Days ahead of the release of a White House report singling out Venezuela for insufficient narcotics enforcement efforts, the US Treasury Department accused four close allies of President Hugo Chávez of assisting Colombia’s FARC guerillas.
President Barack Obama has included El Salvador and Belize on the list of 22 countries ranked as “Major Illicit Drug Transit or Major Illicit Drug Producing Countries,” for the first time placing all seven Central American nations on the annual list.
El Salvador’s President Mauricio Funes won praise from leftist supporters of his FMLN government with his decision to recognize Palestinian statehood—but also won protest with his move to send troops to Afghanistan to back up NATO’s mission.
Members of the Colombian National Police began training Salvadoran, Mexican, Honduran and Guatemalan police and attorneys general at the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in El Salvador—raising sharp criticisms from rights activists.
We recently noted China‘s aggressive embrace of the pathological, dystopian car culture first pioneered by the West. Now comes another sign of this cultural retrogression. From RTTNews, Sept. 16: China Detains General’s Teenage Son Over Road Rage Incident The teenage… Read moreScion of China’s elite abuses proles in “road rage” incident
Two half-naked mutilated bodies left hanging from a bridge in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo were accompanied by “narco-messages” scrawled on cardboard saying the killings were an example of the will happen to “Internet busybodies.”
As David Cameron and Nicloas Sarkozy make a triumphalist tour of Tripoli, tensions emerge between jihadists and secularists in the NTC ranks. EU counter-terrorism chief Gilles de Kerchove warns that al-Qaeda has capitalized on the Libya conflict.
Courts in China’s Xinjiang province sentenced to death four members of the Uighur minority in connection with attacks this July that left 40 dead. The exiled World Uyghur Congress believes the “confessions were extracted through torture.”
Yves Cabannes, UN advisor on forced evictions, visited the contested Dale Farm site at Basildon in England’s Essex county, where a community of “Travellers” and Roma face imminent removal.
Isolated indigenous peoples in remote areas of Peru’s Amazon rainforest are being ‘bribed’ with painkillers and pens, as industry giants seek to open up their land to explore for gas, according to Survival International.
The international price of copper is soaring as strikes halt operations at two of the world’s largest mines, Cerro Verde in Peru and Grasberg in Indonesia—both owned by the multinational Freeport McMoRan.
Tuaregs in Mali and Niger report that their compatriots in Libya are being “hunted in the streets” and tortured. Black African residents of the town of Tawergha were forced from their homes by anti-Qaddafi forces, and have set up refugee camps near Tripoli.
