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This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• According the UN, of the 108 people killed in the Houla massacre, fewer than 20 were killed in shelling. The rest were executed by gunfire. 49 of the dead were children.
• Syrian activist and filmmaker (and current student at Syracuse University), Bassem Shahade was killed in Homs this week. Here is a short film of his about a child survivor of the 2006 war in Lebanon.
• After 31 years, Egypt’s emergency military law expired on Thursday. The rule had empowered security with expanded powers of detention and arrest without charge as well as using torture to extract confessions ever since the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981.
• Egypt’s top prosecutor has charged Hosni Mubarak’s sons with insider trading. 
• Check out this visualization of the Israeli segregation of Palestinian roads.
• PBS Frontline aired a mindblowing good piece of journalism: Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad infiltrated Al Qaeda in Yemen and created a phenomenal piece for Frontline.
• Iraqi police will take over security of Baghdad in July.
• A New York Times article discussing some of President Obama’s decisions and policies regarding counterterrorism revealed the use of a “baseball card” kill list and the definition of “combatant” expanded to include all military age males within a strike area… among others. (I responded with my own opinions on these policies here on TPN).
• GQ has a longform piece by Luke Mogelson in the June issue about the large Taliban jailbreak last spring.
• The computers of high-ranking Iranian officials have been infected by a new virus: a powerful data-mining virus called Flame.
• Two men have been charged with terrorism in Northern Ireland after they were stopped with seven pipe bombs. Their potential group affiliations have been unreported.
• The Hague handed former Liberian president Charles Taylor a fifty year sentence for his war crimes conviction. Inthe Boston Review, Yale law professor Owen Fiss writes about prosecuting atrocities in Africa.
• Negotiations between Sudan and South Sudan resumed Wednesday in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
• Protests across Honduras have been bringing attention to the rampant, unsolved murders of journalists. 20 have been murdered over the past 3 years.
• An unbelievable story: Oscar Ramirez, a Guatemalan residing in the United States, received a phone call informing him he had been one of two boys abducted during the Guatemalan military’s 1982 massacre of the village of Dos Erres, in which 200 people were murdered.
• Veteran and employer confidence in transitioning from military to civilian jobs is dropping sharply.
• A taxpayer’s guide to the earmarks inside the House’s version of the FY2013 defense appropriations bill.
• The military judge in the Sept 11 conspiracy trial at Guantánamo has set the pre-trial hearing dates: the first set occur during Ramadan this year and the second set occur on top of the anniversary of 9/11.
• A House vote Thursday authorized the Defense Department’s new espionage agency.
• Despite the President’s threat to veto the bill, nearly all of the House’s Democrats sided with Republicans to pass a spending bill for military construction and Veterans Affairs.

Photo: Cairo, Egypt. A man paints the phrase “Tahrir Square” on pavement during a protest. Marco Longari/AFP/Getty.