Five Muslim-Americans have filed suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security claiming racial profiling after they were detained and fingerprinted by border agents upon crossing back into the U.S. from a religious conference in Canada. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, names Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff among four defendants, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, representing the plaintiffs.

Court papers said that on their way back from the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference in Toronto in December 2004, the plaintiffs were detained for up to six hours with other Muslim-Americans and searched, photographed and fingerprinted.

Seven suspected Islamist militants have been ordered to stand trial in Italy, charged with belonging to a cell that planned to recruit suicide bombers for attacks in Iraq, judicial officials said. The police closed in on the seven in May 2004 after wiretaps suggested that one was preparing to leave for Iraq. Investigators said the trial would start in October. In France on Thursday, judicial officials said they were holding two people suspected as militant Islamists as part of an investigation into young French Muslims heading to Iraq to fight U.S.-led forces. (Reuters, April 30)

M. Cherif Bassiouni, a professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago who was the UN Human Rights Commission’s independent expert for Afghanistan, released a 21-page report last week, accusing U.S. military forces and civilian contractors of "engaging in arbitrary arrests and detnetions and committing abusive practices, including torture." He had been expecting a routine two-year renewal of his mission; instead he was told April 29 his job is over. He suspects U.S. lobbying as the cause. (NYT, April 30, via Guerilla News Network)

The "peak oil" theory, which remains the domain of the wacko fringe in the U.S., appears to be taken rather more seriously in the U.K., where several members of parliament have signed on to a petition circulated by an alternative-energy advocacy group calling on the govenrment to release research findings on the phenomenon and take steps to prepare for an impending crisis. Here is the press release announcing the petition drive:

It is looking more and more like Egypt is heading towards a reprise of the "dirty war" between Islamist insurgents and security forces that shook the country in the '90s. From Haaretz:

Last update - 22:34 30/04/2005
Two Israelis hurt as wave of terror strikes Cairo
By Yoav Stern and Arnon Regular, Haaretz Correspondents, and News Agencies

CAIRO - A bomber and two veiled women attacked tourists in separate incidents in Cairo on Saturday, targeting people near a popular museum and a bus in the south of the city and wounding seven, including two Israelis, official sources said. An Egyptian man, probably the bomber, and the two women were killed, they said.

Here's a textbook case in how the reigning anti-Semitic propaganda system works, with the paradoxical complicity of certain powerful (and deluded) Jews. This propaganda system is all the more effective for being nearly universally unrecognized.

It is a looming nightmare for Washington, but Mexico may be the next to join the fast-growing loose alliance of left-populist governments in Latin America, if Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the left-opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) becomes president next year, joining Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Lula da Silva of Brazil, Nestor Kirchner of Argentina and Tabare Vazquez of Uruguay. Not surprisingly, the power structure around President Vicente Fox's ruling right-wing National Action Party (PAN) has moved to block Lopez Obrador's candidacy through legalistic prestidigitation. But the PAN regime now appears to be backing down in the face of sustained and determined protest. From Reuters:

Taxi driver, pregnant passenger, pedestrian in critical condition

April 26, 2005, 12:31 PM EDT

NEW YORK -- A taxi driver whose out-of-control cab set off a chain reaction of crashes at Times Square remained in critical condition on Tuesday, as did his pregnant passenger and a pedestrian.

The driver, Syed M. Zia, 54, of Corona, Queens, was driving along 42nd Street near the Port Authority Bus Terminal at around 10:30 a.m. Monday when he collided at the intersection of Eighth Avenue with a station wagon, which then hit a pedestrian, authorities said.

The cab then went around the station wagon, striking the pedestrian a second time, then sped off, and hit a minibus, then a Chevrolet Impala, and finally hit a row of taxicabs, the last of which stopped near Ninth Avenue, police said.