This should be interesting to follow. As with the London tube attacks, homegrown, no direct link to "Osama" claimed, just inspired by his dreams:

17 Terror Suspects Arrested in Toronto

filed June 3, 2006 12:04 p.m. ET

TORONTO (AP) -- Canadian authorities said Saturday they had foiled plans for terrorist attacks in southern Ontario with the arrests of 17 people who were ''inspired by al-Qaida.''

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they had arrested 12 male adults and five youths on terrorism-related charges, including plotting attacks with explosives on Canadian targets. The suspects were either citizens or residents of Canada and had trained together, they said.....

speaking of London, there's also news....the rumors of a dirty bomb being involved look like they are coming from "The Sun," so that may be bull, but I note that the operation was "one of the biggest since last July’s suicide bombings."

Reports: U.K. police hunt for 'dirty' bomb

Major raid fails to unearth chemical device believed to exist, papers say

4:21 a.m. ET June 3, 2006

Reuters

....The operation, one of the biggest since last July’s suicide bombings in the capital, was prompted by suspicions that the house could have been used for making bombs or chemical weapons.

“Because of the very specific nature of the intelligence, we planned an operation that was designed to mitigate any threat to the public either from firearms or from hazardous substances,” said Peter Clarke, head of the UK’s anti-terrorism branch....

The 23-year-old man, shot at the house during the raid is now recovering in hospital. His injury is not said to be life-threatening and he has been arrested on suspicion of “the commission, preparation and instigation of acts of terrorism.”

A second man was also arrested at the house under the Terrorism Act.

Neighbors said the family who lived at the house were Bangladeshi, describing them as friendly and “very religious.”....

SHANGHAI, June 2 — It began...on one of the country's most popular Internet bulletin boards....

"Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," one person wrote, "to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband."

Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home.

It was just the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined....

While Internet wars can crop up anywhere, these cases have set off alarms in China, where this sort of crowd behavior has led to violence in the past. Many draw disturbing parallels to the Cultural Revolution, whose 40th anniversary is this year, when mobs of students taunted and beat their professors. Mass denunciations and show trials became the order of the day for a decade....

from New York Times June 3, 2006:

Online Throngs Impose a Stern Morality in China

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

----

Also see:

My post citing Simon LeBon's "The Crowd" vis-a-vis email lynch mobs springing from political echo chamber sites: HERE.

Josh Marshall's post citing a White House reporter on American email mobs eventually crossing the line into brick-and-mortar territory: HERE.

Richard Cohen's "Digital Lynch Mob" column: HERE.

The contrarian on an internet forum may be a party pooper, but he also may end up being a hero. It's unusual to see anyone say they are "pro-Balkanization;" that's because The Balkans don't have a particularly nice track record?

Brad, Angelina and the rise of 'celebrity colonialism'

by Brendan O’Neill @ Spike, May 30:

What gives two Hollywood actors the right to shut down an African nation so that they can have a special experience?....

Al-Qaeda's long march to war

Asia Times, May 31

In recent weeks, media reports from both Iraq and Afghanistan have suggested the appearance of a slow evolution of the Islamist insurgents' tactics in the direction of the battlefield deployment of larger mujahideen units that attack "harder" facilities....extraordinary patience, as well as on their enemies' lack thereof. Before his death in a firefight with Saudi security forces, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Abu Hajar Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin, wrote extensively about how al-Qaeda believed the military fight against the US and its allies would unfold.....

in Russia, that is, according to this op-ed:

The Philosophy Behind the Nationalism

The Moscow Times, June 1

Scattered excerpts for a taste (better to go to link!)

Ultranationalism among Russian youth, along with nascent official activity against xenophobia is receiving increasing attention from Russian and Western observers. Alarmed by the growing number of victims among foreign students, visitors from abroad and immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Americas, the administration of President Vladimir Putin has started to take action against escalating skinhead violence. The Kremlin-directed mass media reports now on a daily basis about attacks on foreigners and the prosecution, if hesitant, of the offenders.....

....less manifest yet similar illiberal tendencies in public and elite discourse continue to develop and appear to be gaining influence in mainstream politics, civil society, mass media and higher education.

The country's publishing market is flooded with anti-liberal diatribes outlining bizarre visions of a Russian rebirth and apocalyptic worldviews. The authors of these works include names like....

Perhaps the most prolific commentator here, both in print and on television, is mystic philosopher Alexander Dugin.....Dugin melds all of these influences together to draw a picture of an ancient conflict between two civilizations and between two contradictory ideas. On one side are the free-market, capitalist, Atlantic sea powers (he calls them "thallocracies") in the tradition of the ancient states of Phoenicia and Carthage, which are now headed by the United States, and on the other autarchic Eurasian continental land powers (labeled "tellurocracies"), begining with the mythical country of "Hyperborea" and running through the tradition of the ancient Roman Empire to its main representative today, Russia. The secret orders, or "occult conspiracies" of these two antagonistic empires -- Eternal Rome and Eternal Carthage.....

This opposition to "American imperialism," in turn, serves as a justification for Putin's illiberal policies and provides the glue that holds Russia's elites together.

among other things:

May 30, 2006

In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discusses the Holocaust, the future of the state of Israel, mistakes made by the United States in Iraq and Tehran's nuclear dispute with the West.

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 30---As they swept up broken glass and boarded up windows and doors on Tuesday, Kabul residents placed blame for Monday's rioting on young hoodlums and criminal gangs who seized on a fatal accident involving an American military convoy to spark a citywide conflagration.

But they also criticized the American military for its arrogance, saying military vehicles frequently crush civilian cars, and they doubted that the government or the military would conduct an honest investigation of the incident....

There was an unmistakably anti-government and anti-American tinge to Monday's protests. In the main square, rioters burned a huge banner of President Hamid Karzai, who is frequently caricatured by his opponents as a puppet of Washington. A similar banner of the late commander of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by Al Qaeda on Sept. 9, 2001, remained untouched.....

"It was frustration at the whole process, especially the lack of reconstruction and security," said Faheem Dashty, the editor of The Kabul Weekly newspaper. "For the last four years, people were waiting to see some changes in the government. But they did not see it."

Other residents complained about the presence of not only foreign troops but also Western aid workers, who live in upscale compounds, drive fancy S.U.V.'s and, in many Afghans' minds, are responsible for the spread of vices like alcohol consumption and prostitution. Protesters even trashed the headquarters of CARE International, one of the longest-serving nongovernmental organizations — and much loved in Kabul for its work with war widows and the poor......

from

May 31, 2006

After Riots End, Kabul's Residents Begin to Point Fingers

By CARLOTTA GALL

....Some observers insist that the crowds of rampaging youths were not a

spontaneous outburst of public anger, but a carefully orchestrated political

action by forces hostile to the current government.

Jamiat-e-Islami, the political faction to which many prominent

parliamentarians belong, was singled out by several analysts as the likely

culprit. As evidence, they cited the fact that many demonstrators were

carrying large posters of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, the mujahedin

commander who has been elevated into an official national hero for his role

in fighting the Soviets and later the Taleban. Massoud belonged to and in

many ways symbolised Jamiat.

“The demonstrations were led by Jamiat-e-Islami,” said political analyst

Fazel Rahman Oria. “I was in the midst of the demonstrations for four hours,

and I saw people from Jamiat there. Initially, they received a lot of

support, but people later left them when they realised what they were up to.

Jamiat had small groups in all parts of Kabul, and they were burning shops,

hotels and NGOs [non-government organisations].

“They took advantage of the traffic accident to display their power both to

the government and to the Coalition Forces.”....

from

Unrest in Afghan Capital a Bad Omen

The outburst of street violence in Kabul has some Afghans wondering if the tenuous peace will hold.

By IWPR staff in Kabul (ARR No. 218, 30-May-06)