The ascendance of the center-left Romano Prodi as Italy's new prime minister in the narrow (and contested) April elections will apparently mean at least a phased withdrawal of Italian troops from the US-led mission in Iraq, depriving Bush of one more European ally in his Mesopotamian adventure. It will not, however, mean a withdrawal from the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. On the contrary, Italy may be expanding its troop presence there. From the Pakistan Tribune, June 2:

For a second consecutive night yesterday, French police battled hundreds of Muslim youth in the Paris suburbs of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil. (Seattle Times, June 1) This makes headlines; the ongoing institutionalized racism that fuels these periodic eruptions does not. From Turkey's Zaman, June 1:

Half of those being detained in French prisons are said to be Muslims.
A Le Monde news article wrote that according to a poll run by Religions World magazine, although Muslims constitute 7-8 percent of the French population, 50 percent of all prisoners are Muslim immigrants.

What a breath of fresh air! The website Screw Loose Change reports that Gedeon and Jules Naudet, the French film-makers who captured images of the first plane striking the World Trade Center on 9-11, have sent a "cease and desist" letter to the makers of the all-too-popular (though transparently bogus, to anyone with a modicum of critical reasoning skills) conspiracy video Loose Change, taking the lugubrious vultures to task for appropriating their footage to advance irresponsible claptrap, and threatening litigation if they don't back down. For the moment, the video has been removed from the Loose Change website.

Alan J. Kuperman, author of Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion and Civil War, has a positively ghastly op-ed in the New York Times May 31, blaming the Darfur guerillas for sparking the genocide--as if they had taken up arms arbitrarily and not because Darfur's Black Africans were already second-class citizens in their own land before the war began, as if the Fur had not been deported as slaves and usurped of their lands for generations, as if the iniquities of the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime had not been recognized by the world in the peace accord that ended the war in southern Sudan last year, as if the betrayal of the Black Africans of Darfur by their non-inclusion in those accords was not a key factor in the decision to take up arms. Worse than a Pilate-like washing of the hands, Kuperman actually advocates giving Khartoum a free hand to crush the guerillas (what, have they been restraining themselves thus far?). The fact that this noxious piece of propaganda is given such good billing (the lead op-ed) is the clearest evidence yet that US elites are divided on how to handle Sudan, with a significant faction opting for wooing the genocidal Khartoum regime as GWOT allies (or proxies). Hell, why not? It isn't like the US didn't do essentially the same thing in Guatemala a generation ago... Some excerpts, for those with strong stomachs:

Pretty bad times to be part of an ethnic or religious minority in Iran, it seems. From the New York Times, June 1:

Members of the Bahai religious minority in Iran said this week that the government had recently intensified a campaign of arrests, raids and propaganda that was aimed at eradicating their religion in Iran, the country of its birth.

From the Pakistan Tribune. June 2:

KABUL: U.S. troops fired into a crowd of hundreds of stone-throwing rioters, killing at least three Afghans, as their convoy left the scene of an accident that triggered Monday’s anti-American riots, Kabul’s chief of highway police said.

From the Mumbai Mirror, June 2 (link added):

Baghdad: A pregnant woman was shot dead at a US checkpoint in Iraq while on her way to give birth, officials said on Thursday, sparking further controversy amid a furor over an alleged marines shooting rampage.

When Slobodan Milosevic died, he was in a prison cell at The Hague facing war crimes charges, and it made world headlines. The May 27 passing of Guatemala's equally genocidal dictator of the late '70s and early '80s, Romeo Lucas Garcia, was largely confined to the obituary pages and wire copy, and he died a free man, passing his final years in luxurious Venezuelan exile. Nothing could indicate more clearly how much cheaper life is for indigenous peoples such as Lucas Garcia's Maya Indian victims, and for those whose oppressors happen to be on the good side of US imperialism. Obits have generally noted his bloody 1980 attack on the Spanish embassy after it was occupied by Maya protesters. This is because Spanish judicial authorities would later seek his extradition over the affair. Forgotten is what the embassy occupiers were protesting--the reign of terror in the Guatemalan countryside that (carried on by Lucas Garcia's successor Rios Montt) would ultimately leave some 50,000 dead, a million displaced and hundreds of villages destroyed. The obits have generally not used the "G word," but the 1999 findings of the UN-backed Guatemala Historical Clarification Commission estimated 200,000 dead in the civil war that lasted from 1962 to 1996, squarely accusing the Guatemalan state of "genocide." (BBC, Feb. 25, 1999) The Lucas Garcia-Rios Montt period was the bloodiest of the war, and that in which the violence was most explicitly aimed at the Maya ethnicity. This typically abbreviated account from Reuters, May 29: