"The End of Murder"

In the LA Weekly, David Zahniser reports on homicide in Los Angeles, and officials' efforts to make the city safer. Zahniser profiles several who were killed in LA in 2006, including 17-year-old Chris Castellanos:

The slaying of Chris Castellanos was the first truly horrific murder of 2006, the type of killing that sends a chill through any parent waiting for a child to come home from the market or the movies or the mall. It happened at 10 a.m. on a busy boulevard. Witnesses were plentiful — one in a parking lot, another in a car. Castellanos had one dollar and two quarters and, prosecutors say, died because he didn’t give them up.

...

The death of Castellanos, who had written about going to college and possibly becoming a doctor, earned no mention in the Los Angeles Times. NBC Channel 4 aired the standard helicopter shot of the crime scene and news of Torres’ arrest. But then, there would always be another homicide in Los Angeles — 477 more in 2006, to be exact. And quietly, the effects of the January 3 killing metastasized, spreading poison far beyond the corner of Whittier and Boyle.

"Senseless violence" in Somalia

New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman has filed a number of reports from Somalia on fighting between the recently established transitional government--which has been aided by the Ethiopian and U.S. military--and Islamist forces.

A January 12 story is accompanied online by an audio "Back Story" interview with Gettleman, who explains the past weeks' events. In a January 18 story, Gettleman profiles a 22-year-old wounded militiaman:

MOGADISHU, Somalia, Jan. 18 — A week ago, Yoonis Issay Alin was riding around in the back of a pickup, part of a squad of tough-looking guys with big trucks and big guns.

Now he is drooling on a metal cot, shot in the head over a parking spot.

All around him at Medina Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, young men writhe in steamy beds, their arms and legs trapped in traction ropes, their gunshot wounds the latest proof of a society out of control. It is hard to imagine there is enough gauze in this broken-down country to keep up.

Somalia may be at a turning point, with a potentially viable government for the first time since 1991. But senseless violence is still the norm, as ubiquitous as qat, the plant people here chew and chew as a drug until the ugliness of life fades away, even if just for a moment.

Taking a break on the way home

Brendan Nicholson, a Baghdad correspondent for The Age of Melbourne, Australia, describes--in less than 400 words--an important mental health program recently implemented by the Australian Defence Force.

Sago mine anniversary

Charleston Gazette reporter Tara Tuckwiller interviews family members of the miners who died a year ago in the Sago mine disaster. The family members, Tuckwiller reports, are concerned about "deep-seated problems with mine safety and the coal industry in general" that "are being brushed aside by state investigators’ theories about lightning igniting the explosion."