The contours of chaos encompass those left behind.

Army wives under stress because their husbands are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have committed markedly higher rates of child neglect and abuse, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The Army-funded study examined maltreatment rates among families.

Child neglect committed by civilian wives of enlisted soldiers was almost four times greater during combat deployments than when husbands were home.

Physical child abuse by Army wives was nearly twice as high during combat deployments.

Child neglect can involve a parent failing to provide appropriate supervision, said Deborah Gibbs, the study’s lead author and a senior analyst at RTI International, a North Carolina-based research center.

It also includes failing to meet a child’s basic needs, such as nourishment and sanitation. Abuse can include physical harm.

Researchers examined reports of abuse and neglect within 1,771 Army families with nearly 3,000 children. The cases occurred between Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 21, 2004. The largest single group of victims was children ages 2 to 12. Article

Signposts of service: Before and after tattoos.

Keeping up with the kidnappings in Nigeria’s oil region:

Seven gunmen kidnapped a Pakistani construction manager in southern Nigeria on Tuesday and demanded a ransom, a local rights activist said citing sources at the man’s company and witnesses.

The attack takes to at least 12 the number of foreigners being held hostage by armed groups in the oil-producing Niger Delta, where crime and militancy have surged since early 2006. Article

It is difficult for many in the West to fathom just how widespread, how affective and how shared and discussed such tomes are. In attention and potential influence, though of course entirely on different planes in terms of content, bigger than Pottermania.

In a prison cell south of Cairo a repentant Egyptian terrorist leader is putting the finishing touches on a remarkable recantation that undermines the Muslim theological basis for violent jihad and is set to generate furious controversy among former comrades still fighting with al-Qaeda.

[snip]

“When the book comes out there will be a furious reaction from Zawahiri and the global jihadi movement. It is clear that Sayid Imam will call a halt to killing operations in Egypt and abroad,” he says.

Diaa Rashwan, of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, says: “I have no doubt that this is genuine. It will be a real shock and cause a lot of confusion. Jihadis will see hundreds of their former brothers criticizing their most fundamental ideas. That’s why Zawahiri is so bothered by it.”

No one is predicting that the book will bring an end to suicide bombings in Iraq or Afghanistan. But interest is so intense that several Arabic newspapers are competing to buy the 100-page work, entitled Advice Regarding the Conduct of Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World.

[snip]

Sharif’s recantation has emerged from an Egyptian government counter-radicalization program which has successfully “converted” and rehabilitated members of the Gama’a Islamiyya (Islamic Group), once the largest jihadist organization in the Arab world, and which mounted countless armed attacks starting in the 1980s until calling a ceasefire after massacring 62 foreign tourists at Luxor in 1997.

Its top ideologues, mostly now freed, have written 25 volumes of revisions in a series called Tashih al-Mafahim (Corrections of Concepts). These tackle key doctrinal issues such as the concept of takfir — declaring a Muslim an apostate and therefore permissible to kill; attacks on civilians and foreign tourists; and waging jihad against a Muslim ruler who does not apply sharia law.

“If you want to rob these people of their cover you have to take away their legitimacy,” says Ashraf Mohsin, an Egyptian diplomat dealing with counter-terrorism.

“The way to deprive them of their ability to recruit is to attack the message. If you take Islam out of the message all that is left is criminality,” he said.

Like the Gama’a before them, Sharif and other Jihad prisoners have been allowed by the interior ministry and state security to meet and consult each other in prison and have held religious dialogues with clerics from al-Azhar, the fount of mainstream jurisprudence in the Sunni world.

“Of course the Egyptian government is benefiting from this,” Zayyat agrees.

“But it’s not done for their benefit, or for the Americans,” he says.

Past “revisions” have included apologies to the victims of terror attacks, recognition of them as “martyrs”, and the annulment of fatwas as misguided.

[snip]

“Security measures alone cannot defeat terrorism,” argues Fouad Allam, a former state security general — the guards outside his Cairo home testimony to decades spent hunting down armed Islamists.

“Terrorism has to be fought with a broader strategy in which the political issues that fuel extremism are dealt with so that these sort of `revisions’ will have some effect,” Allam says. Article

Noted FYI — markets untethered from the marketplace:

Oil prices shattered a record today, settling at $78.21 per barrel, driven by the familiar drumbeat of energy demand outpacing supply.

No hurricanes appeared poised to ravage Gulf of Mexico oil production, geopolitical hot spots were relatively quiet, and economists weren’t predicting big changes in the economic growth pushing China’s thirst for energy.

So what caused the price to hit the latest milestone today in particular?

“Nothing,” said Philip Verleger, an oil economist who heads PK Verleger in Aspen, Colo. Article

No particular comment, just found this of interest.

Survivors have long claimed that European countries treat them far better than Israel, where many elderly survivors live in poverty. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s announcement of the new allowance did nothing to change that impression. One survivor called the offer “absurd and insulting.”

[snip]

[Israeli PM] Olmert presented his program as a solution.

“We are correcting a 60-year-old blight,” he said. “Holocaust survivors living in Israel are entitled to live respectably without reaching a situation in which it is beyond their means to enjoy a hot meal.”

Beginning next year, the amount allocated for 120,000 needy survivors, about half the total number still living in Israel, will be $28 million annually, according to Olmert’s statement.

But that works out to an average of just $20 a month for each survivor.

[snip]

The new payment is in addition to government support already given to survivors, including those deemed physically or psychologically handicapped, and regular pension payments of about $487 a month.

Survivors groups charged, in what was meant to be an especially painful dig at the Israeli government, that survivors are treated better in Germany.

[snip]

Hillary Kessler-Godin, spokeswoman for Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said Germany still pays monthly pensions to 80,000 survivors around the world, after starting in the 1950s.

“Each survivor’s pension can be different depending on their persecution history,” she told the AP. Other funds have paid out billions of dollars to various categories of Nazi victims.

Roet said the average stipend for survivors in Holland, where he was born, is between $2,740 and $4,110 a month. Article