From the LA Times, April 1:

Fred Korematsu, the Japanese-American whose court case over his refusal
to be interned during World War II went to the U.S. Supreme Court and
became synonymous with this nation's agonized debate over civil
liberties during time of war, has died. He was 86.

Reads the latest communique from the Biotic Baking Brigade, dated March 30:

William Kristol, founder of the Project for the New American Century (a leading neo-con think tank) and a key figure in American foreign policy for over 20 years, was hit by what appeared to be a cream pie tonight in Richmond, Indiana. Throughout his speech, given at Earlham College, he defended the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war and state terror and was in the process of comparing current policy challenges to those of the early Cold War when a young man calmly lifted himself onto the stage and quickly walked to the podium, splattering a delicious dish all over the speaker as well as the college's president (collateral damage, perhaps?).

Well, all the lefties and Bush-haters are gloating again—this time at the new report from a presidential commission finding that the intelligence the White House received aboout weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was "dead wrong." (AP, March 31) Will Pitt of TruthOut does an impressive job of documenting how the report is actually a whitewash that allows the Administration to scapegoat the intelligence community for its own lies (or, more charitably, distortions and misreadings of data).

Reads an AFP report that seems to have been picked up exclusively by the Kurdish Media website:

A musician from Turkey's Laz minority group said the country's public television refused to allow him to perform his songs, claiming that new laws adopting democratic European standards exclude the Laz language.

The Laz musician, Birol Topaloglu, said he had been invited to participate in a musical special on March 18 in Ankara on the national television station TRT-INT. He has been involved since 1997 in trying to preserve the culture of the Laz community of about 250,000 people in northeast Turkey.

What is now being dubbed Kyrgyzstan's "Tulip Revolution" is starting to look considerably less than velvet. The country remains divided, with ousted president Askar Akayev in hiding but refusing to step down, and some protests and even road blockades reported in his support. (AP, March 28) Looting and sporadic gunfire continue, with armed bands roaming the streets of Bishkek, the capital.

Well, it seems workers are battling to contain a large spill of crude-contaminated water—111,300 gallons—at ConocoPhillips' Kuparuk oil filed on Alaska's North Slope. State officials are concerned about impacts on the fragile tundra environment. How ironic that this comes days after the Senate voted to open the nearby ANWR to oil development. Fortunately, however, the compliant media have contained the crisis—by keeping it out of the headlines.

As Bush equivocates, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter states in a commentary for al-Jazeera that he was told by an anonymous "someone close to the Bush administration" that the U.S. military attack on Iran is slated for June 2005. An Israeli determination that Iran's uranium enrichment program could be functional by then was cited, Ritter says.

The German-based pro-Kurdish Flash-Bulletin website has posted a Feb. 16 letter from a group of Ezidi academics protesting that Ezidi children in eastern Turkey are being forced to study Islam in school by local village authorities—a practice they charge is part of the "Turkish state's assimilating policy against other ethnic and religious groups in general and Ezidis in particular." (Particularly cited is an unsourced press account from Oglakci village in the Viransehir region of Urfa province.) The writers of the letter accuse the Turkish government of bad faith in officially granting language and cultural rights to Kurds and other minorities in eastern Turkey, saying this policy is just a facade intended to facilitate entry into the European Union. The writers charge: