Alfonso Chardy writes for the Miami Herald, May 3 (links added):

Militant Cuban exile honored
A beaming Luis Posada Carriles hugged and shook hands with hundreds of supporters late Friday as he arrived at a club in west Miami-Dade fo a dinner in his honor.

Our April issue featured the story "The Audacity of Vagueness: Barack Obama and Latin America," by Nikolas Kozloff of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Wrote Kozloff: "Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, has not been very eager to comprehensively address Latin America as an issue. In recent years, the region has undergone a major tectonic shift towards the left, surely prompting many to wonder how the young Illinois Senator might deal with progressive change throughout the hemisphere were he elected to the White House. Would he seek to continue the rabidly hawkish stance of the Bush administration towards such nations as Venezuela, or could he be convinced to broker a rapprochement?" We have noted before Obama's alarmingly bellicose rhetoric on Pakistan. Our April Exit Poll was: "Are you rooting for Barack Obama? With or without grave misgivings?" As an Extra Credit question, we asked: "Will Cheney pull an 'October Surprise'?" We received the following responses:

Talk about chutzpah. The right-wing blogosphere is ballistic over Barack Obama's rather tenuous ties to a former member of the Weather Underground. It was Hillary Clinton who first made an issue of the fact that Obama once served on the board of Chicago's progressive Woods Fund with ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers. Hillary later pleaded ignorance when reminded that her husband pardoned one member of the Weather Underground and commuted the sentence of another. (Huffington Post, April 17) Particularly hot under the collar about the fact that Ayers has any place at all in respectable American society is Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily. After running down a litany of Ayers' and Bernardine Dohrn's rioting, bombing, travels to Cuba, juvenile rhetoric about killing your parents, etc., he fumes:

We've always maintained that anti-Semitism and anti-Arab racism are genetically linked phenomena. A lovely illustration is provided by Joseph E. DiGenova, the prosecutor in the Jonathan Pollard case, following the latest bust in the endless Israeli spy scandal—of octogenarian former US Army mechanical engineer Ben-Ami Kadish, for crimes supposedly committed back in the '80s. DiGenova uses precisely the same lurid phraseology employed against supposed Arab and Muslim terrorists. From YNet, April 24 (emphasis added):

Stories like this make us think Orwell was an optimist. From Reuters, April 8:

Robots seen doing work of 3.5 million in Japan
Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in graying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks.

We've said it before, but here we go again. The Conspiracy Industry plays into the very hands of the police state it ostensibly opposes. The latest blog fodder from Raw Story, April 1, emphasis added, links not included:

Mukasey hints US had attack warning before 9/11
When Attorney General Mukasey delivered a speech last week demanding that Congress grant the president warrantless eavesdropping powers and telecom immunity, the question and answer session afterwards included one extraordinary but little-noticed claim.

The US State Department's new annual human rights report accuses China of "extrajudicial killings, torture and coerced confessions of prisoners and the use of forced labor." Russia and Sudan were also especially criticized. Ten countries were named as under "unaccountable rulers [who] remained the world's most systematic human rights violators": North Korea, Burma, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Eritrea and Sudan. It noted improvements in Mauritania, Ghana, Morocco and Haiti, but little or no progress in Nepal, Russia, Georgia Kyrghyzstan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan or Iraq. (AlJazeera, March 11)

A man claiming to be Jaber al-Banna (also rendered Elbaneh), a Yemeni-American who is among the FBI's most wanted terrorism suspects, showed up in a Yemeni court Feb. 23—and was allowed to walk free, surprising the attendees. Al-Banna's appearance was at the court hearing the appeals case of 36 Yemenis sentenced convicted last year of planning attacks for al-Qaeda.