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.
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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.
The Israeli government said it will move ahead with “sensitive housing projects” in East Jerusalem and the West Bank as a rebuttal to UNESCO’s decision to grant Palestine full-member status. The US meanwhile cut funds to UNESCO.
Thousands of protesters blocked the Port of Oakland Nov. 2, bringing work there to a halt, as the city’s teachers and nurses and many businesses honored a general strike call. Protesters also blocked downtown streets, and seized an abandoned building near City Hall. Police only intervened in the wee hours of the next morning, evicting the occupied building, using tear-gas and rubber bullets and arresting some 80.
Photo: Climate Connections
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.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said it had begun injecting water and boric acid into Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, after detecting signs of fission which had supposedly achieved a “cold shutdown.”
Abdurraheem el-Keib—a dual US-Libyan citizen and veteran of the energy industry, described favorably as a “technocrat” by the Washington Post—was elected prime minister of Libya by leaders of the National Transitional Council.
Colombia’s DAS secret police agency was officially closed after years of scandals concerning paramilitary ties, assassinations, illegal wiretapping and corruption. DAS employees leaked hundreds of classified documents as the agency shut.
