From El Universal, May 4 via the Chiapas95 archive:

A state judge on Wednesday exonerated a Michoacan police officer accused of shooting and killing a striking steel mill worker last month, despite video footage showing the officer firing his rifle toward the workers.

With Darfur in the headlines, if not the minds of our policymakers, it is generally forgotten that armed attacks, forced deportations and even slavery continue against Black African peoples throughout the Sahel. On Tuesday, May 9, at 7:30 PM, the Libertarian Book Club's Anarchist Forum will present a discussion in New York's Greenwhich Village on "Ethnic Cleansing and Slavery in Contemporary Africa," with an emphasis on Mauritania, Sudan and Darfur. The featured speaker will be Abdarahmane Wone of the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM), which has been attempting to resist and expose the system of slavery in that country for a generation.

Sarah Ferguson writes for the Village Voice, May 2:

A Day Without White People
On May Day, the masses rose up in New York. But where were the white peaceniks?
A bit of revolution hit the streets on May Day in New York. Folks will debate the size of the crowd that jammed Union Square and beyond yesterday afternoon. People filled sidewalks along side streets, searching for a way into the rally. By 3 p.m. the park was full; by 5 it was bursting--so much so that police pulled back the metal barricades blocking 14th Street and let the throngs spill down Broadway an hour before the rally inside the park was supposed to end.

One civilian was killed and several injured (both police and civilians) in a clash that erupted when police opened fire on protesters blocking a road in Dagestan's Dokuzpari district April 25. The protesters, who were demanding the dismisal of a local prosecutor accused of corruption, responded by hurling stones. (ITAR-TASS, April 26)

Another (very tentative) glimmer of hope in the battle for your privacy rights. From AP, April 25:

WASHINGTON -- An appeals court on Tuesday returned the criminal case against an Islamic scholar to a trial judge to determine whether the Bush administration's domestic spying program was used to gather evidence against him.

From Newsday, April 26:

Nine New York City firefighters sued the city and its fire pension fund yesterday saying they were denied disability pensions even after the department told them their breathing disorders sustained at Ground Zero had left them unfit to serve.

New Yorkers are supposed to be celebrating this break in the long impasse which has stalled reconstruction at Ground Zero. And indeed Larry Silverstein's megalomania and greed have been an appalling spectacle. But, as we have repeatedly emphasized, rebuilding a skyscraper at the WTC site is a very bad idea, just as building the original Twin Towers was a very bad idea. The WTC helped transform New York from a working-class city of neighborhoods and industry to a sterile administrative clearinghouse for global finance and a culturally-cleansed playground for the rich. The new (and Orwellianly-named) "Freedom Tower" will only accelerate this process. And, obviously, as a hubristic symbol of American power, the old WTC invited terrorist attacks; so (we hate to say it) will the Freedom Tower--as is explicitly acknowledged by the unprecedented heavy hand given to the NYPD and security concerns generally in its very design. WW4 Report officially dissents from the celebrations. From Reuters, April 27:

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)