On Sept. 15 a state judge in Zihuatanejo in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero ordered the release of Felipe Arreaga Sanchez, a leader in the campesino environmental movement who had been held in prison since November 2004. Judge Ricardo Salinas Sandoval ruled that there was insufficient evidence for the state's charge that Arreaga was involved in the 1998 killing of Abel Bautista, son of timber boss Bernardino Bautista Valle. Arreaga left the prison in Zihuatanejo a half hour after the ruling. The state had five days to appeal the decision.

Activists from Mexico's east-central indigenous region of La Huasteca held a press conference in the national capital Sept. 21 to protest a growing presence of soldiers and paramilitaries in the the zone, citing a wave of assassinations of peasant leaders. Directors of the Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights (LIMEDH) and the Human Rights Committee of Las Huastecas and Sierra Oriental (CODHHSO) said the militarization of the region coinicded with growing "struggles by the indigenous to recover lands stolen by the landlords."

In a new two-part communique published in the newsweekly Proceso, southern Mexico's mysterious Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), both admits to errors and reproaches the rival Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). The communique, "A little more about the history of the EPR," charges that the group repeatedly sought to participate in the Zapatistas' national strategy meetings, but were always rejected and branded as "ultras" (extremists).

Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas announced Sept. 16 he will leave the group's jungle strongholds and embark on a six-month tour of all of Mexico, promising to "shake this country up from below—pick it up and turn it on its head."

With the approval of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the ultra-fundamentalist Jewish “Ateret Cohanim" organization “is at the moment conducting a dig" at a depth of 12 meters beneath a building just 80 meters away from the walls of Islam’s third holiest site, the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, and that the excavations “have already advanced 20 meters eastward," Israeli daily Haartez reported Sept. 23.

From the Somerville, MA, Divestment Project:

Dear Friends,

The Somerville Divestment Project collected 4,400 signatures (more than the 3966 required, which is 10% of registered voters in Somerville) on a petition (copied below and posted at http://www.divestmentproject.org/petition.shtml ) to place a non-binding Question on the November municipal ballot that would let people vote whether or not Somerville should divest from Israel and from corporations that supply military equipment to Israel.

The Fall edition of Yes! magazine carries a proposal by Erik Leaver of Foreign Policy in Focus, entitled "Operation Homcoming: How to End the Iraq War." The progressive end of the wonk spectrum is weighing in—but is anybody missing?

U.S. public opinion is turning against continued occupation of Iraq. But how might we extract ourselves?

"There is an old military doctrine called the First Rule of Holes:
If you find yourself stuck in one, stop digging.

From the front page of the Washington Post, via TruthOut:

New Reports of Abuse of Detainees Surface
Mistreatment Was Routine, Group Is Told

By Josh White

Saturday 24 September 2005

"Some days we would just get bored so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid," ... "This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did that for amusement."

Two soldiers and an officer with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division have told a human rights organization of systemic detainee abuse and human rights violations at U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, recounting beatings, forced physical exertion and psychological torture of prisoners, the group said.