A front-page story in today's New York Times paints an even more desperate picture of the deteriorating situation in Darfur than usual. Lydia Polgreen reports from Tina, a village that was overrun April 19 and the residents forced to flee to the overstretched and over-crowded refugee camp at Tawila. Only this time the armed horsemen who swept through, burning, looting, shooting and raping, were not Janjaweed, but a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army, the major guerilla group resisting the Sudanese pro-government forces. The SLA has splintered, with the faction that signed the recent peace accord turning against the more intransigent faction which has held out, calling the accords a sham. The ostensibly pro-peace faction is now attacking civilian villages, mimicking the tactics of their Janjaweed enemies. Again, there is an ethnic dimension: the supposedly pro-peace faction is led by ethnic Zaghawa, who are traditionally semi-nomadic herdsmen, while the hold-out faction is led by sedentary, agricultural Fur, who are the big majority in Darfur ("Land of the Fur"). "It was the Zaghawa who did this," a Tina sheikh told Polgreen. "We used to fear the Arab janjaweed. Now we have another janjaweed."

From the London Times, May 20:

THE largest prisoner uprising yet at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre was reported by the US military yesterday as the UN watchdog on torture called for the camp to be shut down.

From Long Island Newsday, May 18:

Two teenage girls and a 25-year-old man were killed Wednesday morning when their car rear-ended a parked tractor-trailer on a busy two-lane road in Brentwood, Suffolk police said.

More pendulum swings. Douglas Feith, former no. 3 at the Pentagon, Richard Perle, who served on a Pentagon Advisory board, and former undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz have all been the subject of investigations for their ties to Israel, according to Stephen Green, writing in Counterpunch. Even though the three were subject to repeated investigations, they continued to get Defense Department jobs. The following may signal the proverbial chickens coming home to roost. From the Jerusalem Post, May 18:

Israeli ties impair US security clearance

US citizens who have ties to Israel or an Israeli-American dual citizenship encounter difficulties in obtaining security clearance from the Pentagon and are dealt with in a manner similar to that of Americans who have ties with hostile nations.

More protests in Cairo, where last week when 255 people were arrested. Today, thousands of riot police and hundreds of plainclothes officers were deployed in streets leading to the courthouse in downtown Cairo as they attempted to prevent opposition activists from gathering. At issue are arrests and prosecution of opposition activists, and demands for an independent judiciary. Does the below story from the Washington Post (May 18) indicate that arrested opposition figure Ayman Nour is the neocons' man—as opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood?

A judicial ruling against a teacher who wore the hejab inspires an assassination of a judge—which in turn sparks a mass mobilization against the Islamists. Whatever one thinks of the Ataturk-era policy of mandatory secularism, the politics of this one are pretty interesting. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the (moderately) Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) condemned the killing, but was much more vociferous in his denials that his own statements about the ruling might have helped inspire it. (Hurriyet, May 19) Then he refused to attend the funeral. (Financial Times, May 18) From The Independent, May 18:

Thousands march in Turkey to denounce Islamic gunman's attack

More than 15,000 Turks, from students to judges still in their robes, marched in the capital to support secularism and to condemn a courtroom shooting that killed one judge and wounded four others.

Talk about Phyrric victories. The quick overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 paved the way for the invasion of Iraq and the quick overthrow of Saddam Hussein a year and a half later. Now, just as Iraq is spinning horribly out of control, it looks like Afghanistan is going in the same direction. Tom Coughland writes for the UK Independent, May 19:

Violence escalates in Afghanistan

The storming of Musa Qala was ferocious. Hundreds of Taliban fighters poured incessant fire into the government buildings and police station. The ensuing battle was the longest and fiercest since the end of the war four years ago. As homes and shops were set alight, Qari Mohammed Yousef, a Taliban commander, used his satellite telephone to announce to a news agency that the town in Helmand had fallen to the "forces of Islam".

Remember all those wacky conspiracy theorists who said that "liberating" Afghanistan from the Taliban was really about building an oil pipeline through the country? From India's Rediff.com, May 19:

India joins Afghanistan gas pipeline project
The Cabinet on Thursday approved India joining the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan natural gas pipeline and the inclusion of 1,113 km of national highways for upgradation under the third phase of the National Highway Development Project.