From AP, Oct. 30:

MARSEILLE -- France's interior minister sent riot police to patrol the southern port city of Marseille yesterday after a group of marauding teenagers torched a bus, gravely burning a young woman.

Which is more hilarious? The US warning regional powers against carrying out a "proxy war" in Somalia while Washington itself is openly backing the warlord alliance that opposes the Islamic Courts Union? Or Eritrea's apparent backing of the Islamic Courts Union to oppose rival Ethiopia even as it uses the supposed jihadist threat to repress freedom at home? From Reuters, Oct. 30:

A bomb blast ripped through a crowd of laborers lining up for work offers in a square in Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City enclave Oct. 29, killing at least 25 people and wounding 60. It was the most recent of several attacks by presumed Sunni insurgentsin Sadr City. In July, more than 60 people were killed when a car bomb blasted through a market in the district. (Reuters, Oct. 31) But this attack came as US troops are sweeping Sadr City and throwing up barricades and checkpoints in a search for a kidnapped US soldier. (WP, Oct. 30 via Electronic Iraq) Sadr City residents demonstrated Oct. 30 against the siege of their district by US forces. Shi'ite MP Fallah Hassan Shanshal blaimed US troops for all attacks citizens in the district. Radical Shi'ite leaders Moktada al-Sadr's local office threatened a campaign of "civil defiance" if siege is not lifted. (Alsumaria TV, Iraq, Oct. 30)

Pakistan's army admitted Oct. 31 it had killed up to 80 in an early-morning strike on a supposedly al-Qaeda-linked madrassa in a tribal area near the Afghan border. The military action sparked protests in the area, and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province, where a local minister belonging to the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami resigned. The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, the religious coalition that rules the province, announced it would organize nation-wide protests beginning Oct. 31. Qazi Hussein Ahmed, leader of JI and the MMA, rejected the military claim that the madrasa was harboring militants and said a number of children were among the dead. He asserted that the army had acted under pressure from the US.

An Oct. 24 explosion at the University of Atlantico left four students dead and four wounded in the city of Barranquilla, capital of Atlantico department on Colombia's Caribbean coast. (Some sources say three students were killed and five wounded.) The police announced on Oct. 25 that the wounded students would be investigated for their presumed responsibility in the explosion. Another two students have also been arrested in connection with the incident.

On the night of Oct. 18, or the early hours of Oct. 19, suspected hired killers shot to death university student leader Milton Hernan Troyano Sanchez in Mosquera park in the city of Popayan, capital of the southwestern Colombian department of Cauca. Troyano was in his last semester as a biology student at the University of Cauca (Unicauca); he had been active since 2004 in campaigns defending public education and university democracy, and against authoritarianism and repression. (Message from Dora Troyano on Colombia Indymedia, Oct. 19; Joint Communique from 13 student committees and associations at Unicauca, Oct. 23)

On the order of President Vicente Fox, thousands of federal police backed up by army troops stormed past barricades in embattled Oaxaca City Oct. 29, seizing control of the city center from protesters who have held it for five months.

Nervous Democrats are distancing themselves from Jimmy Carter's forthcoming Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and urging him not to use the term to describe the continuing Israeli occupation and colonization of the Palestinian territories. It should be noted that Ha'aretz, Israel's most respected newspaper, wrote in an Sept. 13 editorial,"...the apartheid regime in the territories remains intact; millions of Palestinians are living without rights, freedom of movement or a livelihood, under the yoke of ongoing Israeli occupation, and in the future they will turn the Jews into a minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.[...]"