On Oct. 30, activists in Naples rallied at the local Mexican consulate in protest of the repression in Oaxaca, where Mexican President Vicente Fox has sent in a massive force of federal police. (Chiapas IMC) But Naples itself may soon be facing a similar dilemma. Following a crime wave which has left 12 dead over the past ten days, Prime Minister Romano Prodi is under growing pressure to send the army to patrol the southern port city. To his credit, he is thus far resisting the pressure. Meanwhile, the openly chauvinist Northern League frames the problem in its typically helpful and sensitive way. From AGI, Nov. 2:

From AP, Oct. 30:

MARSEILLE -- France's interior minister sent riot police to patrol the southern port city of Marseille yesterday after a group of marauding teenagers torched a bus, gravely burning a young woman.

Could someone possibly please explain what this one is all about? A rather opinionated report from the right-libertarian Liberty Forum, Oct. 20:

Thessalonica - The Greek Government will move, as early as this weekend, to have armed police forcibly remove the monks of the Holy and Sacred Monastery of Esphigmenou from their monastery property. Over 150 police have been deployed on Mt. Athos, an unprecedented number in a community entirely populated by peaceful and defenseless monks.

The political trajectory of Oriana Fallaci speaks to one of the funamental political dilemmas on the planet at this strange juncture. The daughter of an Italian anti-fascist militant, a veteran Vietnam war correspondent, a survivor of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico, longtime lover of a martyred opponent of the Greek military dictatorship—she nonetheless joined the anti-Islam and anti-immigration chorus after 9-11. While large sections of what we call the "idiot left" rush into an "anti-imperialist" alliance with political Islam, others (especially in Europe) rush into the equally unsavory xenophobe and Islamophobe camp in the name of defending secularism and feminism. From The Guardian, Sept. 15:

Here we go again. Israel's envoy to Norway complains that a cartoon goes "beyond free speech." What the hell does that mean? Beyond good taste? Beyond acceptable discourse? Beyond what should be permitted in a free society? Where are these lines to be drawn and by whom? Why can't the offended (Muslim or Israeli) protest offending images without calling for their censorship, either explicitly or (worse, because it is more insidious) implicitly? Maybe this kind of sloppy and censorious speech is worse than hate speech? From BBC News July 26:

The Srebrenica Genocide Blog notes the July 11 ceremony at the Bosnian town to commemorate the mass murder that took place there precisely 11 years ago—an anniversary largely overlooked by the world media, despite some important new developments in the survivors' ongoing search for justice:

With the world's eyes elsewhere, the still-unresolved status of Kosova is a major crisis just waiting to erupt. Kostunica delivered this speech outside a 14th-century monastery in the town of Gracanica rather than at the Plain of Blackbirds, the site of the famous Battle of Kosovo. But the allusions are obvious to Slobodan Milosevic's notorious June 28, 1989 speech at the Plain of Blackbirds which signaled the start of his long camapign against the province's Alabanian majority and also marked the beginning of Yugoslavia's self-destruction. It is amazing that the media accounts are not picking up on this. From AP, June 29:

Scotland Yard's anti-terror chief is awarded "Commander of the British Empire"—in the wake of a controvesial shooting of a young Muslim man in a police raid that turned up nothing. From The Telegraph, June 17:

There has been a storm of protest after it emerged that a senior police officer involved in a controversial anti-terror raid in which a suspect was shot was to be awarded a CBE.