Noam Chomsky will speak at Queen's University in Belfast tonight as this year's guest for the annual Amnesty International lecture. In comments to students ahead of his lecture, Chomsky warned of the dangers of resurgent right-wing extremism in the wake of Obama's election: "The far-right is providing answers that are completely crazy: that rich liberals are giving their hard-earned money away to illegal immigrants and the shiftless poor. A common reaction in elite educated circles and much of the left is to ridicule the right-wing protesters, but that is a serious error... If the protesters are getting crazy answers from the hard-line right-wing extreme, the proper reaction is to provide the right answers..." (Belfast Telegraph, Oct. 30)

The neo-Nazis arrested last week on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack in the Czech Republic were trained by a member of the Czech armed forces, authorities say. Czech national police commander Oldrich Martinu made the announcement on Czech TV Oct. 25. Military training of the far-right militants was also mentioned by Robert Slachta, head of the Organized Crime Detection Unit (ÚOOZ), after evaluating film footage of the training. In the footage masked men taught the neo-Nazis how to disable an opponent armed with a knife or gun.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a resolution Oct. 23 in the case of Karmelo Landa, a Basque nationalist arrested by Spanish earlier this year in Bilbao on charges of "collaboration" with the outlawed political party Batasuna. The resolution found that "the only accusation against Mr. Landa (possible membership in Batasuna's national executive) without expressly identifying any kind of role promoting criminal or terrorist activities, means that his arrest and imprisonment is based only in being a member of an illegal party. This is not a crime, but exercise of a human right recognized both by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 19, 20, 21) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Art. 18, 19, 22)." The resolution called on Spain to immediately "remedy the situation." (Euskal Herria News, Gara, Bilbao, Oct. 23)

Detectives from the Czech Republic's Organized Crime Detection Unit (ÚOOZ) charged 18 with the criminal offense of promoting a movement aimed at suppressing human rights following house raids Oct. 21 in Dobříš, Prague, Kladno and Tábor, in which a total of 24 were arrested. ÚOOZ head Robert Šlachta said those arrested belong to the organizations White Justice and National Resistance, and are suspected of preparing a terrorist attack. Among those charged is Patrik Vondrák, leader of the right-wing Workers' Party in Prague. All but two were released on their own recognizance. (Romea, Prague, Oct. 23)

Tens of thousands demonstrated in the center of Rome Oct. 17 against the Italian government's immigration policy—and especially a new law introduced by the Berlusconi cabinet which creates the specific criminal offense of "illegal immigration." Protesters carried signs reading "No to Racism and the Criminalization of Immigration," "No Expulsion of Immigrants" and "Berlusconi, Leave!" The event, which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the first pro-immigrants' rights demonstration in Italy, was organized by trade unions and leftist political parties. "After 20 years, racism has not yet been defeated. It still creates victims and is fuelled by the policies of the Berlusconi government," the official call read. (Romea, Oct. 19)

After two days of protests at the IMF/World Bank meeting in Istanbul Oct. 6-7, reports are mounting of arrested youth brutally beaten by police while in custody. Şerife Ceren Uysal of the Contemporary Lawyers Association said that of the 103 arrested on the first day of protests, 22 were underage. Uysal reported: "Many people were assaulted by the police while in detention. Arrested people were assaulted in the police buses, many of them sustained bruises and swellings." (BiaNet, Oct. 9)

On July 27, Stavros Vitalis, representing the Panhellenic Macedonian Front, filed a libel suit against Greek journalist Takis Michas, author of Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia. Michas' book and work in the daily Eleftherotypia accuse Greek mercenaries in Bosnia of participating in the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre. In a media statement, Vitalis said that the Greek volunteers who fought in Bosnia under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic were there to help the Serbs, "who were being slaughtered by international gangs that were also stealing their houses, their country and their dignity."

A Roma woman, Maria Balogh, was shot dead and her 13-year-old daughter gravely injured when their house in the village of Kisleta, Hungary, was attacked early Aug. 3—the latest in a series of attacks on Roma. She was the sixth victim of what police believe is an armed gang targeting members of Hungary's large Roma community. The other victims killed over the past year were similarly slain in night attacks on their homes, apparently without any provocation. (BBC News, Aug. 7; NYT, Aug. 3)