Boogie for your right to defy gringo imperialism, y'all. From Reuters, May 23:

CARACAS - Among the shabby high-rise tenements overlooking Venezuela's capital, hip-hop beats rather than the usual gunfire kept the Caracas neighborhood of Pinto Salinas awake one night recently.

From Upside Down World, May 24:

The nullification of Occidental Petroleum’s oil-drilling contract by the Ecuadorian government has generated mixed reactions in the Americas. Ecuador's oil minister revoked the California-based oil giant’s contract last week for allegedly not informing the government that the company sold off 40% of its Ecuadorian holdings to Canadian-based EnCana. However, it had long been known that Oxy’s presence in Block 15—a 464,000 acre chunk of Northeast Ecuador--invoked militarization, an environmental catastrophe and sparked off a social unrest in indigenous communities that the government could not contain.

A year after he was arrested on immigration charges, Posada Carriles is being investigated by a federal grand jury--but the media are no longer paying attention. From our sibling journal Upside Down World, May 24:

Convicted terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is being investigated by an El Paso-based grand jury [Prensa Latina, May 22]. Carriles just celebrated a year of incarceration in El Paso’s Federal Immigration Detention Center. The investigation seems to be centered around how Carriles entered the US without a visa in March 2005.

Another restive ethnic group in Iran is making demands for culture and autonomy felt—and meeting with harsh repression. Following the Arabs of Khuzestan and the Kurds of Kordestan, now the Azeris—who, like the Kurds, had a short-lived independent state under Soviet protection in northern Iran during World War II. Note the irony that the riots were sparked by an offensive anti-Azeri cartoon that appeared in the Iranian press! From IranMania, May 24:

A statement from the New York-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy:

Just as it did before its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration is manufacturing a climate of fear in order to prepare public opinion for another act of aggression -- this time against Iran. Three years ago it was the specter of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction; today it's the threat of a possible Iranian nuclear bomb. Washington's immediate goal is to get the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran and, in all probability, to justify a military attack on Tehran's nuclear facilities -- a job that may be outsourced to Israel. The White House even insists on keeping the catastrophic "nuclear option" on the table -- that is, using tactical nuclear weapons to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, many of which are located in or near civilian population centers. Although a full-scale invasion of Iran is highly unlikely at the moment, there can be little doubt that the neoconservatives in the Bush administration have a grand strategy that includes, eventually, "regime change" in Tehran as a way of further enlarging U.S. imperial power.

This one is really funny. The ultra-conservative hyper-interventionist Islamophobes at the oddly named Human Events managed to score an interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran and pretender to the throne. But this self-promoting monarchist restorationist, it turns out, is insufficiently bellicose and reactionary for the likes of his interviewers! They keep trying to goad him into supporting military action, and he (to his credit!) won't take the bait. Who'd have thought it would come to this—the scion of the Shah is more progressive (at least in word) than either the ruling mullahs or the beltway neocons who seek to overthrow them!

From CNN, May 23:

Wave of violence in Afghanistan

Fighting this week in Afghanistan has been among the most intense since the U.S. invasion more than four years ago, with up to 300 people reported killed since last Wednesday.

The United States says it struck a blow against the Taliban on Monday when its warplanes killed as many as 80 people.

Afghans at the scene, however, say some of the victims were innocent civilians.

The vote for secession in Montenegro is being posed as the final chapter in the disintegration of Yugoslavia that began in 1990 with Slovenia's vote for seccession. Technically, "Yugoslavia" ceased to exist in 2003 when what was left of it was formally renamed "Serbia and Montenegro." But the salient point that most of the Western media is overlooking is the implications of Montenegro's secession for neighboring Kosova. Ironically, the destabilization of Yugoslavia began with the crisis over Kosova, which lost its constitutional autonomy in the first wave of Serb ethno-nationalism in 1989. Subsequent protests there were put down in a wave of repression. This was the first blow to the Yugoslav federal system, and led directly to the subsequent secessions. Yet Kosova's own status was never determined. It remains a de facto NATO protectorate while still officially part of Serbia. The Albanian majority there would like to formally secede; the Serb minority wants reunion with Serbia. The West has posed as the protector of the Albanians, but (as we have argued before) the actual motives in the NATO intervention were more likely to contain Albanian national apsirations in Kosova and head off the emergence of a new Muslim-led state in Europe. This is slyly (if unintentionally) revealed by the Western media's universal use of the Serbian spelling "Kosovo" instead of the Albanian "Kosova" to denote the province which is overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian.