From Newsday, Sept. 12:

Chilling testimony told in limo crash trial

Little Kate Flynn's body was not difficult to identify after she died in the wreckage of a head-on crash on the Meadowbrook Parkway, a Nassau medical examiner testified this morning: Her mother was still carrying her daughter's head at the hospital.

If, as we recently speculated, the White House was hoping it could groom Islamists in Syria as proxies to destabilize the regime, this ought to provide a little cold water in the face. In fact, much to the consternation of the neocons, we could see Washington mending fences with Damascus, viewing the Assad dictatorship as the most expedient proxy to put down the Islamists. Official embrace of the "terrorist" lingo indicates Assad may want such as arrangement, lest he be on the receiving end of the Pentagon's smart bombs. From Canada's CTV, Sept. 12:

Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi and founder of the MK Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence, spent Sept. 11 with Camp Democracy, a small tent city established by anti-war activists on the National Mall in front of the US Capitol. Gandhi joined peace campers in a march that set out from the Washington Hebrew Congregation and stopped at the National Cathedral and the Islamic Center before culminating at the city's Gandhi memorial.

There's a lot of this going around all of a sudden. Watergate figure and born-again evangelical Chuck Colson wrote for the Christian Post Aug. 18 (in a piece imaginitively entitled "The Clash of Civilizations"):

During the Cold War, there was a great clash of civilizations—communism vs. Western liberal democracy. And it threatened to destroy us in a nuclear holocaust. I was in the White House during those years. I can tell you, it was terrifying getting those daily briefings from the military. But the danger that we face from radical Islam today is even greater than the Cold War.

From AndhraVision.com, Sept. 11:

Satyagraha movement completes 100 years

A hundred years ago today, Mahatma Gandhi launched the historic Satyagraha movement in South Africa to fight racism and colonial oppression in that country. Later, he used the same principles of non violence and mass civil disobedience in India, which eventually paved the way for the country's independence. The first seeds of Satyagraha were sown in 1893 when a young struggling lawyer Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi came to South Africa. He arrived to serve as a legal advisor for an Indian merchant. But this was a country where the colour of one's skin mattered more than anything else.

From El Universal, Sept. 10, via Chiapas95:

Unknown perpetrators attempted to burn down the offices of a leftist organization that is taking part in protests in Oaxaca City early Saturday. The door and main gate of offices belonging to the New Left of Oaxaca (NIOAX) were set afire but the blaze was put out before any real damage occurred.

For those who continue to follow events in Mexico's conflicted southern state of Chiapas, there is an increasingly surreal sense of being through the proverbial looking glass. On a national level, the leftist PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is challenging his narrow defeat in the presidential race as fraudulent with massive protest movements; in Chiapas, Jose Antonio Aguilar Bodegas, the candidate of the PRI (which ruled Mexico through blatant fraud and corruption for 70 years) is attempting to emulate Lopez Obrador's example—claiming his victory was stolen by the PRD candidate! The conservative PAN (the party of President Fox and his apparent successor Felipe Calderon) is backing Aguilar Bodegas out of mutual enmity for the PRD—despite the fact that the PRI stole many electoral victories from the PAN in its long tenure in power nationally. Just to make the political bedfellows even stranger, Jorge Kanter—the notorious conservative rancher long held to be the mastermind of the White Guards, the brutal paramilitary force of Chiapas' landed oligarchy—has declared for the PRD candidate, Juan Sabines!

From Spain's El Pais, Sept. 9, via Chiapas95 (our translation):

The entrance of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD, leftist) into Mexico's institutional life, with the signing of an accord for reforms to the Law of Congress, is a bad sign for its ex-presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who maintains a resistance against the president-elect, Felipe Calderon, and the "invalid institutions." The governor of the state of Michoacan, the PRDista Lazaro Cardenas (son of the founder of the party), and that of Chiapas have recognized Calderon as the new executive.