From the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), June 13:

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the shooting of a Mexican journalist who had received death threats in connection with his investigation of the slaying of a U.S. journalist during violent street protests last fall in the southern city of Oaxaca.

The UN is expected to release a report shortly that will shed light on human rights violations of migrants in the United States. The report will be presented to the Human Rights Council by Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Migrants Jorge Bustamante, who conducted a controversial fact-finding mission in the US from April 30 to May 17. The visit was arranged to investigate concerns including arbitrary detention, separation of families, substandard conditions of detention, procedural violations in criminal and administrative law proceedings, racial and ethnic discrimination, arbitrary and collective expulsions and violations of children’s and women’s rights. [UN press release, May 17]

From ZNet, June 12—George Monbiot's latest in his series of exchanges with Alexander Cockburn over the question of global warming:

The Conspiracy Widens
So at last, and after only seven requests, we have some references. And, to no gasps of surprise, they reveal that the "papers" on which Alexander Cockburn bases his claim that carbon dioxide doesn't cause global warming have not been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In fact they have not been published at all.

Former US ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke has an essay in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, "Defying Orders, Saving Lives: Heroic Diplomats of the Holocaust," which draws an unsettlingly valid analogy to contemporary Iraq. Holbrooke outlines the cases of Sweden's Raoul Wallenberg, Portugal's Aristedes de Sousa Mendes and the USA's Hiram Bingham IV, who all risked their careers and even their lives to help Jews escape Axis Europe in defiance of their own governments' policies. Holbrooke notes that asylum policies are similarly restrictive today, even as Iraq approaches a genocidal situation—and asks where such heroes as Wallenberg are in the face of Iraq's refugee crisis:

One Abdur Raziq contributes June 9 a brief account to the open-posting website Ground Report ("Where You Make the News") of the Taliban crackdown on elements of traditional Pashtun culture which are considered "un-Islamic" in Pakistan's Tribal Areas—Lakhtai dancing boys and "eunuchs." These latter are not necessarily literally castrated, but what we call "trans-gendered" in the West. However, an entry in the Things Asian website informs us that a real eunuch caste known as the hijras survives in India. We have noted before Taliban intolerance of the region's indigenous gay culture and music.

New details are emerging surrounding the 208 arrests at the June 10 Puerto Rican Day Parade in Manhattan. According to the New York Times June 13, the police still claim that people were arrested for "specific illegal behavior," like blocking traffic, and not because they were wearing colors of the Latin Kings gang. However, the Times found:

Two minarets at Shia Islam's revered Golden Mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra were blown up June 13. The government has imposed a total curfew on the city until further notice. Shi'ite officials blamed al-Qaeda for the attack, but Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, has called for restraint. "He condemns the attack and urges calm and not to do acts of reprisal against Sunnis," Sistani's spokesman, Hamed Khafaf, told Reuters.

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerillas have declared a unilateral cease-fire, while still maintaining the right to "self-defense" against Turkish forces. "We are renewing our declaration to halt attacks against the Turkish army," said PKK official Abdul Rahman Chaderchi, speaking in northern Iraq, AP reported. "We want peace and we are ready for negotiations. But if Turkey decides to attack our bases inside Turkey or inside Iraqi Kurdistan, then this unilateral cease-fire will be meaningless. If we are attacked, we will fight back and we have the ability to confront any Turkish aggression." (IraqSlogger, June 12)