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At least five foreigners have been shot dead in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar, security sources have said.
They said armed fighters stormed three compounds on Saturday housing oil-servicing offices and residential homes of employees.
Diplomatic sources said "armed terrorists" took a large number of people hostage, including five Lebanese, at the housing compound.
It is not yet clear if the foreigners worked in one of the oil companies in Khobar.
Earlier this month, fighters killed (…)

Call from UK NGOs wishing to participate in the 3rd European Social Forum in London in October 2004 for a sixth overarching theme to address the issues of Poverty, Economic Justice and the Global South.
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The banner headlines of the Social Forum movement are: ’Another World is Possible’ and ’People before Profit’. As NGOs, we consider that a significantly higher emphasis needs to be given to the unequal and exploitative relationship between (…)

http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/
Feds Unable to Distinguish Art from Bioterrorism Grieving Artist Denied Access to Deceased Wife’s Body
Steve Kurtz was already suffering from one tragedy when he called 911 early in the morning to tell them his wife had suffered a cardiac arrest and died in her sleep. The police arrived and, cranked up on the rhetoric of the "War on Terror," decided Kurtz’s art supplies were actually bioterrorism weapons.
Thus began an Orwellian stream of events in (…)

by WILLIAM FINNEGAN
The New Yorker
The climax of Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father," occurs in rural Kenya when the author sits between the graves of his father and his grandfather and weeps. Obama, then in his late twenties, hardly knew his father and never met his grandfather, but in the course of writing the book he had learned their stories in devastating detail. Both were proud, ambitious men who travelled far from the Luo-speaking villages where they grew (…)

by Keith Boykin
Village Voice
Maybe it was destiny. As the nation commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision on May 17, gays and lesbians launched a new chapter in their own struggle for equality. But the black clergy that lit the fire for change half a century ago is now out to dampen that flame, at least where same-sex marriage is concerned.
"If the KKK opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them," Reverend Gregory Daniels, a black minister from (…)

By Michael Young
Special to The Daily Star
With the death of Maxime Rodinson on Monday, the world of Middle Eastern studies has lost a French Marxist scholar who rarely succumbed to dogma, and who always enriched his works through the intricacies inherent in his own person - those of a working-class French Jew whose parents were killed at Auschwitz, and who devoted his life to learning about the Arabs and Islam.
For many outside the academy (where Marx lives on, beyond extradition) (…)

BY JEREMY HAINSWORTH Associated Press Writer The Guardian (UK)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4133950,00.html VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) - An American soldier who deserted his Iraq-bound unit and sought asylum in Canada said the war in Iraq was illegal and accused the United States of committing war crimes. Pfc. Jeremy Hinzman, 25, defended his decision to leave his unit with the 82nd Airborne Division on Jan. 2, about two weeks after he learned his unit (…)

Editorial http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55981-2004May25.html IN A COLUMN on the opposite page Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez makes the remarkable assertion that he hopes his opponents will succeed in triggering a recall referendum that could cut short his term in office. Remarkable, because polls consistently show that Mr. Chavez would lose the referendum — less than 40 percent of the population supports his eccentric, quasi-authoritarian populism. Contrary to his (…)

By Hugo Chavez Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55957-2004May25.html CARACAS, Venezuela — For the first 24 hours of the coup d’etat that briefly overthrew my government on April 11, 2002, I expected to be executed at any moment. The coup leaders told Venezuela and the world that I hadn’t been overthrown but rather had resigned. I expected that my captors would soon shoot me in the head and call it a suicide. Instead, something extraordinary happened. (…)

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/24/148212 Ex-Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey talks about his time in Iraq where he admitted the U.S. treatment of Iraqi civilians is fueling the Iraqi resistance. In a recent interview he said "I felt like we were committing genocide in Iraq." [includes rush transcript] The US Army is denying reports that the highest-ranking American officer in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, was present during some of the interrogations and (…)