From Newsday, Jan. 9:

[A] French engineer abducted Dec. 5 apparently was dumped on a Baghdad street by his fleeing captors and recovered by U.S. troops, who turned him turned over to the French Embassy on Sunday, according to Iraqi police and the French Foreign Ministry in Paris. Bernard Planche, 52, was kidnapped on his way to work at a water plant. Planche worked for a non-governmental organization called AACCESS and was found Saturday night near a checkpoint in the Abu Ghraib neighborhood. His captors had demanded the withdrawal from Iraq of French troops—even though the country has none in Iraq.

Zapatista leaders and family members held a small, private funeral for Comandante Ramona somewhere in the territory of the mountain hamlet of Oventic Jan. 7. The exact location was not revealed. (El Universal, Jan. 7) In a Jan. 9 communique, the Zapatista General Command issued a revised schedule for their national tour:

Talli Nauman writes for Mexico's El Universal, Jan. 7 via Chiapas95:

Representatives of the first peoples of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States have issued a joint communique' they hope will set the new year's agenda for protection of the environment they have shared since long before a national border separated them.

Negotiators for 26 Mexican indigenous communities and U.S. tribes who felt their concerns were sidelined in a 2005 binational declaration on border environment, released their own statement in response.

On Jan. 6, just as the Zapatista national tour (dubbed the "Other Campaign" in reference to the presidential campaigns now underway in Mexico) had reached the town of Tonala, in the Pacific coastal zone of Chiapas state, word arrived that Comandante Ramona, a highly respected member of the Zapatista Army's General Command, had finally succumbed to kidney cancer after a long struggle. Subcomandante Marcos announced from Tonala that the tour would be delayed by two days as the Zapatistas congregated in the highland hamlet of Oventic for Ramona's funeral. "Comandante Ramona snatched 10 years from death," Marcos said. "[T]he world lost one of those women who give birth to new worlds."

Chadian gunmen killed an African Union peacekeeper and wounded at least 10 others in an attack in the Darfur region near the Sudan-Chad border, Sudanese authorities said Jan. 7. It was not clear whether the attackers were from the Chadian army or were government-linked tribesmen, a Sudanese military official said. But Mahjoub Hussein, a spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), one of the rebel groups fighting in Darfur, said the attack was carried out by the Sudanese army. Officials from the African Union, which has more than 6,000 peacekeepers in Darfur, were not immediately available for comment, Reuters said. The attack came a day after Chad said Sudanese militiamen killed nine civilians in a cross-border raid. (Reuters, Jan. 7)

As if the controversy over the Basque country wasn't enough, now a Spanish general rattles the proverbial sabre over moves by Catalonia, Spain's most industrialized region, to seek greater autonomy from Madrid. A lovely irony: as the world waits for Balkan republics like Croatia to outgrow recent fascistic leanings in order to gain European Union entry, we have EU member Spain displaying its own atavistic fascist tendencies. From Reuters, Jan. 6:

From Reuters, Jan. 5:

New Orleans residents and supporters angrily confronted demolition workers in one of the city's hardest-hit neighborhoods on Thursday amid heated debate over the proposed razing of houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Officials said the demolition workers were merely using a backhoe to clear debris in the poverty-stricken Lower Ninth Ward, a process that has been ongoing to clear streets and sidewalks, but residents said the sight of the heavy equipment in action raised fears their homes will be bulldozed without their permission.

From CNN, Jan. 5:

Television evangelist Pat Robertson suggested Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine retribution for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which Robertson opposed.

"He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club."

"God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone,'" he said.