President Barack Obama said June 28 that his newly announced drawdown of US military forces in Afghanistan will be done "in a responsible way." Under the plan, 10,000 troops will be pulled out of the country by year's end, and a total of 33,000 troops will be out by next summer, fully returning the "surge" troops the president announced in late 2009. (Xinhua, May 30) Simultaneously, coalition and Afghan officials will be tripling the size of a US-funded program to establish local self-defense militias to fight against insurgents. The militia forces—said to be modeled after the Sons of Iraq, led by Sunni ex-insurgents who turned against al-Qaeda—are to grow from a current 6,500 recruits to 30,000. "Where we have them trained and fully employed the Taliban is not re-emerging," boasted Army Brig. Gen. Jefforey Smith, an assistant commanding general at the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan. (USA Today, June 29)

Egyptian security forces fired tear gas at some 3,000 protesters, some of whom hurled back stones, in Cairo's Tahrir Square the evening of June 28. The clashes were apparently triggered when family members of the more than 800 protesters killed during the campaign to oust Hosni Mubarak attempted to storm a theatre where a memorial service was being held for those fallen in the uprising. Activists said the families of the victims had been denied entry to the memorial, and were beaten by police when they tried to force their way in. Activists have called for a massive rally on July 8 aimed at keeping up the pressure for democratic reforms. (Middle East Online, June 29; AlJazeera, June 28)

French officials announced June 29 that they have armed rebels in Libya, in an attempt to break the stalemate in a conflict that has stretched longer than many policy-makers anticipated. France dropped guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other munitions in Libya's western Nafusa Mountains (heartland of the Berber insurgency) in early June to help rebel forces who were at the time under threat from Qaddafi's military, a French military spokesman told reporters. (WP, June 29)

International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo on June 28 urged personal aides of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi to implement the ICC arrest warrants issued the previous day. Moreno-Ocampo called on the aides to arrest Qaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the "de facto Prime Minister," and his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Sanussi, the head of intelligence, for alleged crimes against the people of Libya, saying the aides could be "part of the solution."

Our last issue featured the story "The Two Wars in Libya: Revolutionary Struggle and NATO Intervention" by Art Young of Green Left Weekly, arguing that progressives in the West can support the first while opposing the second. We also ran the story "Libya and the Left" by Seth Weiss, special to World War 4 Report, who asks whether it is possible to support the rebels without supporting their call for military assistance. Our May Exit Poll was: "Is NATO's Libya war a necessary humanitarian intervention or bloody imperialist aggression?" We received the following responses:

Activists preparing the new aid fllotilla to the Gaza Strip charge that Israel sabotaged one of their boats at the Greek port of Piraeus. In a statement, Scandinavian organizers said "hostile divers" had cut the propeller shaft of the Juliano, a ship shared by Swedish, Norwegian and Greek activists. They said the damage can be repaired and that it will not affect plans to sail for the Palestinian territory toward the end of the week. The 10-ship flotilla has already been delayed by administrative problems with Greek port authorities that activists blame on Israeli diplomatic pressure.

According to Mexico's National Defense Secretariat (Sedena), the military has taken responsibility for 44 cases of violations of civilians' human rights since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa ordered soldiers to join in the fight against drug trafficking. Sedena says it has initiated criminal or administrative proceedings against 223 soldiers, including officers, in these cases. However, no general has faced charges so far, and no soldier has received a sentence in cases resulting from recommendations by the government's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH). A total of 5,055 complaints against the military have been received by the CNDH during this period; the military dismisses some of these as "presented by members [of criminal organizations] to discredit the military institution and in this way to limit its operations."

The distribution of international aid after the devastating January 2010 earthquake in southern Haiti has been slow and in some ways counterproductive, according to a United Nations (UN) report released in June of this year. "Has Aid Changed? Channeling assistance to Haiti before and after the earthquake" was prepared by the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Haiti; the office was set up in May 2009 "to assist the Haitian government and people in carrying out their priorities with the help of the international community," according to a UN press release.