Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev defends his use of force to put down unrest in the country's prisons, which cost four lives on Nov. 1. "Police did the right thing when they demanded that suspects and other inmates leave the prison for interrogations," said Bakiev. "[The inmates] refused to come out. [Law-enforcement officers] approached them to meet and they [the convicts] started shooting. Should they have been presented bagels in response?" (BBC, Nov. 2)

Well, the White House already appears to be at war with the CIA. Is the Energy Department next? The latest doom-and-gloom predictions on global climate change are coming from Livermore Labs, Ed Teller's old stomping grounds... Not exactly Greenpeace... From Science-a-Go-Go:

Two new studies released this week paint a gloomy picture of a planet changed beyond recognition by the impact of climate change. The first study, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, looked at the likely outcomes if fossil fuels continue to be used as they are now until depleted. Using a coupled climate and carbon cycle model to look at global climate and carbon cycle changes, the researchers found that the earth would warm by an average of 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2300. The big increase in temperatures would cause the disappearance of the polar ice caps and sea levels would rise by around 7 meters (22 feet).

Ethiopian police have killed at least 40 since protests erupted Nov. 1 over disputed parliamentary elections in Addis Ababa, the capital. Violence continues as protests are now spreading to other cities, including Dessie, Gondar, Bahar Dar, Arba Minch, Awassa, Dire Dawa—all opposition strongholds. The vote gave Prime Minister Zenawi Meles' Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front control of nearly two-thirds of parliament. Opposition parties say the election and vote count were marred by fraud, intimidation and violence, and they accused the ruling party of rigging the elections. (AP, Nov. 4)

Simultaneously, as if by chance, renewed border tensions with Eritrea. Also note Eritrea's claim (mirroring that of Niger a few weeks back) that the UN is using claims of a "humanitarian crisis" in the country as a cover to undermine its sovereignty. From IRIN Nov. 3, via AllAfrica.com:

As unrest in the Muslim immigrant suburbs of Paris enters its ninth night, violence appears to be spreading to other towns such as Dijon, Marseille and Normandy, and into the capital itself. Trouble has now been reported from almost 90 towns around the capital, more than twice as many as the previous night, according to police. France's notoriously hardline Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy is now seeing conspiracies. "What we have been witnessing ... has nothing spontaneous about it. It was perfectly organized. We are trying to find out by who and how," he said. (The Hindu, Nov. 5)

"The speed with which Algeria has gone from symbol of revolutionary socialism to Islamic battleground has confounded most observers," states the blurb for The Call From Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam by Robert Malley (UC, 1996). Remember when Black Panthers like Eldridge Cleaver fled there, and the Algerian revolution's theorist and chronicler Frantz Fanon—who rejected religion as the opiate of the oppressed—was a global icon of anti-colonial struggle? A generation later, the country has embraced a degree of mandatory piety that would make Jerry Falwell blush—largely in response to the jihadi threat. From BBC, Nov. 1:

Noam Chomsky appears to be joining his one-time co-author Edward Herman in loaning legitimacy to denial of (or outright cheerleading for) the genocide in the former Yugoslavia. David Adler notes on his Lerterland blog an Oct. 31 interview with The Chom in the UK Guardian, entitled, with refreshing skepticism, "The Greatest Intellectual?" Writes Adler, in comments bracketing some incriminating, alarmingly stupid quotes from the interview:

Once again, do we want to take bets on whether this will be on the front page of tommorrow's New York Times? Another 20 Shi'ites killed by the glorious Iraqi "resistance," this time in Basra. From the Nov. 1 edition of the UK Independent:

At least 20 people were killed yesterday in a car bomb blast aimed at shoppers in Basra in one of the worst attacks in British-controlled southern Iraq since the war. In Baghdad seven American soldiers were killed, making October the bloodiest month for the US since January.

We always knew the Pentagon had no sense of humor, but this really proves it. This case, reported in Newsday Oct. 31, is truly Orwellian on multiple levels: it reads like a dark political satire, and it concerns two Afghan intellectuals who appear to have been detained at Guantanamo for three years precisely for writing dark political satire!

The young scholars Badr Zaman Badr (who holds a master's degree in English literature) and his brother Abdurrahim Muslim Dost fled into exile in Pakistan with the Soviet occupation of their country in 1980s and joined a Mujahedeen faction, the Jamiat-i-Dawatul—although they just worked as propagandists, and did not return to Afghanistan to fight. Dost became editor of the faction's magazine. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the brothers split with Jamiat, partly over its embrace of the extremist Wahhabi sect. Dost wrote lampoons against the group's leader, a cleric named Sami Ullah, portraying him as a corrupt pawn of Pakistan's secret police, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). In November 2001, as the US was attacking Afghanistan, party leaders warned the brothers they would be imprisoned if they didn't stop their criticisms. Sure enough, ten days later they were arrested by the ISI and dragged off to grimy prison cells. Although it was never clear what charge they were being held on, one midnight in February 2002 they were taken to Peshawar airport and turned over to the US military.