Kudos to Newsday, which (unlike the NY Times thus far) today notes the approaching one-year anniversary of Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to judicial review. It was hailed as a victory by civil libertarians at the time, yet detainees have had no access to the courts since then. Note that Newsday rightly uses the word "courts" to refer to the civilian judiciary and not the Pentagon's special "tribunals" for the detainees, which are laden with extraordinarily onerous restrictions, and are arguably a legal fiction. Here are some excerpts from Newsday's coverage:

Police in Zimbabwe fought running battles June 14 with residents of Makhokhoba, one of the oldest townships of the country's second city, Bulawayo as they demolished illegal structures. One woman stripped naked in protest after police destroyed her shack (a traditional African gesture of shaming men). A police spokesman said that more than 20,000 structures had been destroyed and 30,000 arrested in the three-week nationwide operation.

Western governments are flouting their own rules and contributing to grave human rights abuses by selling arms and weapons systems to Nepal, Amnesty International said in a statement today. The rights group accused the UK, US and India of supplying thousands of assault rifles to the Himalayan kingdom and said Belgium was selling machine guns and South Africa military communications equipment. "With the conflict poised to escalate, any further military assistance would be highly irresponsible," Amnesty said, appealing for a ban on arms sales to the kingdom.

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is something of a mixed bag: he makes frequent noises like a Terror War hardliner and quasi-Ashcroftian freedom-hater, but (even if, perhaps, for some bad Arabophobe reasons) he was among the first to raise the alarm on Darfur, and stayed on top of the issue even as the Powers That Be sought to ignore it. Today he gets a big thumbs-up from us for bringing this egregious injustice in Pakistan to the world's attention:

Raped, Kidnapped and Silenced

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times
June 14, 2005

No wonder the Pakistan government can't catch Osama bin Laden. It is too busy harassing, detaining - and now kidnapping - a gang-rape victim for daring to protest and for planning a visit to the United States.

Mexican federal army troops have taken control of the border city of Nuevo Laredo, and detained 41 local police for questioning. The crackdown comes after local police opened fire on federal agents sent in to investigate the murder of the newly-appointed police chief. A surge of drug-related violence in the city has claimed 45 lives this year.

Mexican President Vicente Fox launched "the mother of all battles" on the drug trade, sending hundreds of armed police to the border cities in March to restore order. But concerns about lawlessness were reignited last week with the killing of Nuevo Laredo's police chief, Alejandro Dominguez, a day after he took office.

It seems the US and Russia, acting in concert to protect their mutual ally Islam Karimov, exerted pressure at a NATO meeting in Brussels to make sure language calling for an investigation into last month's bloody repression in Uzbekistan would be excized from the meeting's final document. Nice to see Washington and Moscow putting aside their differences, and this certainly indicates that Karimov has been playing his cards very well. Pentagon officials of course invoked the need for continued access to Uzbekistan's military bases. Interesting that the State Department dissented, indicating a possible split in the administration between sleazy pragmatists who see Karimov as "our son of a bitch" and hubristic visionaries who support "regime change" in favor of a less equivocal client who won't have to be shared with the Russians...

More explosions are reported in Iran this morning, this time in the southeastern city of Zahedan, near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. The three blasts took no lives, but injured two people and caused property damage. Authorities were unclear on a link to the June 12 blasts in Ahvaz and Tehran, noting the presence of drug-smuggling networks in the Zahedan area. (AP, June 14)

Well, at least this makes the NY Times, even if they buried it on page 14. Thanks to TruthOut for forwarding it:

Some Held at Guantánamo Are Minors, Lawyers Say
By Neil A. Lewis
The New York Times

Monday 13 June 2005

Washington - Lawyers representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say that there still may be as many as six prisoners who were captured before their 18th birthday and that the military has sought to conceal the precise number of juveniles at the prison camp.