At least 16 were killed and 67 injured in two attacks in the eastern Ethiopia towns of Jijiga and Degah Abur May 28. Up to 11 were killed when a hand grenade was thrown as hundreds of people gathered at a stadium in Jijiga. Regional president Abdullahi Hassan was wounded as he spoke at a ceremony to mark the 1991 overthrow of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. The Ethiopian government blamed the attack on the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). Adurahmin Mohammed Mahdi, the ONLF's spokesman in London, denied the claim. "Our policy is not to attack civilian targets or Jijiga," he told Reuters. "The ONLF attacks military targets only." (AlJazeera, May 28)

At least 13 people were killed and more than 32 wounded in Shiberghan, capital of Afghanistan's northern Jowzjan province, when police opened fire to break up a protest against governor Juma Khan Hamdard on May 28. Provincial spokesmen said protesters hurled stones and police fired to stop them from raiding government offices. Provincial authorities also said the casualties were caused by the protesters, who were armed supporters of supporters of northern warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum. (AlJazeera, May 28)

Cindy Sheehan writes in her public diary on Daily Kos, May 28:

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called "Face" of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such "liberal blogs" as the Democratic Underground. Being called an "attention whore" and being told "good riddance" are some of the more milder rebukes.

From AP, May 28:

A suicide car bomber struck a busy Baghdad commercial district Monday, killing at least 21 people, setting vehicles on fire and damaging a nearby Sunni shrine, police and hospital officials said.

From Reporters Without Borders via AllAfrica, May 25:

Reporters Without Borders has called for the immediate release of Abdel Fettah Ould Ebeidna, managing editor of the daily newspaper "Al-Aqsa", who was sent to prison in Nouakchott on 24 May 2007 because of a libel complaint against him by a businessman.

US and Iranian diplomats met in Baghdad for their first formal direct talks in more than a quarter of a century May 28, to discuss the security situation in Iraq. Washington's ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker called the proceedings "businesslike." (LAT, May 28) Meanwhile in Iran, authorities summoned the Swiss Ambassador Philippe Welti to complain that a US espionage network organizing sabotage and subversion campaigns has been discovered.

Egyptian police arrested three Muslim Brotherhood candidates to the upper house of parliament as they campaigned in the Nile Delta province of Dakahlia May 27, bringing to 63 the number of Brotherhood members detained in the province since Egypt's largest opposition movement said it would run in the June 11 elections. At least one of the candidates, Khaled el-Deeb, was charged with belonging to a banned group, illegally using religious slogans for his election campaign and campaigning outside an alotted time period. (Al-Bawaba, May 28)

When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI two years ago, we pointed out that he had been the Vatican's pointman on dialogue with the "Traditionalist" schism that rejects the Vatican II reforms. Now it seems he may be ready to give the Traditionalists what they want—healing the breach with the schism, but making Catholicism more obscurantist and less appealing at a time when it is under assault from Islam and Protestantism (not, alas, from secularism and rationalism, as His Holiness seems to think). From AP, May 28: