Mauritania's recently-ousted president Maaoya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya, now in exile in Niger, pledged to return to power, and appealed to the Mauritanian armed forces to launch a counter-coup on his behalf. He made the appeal in an interview on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV, broadcast throughout the region, including in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott. Taya said he would "return soon" and issued orders "in my capacity as president of the republic to the armed forces to restore the natural order and put an end to this crime."

A top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive wanted by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia for atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnia war was arrested in Argentina Aug. 8. Milan Lukic, who went underground after the war ended, is being held in a Buenos Aires jail. Lukic was indicted on several counts of crimes against humanity by the tribunal at The Hague in 2000. A Belgrade court also convicted him for the 1992 slaying of 16 Muslims and later sentenced him in absentia to 20 years in prison.

The bio-chemical warfare tests in New York City, initially scheduled for two days ago, went ahead today. New York's ABC News reports Aug. 8 that scientists in midtown Manhattan used perfluorocarbon, "a harmless gas," which was tracked with electronic monitors.

A lawsuit filed Aug. 8 against US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reveals the gratuitous cruelty inflicted on a foreign student held without charges for more than two years as an "enemy combatant" in a South Carolina naval brig, Human Rights Watch said in a press release.

An interesting development in the extremely contentious Valerie Plame affair: Deputy Attorney General James Comey, the only Justice Department official overseeing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak scandal, is leaving to take a job in the private sector. And his likely successor, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum, is—like the incumbent president whose administration may be responsible for the leak—a Yale Skull & Bonesman! Via TruthOut:

The annual Hiroshima Peace Declaration, delivered this year by the city's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, explicitly calls the nuclear powers to task for not living up to their committments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The historic 60th anniversary of the dawn of the nuclear age comes just two months after the UN conference on the treaty ended in dischord and paralysis. As we noted in 2002, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "Doomsday Clock" moved forward two minutes that year in response to rising world tensions and lagging support for disarmament efforts. The clock now stands at seven minutes to midnight—the same position as when it debuted in 1947.

TruthOut offers the following tidbit from Newsweek on a National Intelligence Council finding that, contrary to Bush's dearest dreams, Iran "is not in a prerevolutionary state." We wonder if this document was drawn up before several cities in western Iran exploded into rebellion. Yes, we shouldn't underestimate the populist appeal of the newly-elected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But nor should we underestimate the degree of anger and alienation among Iran's Kurds, Arabs and other minorities—as well as young people tired of the mullahs' repressive rule. If Bush is cultivating illusions that "regime change" in Iran would be an easy affair, his opponents must also avoid the self-deception that everything is hunky-dory in Iran.

Turkey's Kurdish separatist guerillas, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), officially ended a five-year truce in June, and eastern Turkey has since seen a series of bombings and skirmishes. Most recently, five Turkish soldiers died after a bomb blast ripped through a busy street in the town of Semdinli, Hakkari province, near the border with Iran and Iraq, on Aug. 5. (Turkish Weekly, Aug. 6)