Following a prisoner uprising at Guantanamo last week, the campaign of passive resistance at the detention center is again growing. Reports the AP, May 29:

The number of Guantanamo Bay detainees staging a hunger strike has grown from three to 75, the U.S. military said Monday, reflecting increasing defiance among men who have been held for up to 4 1/2 years, most without charges and with little contact with the outside world.

On May 27, América del Valle, leader of the Peoples' Front in Defense of the Land, in hiding since the May 3 violence at San Salvador Atenco, spoke to the international Telesur TV network from a clandestine location. She said the human rights violations against the people of Atenco demonstrate that Mexican President Vicente Fox wants to show he "maintains a firm and strong hand over those at the bottom," before he steps down from power. She said the police violence at her village was an attempt to "intimidate" Mexicans who stand up for their rights.

As of May 25, two immigrant mothers who began a hunger strike in Chicago on May 10 were still consuming only liquids as they called for an end to all deportations until Congress finalizes a legalization bill. Elvira Arellano and Flor Crisostomo, both of whom were arrested in immigration raids and are fighting their own deportation, have been joined by three other hunger strikers and are camping out in a plaza on Chicago's south side. They plan to continue their fast until at least June 1, the day when 23 of 26 Chicago-area IFCO Systems employees arrested in a nationwide sweep on April 19 face hearings in immigration court. Crisostomo is one of the "IFCO 26." (Chicago Tribune, May 25)

According to a May 27 CBC news report, the Ontario section of Canada's largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has voted overwhemingly to support a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. There are over 200,000 members in the Ontario division of CUPE. This stands in contrast to the largest US trade union, the AFL-CIO, which campaigned against a proposal for the city of Somerville, MA to divest from Israel bonds.

More from the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA):

Leave it to Los Angeles. The media start paying attention when big-name stars flock to the cause. Meanwhile, heartening to know that this grassroots effort at urban-renewal-from-below has lasted as long as it has. From the LA Daily News, May 25:

Farmers facing imminent eviction from their urban plots of land played the ultimate trump card Wednesday: They called folk singer Joan Baez and stuck her in a tree.

The Los Angeles South Central Farm has been an oddity for the past 14 years. Tilled by mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants amid warehouses and train tracks, the 14-acre plot stuck out as a verdant block in a drab, industrial sector off the Alameda corridor.

How long before this particular axe falls? What is ironic about the pro-drilling rhetoric is that it implicitly or explicitly demonizes the Arabs (as well as the environmentalists, of course) for driving up oil prices. Meanwhile: a.) the Arabs are pumping the stuff as fast as they can, and prices remain sky-high despite this, and b.) it is the high prices which hold the only promise of making their dreams of exploiting ANWR a possibility. Who are they kidding? Themselves? From Market Watch, May 25:

House passes ANWR exploration
Oil, gas exploration measure likely to face Senate filibuster

WASHINGTON — Seeking to respond to soaring gasoline prices, the House on Thursday revisited a top Bush administration priority by voting again to open a portion of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, to oil exploration.

Revelations by Human Rights Watch May 26 that Darfur's Janjaweed have overrun villages in Chad. The rapidly shifting alliances are dizzying here. On the face of it, this is simple: Chad's government has backed the Darfur guerillas and this is simple retaliation by Khartoum's proxy force. Except (as we have noted), Chad's government is now divided, with rival factions of the ruling Zaghawa tribe in a violent struggle for power. The faction around President Idriss Deby accuses Sudan of supporting his enemies and is demonizing Sudanese refugees in Chad as subversives—even though they were cleansed from their lands by the Janjaweed, Sudan's proxy force. Meanwhile (as we have also noted), the Darfur rebels have also split, between factions led by the Fur and Zaghawa ethnicities. The Zaghawa-led faction is presumably closer to Chad—but to which faction in Chad? And does the report of "Chadian recruits" working with the Janjaweed indicate that Khartoum and its proxy force have made an alliance with the Zaghawa-led guerillas in both Darfur and Chad against the Fur and the rival (ruling) Chadian Zaghawa faction? HRW duly notes the claim—universal throughout the Darfur crisis—that this is just tit-for-tat violence over stolen cattle. This may, in fact, be the immediate and ostensible spark for the attacks. But, especially given the oil stakes in Chad, it is pretty disingenuous to argue that this war is about cattle-rustling.

Exactly four years after winning its independence from Indonesia, East Timor is tragically descending into chaos, and Australia has sent a "peacekeeping" force. Excerpts from a Reuters account via TV New Zealand, May 27:

Gangs of youths allied to feuding East Timor police or army units went on the rampage in parts of the capital on Saturday, torching houses and vehicles, as Australian and Malaysian peacekeeping troops stepped up their patrols.