Guatemalan police arrested a presumed leader of the Zetas narco-paramilitary network who authorities say is likely commander of the assassin squad that carried out this week's grisly massacre of 27 farmworkers.
At least 11 people were killed and more than 80 injured as a protest demonstration sparked by a deadly US raid erupted into clashes with security forces in Taliqan, capital of Afghanistan’s northeast Takhar province.
Engineers at Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant abandoned attempts to stabilize reactors by flooding them with water, finding that melting fuel rods have created holes in the chambers, allowing contaminated water to leak out.
Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian ex-military officer who helped establish the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, has reportedly been named as al-Qaeda’s interim leader as the organization awaits a formal successor to Osama bin Laden.
A court in Argentina sentenced eight former army officers to life imprisonment for their role in the Margarita Belén massacre, named for the town where 22 unarmed political prisoners were tortured and killed on Dec. 13, 1976.
Hugo Chávez is playing it cool over a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies accusing him of collaboration with the FARC guerillas—but Venezuela’s UK embassy dismissed it as a “dodgy dossier.”
Guatemalan authorities announced the discovery of 27 bodies—all but one decapitated—at a ranch in the northern jungle of Petén. The victims were farmworkers who were apparently massacred by a Zeta narco-trafficking cell.
Barack Obama announced that he is ordering the Interior Department to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve—as the oil industry gears up for a new thrust of expansion in the Last Frontier.
WikiLeaks cables reveal embarrassing details of an Israeli military contractor's secret operations in Latin America—sparking a government "hate campaign" against journalists who reported the shenanigans in Panama.
In an open letter, young Jewish descendants of the Arab and Islamic world living in Israel write to their peers in the Middle East and North Africa, expressing solidarity with the regional revolutions.
The annual Jewish pilgrimage to the Tunisian island of Djerba for the Lag B’Omer holy day has been officially canceled for the first time ever due to security concerns this year.
Violence erupted on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, leaving at least 12 dead and scores wounded, as Palestinians commemorated the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.
