Farmers staged sit-in protests at the regional offices of lawmakers of South Korea’s ruling party, demanding no ratification of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Days earlier, anti-FTA protesters stormed the parliament building in Seoul.
Israel’s public sector workers walked out for four hours, shutting down trains, buses, airports, banks, government ministries and municipalities. Traffic jams clogged Tel Aviv, and the city’s stock exchange and Ben Gurion International Airport were closed.
Occupy Boston activists “stormed” the Israeli consulate in Beantown, chanting “Occupy Wall Street not Palestine.” The activists were protesting the interception of the Gaza-bound “Freedom Waves” flotilla by Israeli naval forces the day before.
Electoral violence was reported in the north as Sandinista candidate and incumbent President Daniel Ortega was re-elected to lead Nicaragua. Hugo Chávez hailed Ortega’s victory while the US State Department expressed concern about “irregularities.”
Retired military general Otto PĂ©rez Molina emerged victorious from run-off elections for the presidency of Guatemala, vowing a crackdown on crime and drug-related violence. PĂ©rez Molina is accused of having overseen genocide in the 1980s.
The future of Colombia’s FARC guerillas is in question following the death of leader “Alfonso Cano” at the hands of the Colombian army Nov. 4. Local media reports anticipate a power struggle between regional commanders.
At least 63 were killed in bombings and armed attacks by the Islamist movement Boko Haram in two northeast Nigerian towns. The attacks come days after the Yobe police commissioner denied that Boko Haram had any presence in the state.
Colombian army forces announced that they have killed Guillermo Leon Saenz AKA “Alfonso Cano”—supreme leader of the FARC guerillas. Initial reports that he was killed an in airstrike contradict forensic evidence of multiple bullet wounds.
China’s embassy in Zambia denied charges in a new Human Rights Watch report of oppressive health and safety conditions and anti-uinion practices at Chinese-owned copper mines in the southern African country.
Algeria is sending military forces to the border with Western Sahara after a group of Spanish and Italian aid workers were kidnapped from the Polisario-run refugee camps at Tindouf by supposed al-Qaeda militants.
Indigenous and peasant communities in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao are protesting the armed forces' proposal to allow mining companies to establish their own militia force to secure their operations.
Tanzania’s last remaining hunter-gatherer tribe won an unprecedented victory over development interests who claimed they were extinct, acquiring a certificate of “customary rights of occupancy” to their communal lands in the Great Rift Valley.
