From Palestine Monitor, Nov. 7:

Thursday, November 3, was the first day of the post-Ramadan Eid al-Fitr holidays, the feast of fast-breaking, a three-day festival of family visits, new clothes, gifts, and a break from work and school. On that day Ahmed al-Khatib, 12 years old, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.

He was wearing his new holidays clothes and, according to some witnesses, playing with a plastic toy gun he had received as a holiday gift. Israeli soldiers who were in the area saw the boy from about 130 meters away and shot him twice, once in the torso and once in the head.

Arutz Sheva, arch-reactionary organ of the Israeli settler movement, is clearly overjoyed by this Nov. 13 tidbit:

(IsraelNN.com) New York Senator and former US First Lady Hillary Clinton voiced her support for the Partition Wall Sunday.

This may be bad news for Detroit, but given fast-growing evidence of global climate destabilization, it's damn good news for the rest of us. From the New York Times Nov. 2:

DETROIT, Nov. 1 - October, which is the start of the new model year, used to be a month for the auto industry to celebrate. This year, it was a month for Detroit to forget.

After threatening another popular uprising if stalled presidential elections were not allowed to proceed, Bolivian indigenous and populist leader Evo Morales hailed a deal to allow the race to proceed in December. The crisis, which had once again paralyzed Bolivia's government, seems averted for the moment, as the House of Deputies resumed work Nov. 8. Legislators are expected to ratify a date of Dec. 18 for the hotly-contested elections. (Prensa Latina, Nov. 8)

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: