A reference in a recent post on ethnic politics in eastern Anatolia to "the two Kurdish dialects of zaza and kurmanci" prompted the following letter from a reader, which we produce verbatim:

Zaza(Sassaniden)'s are not Kurds and not Turks

We fight for our liberty !
We fight against Turkish and Kurdish Fascism !
We fight against Turkish and Kurdish SS !

thes artickle is not correckt: http://classic.countervortex.org/node/352

Reports Sarah Ferguson in the Village Voice Sept. 25:

Citing a new report concluding that global warming threatens New Mexico's water supply, state and local officials are joining with environmentalists in demanding immediate steps to address the issue. The report, Less Snow, Less Water, was released Friday by the New Mexico Public Interest Research Group. The study concludes that due to rising global temperatures, precipitation that used to fall as snow is increasingly falling as rain in the West. Government snowpack-measurement records going back to 1961 indicate that snowpack levels have been below average for 11 of the past 16 years in the Colorado River Basin and for 10 of the past 16 years in the Rio Grande Basin, the study says.

Violence—generally held to be drug-related—is spreading across Mexico at an alarming pace. The Pacific resort of Acapulco, in the conflicted southern state of Guerrero, has seen some 30 killings this year—many in the disco and restaurant zone frequented by tourists. The incidents have included grenade attacks on police stations and the killing of several officers, although no tourists have been injured. More than 100 federal police agents have been stationed in the city to combat crime and disrupt the drug gangs' turf wars. (Hartford Courant, Sept. 25)

Activists from Mexico's east-central indigenous region of La Huasteca held a press conference in the national capital Sept. 21 to protest a growing presence of soldiers and paramilitaries in the the zone, citing a wave of assassinations of peasant leaders. Directors of the Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights (LIMEDH) and the Human Rights Committee of Las Huastecas and Sierra Oriental (CODHHSO) said the militarization of the region coinicded with growing "struggles by the indigenous to recover lands stolen by the landlords."

Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas announced Sept. 16 he will leave the group's jungle strongholds and embark on a six-month tour of all of Mexico, promising to "shake this country up from below—pick it up and turn it on its head."

With the approval of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the ultra-fundamentalist Jewish “Ateret Cohanim" organization “is at the moment conducting a dig" at a depth of 12 meters beneath a building just 80 meters away from the walls of Islam’s third holiest site, the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, and that the excavations “have already advanced 20 meters eastward," Israeli daily Haartez reported Sept. 23.

The Fall edition of Yes! magazine carries a proposal by Erik Leaver of Foreign Policy in Focus, entitled "Operation Homcoming: How to End the Iraq War." The progressive end of the wonk spectrum is weighing in—but is anybody missing?

U.S. public opinion is turning against continued occupation of Iraq. But how might we extract ourselves?

"There is an old military doctrine called the First Rule of Holes:
If you find yourself stuck in one, stop digging.