Osama bin Laden's latest audiotape release is almost funny. Along with the usual swipes at the "Crusader-Zionist" war on Islam, he accuses the UN Security Council of being controlled by the "Crusader movement along with pagan Buddhists"--an apparent reference to China. (What, they aren't godless communists anymore?). Obviously, this rhetoric closely mirrors that of the Christian fundamentalist right. BBC did note the eerie symmetry of Osama's call for a long jihad against the West coming weeks after the Pentagon's new "Quadrennial Defence Review" which stated: "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war." The most widely quoted line from Osama's statement is: "Your aircraft and tanks are destroying houses over the heads of our kinfolk and children in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Pakistan. Meanwhile, you smile in our faces, saying, 'We are not hostile to Islam; we are hostile to terrorists.'" Has it occurred to anyone that the case against Osama on what is called the "Arab street" would be a hell of a lot stronger if these charges didn't happen to be true!? (Are we allowed to say that?)

On April 18, three Uruguayan military officers--one retired--arrived in Chile after being extradited there to face charges relating to the 1991 abduction in Chile and subsequent murder in Uruguay of Chilean chemist Eugenio Berrios. Berrios worked for the National Intelligence Department (DINA) under Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, and had said before his disappearance that sectors allied with Pinochet wanted to kill him.

Mapuche rights activists Juan Patricio Marileo Saravia, Florencio Jaime Marileo Saravia, Juan Carlos Huenulao Lienmil and Patricia Troncoso Robles (known as "La Chepa") have been on hunger strike since March 13 in prison in Angol, Chile's Region IX, demanding a review of their cases. The strikers were accused of setting a fire in December 2001 that burned 100 hectares of pine plantations belonging to the Forestal Mininco S.A. company on the Poluco Pidenco estate in Ercilla. The court characterized the arson as a terrorist act and invoked a special anti-terrorism law; the four activists were sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay the company restitution of 423 million pesos ($822,717). (Adital, Brazil, April 13; Mapuche International Link, April 20)

On April 17, members of Brazil's Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) commemorated the 10th anniversary of the day in 1996 when Military Police (PM) agents fired at some 1,500 MST members who were marching on the PA-150 highway in Eldorado dos Carajas, Para state. The PM agents killed 19 campesinos and wounded 69 others, many of whom continue to suffer health effects from bullets lodged in their bodies and must seek frequent medical attention.

A violent confrontation between 800 federal and state police agents and more than 500 striking steelworkers left two workers dead and dozens of workers and police agents injured on April 20 at the Siderurgica Lazaro Cardenas-Las Truchas, SA (Sicartsa) steel plant in the port city of Lazaro Cardenas in the Mexican state of Michoacan. The workers had been occupying the plant since April 2 as part of a wave of wildcat strikes against a Feb. 28 decision by the government of center-right president Vicente Fox Quesada to remove Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, general secretary of the National Union of Mine and Metal Workers of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMRM). The Federal Conciliation and Arbitration Council (JFCA) had declared the Sicartsa wildcat illegal.

From the AP, April 22:

CALEDONIA, Ontario — As an uneasy calm settled amid the barricades, fresh tensions erupted Friday as protesters shut down a vital Ontario rail corridor in solidarity with those occupying a disputed tract of southwestern Ontario land.

This may not be linked to the recent ascendence of reactionary elements in the Vatican—but it does point to an intersection of clerical reaction and organized crime in Sicily, at least. From The Guardian, April 21:

Italian police codebreakers are turning to the Bible in their efforts to get at the many secrets of the Mafia's "boss of bosses".

Bernardo Provenzano was arrested this month after 43 years on the run. When an undercover policewoman known as "the Cat" walked into his rural hideout on April 11 she found him surrounded by encoded messages to and from his lieutenants.

Here are the first vaguely credible claims that Darfur refugees are being recruited for the Chad insurgency. But numerous questions are left unanswered. Its a little ironic that Chad's President Déby is using these claims to imply that Sudan is behind the rebels. Why would refugees forced from their homes by agents of the Sudanese government (the Janjaweed) do that government's bidding? Why would they want to unseat Déby, who provided support to the Darfur guerillas they presumably support? If they were press-ganged by the guerillas, then how is Khartoum implicated? Then there was the April 21 New York Times story claiming the rebels are led by Déby's relations from his own Zaghawa tribe—which, conveniently, straddles the Chad-Sudan border. Sudan may be exploiting the conflict in Chad, but does not appear to have created it—and Déby may be playing up the Sudanese angle for his own purposes. From Reuters, April 23: