the mess, the rodents and the lawsuits that might follow. So when a nonprofit planted a purple-leaf plum in front of Hui's Visitacion Valley bungalow 31/2 years ago - all flowers and no fruit, so it was on San Francisco's list of sanctioned species - the soft-spoken 41-year-old got out her grafting knife.

As many as 16 Egyptian police officers were killed Sunday when militants stormed a police post near the border with Israel and hijacked two armored vehicles in a brazen attack against security forces in the increasingly lawless north Sinai peninsula. The assault, which wounded at least seven police officers and border patrolmen, came around dusk when gunmen rushed an outpost after officers had broken their Ramadan fast. The Israeli army said militants stole two armored vehicles and began driving toward the Israeli border.

Recently, after Afghan militants unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan, including in the capital, Kabul, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn't happened. "I'm not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet offensive," said George Little, the Pentagon's top spokesman. "We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], mortar fire, etc. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country.

Amnesty International has asked Jordan to provide information on the condition of jailed members of a Palestinian guerrilla group seized during an investigation into the smuggling of weapons for attacks on Israel. The London-based human rights organization said in a statement received in Amman on Wednesday that it has asked Jordan about the arrest on Oct. 4 of at least nine members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Amman announced Oct.

At least 130 rebels have been killed and 500 have surrendered as Bhutan presses its campaign to flush out Indian guerrillas holed up in the tiny Himalayan kingdom, officials said Saturday. King Jigme Singye Wangchuck and his son are personally "leading the troops" on the offensive, which began last week, a Bhutanese official said. "The king and his son are leading the troops in flushing Indian rebels out of Bhutanese soil," said the government official, who did not want to be identified.

Accepting the green and yellow mantle of power from her immensely popular mentor, former Marxist guerrilla Dilma Rousseff was sworn in Saturday as Brazil's first female president and faced two immediate tasks: keeping the booming economy on track and fleshing out Brazil's developing role on the world stage. Rousseff succeeded Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who left Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia with an 87% approval rating, the highest in recent history for a departing leader of South America's largest and most populous country.