Uruguayan police clashed with Argentine environmentalists who were on a boat to protest a Finnish paper mill they fear will spew pollution into a border river Oct. 27. Police boarded one of 20 boats in a protest flotilla on the Rio Uruguay in front of the paper mill owned by Finnish company Botnia which is due to open soon. "We were conducting a peaceful protest near the Uruguayan coast when three Uruguyan police boats surrounded us and wanted to detain us," protester Gustavo Zapata, told reporters. Zapata claimed that he was struck by one of the officers, who tried to detain him. Another activist said an officer and a protester fell in the river. Argentine environmentalists have maintained a human blockade on one border bridge for nearly a year in protest over the mill, which has been a source of tension between the two countries' governments. Argentina has asked the International Court of Justice to halt the project on the grounds that it violates a bilateral agreement on water quality. (AFP, Oct. 27)

WORLD WAR 4 REPORT editor Bill Weinberg led another modestly-attended presentation this evening about the Iraq Freedom Congress, this time at a meeting of the New York chapter of the Socialist Party USA. An announcement for the event, which featured a screening of the Japanese-produced video Go Forward Iraq Freedom Congress!, sparked this predictable exchange on the always-reliable NYC Indymedia site:

On Oct. 10, federal judge Charles R. Breyer of US District Court in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction barring the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from launching a planned crackdown on workers whose social security numbers don't match the Social Security Administration (SSA) database. At an earlier hearing on Oct. 1, a day after immigrant workers and their supporters demonstrated in front of San Francisco's federal building to protest the crackdown, Breyer had extended a temporary restraining order for 10 days. His Oct. 10 injunction blocks implementation of the plan until the court makes a final ruling in a lawsuit on its legality.

In a two-week sweep that ended Oct. 2, ICE officers arrested 1,327 immigrants in five southern California counties: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. A total of 530 people were arrested in their communities on immigration violations; ICE said 258 of them—less than half of the total--were "fugitives" who had failed to comply with deportation orders or who had reentered the US after being deported. ICE claimed that half of the 530 people arrested in the communities had criminal histories.

On Oct. 2, officials in Nassau County on New York's Long Island called for a federal investigation into an "anti-gang" sweep carried out by ICE Sept. 24-30 during which 186 immigrants were arrested in Nassau and neighboring Suffolk county. Nassau officials said the vast majority of those arrested were not gang members and that local police were misled and endangered by the operation. Nassau County police commissioner Lawrence W. Mulvey noted that many US citizens and legal residents were rousted from bed and required to produce papers during the raids, and that all but 6 of the 96 administrative warrants issued by the immigration enforcement agency in the alleged search for gang members had wrong or outdated addresses. Peter J. Smith, an ICE special agent in charge of the operation, called the Nassau county officials' allegations "without merit."

You know, every time we start to develop a soft spot for a politician, he wastes no time in disabusing us of our comfortable illusions. The most recent case in point is New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. After taking flack from the xenophobes for his plan to make driver's licenses available to undocumented immigrants, he shared a stage with Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff in Washington Oct. 27 to announce changes to the program, bringing it into compliance with the federal REAL ID Act—and creating a special class of licenses for out-of-status immigrants. From NY1, Oct. 29:

Amos Schocken, the publisher of Israel's liberal daily Ha'aretz newspaper, has defended his paper's applying the word "apartheid" to the Israeli- occupied West Bank, as well as the phrase "Jews-only roads." According to journalist and blogger Phillip Weiss, who attended an Oct. 23 conference called "Israel and its Jewish Defamers," by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), Schocken's statements came in a result to inquiries from CAMERA, which is led by Andrea Levin:

We have noted before that, contrary to contemporary assumptions, the first "terrorism" identified by that name was a state phenomenon: that of the Jacobins in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution—which, ironically given its radicalism, was the origin of the modern bourgeois state. On the New York Times op-ed page Oct. 28, François Furstenberg, professor of history at the University of Montreal, makes the unlikely but convincing case that Bush is the heir to Robespierre: