In another exercise in understatement, this terrifying July 27 Washington Post piece by Walter Pincus is entitled "Bush order on freezing assets is unusually broad." Do those "threatening the peace or stability of Iraq" include striking oil workers and other civil anti-occupation forces?

WASHINGTON -- Be careful what you say and whom you help -- especially when it comes to the Iraq war and the Iraqi government.

Well well, look who's running for the Diet. An almost perfect analogy to the vile Alessandra Mussolini in Italy. She was (officially) "shunned" by the "post-Fascist" National Alliance—even as doing so only helped legitimize and mainstream the party whose roots go straight back Il Duce. Japan's ruling LDP does not have roots in the fascist era, but it is leading a propaganda drive to rehabilitate Japan's World War II role—and a political drive to remilitarize the country. This revealing July 26 USA Today report is rather understatedly entitled "Nationalism gains strength in Japan":

We love how the headlines always say "ex-cop." He was still a cop when he killed Julio Ortega-Moncada. He was sacked because of the incident. From AP, July 25:

Ex-cop gets prison for DWI fatality
NEW YORK - A former police officer will go to prison for killing a pedestrian while speeding drunk in the wrong direction in a closed lane of the Queensboro Bridge.

A new report to the UN Security Council finds that Eritrea has secretly supplied "huge quantities of arms" to a Somali insurgent group with supposed links to al-Qaeda, in violation of an international embargo. "Somalia is awash with arms," the Monitoring Group on Somalia said in its report handed in to the Security Council last week and leaked to the AP. It accuses Eritrea of flying shipments of surface-to-air missiles, explosives and other arms to the Islamic insurgent group known as the Shabab. Eritrean Information Minister Ali Abdu called the accusations a "big lie," adding: "These allegations are not new and we know where they are coming from. The UN is acting as a megaphone of the United States." But the report also has criticisms of Ethiopia. It accuses Ethiopian troops of using white phosphorous bombs against insurgents in a April 13 battle that left 15 fighters and 35 civilians dead—one of many such abuses. "Whatever little confidence there was in the ability of the transitional Somali government to rule is fast eroding," the report states. "Antagonism against Ethiopia is at a crescendo, clearly not being helped by the Ethiopian army's heavy-handed response to insurgent attacks involving the use of disproportionate force." (AP, AlJazeera, July 26)

Eleven adherents of the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) arrested in last week's protests in the southern Mexican city have been ordered imprisoned on charges of arson, theft and property damage. Another 18 were ordered released for lack of evidence. (Proceso, July 25) APPO has announced new road blockades throughout the state as a part of its forced boycott of the Guelaguetza folk festival, a major tourist attraction. (El Sol de San Luis, July 26)

More than a month after his disappearance following a police attack on campesino protesters at Ixhuatlán de Madero, in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz, Nahua indigenous leader Gabino Flores Cruz has released a video statement saying he has not been detained but has gone into hiding for "reasons of security." Flores Cruz is a director of "Los Dorados de Villa," the organization that led the occupation of contested lands at Ixhuatlán. (Proceso, July 25) Meanwhile, ten campesinos who had been arrested in the police attack were released July 4 following a mobilization on their behalf by the "Other Campaign" activist network. "Los Dorados de Villa" say the Nahuas had been forced from the disputed lands by the hired gunmen of land baron Faisal Nader, despite having a legal title dating to 1938. (La Jornada, July 5)

Representatives of peasant organizations from across the globe have gathered in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas for the "Encuentro with the Peoples of the World," hosted by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). Participating groups include Brazil's Movement of the Landless, Thailand's Assembly of the Poor and the international NGO Via Campesina. Meetings are being held in the Zapatista "autonomous municipalities" of Oventic, Morelia and La Garrucha, where Comandanta Delia articulated the conditions that led the Zapatistas to take up arms in 1994: "Our grandparents lived in slavery, without salaries. We asked for land, but we were always denied by the evil government. Persecutions, imprisonments, houses burned. There has never been good justice." (La Jornada, July 25)

A group of ex-guerillas from the now-dissolved Clandestine Revolutionary Worker's Party-Union of the People (PROCUP), re-organized as the above-ground Democratic Popular Left (IDP), led by David Cabañas Barrientos and Italo Ricardo Díaz, charged in a statement that there are "clear indications" that the government of Felipe Calderón seeks to "open a new chapter in the dirty war" that gripped Mexico in the '70s, when hundreds of dissidents were "disappeared." The statement said the "detention-disappearance" of two supposed members of the EPR guerilla organization is a "signal that a hunting season has opened against activists and militants of legal and legitimate organizations with the pretext that they are front organizations."