From Reuters, July 19:

UK court convicts Afghan warlord

LONDON: A British court has convicted Faryadai Sarwar Zardad, a former Afghan warlord, of torturing and terrorising civilians in his homeland for four years in what prosecutors said was the first case of its kind the world.

A private army loyal to Zardad (42), including a ‘‘human dog’’ that ate a victim’s testicles, brutalised Afghans in the Sarobi district East of Kabul which he commanded in the 1990s before he was ousted by the Taliban.

Saddam Hussein has finally been indicted by the Iraqi Special Tribunal, for a July 1982 massacre of some 150 Shi'ites at Dujail, a town north of Baghdad. But the ex-dictator's lawyer Giovanni di Stefano is demanding that the trial be relocated from Baghdad to another country. "Baghdad couldn't even prevent the recent kidnapping and killing of the Egyptian ambassador. There are also many Iraqis who want to see Saddam executed and many others who want to see him freed. That means the defense and prosecution would both be in danger there," di Stefano said. He also said the fact that Saddam has been held in custody for 548 days without being formally charged is a violation of international law. "The whole point of the Iraq war was replace Saddam and everything he stood for. But there is a total disregard of the law there now," he said. (UK Guardian, July 18)

The Project on Defense Alternatives sends the following press release:

New proposal outlines "near-total" troop withdrawal by September 2006;
Early exit from Iraq depends on political compromise

The United States could safely withdraw almost all its forces from Iraq within a year or so without further destabilizing the country, according to a 19 July proposal by the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA), a US-based think-tank. Progress toward that end requires a significant political compromise with the Sunni community and with Iraq's neighbors, however.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) runs a July 13 piece from the Florida Times-Union, "Muslim Leaders Condemning Terror to Deaf?" in which columnist Mark Woods speaks to CAIR's new chairman Parvez Ahmed and finds that such Muslim condemnations are in fact widespread—but never seem to be sufficient:

There are twin moral and intellectual traps most commentators are falling into vis-a-vis the London bombings. The first is the terrifyingly myopic and widespread consensus which is emerging that the attack "wasn't about Iraq." The increasingly predictable Christopher Hitchens writes in "The Anticipated Attack: Don't Blame Iraq for the Bombings" (Slate magazine):

The offices of the Oaxaca daily Noticias continues to be under siege by loyalists of the state's entrenched political machine—yet, amazingly, the paper continues to publish. This July 15 report from Dos Mundos, Kansas City's bilingual newspaper:

Journalists held hostage in Oaxaca

By Mischa Byruck

The employees have been unable to leave the building for twenty days. Reporters without Borders, an international non-profit organization that protects the rights of journalists worldwide, immediately condemned the occupation, stating that the “strike" is “the act of persons external to the paper and is just a means used by the local authority to silence it."

The Zapatista communities in Chiapas are beginning to return to normal, as the rebels' "red alert" has been lifted. The rebels say they are about to commence work on the new political initiative—still somewhat vaguely defined—which they agreed upon in the "consulta" they held in their communities during the alert. These two recent communiques state their purposes. First this one, on the new initiative, online in translation at the Chiapas95 archive:

And, really, we could have done without this one. From the New York Times, July 15 via TruthOut:

Chinese General Threatens Use of A-Bombs if US Intrudes
Beijing - China should use nuclear weapons against the United States if the American military intervenes in any conflict over Taiwan, a senior Chinese military official said Thursday.