The class struggle for the future of New Orleans is made clear by this Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) report in Newsday that the volunteers who have established soup kitchens and work brigades to help the poor survive and resist being made exiles from their own city have now been ordered to clear out—due to pressure from the city's old-money elite:

A highly critical report on Israeli actions in East Jerusalem by East Jerusalem and Ramallah-based British diplomats was leaked to the press by "someone who wanted to publicize it," according to the New York Times. The report was prepared for the EU foreign ministers, and was not supposed to be released, if at all, until December. The report -- it's not clear if this is the final version-- can be seen here.

The report warns that Israel's separation wall is being constructed "to seal off most of East Jerusalem, with its 230,000 Palestinian residents, from the West Bank" and is creating a "de facto annexation of Palestinian of East Jerusalem."

David Irving, the self-trained British "historian" currently cooling his heels in an Austrian jail cell, appears to have recanted his denial of the Nazi Judeocide. The Nov.5 UK Guardian reports that a "repented" Irving plans to plead guilty to charges he lied about the Holocaust during speeches in Austria 16 years ago, violating a 1947 Austrian law banning Nazi revivalism and criminalising belittling or justifying the crimes of the Third Reich. Irving claimed at the time there were no gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp, something he first said publicly at the 1988 trial of his friend Ernst Zundel, currently on trial as well in Germany for Holocaust denial. According to his lawyer Elmar Kresbach, Irving said, "I fully accept this, it's a fact. The discussion on Auschwitz, the gas chambers and the Holocaust is finished ... it's useless to dispute it." Kresbach added:

The Bush administration decided to charge designated "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla, a US citizen who was initially said to have been preparing a radioactive "dirty bomb" attack on US soil, with less serious crimes because it was unwilling to allow testimony from two senior al-Qaeda members, government officials said.

The BBC reports Nov. 24 on the struggle of a woman known as Amna to resist village authorities in Pakistan who married her to a man from a rival clan at the age of 10 to settle a family dispute. "All I remember is that my mother cried a lot," says Amna, now nearly 20, and one of three sisters fighting for their freedom from a tribal tradition in which they have no say.

The three—along with two cousins—were married under vani—a tribal tradition whereby disputes are settled through "marrying" girls from the offending family to men from the supposedly aggrieved clan. The marriages were ordered by a village council (jirga) in Sultanwala, Mianwali district. The custom was officially outlawed by the national government in January, but still flourishes in much of the country.

Two days ago, we noted, coordinated twin suicide attacks left some 70 Shi'ite worshippers dead in Khanaqin, a town within Iraq's normally more tranquil Kurdish autonomous zone. Nov. 23 has seen a suicide attack—this time targetting a police convoy, and killing some 20 (only half of them police)—in Kirkuk, also in north but just outside the Kurdish-controlled zone. The attack came after a drive-by shooting on a liquor store lured police to the scene, in a busy market district. Earlier in the day, a suicide bomber detonated his car at a checkpoint on the south edge of Kirkuk, wounding three Iraqi soldiers.

The front-page synopsis below the headline of the New York Times's coverage of Bush's Nov. 20 meeting with President Hu Jintao in Beijing said it all:

Hu Jintao Cedes Nothing on Political Freedoms —Will Act on Trade

Economic "liberalization" without lifting the dictatorship an inch. Contrary to the lingering illusions of the idiot left, the model for the current Chinese regime appears not to be Mao but Pinochet. Bush, for his part, dumbed down the whole notion of human rights by reducing them to one item on a laundry list of concerns, somewhere just below the "intellectual property rights" of US compact-disk manufacturers:

From the British site Labour Friends of Iraq, Nov. 22:

Grassroots members of George Galloway’s left-wing Respect party have condemned as "unacceptable" the decision of the party leadership to exclude lesbian and gay rights from their manifesto for the general election earlier this year.