Our contributor Mahmood Ketabchi writes:

The cartoons of Muhammad created much discussion and debate within the progressive movement. I wrote two articles regarding the cartoon crisis and posted both of them on the NYC Indymedia. On March 1st, I posted my second article "US Left-Nationalists Join the Islamists Against Freedom." In this article, I criticized the section of the US left which supported the Islamists' campaign against freedom of speech and the right to blasphemy. The article generated some pro and con debate among people who read the it. Two days later, to my astonishment, I noticed that the article was removed from the website.

A school textbook used in India's western Rajasthan state compares housewives with donkeys and says the animals are more loyal and make better companions, The Times of India reported. The book was approved by the state's governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and has set off protests by the party's women. (Reuters, April 5)

Seventy-six members of the Nukak-Makú, the last nomadic indigenous group in Colombia, including 27 children, arrived March 6 at the town of San José de Guaviare, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. They arrived naked, exhausted and frightened, fleeing their home region of Tomachipán, some nine hours away by fast launch on the Rio Inírida. It is estimated they marched two months through the forest.

Israeli historian Dr. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University takes issue with Noam Chomsky's reaction to the Mearsheimer and Walt article on the Israel lobby:

So what do we learn from the Chomsky reaction?: We can find out what Noam has missed in his analyses in the last twenty years - as this was clear before the LRB article: Chomsky never paid too much and enough attention to the impact of AIPAC on American policy. He identified other factors and grounds, but failed to highlight something which was next door. Nor did he ever write anything of significance of the Christian Zionists. Chomsky also claims that a two state solution is still viable and opposes sanctions on Israel. Interesting positions but hardly ones the invalidate the counter positions.

WW4 REPORT editor Bill Weinberg will be speaking Thursday, April 6 on New York's Lower East Side, on "International Solidarity with Iraq’s Freedom Struggles." The presentation will also include a screening of the new DVD Go Forward, Iraqi Freedom Congress!, produced by Japanese peace activsts and documenting the activities of a new anti-occupation civilian coalition in Iraq. Weinberg recently returned from a conference in Japan where he met with and interviewed leaders of the Iraqi Freedom Congress.

From DPA, April 3:

ANKARA - Three people were killed and one badly injured when suspected Kurdish assailants threw Molotov cocktails at a bus in Istanbul Sunday night, the NTV television station reported.

From The Independent, April 3:

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has revealed that coalition forces are spending millions of dollars establishing at least six "enduring" bases in Iraq.

Agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Puerto Rican nationalist Antonio Camacho Negron on March 28 on a street in Rio Piedras, near San Juan, after he had addressed the opening of the First National Congress for Decolonization at the University of Puerto Rico. Camacho is a former leader of the rebel Popular Boricua Army (EPB)-Macheteros ["cane cutters"]; he served 15 years in a US prison for transporting money stolen in 1983 when the group robbed $7.2 million from a Wells Fargo depot in Connecticut. US authorities released Camacho on parole on Aug. 17, 2004, but he refused to accept the parole's terms. The US issued a warrant for his arrest on Aug. 20, 2004, after he missed his first appointment with a parole officer.