From time to time I (or whoever wants to) will post snips of news items that strike my interest - with and without commentary, here on the community blog. Some of them may turn into stories later, as more information or time comes to light, which will make already having the links handy.

This seems awfully.... convenient:

Signs of Detainees’ Planning Alleged

Messages Found On Legal Papers

Three suicides at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may have been part of a broader plot by detainees who were using confidential lawyer-client papers and envelopes to pass handwritten notes their guards could not intercept, according to documents that government lawyers filed yesterday in federal court.
[...]
The alleged discoveries have led military commanders to suspend allowing detainees to have paper provided by defense lawyers. Government lawyers have also asked a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to allow them to assemble “filter teams” to scour more than 1,100 pounds of documents seized by investigators, some of which are protected by lawyer-client privilege and would usually be off-limits to authorities.
[...]
Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents most of the Guantanamo detainees, said the allegations that lawyers could have played a role in the suicides are “patently offensive” and “outrageous.” She said the government is again trying to make it difficult for lawyers to represent the 450 detainees held there.

“I can’t imagine what they think they’ve found,” Olshansky said last night. “All I can see this as is an elaborate ruse to take away whatever these people have so they have absolutely nothing, and to make these lawyers fight for yet another thing.”

Extreme Vacations - don’t forget your shots!

Hard Work In the Big Easy

Vacationers Donate Time To Help Katrina Victims

The preparation advice seemed extreme, even for Third World travel.

Hepatitis A and B boosters. Tetanus shot. Face mask for airborne toxins. There’d be no groceries or drinkable tap water within five miles. All nearby homes would be unlivable by Western standards. All this for a trip to New Orleans?
[...]
Even a cursory tour around New Orleans confirms the worst you’ve heard. The Lower Ninth Ward—ground zero for the worst levee break—is a virtually untouched, surreal landscape: splintered houses lying on cars, cars in trees, trees on houses, moldy rubble everywhere. In spring, seven months after the event, the entire area was silent—no rumble of bulldozers, no excavators, no dump trucks.

Clearing up the abyss

Guatemala comes to terms with its past

Guatemala, which suffered from a long civil war in which 200,000 people were killed, appears to be finally coming to terms with its turbulent past.

[...]
Peasant farmers are demonstrating because they have been thrown off their land, and they have brought their complaints directly to the presidential palace, camping outside and holding rallies and demonstrations day after day.

It is this peaceful protest which I find most encouraging.

Twenty years ago when I was in this same square people didn’t dare come out and stroll around, weigh themselves, or have their photographs taken.

In 1986 Guatemala was only just emerging from a ghastly civil war which claimed as many as 200,000 victims, the vast majority of them killed or forcibly abducted by the state security forces.