Former US ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke has an essay in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, "Defying Orders, Saving Lives: Heroic Diplomats of the Holocaust," which draws an unsettlingly valid analogy to contemporary Iraq. Holbrooke outlines the cases of Sweden's Raoul Wallenberg, Portugal's Aristedes de Sousa Mendes and the USA's Hiram Bingham IV, who all risked their careers and even their lives to help Jews escape Axis Europe in defiance of their own governments' policies. Holbrooke notes that asylum policies are similarly restrictive today, even as Iraq approaches a genocidal situation—and asks where such heroes as Wallenberg are in the face of Iraq's refugee crisis:

One Abdur Raziq contributes June 9 a brief account to the open-posting website Ground Report ("Where You Make the News") of the Taliban crackdown on elements of traditional Pashtun culture which are considered "un-Islamic" in Pakistan's Tribal Areas—Lakhtai dancing boys and "eunuchs." These latter are not necessarily literally castrated, but what we call "trans-gendered" in the West. However, an entry in the Things Asian website informs us that a real eunuch caste known as the hijras survives in India. We have noted before Taliban intolerance of the region's indigenous gay culture and music.

New details are emerging surrounding the 208 arrests at the June 10 Puerto Rican Day Parade in Manhattan. According to the New York Times June 13, the police still claim that people were arrested for "specific illegal behavior," like blocking traffic, and not because they were wearing colors of the Latin Kings gang. However, the Times found:

Two minarets at Shia Islam's revered Golden Mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra were blown up June 13. The government has imposed a total curfew on the city until further notice. Shi'ite officials blamed al-Qaeda for the attack, but Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, has called for restraint. "He condemns the attack and urges calm and not to do acts of reprisal against Sunnis," Sistani's spokesman, Hamed Khafaf, told Reuters.

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerillas have declared a unilateral cease-fire, while still maintaining the right to "self-defense" against Turkish forces. "We are renewing our declaration to halt attacks against the Turkish army," said PKK official Abdul Rahman Chaderchi, speaking in northern Iraq, AP reported. "We want peace and we are ready for negotiations. But if Turkey decides to attack our bases inside Turkey or inside Iraqi Kurdistan, then this unilateral cease-fire will be meaningless. If we are attacked, we will fight back and we have the ability to confront any Turkish aggression." (IraqSlogger, June 12)

Leave it to Bollywood. Someone actually went and did it. At least "Springtime for Hitler" was satire. This wasn't, I don't think. Yesterday I was eating lunch at one of the fast-food curry joints in Little India (Lexington Ave. in the 20s) and the song-and-dance romantic extravaganza on the video screen was a (presumably unintentionally) surreal offering called Lucky, No Time for Love, that got more disturbingly bizarre the longer I watched. It is actually set in present-day/near-future Russia, but the visual references are all straight outta the Final Solution. Near as I could tell (the dialogue is in Hindi without subtitles, tho I'm not sure that even makes much difference) it concerns a Hot Young Thing named Lucky (Sneha Ullal) and her older Prince Charming (Salman Khan), the offspring of Indian diplomats caught up in the chaos when a fascist uprising breaks out, and their struggle to escape the country as Russia plunges into civil war. They find the time to repeatedly break into spontaneous song and dance while trudging endlessly through war-ravaged snowclad landscapes and fleeing and fighting off jack-booted Russo-Nazi thugs. (Prince Charming inexplicably has all the martial and acrobatic skills of a James Bond, tho I don't think we are ever told he is a secret agent.) This trailer emphasizes the goo-goo-eyes mushy scenes and dance routines, giving only fleeting glimpses of the cheerfully grim sets that dominate the second half of the film—including concentration camps and terrified peasants being forcibly transfered to God-knows-where in cattle cars. In fact, the big climax is Lucky's rescue by Prince Charming from a sealed box-car full of deportees with long white beards, babushkas and teary-eyed children. (Hey, as long as Hot Young Thing gets away, who cares about the rest?)

In what is being hailed as a landmark decision, a 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled 2-1 that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn't strip Ali al-Marri, a legal US resident, of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court, and that the government must allow him to be released from military detention.

Despite recent denials by the Ethiopian regime, Der Spiegel corroborates June 11 that "terror suspects have been questioned by US officials in Ethiopia after being transferred from Somalia and Kenya. The captives included Europeans who were detained, interrogated and then released without charge." Up to 100 suspects are thought to have been transferred to Ethiopia in the process known as "extraordinary rendition." Der Spiegel spoke with Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was released from Ethiopian detainment three weeks ago. He told Der Spiegel that he had travelled to Mogadishu in December with his girlfriend Safia Benaouda, 17, also a Swedish citizen. He said that after Ethiopian forces invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by local militia, handed over to US troops and sent to Addis Ababa.