Taxi driver, pregnant passenger, pedestrian in critical condition

April 26, 2005, 12:31 PM EDT

NEW YORK -- A taxi driver whose out-of-control cab set off a chain reaction of crashes at Times Square remained in critical condition on Tuesday, as did his pregnant passenger and a pedestrian.

The driver, Syed M. Zia, 54, of Corona, Queens, was driving along 42nd Street near the Port Authority Bus Terminal at around 10:30 a.m. Monday when he collided at the intersection of Eighth Avenue with a station wagon, which then hit a pedestrian, authorities said.

The cab then went around the station wagon, striking the pedestrian a second time, then sped off, and hit a minibus, then a Chevrolet Impala, and finally hit a row of taxicabs, the last of which stopped near Ninth Avenue, police said.

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah met with George Bush in his ranch in Crawford, TX, April 25, where unprecedentedly escalating oil prices obviously dominated the agenda. The reactionary NY Post ran a front-cover story "THE HIGH PRICE OF OIL," with prominent photos of Bush walking hand-in-hand with the prince and exchanging an "air-kiss" (as the caption put it) with him. This was, of course, portrayed as unmanly and a national humiliation, prompting predictably outraged letters from lug-headed Post readers ("No, the prince should not have gotten a kiss on the cheek. He should have gotten a kick in the rear.")

Joseph Mussomeli, charge d'affairs at the U.S. embassy in Manila, was quoted April 11 as saying that the southern island of Mindanao, where U.S. and Philippine forces are battling Muslim rebels, could be the next Afghanistan. According to a report from the Pakistan Tribune:

Largely gone from the headlines and overshadowed by the horrorshow in Iraq, violence continues in Afghanistan, especially in the Taliban-sympathetic zone along that Pakistan border. We recently reported on an especially grisly incident involving U.S. troops. Now comes a similarly grisly report from Pakistan's Daily Times, April 25:

We recently reported that U.S. military forces have been approved to engage in drug enforcement operations in Afghanistan. Now comes this report of DEA agents in New York busting a major opium lord said to be linked to the Taliban resistance:

Kudos to Pacific New Service for picking up our recent commentary on the coordinated propaganda blitz against Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Readers of WW4 REPORT are aware that within a week of each other, Otto Reich called in a National Review cover story for a "coalition of the willing" to act against the Cuba-Venezuela "Axis of Evil," and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) issued a call to drain the terrorist "swamp" in Latin America, starting with Venezuela. Ominously, the media offensive comes at a time of escalating border tensions between Venezuela and Colombia, Washington's militarized South American client state.

Even after the Justice Department has blinked in the case of whistle-blowing FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, declassifying her claims and allowing her suit to go ahead, the judiciary is now blocking public accesss to the proceedings...

From a blogger working with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other groups comes this April 16 appeal on the case of two teenage Muslim girls detained on immigration charges following spurious claims they had been considering suicide-terror martyrdom: