Barack Obama and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos agreed to a deal on the Andean country’s labor conditions, clearing the way for the pending Free Trade Agreement.
The San José de Apartadó peace community in the Colombian region of Uraba has received an ultimatum from local paramilitary groups to leave the area or face extermination.
Ecuador’s government declared US ambassador Heather Hodges “persona non grata” and expelled her from the country in response to a cable released by the Wikileaks whistle-blower web site.
Ecuador’s national indigenous organization announced that is filing a legal complaint against the government, including President Rafael Correa, for complicity with “genocide” against indigenous people in the Amazon.
Peru’s government announced the cancellation of a planned copper mining project in Arequipa after three protesters were killed this week.
Fatah and Hamas are at odds on the political affiliation of the man arrested in the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a co-existence activist and theater director gunned down in Jenin.
Israeli air-strikes and artillery fire struck Gaza nine times on Friday. bringing the total number of dead over the past 24 hours to thirteen, some half of them civilians.
Friday prayers again exploded into protests in cities nearly across the Arab world, with demonstrators killed by police in Syria and Yemen, and thousands of Egyptians again filling Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
As NATO warplanes again bombed their ostensible rebel allies in Libya, Gen. Carter Ham, head of US Africa Command, broached sending troops into Libya with a possible international ground force to back up the rebel army.
Israeli fire killed five Palestinians and injured some 40 after a missile from the Gaza Strip hit a school bus in southern Israel, injuring two. Sudan meanwhile accuses Israel of an air-strike on its Red Sea coast.
A plan awaiting approval by the US Environmental Protection Agency would dramatically increase permissible radioactive releases in drinking water, food and soil after “radiological incidents.”
A group of Iranian intellectuals issued a “Call for Active Opposition to the Nuclear Policy of the Islamic Republic,” warning that “Fukushima completed the warning that was issued by Chernobyl.”
