An important victory is reported from the Brazilian Amazon, which has been the scene of recent violence linked to struggles for control of land and resources. From the BBC, April 15:

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has signed a decree creating an Amazonian Indian reserve the size of a small country in northern Brazil. The reserve, Raposa Serra Do Sol, is called "the land of the fox and mountain of the sun" by the 12,000 Indians who live there. Its hills, rivers and forests cover 17,000 sq km (6,500 square miles).

From the San Francisco Chronicle, April 18:

A car bomb attack near Baghdad has killed a well-known activist from Northern California who entered war zones to record civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and secure aid for those caught in the crossfire.

Marla Ruzicka, 28, of Lakeport (Lake County), founder of CIVIC -- Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict -- died with her driver on the Baghdad Airport road Saturday when a suicide bomber attacked a convoy of security contractors that was passing next to her vehicle, according to her family and news reports quoting U.S. Embassy officials in Iraq.

By order of Secretary Rice, the State Department will stop publishing its annual report "Patterns of Global Terrorism," ceding responsibility for counting and analyzing worldwide terror attacks to the new National Counter-Terrorism Center. The order comes despite controversy over the Center's findings, on which the State Department relied for last year's report. The report found a higher incidence of terror attacks in 2003 than in any year since the State Department began counting them in 1985. This year, the number has again risen dramatically, according to intelligence sources—from 175 "significant" attacks in 2003 to 625 in 2004. The State Department has issued a public version of the report every since 1985, and it is uncertain if the National Counter-Terrorism Center will now do so. The move to halt publication is controversial on Capitol Hill. "This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). "It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it—or any of the key data —from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report." (Knight-Ridder, April 16)

Hopes for a moderately progressive pontiff who could loosen up the Chuch line on the supposed evils of condoms in the age of AIDS--or even an African or Latin American one who could help Catholicism rally against the aggressive inroads of Islam and Protestantism on those continents—have been dashed by the choice of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

At least 20 Kurdish guerilla fighters are dead in an assualt by Turkish army troops backed up by US-made Cobra attack helicopters near the Iraq border, AP reported April 15. Three Turkish soldiers and a village guardsman were also killed in the fighting in Siirt and Sirnak provinces. Turkish authorities said the guerillas infiltrated Turkish territory from Iraq, where they had taken refuge across the border.

Globophobe activists protested the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington DC this weekend, tho BBC reports that they numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands--a testament to how dissent has been sidetracked and marginalized in the post-9-11 world. Photos and accounts of the protests are provided by our friends at the Global Justice Ecology Project.

(The last major globophobe mobilization, at the November 2003 Mi

From the Washington Post, April 14:

A detainee at a U.S. military prison alleges that U.S. military guards
jumped on his head until he had a stroke that paralyzed his face,
nearly drowned him in a toilet and later broke several of his fingers,
according to a lawsuit filed yesterday in federal court.

The business-continuity newsletter Continuity Central and the ecologist EarthTimes.org are among the few media outlets to take note that the long-awaited study of why the World Trade Center collapsed has been released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The report notes that the unusual lack of internal support walls (a measure to increase office space) contributed to the collapse, and that lives were lost due to building occupants scrambling to find seemingly inadequate stairwells. Yet: "The report however did not blame the designers or builders for the WTC collapse..."