Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged for the first time that the US had opened preliminary talks with members of the Taliban as part of an effort to end the war in Afghanistan.
The Qaddafi regime showed off the bodies of Tripoli civilians killed by a NATO air-strike in a lugubrious display to journalists, while US Defense Secretary Robert Gates insisted that the Libya intervention does not constitute “hostilities.”
Walter Aduviri, leader of the Aymara protest movement in Peru’s conflicted Puno region, launched a protest vigil at the congress chambers in Lima, demanding his right to address the body, after an arrest warrant against him was dropped.
Quechua indigenous leaders won an accord from Peru’s government to study the impacts of oil leasing in the Pastaza river basin—while on the Ecuadoran side of the basin, local residents held angry protests over hydro development plans.
Rolando Páucar of the Lima-based Institute for the Investigation of Energy and Development (IEDES) hailed Peru’s cancellation of the mega-scale Inambari hydro-electric plant, but called for development of nuclear power as an alternative.
Skeptical community activists in Peru’s conflicted Puno region charge that the government’s official cancellation of the giant Inambari hydro-electric dam is a “trick” to defuse protests and buy time to move ahead with the project.
As bloody repression continues in Syria and the US considers sanctions, the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to report the Damascus regime to the Security Council for maintaining a secret nuclear facility.
Egypt’s Bedouin, who say they are treated as second class citizens in their Sinai desert homeland, are starting to organize for equal rights. They have long been stigmatized as having collaborated with the Israeli occupation in 1967.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou announced he would dissolve his cabinet as a general strike shut Athens in protest of his new austerity plan and protesters blockaded the doors of parliament.
The US is building a secret airbase “somewhere in the Middle East” from which the CIA can launch drone attacks against al-Qaeda targets in Yemen, in a hedge against the CIA being kicked out in a post-revolutionary situation.
Protesters called off their roadblocks in the Peruvian province of Carabaya as the government announced a suspension of the Inambari hydro-compex—after the project’s contractor expressed concerns about regional unrest.
Walter Aduviri, leader of the Aymara protest movement in Peru’s southern Andean region of Puno, is under siege in the studios of Lima’s Panamericana TV station, with police surrounding the building to carry out arrest orders.
