As the Great Powers condescendingly admonish Darfur's guerillas to participate in the peace talks to open in Libya next week, on Oct. 11, some 22 representatives of Darfur rebel groups were stopped by Sudanese government forces on their way to a pre-summit meeting in the country's autonomous south. They arrived in Juba, south Sudan's capital, after they were detained by soldiers at an airstrip in the North Darfur town of Kotum for several hours. They were apparently released after Sudan's Foreign Affairs Minister Lam Akol intervened. (Reuters, Oct. 12)

None of the media accounts (e.g. London Times, Oct. 12) note the hysterical irony. We suppose Henry Kissinger's Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 was even more ironic, but at least his co-winner Le Duc Tho refused to accept the prize. Now if only Gore's co-winner, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), would show as much principle.

From NJ.com, Oct. 12:

Officials investigate crude oil spill
PAULSBORO — Coast Guard and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection officials are investigating the spill of at least 2,300 gallons of crude oil into the Delaware River from a ship docked at the Gloucester County Citgo Asphalt Refinery Wednesday morning.

Despite the ignorant blather of his brainless liberal apologists that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "not a 'Holocaust denier'" but merely calls for more research into whether it happened (gee, thanks for raising this subtle distinction), BBC Monitoring notes an Oct. 5 radio address by His Excellency, delivered in Tehran during Friday prayers—part of a series of state-sponsored rallies for "Al-Quds Day"—in which he shows his hand pretty blatantly:

From New York Newsday, Oct. 12:

Legless man hit by car in Harlem
A homeless panhandler with no legs was critically injured yesterday when he was struck by two cars in Harlem, police said. Donald Samuels, 33, broke several bones, including his pelvis, and was in critical condition last night at Harlem Hospital Center, police said. A witness told police Samuels was in the middle of East 125th Street, near Third Avenue, when was hit by a white van heading west just before 6 a.m.

On the heels of the outcry over the Blackwater massacre, comes another atrocity by a private contractor in Iraq. A particular ugly irony is that this time the victims were members of one of Iraq's threatened minorities—the Armenians, whose very precarious existence in Iraq largely goes unnoticed by the outside world. The painful irony is compounded by the Bush administrations' ongoing betrayal of the historical memory of the World War I-era Armenian genocide, which is once again in the headlines at the moment. From AP, Oct. 11:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking to the Association of the United States Army in Washington DC Oct. 10, said the US Army of the future will need to concentrate more on training foreign militaries, mastering other languages and customs, and honing its ability to fight small insurgent forces. (AP, Oct. 10). Calling the post-9-11 War on Terrorism "our first protracted conflict with an all-volunteer force since the American Revolution," Gates outlined the challenges facing US forces as this pattern extends indefinitely into the future. Some excerpts from the text, which is online at Defenselink.mil:

Just a week after Baghdad and Ankara made a public show of pledging cooperation against the PKK, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his military staff Oct. 9 for the first time formally approved unilateral incursions into Iraqi territory to route the Kurdish separatist guerillas. “To put an end to the terrorist organization operating in Iraq, the order has been given to take every kind of measure, legal, economic, political, including also a cross-border operation if necessary," said an official statement issued after the security summit in Ankara. The decision came after 15 Turkish soldiers were killed in guerilla attacks Oct. 7 and 8. The White House reacted by again stressing the need for co-operation between the US, Turkey and Iraq. (AKI, Italy, Oct. 9)