One year after the announced “easing” of the Gaza siege, the IDF releases a report boasting of improved conditions in the Strip. But the Israeli rights group Gisha crunches the numbers to reveal that the “easing” is more illusory than real.
Peru’s populist president-elect Ollanta Humala takes office in just one week, and ominous signs are mounting that he will continue his predecessor’s trajectory towards breakneck resource extraction—and attendant bloody social conflicts.
Canadian oil company Pacific Rubiales reached a deal with striking workers following a month of labor unrest in Puerto Gaitan, Colombia, that culminated this week in a blockade of the oilfields and riots in which several vehicles were destroyed.
Frustrated by slow progress in determining the fates of missing loved ones, relatives of ten men from southern Mexico who vanished on the US border have embarked on a hunger strike and public protest.
Days before a new administration in Lima is to take power, Peru’s indigenous affairs agency proposed new regulations to allow oil exploitation within rainforest reserves established to protect indigenous groups in “voluntary isolation.”
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem finds that more than 800 Palestinian youths under the age of 18 charged with throwing stones in the West Bank over a six-year period have been imprisoned—while imprisonment of minors is illegal in Israel.
The “Free Tibet” crowd is not disturbed as the Dalai Lama celebrates his 76th birthday with John Boehner—while the Dalai-demonization set continues to portray the Tibetan struggle as a CIA astroturf creation.
Nery Jeremías Orellana, 26, the manager of Radio Joconguera in the town of Candelaria, in the western department of Lempira, Honduras, was gunned down on his way to a regional meeting of community radio stations.
Libyan and Syrian opposition leaders met with NATO and EU diplomats in Istanbul, winning support for their efforts to oust their respective dictators—while Yemeni protest leaders elected a transitional council under siege in violence-torn Sanaa.
More than 3,000 people—Jews, Muslim, and Christians, Israelis and Palestinians—marched in Jerusalem to demand an independent Palestine in the 1967 borders, chanting “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.”
Hundreds of young Israelis are now living in a tent city they have erected on the fashionable Rothschild Boulevard across from the National Theater to protest unaffordable rents in Tel Aviv.
The People’s Defense Front in Peru’s central Andean region of Ayacucho, announced a one-week deadline for the Southern Peru Copper Corporation to halt its exploration activities in the area before local campesinos launch an indefinite civil strike.
