Meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, July 5, the regional grouping known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) issued a statement that called on the US to establish a timetable for withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Led by Russia and China, the grouping also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Another forgotten war is heating up: the Islamic separatist insurgency in southern Thailand. Thousands of Buddhists are fleeing the region, and teachers seem to be especially targeted for assassination, according to this chilling account from Qatar's Gulf Times, July 6:

Thousands of Buddhists flee Thailand's south
BANGKOK — Thousands of Buddhist teachers and residents are fleeing Thailand’s Muslim south as 19 months of anti-government violence shows no sign of slackening, officials said yesterday.

Things are getting hot and heavy as the G8 summit convenes in Scotland. The Scotsman reports July 7 that masked anarchists swarmed through the countryside around the Gleneagles resort where the summit is about to open, battling police, smashing the windows of a Burger King and otherwise vandalizing a PC World and a Pizza Hut. They finally breached the security fence which had been erected around Gleneagles, prompting police to bring in a Chinook helicopter for the counter-charge which drove them back. Bricks, bottles, iron bars and burning tires were used, and some protesters wore crash helmets. The spectacle prompted authorities to ban the planned legal protest march on Gleneagles, but some 500 marched to within sight of the hotel in defiance of the ban. (See our last post.)

Judith Miller is easy to hate, as a semi-official propagandist for the Bush administration's global military crusades. But the imprisonment of the New York Times star reporter for contempt of court, ordered July 6 by US Judge Thomas Hogan in Washington DC, is dangerous blow to basic press freedoms.

More unsettling news on the falling barriers between foreign intelligence and domestic policing. Thanks to TruthOut for catching this one.

Military Expands Homeland Efforts
Pentagon to share data with civilian agencies
By Bradley Graham
The Washington Post

Wednesday 06 July 2005

A new Pentagon strategy for securing the U.S. homeland calls for expanded U.S. military activity not only in the air and sea -- where the armed forces have historically guarded approaches to the country -- but also on the ground and in other less traditional, potentially more problematic areas such as intelligence sharing with civilian law enforcement.

Press release from www.m26.org:

Contact: Eric Monse (646) 479-9168

Court Orders Records of Protesters' Prior Dismissed Cases to be Resealed
New York State Court of Appeals reverses lower Court Decision

In a unanimous reversal of a lower court's decision, the State Court of Appeals decided today that it was unlawful for District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to unseal defendants‚ prior dismissed cases to use the information in seeking harsher sentencing for the convicted defendants.

Based on the unsealed cases, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is requesting 10 days jail time for four non-violent protesters who were convicted in a demonstration against U.S. and Israeli war crimes that took place in March of 2003. Other protesters present at the demonstration who were convicted of the same offenses but did not have prior dismissed allegations have been sentenced to community service.

News reports of the Deep Impact space probe's explosive Independence Day rendezvous with a comet could not have made clearer that the whole affair was barely-disguised patriotic propaganda, very convenient at a time when the Iraq war is turning into a deepening quagmire. Reads a July 5 AP account:

NASA's Deep Impact Web site registered nearly 1 billion hits when the space probe collided with comet Tempel 1 early Monday -- about twice as many hits as the twin Mars rovers got when they parachuted to the Red Planet last year.

The cosmic fireworks from the collision were not red, white and blue and were visible only through telescopes. But the sharp flash of light gave scientists "something to be proud of on America's birthday," said Rick Grammier, the mission's project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It seems Baghdad's occupiers are emulating those of Palestine. The city now has a "security fence" cordoning off the Green Zone, mirroring Israel's "Apartheid Wall." An excerpt from a story carried by the July 5 New York Times:

Iraqis call it Assur, the Fence. In English everyone calls it the Wall, and in the past two years it has grown and grown until it has become an almost continuous rampart, at least 16km in circumference, around the seat of US power in Baghdad.