Bolivia's President Evo Morales told a press conference at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago that he had asked US President Barack Obama to publicly repudiate an assassination plot against him. Although Morales stopped short of accusing the US of being behind the plot, he said Obama's speech promising a new policy for the Americas rings hollow without a denunciation: "Obama said three things: There are neither senior or junior partners. He said relations should be of mutual respect, and he spoke of change. In Bolivia...one doesn't feel any change. The policy of conspiracy continues."

The New England Journal of Medicine is releasing a new study by the University of London based on data from Iraq Body Count, finding that sectarian militias were responsible for a full third of killings in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion. The finding that 33% of civilian deaths since the US-led invasion are attributable to armed gangs contradicts previous assertions by the Iraqi government that foreign military operations were responsible for the majority of deaths.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a new US initiative April 15 to battle piracy off Somalia, and said she has formed a diplomatic team to press Somali leaders "to take action against pirates operating from bases within their territories." She added: "These pirates are criminals. They are armed gangs on the sea. And those plotting attacks must be stopped."

Mexico's ambassador to the US, Arturo Sarukhan, speaking to Bob Schieffer of CBS' "Face the Nation" April 12, once again called the norteamericanos to task for allowing a highly unregulated gun trade which is fueling armed violence south of the border. Transcript from CQ Politics:

Pakistan's newly re-instated chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has called a court hearing into a video in circulation showing the public flogging of a teenage girl in the northwestern Swat Valley, where a peace-for-sharia deal has been brokered with local Taliban leaders. He has ordered top officials from North West Frontier Province to appear and produce the girl, who is shown in the video being held down by two men while a third hits her with a strap as she cries out in pain.

Israel may attack Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear bomb, the top US commander in the Middle East told Congress April 1. Gen. David Petraeus said "the Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it."

The New York Times' City Room blog March 27 notes the ruckus raised by NYC's tabloids upon hearing that the Port Authority has dropped the name "Freedom Tower" for the monstrosity going up at Ground Zero in favor of the more prosaic "World Trade Center 1" (NY Post front-page hed: FREE DUMB TOWER). Noted City Room:

This time it is none other than neocon whiz kid and former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, along with Justin Polin, a sidekick from the Hudson Institute, who favorably invoke the Sufis in a New York Times op-ed about Pakistan March 30. How frustrating that the attack on sufism by Pakistan's neo-Taliban receives practically no coverage in the international media—until war propagandists seize on it for their own cynical purposes...