MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty Images

Here are some things you can no longer do in certain parts of Italy:

• No building sand castles in Eraclea
• No wearing noisy wooden clogs in Capri
• No gatherings of three or more people in parks at night in Novara
• No mowing your lawn on the weekends in Forti dei Marmi

As part of a countrywide effort to fight crime, Italian mayors have been given more law-and-order powers, but some mayors appear to have gone way overboard. One man in Vicenza was fined for lying down at the park to read a book, though after the man vented on national radio, the mayor said he would remove the ban.

Sounds like some Italian mayors need to lighten up and have some summertime fun.

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Here's a little-noticed story suggesting that, despite the Russo-Georgian war, the international system is alive and well.

Claimed by both Nigeria and Cameroon, the Bakassi peninsula has a local population that considers itself Nigerian, but is believed to hold rich oil and gas deposits. You might think such a situtation is a recipe for disaster.

Not so. Nigeria has just officially ceded Bakassi to Cameroon, honoring a 2002 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and bringing a peaceful close to a decades-long despute. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hailed the transfer as "a model for negotiated settlements of border disputes," and Nigerian officials cited the importance of international law in reaching the settlement:

The gains made in adhering to the rule of law may outweigh the painful losses of ancestral homes," said the head of the Nigerian delegation, Attorney General Mike Aondoakaa.

The agreement isn't perfect. Some analysts expressed concern that armed groups opposed to the handover will sow violence to further delay the deal.

Still, in an age when nationalism and natural resources seem to trump all, it's an encouraging sign. Hopefully, Nigeria's move will further legitimize the international legal system, which has seen its rulings recently ignored by the United States and Sudan. Now Georgia, too, is seeking the ICJ's assistance to remedy its conflict with Russia. Unfortunately, I'd expect it to be easier for Russia to ignore the ICJ than it was for Nigeria.

FBI

I'll admit that the FBI has put together some very suggestive information about Bruce Ivins, the anthrax researcher who committed suicide last week. The key document is this one (pdf), an affadavit for a search warrant, in which Postal Inspector Thomas F. Dellafera informs us that Ivins was under suspicion for the following reasons:

(1) At the time of the attacks, he was the custodian of a large flask of highly purified anthrax spores that possess certain genetic mutations identical to the anthrax used in the attacks; (2) Ivins has been unable to give investigators an adequate explanation for his late night laboratory work hours around the time of both anthrax mailings; (3) Ivins has claimed that he was suffering serious mental health issues in the months preceding the attacks, and told a coworker that he had "incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times" and feared that he might not be able to control his behavior; (4) Ivins is believed to have submitted false samples of anthrax from his lab to the FBI for forensic analysis in order to mislead investigators; (5) at the time of the attacks, Ivins was under pressure at work to assist a private company that had lost its FDA approval to produce an anthrax vaccine the Army needed for U.S. troops, and which Ivins believed was essential for the anthrax program at USAMFUID; and (6) Ivins sent an email to [redacted] a few days before the anthrax attacks warning [redacted] that "Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas" and have "just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans," language similar to the anthrax letters warning "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX . . . DEATH TO AMERICA . . . DEATH TO ISRAEL."

I'd like to hear some scientific experts weigh in on #1, which is the only non-circumstantial piece of evidence here. The Feds have more damning stuff, too, such as this bit about the anthrax letters noted by the New York Times:

[S]earches of Dr. Ivins's home in Frederick, Md., turned up "hundreds" of similar letters that had not yet been sent to media outlets and members of Congress.

But here's something Bloomberg caught about Ivins's late-night work habits:

The spike in his evening hours began in mid-August, almost a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators said.

So, he was working on all this before 9/11? What's that all about?

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Am I the only one who finds the FBI's steady drumbeat of leaks in the anthrax case a bit unseemly and, well, downright suspicious?

Since Fort Detrick scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide last week, "law enforcement officials" and other anonymous sources have been feeding information to the press about his alleged responsibility for the anthrax mailings of 2001, which killed five postal workers and sent the country into a panic.

Here's what we've learned about Ivins, through anonymous leaks:

• He had an alcohol problem
• He was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority
• He used a PO box, listed under a false name, to receive pictures of naked, blindfolded women
• He spilled anthrax and didn't report it
• He had a financial stake in anthrax vaccines
• He threatened to kill a social worker and his coworkers
• He wrote strange letters to newspapers
• He had access to an anthrax dryer

Sounds like a creepy dude, yes. But it's the kind of suggestive information you leak if you don't want people to notice that your hard evidence -- scientific proof that Ivins was the guy -- is lacking and won't stand up in court. The FBI insists that they've got the goods, and they'll make their findings public tomorrow. We shall see.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has much, much more.

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Yesterday, a shorn and shaven Radovan Karadzic faced his first day in court at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The Karadzic arrest has been hailed as a pivotal turning point in Serbia's path to EU cooperation and accession. But although Karadzic was captured in Serbia, his crimes were in creating the ethnically divided state that is Bosnia. And in Bosnia today, the story remains less than comforting.

In a compelling call for a revitalization of international efforts in the still-fractured country, Paddy Ashdown, former head of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, explains:

Bosnia's predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, Karadzic's creation, has seen the vacuum where will and policy should be. Its premier, Milorad Dodik, is now aggressively reversing a decade of reforms. He has set up the parallel institutions and sent delegations to Montenegro to find out how they broke away….

Meanwhile, in European capitals the growing view goes like this. We invested 13 years of hard work and huge resource in Bosnia. Now it is stable and peaceful and we are rather tired. Kosovo has proved it is possible to divide a country. What matter if Bosnia becomes another Cyprus?…

This is folly of a very dangerous order. What happens to the Muslim populations who have moved back to Republika Srpska, even to Srebrenica, if they are handed back to an exclusively Serb-dominated regime? What happens to Bosnia's shining star, the multi-ethnic, markedly successful sub-entity of Brcko, hemmed in by Republika Srpska? Is it to be handed over, too? I do not believe Bosnia is likely to go back to conflict; most of its people are just too war-weary. But the one event that could change that calculation in favour of blood would be to return to the old Karadzic/Milosevic plan to divide Bosnia.

But minus those few returnees and that one "shining star," Bosnia is divided, functioning largely as two separate, ethnically split states. Yes, it's a sad fact -- one that U.N. peacekeepers allowed to materialize between 1992 and 1995, and one that any international efforts will be hard pressed to undo.

It's no wonder the celebration over Karadzic's arrest in Bosnia has been short-lived. For as Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon concludes in an excellent NYT op-ed, "Justice is good, but a peaceful life would have been much better."

A 22-year-old St. Petersburg ad executive who was hoping to become the third woman in Russian history to successfully sue for sexual harassment (yes, you read that right) just had her case thrown out. Here was the judge's reasoning:

If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children."

Well I guess that's settled then.

Reversing Russia's population decline is a major priority for Russia's government, but this isn't exactly the most enlightened way to address the problem. Conditions for working women in the country are already in a sad state:

According to a recent survey, 100 percent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 percent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven percent claimed to have been raped.

Telling male bosses that this is their patriotic duty is probably not going to help.

(Thanks to my friend Emily for the link.)

Turkey's top court announced today that the ruling AK Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not, in fact, violating the fiercely secular constitution. Instead, Erdogan got off with a warning and the party's state funding was cut in half. Six of 11 justices ruled against the AKP, but luckily for Erdogan, seven votes were required to give him the boot. Close call.

Political analysts everywhere breathed a sigh of relief, as did investors in Turkey's stock market. Interestingly, investors began to bet on Erdogan surviving before the decision was announced. Bloomberg reports:

Markets extended gains after court officials started admitting journalists into the court building in Ankara pending an announcement by court chief Hasim Kilic later today.

Loose lips sink short-sellers? In this case, it doesn't seem like insider trading is to blame. Newspapers had apparently been speculating for days that the AKP would win its case. But it sure would be interesting to see when the upward trend began vs. when the first rumors started to leak out in the press.

UPDATE: The Century Foundation's Jonathan Kolieb writes in with a clarification:

10 judges found them guilty of being in some sense anti-secularist. But only 6 voted to ban them. That is an interesting split. This really does put the AKP on notice. Gives something to everyone, but everything to no one.

He also observes that, according to Today's Zaman, JPMorganChase told investors it was "80 percent sure" that the AKP would not be disbanded and that even if it were, it would stay in power. Interesting.

MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty Images

This should be easy fodder for the anti-globalization crowd. A lobbyist for oil giant Chevron, which is embroiled in a potentially costly lawsuit with Ecuador over the dumping of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadorian Amazon, is complaining of mistreatment at the hands of the big bad South American nation:

"The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company," said one Chevron lobbyist who asked not to be identified talking about the firm's arguments to U.S. officials. "We can't let little countries screw around with big companies like this—companies that have made big investments around the world."

Chevron is playing hardball, asking the Bush administration to revoke special trade preferences with Ecuador if the case isn't dismissed. But the plaintiffs have the backing of Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, a Hugo Chávez ally, and two years ago secured the support of one Barack Obama, who wrote a letter arguing that the Ecuadorian peasants pressing the case should have "their day in court."

If the Bush administration doesn't act, and Obama wins in November, I wouldn't bet on Chevron in this rumble in the jungle.

The international community may have finally succeeded in creating a safe space where people from all the Balkans' ethnic groups can live together in harmony and respect each others' cultures. The trouble is, it's in a prison for ruthless war criminals awaiting trial at The Hague:

Released inmates say the ethnic rivalries that drove them to fratricide in the bloody wars that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia have faded within the walls of the prison.

Now the detainees, who in 2006 had an average age of around 52, enjoy their common language, cook Balkan food together in the corridor kitchens, watch television and play board games.

[...]

"We Muslims from Bosnia and Kosovo celebrated our religious holidays with the Serbs and Croats," former inmate, Bosnian Muslim general Naser Oric, has said.

Serb nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj and Bosnian Croat paramilitary leader Mladen Naletilic were the unit's biggest jokers, he added.

Radovan Karadzic will join the party when he is extradited early next week.

AFP/Getty Images

This week's arrest of the Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic has made headlines almost as big as those announcing the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic back in 2001. The shocking photos of Karadzic disguised as a bearded Dr. Dabic have painted the whole story ridiculous; statements from Brussels highlighting the arrest as a milestone trumpet the news that Serbia has really chosen a European future; and re-reported accounts from Bosnian Muslim victims have added an element of remorse for the fact that justice had not been brought sooner. But a lesser story today, that of Dinko Sakic, illustrates the long-term significance of Karadzic's overdue arrest.

Sakic, the last living commander of Jasenovac, the Croatian World War II concentration camp, died this week. Long after fleeing to Argentina, where he lived a rather vocal life in support of Croatian nationalism, Sakic was eventually tried and found guilty of killing thousands of Serbs and Jews -- but not until 1999, decades after his crimes were committed and years after those very crimes were used by Croat and Serb leaders alike to stir up nationalist fervor and inter-ethnic fear during the last bloody days of Yugoslavia.

Fortunately the losses at Srebrenica and Sarajevo will not go the way of Jasenovac, whose significance and death toll still remain in question. Thanks to the work of the ICTY, the former Yugoslavia's crimes of the 1990s have been investigated and documented in great detail, leaving far less room for future finger-pointing and fear-mongering. And with the EU promising future membership to all the countries of the Western Balkans, they'll need all regional stability they can get.

For more reflections what Karadzic's capture means, check out FP's interview with Richard Holbrooke, the man who did as much as anyone to bring peace to Bosnia. He's thrilled:

I got the news on a train from New York to Washington. I’ve rarely been so excited about any news event in a positive sense. The world gets so much bad news, and to bring this man to justice, this terrible man, ranks right up there with capturing Saddam Hussein.

I know you've all been on the edge of your seats since we blogged this a couple months back, but a ruling has been reached in the great Greek lesbian lawsuit. To recap, residents of the island of Lesbos had sued a prominent Greek gay rights organization to prevent them from using the word "lesbian" to describe gay women. If victorious, they had plans to take their crusade worldwide.

The court just ruled that the Gay and Lesbian Union of Greece (and anyone else for that matter) is free to continue saying lesbian. Glad we cleared that up.

STR/AFP/Getty Images

"We are not saying that the three war crimes indictees, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic, are not in Serbia, but we cannot be 100 per cent sure that they are."

That's what Rasim Ljajic, the head of Serbia’s Council for Cooperation with The Hague Tribunal told reporters yesterday. Of course, Karadzic was captured that night right in Belgrade, where he has been practicing alternative medicine and even lecturing for years. The arrest seems to confirm what most observers had assumed all along, that Karadzic's arrest was being held up not by the difficulty of capturing him but by the lack of political will to do so. It's unclear whether handovers of Mladic and Hadzic will follow, but it's going to be a lot harder for Serbian authorities to plead ignorance now.

Some are describing today's developments as a triumph for the International Criminal Court, which is fair. But the bigger story is how effective a carrot the prospect of EU integration can be in the right circumstances. It was this carrot that largely swung the last Serbian elections (despite the outrage over Kosovo) in favor of the current pro-European government, making today's arrest possible.

The EU badly has badly needed a victory for a while now and this is a big one.

Update: Then again, perhaps it's all Barack Obama's doing.  

ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got Italy's lower house of Parliament to agree today on a controversial crime bill, which critics say would allow him to wiggle out of various corruption charges.

Here's what the oft-prosecuted Berlusconi had to say:

I'm the universal record-holder for the number of trials in the entire history of man -- and also of other creatures who live on other planets."

I'd fact-check this, but I'm not sure there's an intergalactic version of the Guiness Book of World Records. Guess we'll have to take his word for it.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Meet David Remes, a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling and pro bono attorney for 15 Yemenis held at Guantanamo. Since 2005, Remes, who is half Yemeni, has been a high-profile member of the legal team challenging captives' detention at Gitmo.

And now, click here -- if you dare -- to see Remes at a recent news conference where, for some inexplicable reason, he decided that dropping trou' was a good way to show the assembled press corps just what his clients have had to endure.

Just what comparison was he trying to draw? That his clients were made to stand around in their underwear? It's an utter mystery. But one enigma has been cleared up: He's not a boxers man.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

If you're trying to understand why many Europeans remain skeptical of European Union expansion despite its demonstrated economic benefits, look no further than the union's marketing standards for produce, which are being debated this month:

Consider the Class I cucumber, which must be "practically straight (maximum height of the arc: 10 mm per 10 cm of the length of cucumber)." Translation: A six-inch cucumber cannot bend more than six-tenths of an inch. Following 16 pages of regulations on apples (Class I must be at least 60mm, or 2 1/3 inches, in diameter) come 19 pages of amendments outlining the approved colors for more than 250 kinds.

As for peaches, "to reach a satisfactory degree of ripeness . . . the refractometrix index of the flesh, measured at the middle point of the fruit pulp at the equatorial section must be greater than or equal to 8° Brix."

Wikipedia informs me that Brix is a measurement of the level of sugar in a liquid. What this has to do with the refractometix index--a measurement of light--is beyond this liberal arts major.

The European Commission's agriculture comissioner wants to scrap the majority of the standards, arguing that it's ridiculous for stores to be throwing away perfectly edible food during a global shortage. This makes a lot of sense, but I suspect the real reason is that arguments over cucumber thickness and banana straightness give EU opponents such perfect fodder for mockery.

Russia's State Duma is currently considering a package of laws aimed at protecting the morality of its children and preventing youth suicide and alcoholism. Some of the ideas kind of seem like overkill:

Together with proposals to combat child alcoholism and pornography, the policy project outlines a raft of draconian measures such as a 10 p.m. curfew for all school-age children and a ban on tattoos and body-piercings.

Under the new measures, schools would be prohibited from celebrating Western holidays like Halloween and St. Valentine's Day, which are deemed inappropriate to "Russian culture." Toys in the shape of monsters or skeletons would be banned as "provoking aggression."

The proposal also sets its sights on teenage subcultures such as emo, a style of hardcore punk, and goth, which lawmakers accuse of "cultivating bisexuality." Both styles, the legislation implies, are social scourges on a par with the skinhead movement, and must be eliminated from the social landscape.

Monday's ruling by a French court that eBay must pay French luxury goods manufacturer LVMH $60.8 million and do more to prevent counterfeit sales (think: fake Louis Vuitton handbags) raises big questions about globalization and the future of e-commerce.

As International Herald Tribune blogger Daniel Altman puts it, who should police the Internet? There's a potential slippery slope here, Altman points out, if countries are left to their own devices and sue portals such as Amazon for books considered libelous or YouTube for videos considered indecent.

The French, at least, have a history of holding Internet providers accountable for content hosted on sites they own. There's precedent in the United States, too, from the 2001 decision ordering Napster to prevent illegal file sharing between users of its site.

To some, Monday's ruling reeks of protectionism. The ruling condemns eBay's unauthorized sales of certain perfumes, limiting the sale of these luxury items to approved channels such as perfume and department stores, not the open market.

What's the answer? Leaving regulation to national courts may lead to a hodgepodge of different rulings in different countries, making it difficult for multinational firms to navigate.

Altman asks if a "global authority" to help nations and multilationals sort out e-commerce is necessary. Perhaps, but it's hard to imagine what such an authority would look like or how it would operate. I think it's safe to say eBay is on its own for now.

WorldPublicOpinion.org just released a poll that reveals some surprising insight on what people around the world want from their government when it comes to one of the most touchy subjects of all: abortion.

The poll's 18,465 respondents hail from 18 countries, including China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and the United States. Although the results might not always shock you -- British and French respondents overwhelmingly say that their governments should "leave the matter to individuals" -- they do shed some new light on countries that don't get polled too often.

Forty-seven percent of Egyptians, for instance, want their governments to take a hands-off approach to abortion. So do 67 percent of China's respondents and 48 percent from Turkey and Azerbaijan. Just 28 percent of Iranians say that abortion should be a matter for individuals, but 38 percent want the procedure to be discouraged using "non-punitive measures" such as education and adoption services. Indonesians are far less forgiving: A full 60 percent say that those who have abortions should be criminally prosecuted.

What if you group respondents by religion? Some schools of Islamic law permit abortion in certain cases, such as pregnancies induced by rape, but Muslims in the survey show the strongest support for government measures to discourage abortion, both punitive and not. As for Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church still takes a firm line against abortion, yet Christians as a group are extremely liberal toward the practice: 65 percent favor individual choice in the matter. (Read on -->)

The Charlotte Raleigh News & Observer has an unbelievable story about how Presidential Airways, a Blackwater affilate that is being sued by three widows of U.S. soldiers who died when one of its planes crashed in Afghanistan, is trying to fend off a lawsuit by claiming that sharia law applies:

The lawsuit 'is governed by the law of Afghanistan,' Presidential Airways argued in a Florida federal court. 'Afghan law is largely religion-based and evidences a strong concern for ensuring moral responsibility, and deterring violations of obligations within its borders.'

If the judge agrees, it would essentially end the lawsuit over a botched flight supporting the U.S. military. Shari’a law does not hold a company responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their work.

An investigation (pdf) of the crash by the National Transportation Safety Board found that eight minutes before plowing into the side of a canyon, the plane's co-pilot told his partner, "yeah you're an x-wing fighter star wars man." And later, "I swear to god they wouldn't pay me if they knew how much fun this was."

I somehow doubt that the sharia defense is going to fly. I asked Peter W. Singer, an expert on military contracting at the Brookings Institution, to weigh in on the case. He noted, "This truly flies in the face of their prior argument that they should be considered legally immune, as if they were a sovereign part of the US government operations (which was a specious argument to begin, but truly odd sounding now)."

Via Andrew Sullivan, some very harsh words from Antonio Taguba, the now-retired general who investigated the Abu Ghraib abuses in 2004:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

I can't speak to the legalities here, but I have a question for readers on the politics. Does throwing around charged phrases like "war crimes" help or hurt Taguba's cause?