The annual US State Department report on global human rights, released March 6, notes improvements in the rghts climate in Mexico but says a “culture of impunity and corruption” persists. (La Jornada, March 7) Source archived at Chiapas95. See our… Read moreState Department rights report blasts Mexico
On March 14, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) handed a report to the Senate demanding that killings and other rights abuses in the conflicted southern state of Oaxaca over the past months be punished. “There were threats, persecution, physical… Read moreOaxaca: rights commission blasts government
Chiapas state authorities have declared a “Huitepec-Alcanfores Natural Protected Area” in exactly the location where a “Zapatista Communitarian Ecological Reserve” had been declared weeks earlier. The Zapatistas say the Huitepec area, just outside the highland city of San Cristobal de… Read moreZapatista peace camps threatened
The leader of the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (OPDDIC), Pedro Chulin Jimenez, and at least 25 of his militants were arrested by state authorities in Chiapas, Mexico, March 8 following reports of attacks on three… Read moreChiapas: paramilitaries threaten journalists
One of 15 immigrants arrested in March 2002 in connection with a supposed plot to attack the US Embassy in Rome with chemical agents has been awarded $133,000 for wrongful detention. Tunisian-born Abdelmoname Ben Khalifa Mansour, initially charged with being… Read moreItaly pays in bogus terror bust
Iran’s representative to UNESCO, Mohammad-Reza Dehshiri, issued a protest in a letter to the UN cultural organizaiton’s director general against the Warner Brothers blockbuster 300, calling it an insult to Iranian culture. Dehshiri called on UNESCO to bring the issue… Read moreIran protests to UN over “300”
On March 17, Trokavec village in the Czech Republic voted its opposition to a US radar base slated to be built in a nearby military zone as part of Washington’s proposed “missile shield.” Seventy-two out of 90 eligible voters in… Read moreCzech villagers vote against US radar base
Three suicide bombers exploded trucks loaded with explosives and tanks of chlorine gas in Iraq’s Anbar province March 16, killing at least two Iraqi police and sickening more than 350 people. In the first attack, a pick-up truck carrying chlorine… Read moreIraq: who is behind chlorine attacks?
It is endless, and it comes (tellingly) from the both the right and the left. The latest entry is from Columbia University scholar Mahmood Mamdani, writing in the March 8 London Review of Books—who probably fancies himself on the left…. Read moreMore denial on Darfur —this time from the “left”
Talk about hideous historical ironies. Ammar Alwan writes for Reuters, March 16: TANAF, Iraq – Hameda Um Firas has lived most of her 70-odd years as a refugee — now she is stranded in a tent again at Iraq’s border… Read moreIraq’s Palestinian refugees face new exile
From AP, March 16: NORTHAMPTON – Maha Ghosananda, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated monk who rebuilt Buddhism in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, has died. Ghosananda, who lived in Leverett and Providence, R.I., was believed to be in… Read moreGhosananda, “Gandhi of Cambodia,” dies in Massachusetts
The Bush administration has announced a new $750 million aid package for development and security in Pakistan’s northwest, where the tribal areas are thought to be a staging ground for Islamist militant attacks both into Afghanistan and increasingly within Pakistan…. Read moreCongress gives Pakistan blank check
