In the wake of the May 25 massacre in Houla, shock and revulsion reverberate across the world—except among "anti-war" voices in the West, those supposedly most concerned with war crimes and mass killings of civilians. Kind of funny, eh? Amnesty International calls for action from the International Criminal Court, finding: "The Syrian military's barrage of shells, mortars and rockets and raids on the residential area of Teldo...left at least 108 dead, including 34 women and 50 children." Said AI's Middle East director Philip Luther: "The high civilian death toll—including scores of women and children—in Houla must spur the Security Council to act in unison and immediately refer the situation in Syria to the ICC." Since then, the annual UN "Children and Armed Conflict" report has been released, accusing the Assad regime of torturing kids:

From the Village Voice, June 11:

NYPD Slammed With Lawsuit Over Handling of Pedestrian and Cyclist Deaths
On July 10, 2011, Clara Heyworth was walking to meet her husband when she was fatally struck by motorist Anthony Webb, who was driving with a learner's permit, not a license. He also might have been drunk and speeding at the time of the incident. Webb was arrested at that time.

A startling article in the New York Times May 8 noted that Honduras in late 2010 passed a constitutional amendment drawn up by the administration of President Porfirio Lobo that allows the creation of a separately ruled "Special Development Region" within the country—where the national state would have limited, if any, authority. The article, entitled "Who Wants to Buy Honduras?," portrays a vision for privately run islands of order and security amid the squalor and violence of the impecunious Central American country. This was apparently the brainchild of a young Lobo aide, Octavio Rubén Sánchez Barrientos, who was taken with the ideas of US economist Paul Romer, theorist of "economic zones founded on the land of poor countries but governed with the legal and political system of, often, rich ones."

The Fukushima nuclear disaster has almost completely gone off the world media's radar screen—despite the fact that it isn't over yet. It won brief coverage, at least, when the US National Academy of Sciences revealed last month that radiation from Fukushima had been detected in bluefin tuna caught off the California coast. "The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years," according to AP on May 30, while reassuring: "But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the US and Japanese governments." The perhaps more alarming news a few weeks earlier failed to win as much coverage—technicians have detected a leak the Reactor No. 1 containment vessel, with radioactive water almost certainly escaping into the environment. Reuters less than comfortingly tells us that plant operator TEPCO "may have to build a concrete wall around the unit because of the breach, and that this could now take years."

Tokyo's notoriously nationalist governor Shintaro Ishihara is pushing a plan for the metropolitan government to purchase and annex the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea—known to Chinese as the Diaoyu Islands, and claimed by China although under Japan's actual control. The uninhabited islands are now privately owned by the Kurihara family, who bought them decades ago from descendants of the previous Japanese owners. With East China Sea hydrocarbon resources at stake, the barren islands have become a flashpoint for Sino-Japanese brinkmanship—most recently in September 2010, when Japan Coast Guard patrol boats confronted a Chinese fishing vessel. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has received more than ¥1 billion in donations from citizens over the past month for its plan to buy the islands. The scheme is an implicit dig at the national government, which Ishihara accuses of not doing enough to defend the islands from China. But his explicit wrath was aimed at Beijing: "An endlessly hegemonic China is now trying to get control of the Pacific, and targeting Senkaku is one of the steps for doing that. We must lock the doors of the Japanese house more carefully when they have clearly shown their intention to intrude and steal things."

China arrested a few courageous activists who attempted to mark the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, while any mention of the June 4, 1989 events was purged from the communications media with Orwellian completeness. BBC News tells us that authorities have again resorted to pre-emptive electronic action to head of protests, blocking Internet searches for terms such as "six-four," "23," "candle" and "never forget." Micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo has deactivated the candle emoticon, commonly adopted on the web to mourn deaths. Another BBC report, citing unnamed "rights campaigners," tells us that hundreds were rounded up in Beijing, while a delegation of some 30 who came from Zhejiang province to "petition" were met at a railway station by police who put them on a bus back to their hometown of Wuxi. Some 20 were also reported by AFP to have been arrested and beaten in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian province, when they attempted to gather in the city's May First Square.

Reports from Mali's breakaway northern region of Azawad are as murky and contradictory as ever. Last week we were told that the Tuareg rebels of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) had cut a deal with the largest jihadi faction in the region, Ansar Dine, for creation of an "Islamic state." Now a May 29 AFP report picked up by Nigeria's This Day and South Africa's IOL News quotes a Tuareg rebel leader as saying the deal has collapsed. But the leader is named as speaking not in the name of the MNLA, but a "National Liberation Front of Azawad (FNLA)." To wit:

A new law granting Israeli authorities the power to detain "illegal migrants" for up to three years took effect June 3, following a wave of Tel Aviv protests over the influx of African migrants who cross into Israel along its border with Egypt. The law even makes asylum seekers liable to imprisonment—without trial or deportation—if caught staying in Israel for long periods. Additionally, anyone found to be aiding migrants or providing them with shelter could face up to 15 years in prison. The law amended the Prevention of Infiltration Law, passed in 1954 to prevent the entry of Palestinians.