On March 17, Trokavec village in the Czech Republic voted its opposition to a US radar base slated to be built in a nearby military zone as part of Washington's proposed "missile shield." Seventy-two out of 90 eligible voters in the village of 100 participated. All but one authorized the village council to take all legal steps possible to stop the radar base from being built. Trokavec residents say they fear the radar would emit harmful radiation, cause real-estate prices to fall and natives to flee the area. While the vote is not binding for anyone but the village council, the results reflect public opposition to the planned radar base, which the latest nationwide poll put at 70%. On March 14, the Czech parliament rejected by one vote a bill calling for a national plebiscite on the radar base. Green and Communist proponents of the referendum pledge to try again. (DPA, March 17; Eux TV, March 14)

More than 500 Muslim villagers gathered at southern Thailand's Sabaiyoi town March 18 to demand justice after a midnight attack on an Islamic school left two young students dead and eight wounded. Students were asleep at the boarding school when assailants threw grenades and strafed the building with automatic rifle fire. Unidentified assailants also threw a grenade into a local mosque, injuring 11, on March 15, the same day suspected Islamist militants killed eight Buddhist civilians in an attack on a van. Local authorities blamed the schoool-house attack on Islamist militants, but this is disputed by local residents.

Three suicide bombers exploded trucks loaded with explosives and tanks of chlorine gas in Iraq's Anbar province March 16, killing at least two Iraqi police and sickening more than 350 people. In the first attack, a pick-up truck carrying chlorine blew up near a checkpoint northeast of Ramadi, the provincial capital, wounding a US soldier and an Iraqi civilian. In the second, a dump truck filled with chlorine exploded outside the town of Amiriya, south of Fallujah, killing two police officers. Local police and hospital officials said that as many as eight people were killed in the attacks. The perpetrators were said to be Sunni militants, even though the chlorine attacks came in an overwhelmingly Sunni region. The New York Times writes March 18: "Some local officials blamed militants linked to the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for the attacks Friday and said they were part of a campaign to intimidate moderate tribes that have declared their opposition to such fundamentalist insurgent groups." Could be. But the article also states that on March 17 a bomb partly destroyed a Sunni mosque in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood. Was this also the work of Sunni extremists—or of Shi'ite militants? The Times does not venture to speculate...

It is endless, and it comes (tellingly) from the both the right and the left. The latest entry is from Columbia University scholar Mahmood Mamdani, writing in the March 8 London Review of Books—who probably fancies himself on the left. But like his counterparts on the right and even in the Bush administration, he has a lot invested in denying that there is genocide in Darfur. What's particularly maddening is that Mamdani's piece, "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency," could be a good starting point for a sorely needed discussion—could, that is, if it were not guilty of exactly what he accuses his opponents of...

BBC Monitoring reports on a March 14 story on the website of the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, "Libya hints at [possibility of] expelling the Palestinians under the pretext of combating settlement in the diaspora":

The Palestinians have expressed surprise at Libya's remarks of the possibility of expelling thousands of Palestinian residents under the pretext of combating settlement, and called on Col [Mu'ammar] al-Qadhafi to refrain from that [measure].

Talk about hideous historical ironies. Ammar Alwan writes for Reuters, March 16:

TANAF, Iraq - Hameda Um Firas has lived most of her 70-odd years as a refugee -- now she is stranded in a tent again at Iraq's border with Syria where hundreds of Palestinians have fled to escape violence in Baghdad.

From AP, March 16:

NORTHAMPTON - Maha Ghosananda, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated monk who rebuilt Buddhism in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, has died.

The Bush administration has announced a new $750 million aid package for development and security in Pakistan's northwest, where the tribal areas are thought to be a staging ground for Islamist militant attacks both into Afghanistan and increasingly within Pakistan. Islamabad will be pleased by the failure of a measure pushed by US senators Joe Biden and John Kerry, which would have made demonstrated progress on democratic reform and gains against the Islamists a criteria for future military aid. A similar measure is still pending in the House. (Madrid11.net, Dawn, March 16)