Shops, gas-stations, hotels and restaurants shut down as part of a 48-hour strike seeking to pressure the federal government to intervene in the Oaxaca crisis Sept. 28, triggering long lines as residents stocked up on supplies. Meanwhile, followers of the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) declared a "maximum alert," reinforced their street barricades and readied piles of Molotov cocktails. (The Guardian, Sept. 29)

From BBC, Sept. 29:

UN 'must drop' Darfur peace force
Top UN officials say the world body must abandon efforts to pressure Sudan to accept UN peacekeepers in Darfur. UN Sudan envoy Jan Pronk says the existing African Union force should instead be strengthened.

From Ynet, Sept. 27:

Hi-tech firm boycotts Israel over 'war crimes'

Belgian hi-tech company specializing in development consulting notifies manager of Israeli company seeking cooperation that 'your country has conducted war crimes and is an apartheid regime'

Ominous news, and a different perpective from our usual left-wing Mexican sources like La Jornada and APRO. Will the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca be put down by armed force before the December presidential transition? Whatever antipathy may exist between the PAN-led federal government and the PRI state government the People's Assembly opposes, we should have known better than to think Fox would allow Calderon to begin his term with a state of parallel power persisting in the Oaxaca's capital. From the conservative MexiData:

We again point out the surreal irony that Pakistan, the closest US ally in the region, is serving as a staging ground for the anti-US insurgency in Afghanistan. This report indicates that the actual Taliban leadership which was chased out of Afghanistan almost exactly five years ago has seized power in Pakistan's border region of Waziristan. And we also point out the intractable nature of the problem: if Musharraf seriously moves to oust the Taliban there, he will almost certainly face a tribal insurgency war in Waziristan, and may even face a coup attempt from the pro-Islamist elements of his own military. From Newsday, Sept. 27 (emphasis added):

Yeah, except the Cali cartel is old news. Its been dead for almost a decade, and Colombia's still-booming narco trade has now been effectively taken over by the armed gangs which were the former enforcers for the cartels (in the case of the paramilitaries) or their rivals (in the case of the guerillas). The US-led struggle against the Cali and Medellin cartels in the '90s was emblematic of the global War on Drugs, which history reveals as a sort of transition war between the Cold War (1945-1989) and the War on Terrorism (2001-?). The great thing about the Colombia war (from the perspective of US policy-makers) is that it now combines all three propaganda paradigms: a struggle against Communist terrorists funded by the drug trade. Some nearly non-news from AP, Sept. 27:

The Chiapas daily Estesur Sept. 24 noted a "bad weekend for Lopez Obrador," with PRD founder Cuauhtemoc Cardenas dissenting from his declaration as Mexico's "legitimate president," and a tough struggle looming for the PRD candidate in next month's Tabasco gubernatorial race. But this Sept. 22 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times should make him feel a little better—and certainly provides a challenge to those who would dismiss his claim as merely "spurious" (to use Lopez Obrador's favorite word for rival Felipe Calderon's victory).

In a Sept. 18 statement on the Papal controversy, the Islamic Society of North America—which recently made headlines by electing a woman (and Canadian ex-Catholic), Ingrid Mattson, as president (LAT, Sept. 21)—calls out His Holiness on some shabby scholarship.