Security forces have blocked roads leading to the village of Wukan, in China’s Guangdong province, after residents chased out police. Villagers are demanding the central government intervene over a land grab by local officials.
Amid days of three-way violence on the West Bank between Palestinian protesters, Jewish settlers and Israeli security forces, global outrage is growing at the death of a young Palestinian man in a demonstration against seizure of village lands.
Tutsi rebels who control army units in Congo’s east may take up arms again if Joseph Kabila does not prevail in the contested presidential elections. Corporate designs on eastern Congo’s vast mineral resources continue to fuel the conflict.
Ayman Joumaa AKA “Junior,” a Lebanese drug kingpin with alleged connections to both Hezbollah and Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel, was charged with drug trafficking and money laundering, the Justice Department and DEA announced.
In a day of action dubbed “Shutdown Wall Street on the Waterfront,” thousands of protesters blocked cargo trucks at West Coast ports from San Diego to Anchorage, forcing terminals in Oakland, Portland and Longview to halt operations.
The opposition has called an ongoing general strike, civil disobedience campaign and election boycott in a bid to bring down the Assad regime—but called for the Free Syrian Army to halt attacks on the security forces.
The Colombian Armed Forces have created three new “joint task forces” aimed at targeting the core of the FARC guerilla army, in what the government is plugging as a final offensive against Latin America’s oldest insurgency.
A deliberate strategy by Colombia’s former intelligence agency to undermine NGOs and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been revealed in secret documents. The Administrative Security Department (DAS) was recently disbanded.
Climate Justice Now!, a broad coalition of social movements that coordinated protests at the Durban summit, assailed the last-minute agreement, charging that “the richest nations have cynically created a new regime of climate apartheid.”
Peru’s Prime Minister Salomón Lerner resigned after failed attempts to negotiate an end to the Cajamarca protests—to be replaced by Oscar Valdés, a former army officer who as interior minister has overseen the police repression in Cajamarca.
El Salvador's government held a ceremony at El Mozote village to ask survivors' forgiveness—just as an ex-military commander takes over as Public Security Minister in a move apparently prompted by the US embassy.
Rights groups in El Salvador noted the anniversary of the massacre of 966 villagers at El Mozote by a US-trained battalion, decrying continued impunity after 30 years. The authors of the massacre are known, but protected by an amnesty law.
