Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez charged Nov. 1 that Colombian intelligence agents were behind plots against his government, although he denied that they had undermined relations between the two neighbors.

The accusations come days after the firing of a top official in the Colombian secret police and the resignations of two others in a scandal over alleged links to right-wing paramilitary groups.

In an interview with Caracas-based Telesur TV, Chavez said his government has "many pieces of evidence" that "conspiracies are hatched against us in Colombian intelligence bodies." He did not directly link the resignations in Colombia to his claims, but suggested that the recent scandals illustrate his complaint.

A Jewish inmate at California's San Quentin prison says his life is in danger because he's being housed with white inmates, many of whom belong to anti-Semitic white supremacist gangs. The inmate is asking prison authorities to reclassify him from "white" to "other." Stephen Liebb, an Orthodox Jew and UCLA law school graduate, has been imprisoned since 1981 on a murder charge. Since 1995, he has been incarcerated at San Quentin, where he says he has often been forced to live and to pray in close quarters with neo-Nazis and white supremacists covered in swastikas and SS lightning-bolt tattoos.

Yeah, we think it's pretty obvious too. The violence in France now enters its 12th night. It has spread to every major city, as well as Brussels and Berlin. The scale of the violence has been widely reported. Nearly 1,000 have been arrested, scores of police and firefighters injured, over 5,000 cars destroyed, and now one person killed—an elderly man in Stains who was beaten by rioters Nov. 7. Churches and schools have been firebombed, and police fired on with shotguns. And with the government now imposing curfews, this could only escalate. (NYT, Nov. 8; London Times, Nov. 7) But world press commentary has been singularly shrill and lacking in insight. This Nov. 5 (Saturday) condensed compliation of reports from the Independent Media Centers actually provides a little context (and with refreshing conscision, at that):

Following an 11th straight night of violence in France, extremely unseemly gloating is starting to emerge from the right wing in both America and Israel. Given that the uprising provides the opportunity to indulge both Francophobia and Islamophobia simultaneously, how can they resist? The basic theme is that a "bloody" crackdown is mandated to save Western civilization, but those effeminate frogs will doubtless shirk from this sacred duty. First, from our side of the Atlantic, this gem from the vile RedState.org:

It is increasingly apparent that the Bush administration is riven by a divide between the State Department and CIA on one hand, which still cling to some semblance of traditional notions of state legitimacy, and Cheney and the Pentagon on the other, who have completely swallowed the neocon agenda of "American exceptionalism" and believe in a brave new statecraft that is above all rules. From the NY Times Nov. 2:

More than three years after President George W. Bush determined that the Geneva conventions did not apply to the fight against terrorism, his administration is embroiled in a sharp internal debate over whether to adopt language from those accords as a basic guide for the military's treatment of terrorist suspects, administration officials said.

The immediate dispute centers on whether a Pentagon directive that will establish minimum standards for the treatment of captured enemy combatants should be based on an article of the conventions that prohibits treatment that is "cruel," "humiliating" or "degrading."

What we gringos call the "Valerie Plame scandal" is in Italy being called "Nigergate," and Berlusconi's government is doing somersaults to dis-associate itself with the sleazy episode of forged documents that helped embroil the Italians in Bush's war. From the Italian news agency AGI Nov. 3:

"The Italian government and SISMI have denied any involvement in the creation of the dossier intended to show how Iraq was in possession of materials in order to build arms of mass destruction" claims Enzo Bianco, president of the Parliamentary Committee for the Control of the Secret Services, at the end of a hearing that lasted five hours involving the under secretary Gianni Letta and SISMI director Nicolo Pollari, dedicated to Nigergate. In substance, it emerged from the hearing that Sismi is completely unconnected to the dossier put together by Rocco Martin, an ex-service worker. During the course of the hearing Pollari recalled however that there was proof that pointed to the export of uranium from Niger at the end of the 'nineties. It was also Pollari who emphasised how, before the war, SISMI had said that Iraq would not be in a position to arm itself with nuclear weapons in the short to medium term. Going on to speak about the dossier, the SISMI head referred to having been in contact with other secret services but did not speak of the fake dossier.

Well, the suicide minivan atttack on the Shi'ite town of Musayyib Nov. 2 that killed 20 and injured 60 (AP, Nov. 3) failed to rate even a mention on the front page of the next day's NY Times. It was only referenced deep on page 12—albeit in a story that jumped from the first page on the Iraqi regime's overture to the purged junior officers of Saddam's army to return to posts in the reconstituted military. (NYT, Nov. 3) Particularly perverse is that these bloody atttacks are continuing through Eid ul-Fitr, the holy day marking the end of Ramadan. Remember how aghast all us lefties—including this blog—were that the US continued to bomb Afghanistan through Ramadan in 2001? Well, we have no regrets at our protests—but we are also appalled that the poorly-named "anti-war" movement has no outrage to spare for these atrocities, and that certain segments of the idiot left continue to act as if al-Qaeda were the Viet Cong. See our last post on Iraq.

By the way, a week later we're still trying to figure out what this was all about, and we note with trepidation that there have been no follow-up stories. WW4 Report's chief blogger became aware of the smell at around 7.30 PM Oct. 28 on Whitehall Street in the Financial District. It was still evident, although fainter, upon arriving by bicycle in the Lower East Side, some two miles uptown. The immediate association for this observer was butterscotch. Is it just us, or does anyone else think it might have been a clandestine test of a dispersal agent to simulate bio-chemical attack, such as have been held (overtly) in the city in recent weeks? Or, ominously, an actual attack with some kind of slow-acting bio-chem agent? From the NY Times, Oct. 29: