Well, Judith Miller is out of jail, has testified before the grand jury, and wrote up a story on her own testimony for the New York Times. She even expresses some contrition, admitting to error, if not wilful collaboration with a White House disinformation campaign. For those who care to wade through the barrage of bureaucratese obfuscation unleashed by this twisted affair, it does shed light on how the White House played the media in the prelude to the Iraq campaign, twisted the truth, and ultimately came to regard the Central fucking Intelligence Agency as a bunch of pussy-footing liberals for actually doing their job and providing accurate, um, intelligence. Via TruthOut:

A sudden surge in violence in the Mexican Pacific resort of Acapulco is baffling authorities. In the last year, nine police officers have been killed in Acapulco, a city of 700,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. Since January alone, there have been 20 execution-style killings, among them the municipal police chief, two Mexican tourists, a prominent disco owner and an investigator for the state attorney general's office.

"Plan Colombia," Bogotá's US— backed program to reduce drug production in that Andean nation, "isn't working," charges Luis Correa, leader of Venezuela's National Commission Against Illicit Drug Use (Conacuid). Luis Correa said there had been "a huge increase" in illegal crop production in areas of Colombia near the Venezuelan border. "In July, we were able to prove it through satellite photos provided by the OAS, which even revealed new landing strips," the Conacuid chief told reporters. "In my opinion, this shows that Plan Colombia isn't working, because — according to what they said — the purpose was to eliminate the crops and reduce drug production."

The US Army is probing claims that its troops in Afghanistan burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters they had killed and used the smoldering corpses to taunt insurgents. An Australian TV show broadcast images Oct. 19 of US soldiers incinerating the corpses outside Gonbaz in southern Afghanistan (Faryab provicne) with the bodies facing west toward Mecca, the direction of Muslim daily prayers—in an apparent deliberate denigration of Islamic belief. Islam prohibits cremation and considers desecration of bodies to be blasphemous.

In what has become a yearly ritual, activists from the American Indian Movement (AIM) staged angry protests at the Columbus Day march in Denver, while the city's Italian-Americans intransigently refused to "get it." This from an AP account online at Indian Country Today:

As drums and chants echoed in the background, demonstrators briefly staged a mock death scene in the street Oct. 8 before a Columbus Day parade passed by.

From Chile's English-language Santiago Times, Oct. 14:

Second-To-Last Yagana Woman Dies Of A Heart Attack
The second-to-last member of Chile's pre-colonial Yagán tribe, 84-year-old Emelinda Acuña, died on Wednesday, taking with her the traditions, stories, and secrets of a little-known indigenous population. The only remaining pureblooded member of the Yagán tribe is now Acuña's sister-in-law, Cristina Calderón.

A picture of the Noble Drew Ali, North Carolina-born Prophet of the Moorish Science Temple of America, adorns a page on the progressive Muslim Wake Up! website featuring a story by Laury Silvers, who has taken note of our contention that Moorish Science, a little-known but highly influential precursor to the Black Muslim movement, represents an indigenous American form of Islam (see Moorish Science in the news, Sept. 21). Silvers calls for a more inclusive view of this tradition on the part of "mainstream" or orthodox Islam, while acknowledging stark doctrinal divisions.

Nourished by the Waters of Indigenous Islam

By Laury Slivers

Simply said, American Indigenous Islam in all its forms should be properly honored and respected by the Muslim community as part of the history and life of Islam globally. I do not mean simply Indigenous American Islam in the sense of the Islam of the slaves. I mean all of Indigenous American Islam, even the forms that are difficult for the “mainstream

Ten years after Niger's government and insurgents signed an accord to end the Tuareg rebellion, authorities have launched an economic assistance program for more than 3,000 ex-combatants in the country's north—the final phase as laid out in the peace pact. Under the project, 3,160 former combatants will be granted around US $300 each in the form of micro-loans for projects in animal husbandry, local crafts and vegetable gardening, said Michele Falavigna, Niger representative of the UN Development Programme (UNDP).