After very length delays, issues 11 and 12 have finally been added to the website. Issue 11 was published last May, and issue 12 came out at the end of October. There are a lot of great articles in these most recent issues, so make sure to take a look at them!

New Haven, Connecticut, made national headlines on June 4 when it approved a plan to issue municipal IDs to all city residents — a scheme that would let undocumented immigrants use city facilities and enable them to open bank accounts. Some 36 hours later, a team of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 32 immigrants in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood, which is mostly Latino.

Mayor John DeStefano, along with city officials and longtime immigrants’ rights activists, has accused ICE (which is a part of the Department of Homeland Security) of retaliating against New Haven — which, so far, is the only city in the country to agree to issue such IDs to all of its residents. For all undocumented immigrants, the raids raise the questions of whether other municipalities could issue similar IDs, and is the risk of retaliatory raids by ICE too great?

Because if you're not, you should be. Hippo Publisher Camille is among the bloggers who have been ripping it up over at Yale's own blog written entirely by left-wing black students. Check it out while the Hippo slumbers for a little while.

A little blip on the local news this morning (with no follow up later) announced that the US was launching a campaign to "destabilize" the government of Iran :

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding" that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

Particularly strange is the fact that the US Navy has been staging cute parades of its might in the Persian Gulf, directly off the coast of Iran. This is our fanfare before talks begin between the US and Iran on how to deal with Iraq. Somehow Bush expects the talks to go smoothly, after they've been prefaced with military formations and a threat to overthrow the government? I don't know how to put it other than this: This sounds like a terrible idea.

It also seems like we've seen this before: the US doesn't like what a rival president is doing, and sends the CIA in to destabilize that government and replace it with a more palatable one. In fact, it previously blew up into a scandal. With Iran's name in the title. Under the watch of many members of Bush's current cabinet, who don't seem to have learned from their mistakes the first time around.

It is particularly disturbing when this kind of police repression takes place in broad daylight, with the cameras rolling. It's as if they actully WANT the world to know what they are doing. It constitutes an attack on the political itself, an attempt to intimidate people from protesting in the future. Not that this is anything new, just that it's startling every time, in a country that presents itself as a democracy.