The Colombian Attorney General's office suspended for 90 days retired army general Pablo A. Rodriguez and Col. Javier V. Hernández for failing to provide security for the village of San José de Apartadó, the self-declared "peace community" in the wartorn Urabá region of the country. The ruling said that the officials' actions left the community "vulnerable to illegal armed groups on several occasions."

This one isn't a joke, tho we wish it was. Another entry in the fast-mounting signs of global ecological collapse. From AP, March 31:

WASHINGTON - A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.

We sure hope this is just a couple of lone wackos and not the beginning of a destabilization campaign against Evo Morales. An AP report indicates suspect Triston Jay Amero of California "has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since he was seven-years-old"—which is comforting for us, even if it doesn't seem to have done him much good. Still, that doesn't mean he wasn't being paid or manipulated by the CIA (or somebody). From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 26:

From Reuters, March 30:

CANBERRA - An Indonesian cartoon depicting Australia's prime minister and foreign minister as fornicating dingoes was "grotesque", Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Thursday as bilateral tension flared with Jakarta.

From Earth First!, March 29:

Environmental Activists Jailed as Grand Jury Indictments Increase

San Francisco, CA—As attorneys argue in federal court in San Francisco on March 30 to quash a grand jury investigating a protest in San Francisco, activists point to current trends that use secret grand juries to carry out broad, politically-motivated sweeps of environmental and other activists around the country.

From the technology news site CNET, March 29:

Unmanned aerial vehicles have soared the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq for years, spotting enemy encampments, protecting military bases, and even launching missile attacks against suspected terrorists.

The final results of Israel's Knesset election are as follows: Kadima, the party created by Sharon and now led by Ehud Olmert has 29 seats, a disappointment considering polls had projected up to 43 seats at one point. Labor, led by Moroccan-born Amir Peretz, has 20. The Mizrahi Orthodox party Shas and Likud have 12 each. Yisrael Beiteinu, the party led by Moldovan-born xenophobe Avigdor Lieberman, who once threatened to blow up the Aswan dam, won 11. The transferist National Union-National Religious Party won nine; the Pensioners' Party, led by Jonathan Pollard's control agent Rafi Eitan, won seven; the non-Zionist United Torah Judaism won six; the increasingly moribund Zio-leftist Meretz won five; the Palestinian Israeli Ra'am-Ta'al party, led by Sheik Sarsur of the more moderate southern wing of the Israeli Islamic movement, won three; the Arab-Jewish communist faction Hadash led by Mohammed Barekeh, won three; and the Balad party led by Palestinian nationalist Azmi Bishara won three. The lowest voter turnout in Israeli history was advantageous for the smaller parties as it lowered the amount of votes needed to pass the 2% threshold to enter the Knesset. Likud also suffered as a result of a voter backlash against the neo-liberal policies of current party leader and former finance minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The pro-marijuana Green Leaf party did not make it past the threshold. (Haaretz, March 31)

File this under words-mean-whatever-we-say-they-mean. NYU "had not put any pressure on [the Objectivist Club's] free speech", but "said the panel discussion could not be open to the public if the cartoons were shown on stage." Huh? It's amazing how absolutely everybody pays lip service to free speech, while practically nobody upholds it. And of course it is right-wing nimrods like the Objectivists and the New York Sun who get to reap the propaganda benefits of this capitulation. Will "progressives" never learn? From The Sun, March 30: