Did you happen to see this one? From AP, July 31:

NASHVILLE — A proud enclave of Kurds has lived in this city for decades, starting businesses and soccer leagues, holding down good jobs and blending into the immigrant neighborhoods south of town. But now the Kurdish immigrant community has been shaken to see its young people joining a street gang that blends old-world customs and new-world thuggery. Police blame the gang for a string of rapes, assaults and home invasions. The gang calls itself Kurdish Pride and is made up of 20 to 30 teenagers and young adults.

At least 250 and perhaps up to 500 are dead in four coordinated truck-bomb attacks that devastated Tal al-Azizziyah and Sheikh Khadar, two northern villages outside the town of Qahataniya near the Syrian border in Iraq's Nineveh province, Aug. 14. Residents and rescue workers continue pulling the dead and wounded from the rubble of hundreds of clay homes that collapsed when the massive bombs exploded. At least 350 are wounded. Rescue workers set up tents along the highway between the cities of Dohuk and Mosul to house the wounded after health ministry officials announced that hospitals in Sinjar, the nearest city, were overwhelmed. The area of devastation in one of the villages measured a half-mile in diameter. Many bodies are so mangled that they cannot be recognized. Ziryan Othman, minister of health for the Kurdistan region, likened the devastation to a natural disaster.

Gee, it's great to be home. From AP, Aug. 14:

Explosion destroys gas station
MINEOLA, N.Y. — A massive fire destroyed a gas station, an auto repair shop and a dozen customers' cars on Tuesday.

The Japanese anti-war group Zenko, whose 37th annual conference just closed in Tokyo, is a critical voice of dissent to the controversial Yasukuni shrine, where "Class A" war criminals like Hideki Tojo, as well as many hundreds of common soldiers, are honored. Not all of the survivors of those soldiers are happy that their loved ones are enshrined at Yasukuni, and Zenko has organized support for Koreans and Okinawans who have brought suit in the Japanese courts to have the names of their fathers or grandfathers removed from the shrine. Kinjo Minoru, an Okinawan sculptor and leading voice against the US military presence on the island, is one of the litigants. He said his father did not fight for Imperial Japan willingly, and that official Japanese history is trying to erase the memory of the "Okinawa massacre"—in which military authorities ordered the island's inhabitants to commit mass suicide rather than surrender to the US in July 1945, leading to hundreds of deaths.

Hiroshima marked the 62nd anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack Aug. 6, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe scrambled to mend fences with survivors still outraged by comments from a cabinet member apologizing for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan's historic first post-war Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma, an Abe appointee, said in a June speech, "I understand that the bombings ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped." Kyuma was forced to step down in the outcry following the comments, but still retains his seat in the Diet, where he represents—perversely—Nagasaki.

On Aug. 4, the National Assembly for Peace and Democracy opened at a conference hall in Kamata, a city within the Tokyo metropolitan area. Attended by some 500 activists from throughout Japan, as well as participants from South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States, this was the 37th annual National Assembly, better known by its Japanese acronym Zenko. The group first emerged from the struggle against Japanese involvement in the Vietnam war, and history has now brought it full circle, as Washington again calls upon Tokyo to back up a US military adventure—this time in Iraq, where Japan still maintains troops in an officially "noncombatant" role. The most honored guests at the Zenko conference were Samir Adil and Nadia Mahmood, leaders of the Iraq Freedom Congress (IFC), a civil resistance coalition which came together in 2005 to oppose the occupation and demand a secular state. Another luminary was Tokushin Yamauchi, a leading opponent of the US military presence in Okinawa, who was elected to the upper house of the Diet in last month's dramatic turn-around elections that dealt a humiliating defeat to the Liberal Democratic Party of pro-military Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

On Aug. 3, some 100 activists from the Japanese anti-war group Zenko (National Assembly for Peace and Democracy) gathered near the US embassy in Tokyo's central Shinbashi district to protest the July 4 slaying of Abdelhussein Saddam by US Special Forces troops in Baghdad. Abdelhussein had been the leader of the Safety Force, a civil patrol organized by the Iraq Freedom Congress (IFC) resistance organization to protect their communities from sectarian militias. Among those speaking were two IFC leaders who had been flown in for the 37th annual Zenko conference which opens this week. The principal banner read: "American ambassador, report this protest; give IFC immediate apology and compensation!" Another read: "Do US-Iraqi security forces promote civil rights or Big Brother thuggery? Abdelhussein found out!"

Media revealed this week that at a high-level meeting in Riyadh in January, Saudi officials confronted then-US Iraq envoy Zalmay Khalilzad with incriminating documents on Iraq's prime minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki. One purported to be an early alert from al-Maliki to radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, warning him to lie low during a US troop surge. Another document purported to offer proof that Maliki was an Iranian agent. Khalilzad immediately protested to King Abdullah, contending that the documents were forged. Earlier this month, in an oblique reference to Saudi Arabia, Khalilzad charged in a New York Times op-ed: "Several of Iraq's neighbors—not only Syria and Iran but also some friends of the United States —are pursuing destabilizing policies." (NYT, July 27; The Scotsman, July 29) It seems the Saudis are following through on their longtime threats to arm the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Nonetheless, on July 28, the Times reported that the US is preparing a major arms deal with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states worth $20 billion over the next decade, including missile guidance systems, fighter jets and warships. (NYT, BBC, July 28)