Pretty bad times to be part of an ethnic or religious minority in Iran, it seems. From the New York Times, June 1:

Members of the Bahai religious minority in Iran said this week that the government had recently intensified a campaign of arrests, raids and propaganda that was aimed at eradicating their religion in Iran, the country of its birth.

From the Pakistan Tribune. June 2:

KABUL: U.S. troops fired into a crowd of hundreds of stone-throwing rioters, killing at least three Afghans, as their convoy left the scene of an accident that triggered Monday’s anti-American riots, Kabul’s chief of highway police said.

When Slobodan Milosevic died, he was in a prison cell at The Hague facing war crimes charges, and it made world headlines. The May 27 passing of Guatemala's equally genocidal dictator of the late '70s and early '80s, Romeo Lucas Garcia, was largely confined to the obituary pages and wire copy, and he died a free man, passing his final years in luxurious Venezuelan exile. Nothing could indicate more clearly how much cheaper life is for indigenous peoples such as Lucas Garcia's Maya Indian victims, and for those whose oppressors happen to be on the good side of US imperialism. Obits have generally noted his bloody 1980 attack on the Spanish embassy after it was occupied by Maya protesters. This is because Spanish judicial authorities would later seek his extradition over the affair. Forgotten is what the embassy occupiers were protesting--the reign of terror in the Guatemalan countryside that (carried on by Lucas Garcia's successor Rios Montt) would ultimately leave some 50,000 dead, a million displaced and hundreds of villages destroyed. The obits have generally not used the "G word," but the 1999 findings of the UN-backed Guatemala Historical Clarification Commission estimated 200,000 dead in the civil war that lasted from 1962 to 1996, squarely accusing the Guatemalan state of "genocide." (BBC, Feb. 25, 1999) The Lucas Garcia-Rios Montt period was the bloodiest of the war, and that in which the violence was most explicitly aimed at the Maya ethnicity. This typically abbreviated account from Reuters, May 29:

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)

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.