Two days after launching aerial attacks on Shi’ite enclaves in Baghdad, the US is accused of air raids on police stations in the Kurdish autonomous zone. Jabar Yawer, spokesman for the Kurdish peshmerga militia, said a US helicopter attacked two… Read moreIraq: US attacks Kurds?
Opium production in Afghanistan has hit a record $3 billion this year, accounting for more than 90% of the world’s illegal output, according to a new report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Production is concentrated mainly… Read moreUN: Afghan opium bumper crop
The self-declared “autonomous municipality” of San Juan Copala and the Popular People’s Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) announced they will hold a national meeting of autonomous municipalities, to take place at the indigenous mountain village September 15-16. APPO also said they… Read moreAPPO, Zapatistas hold national meetings on autonomy
The president of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (CIDH), Florentín Meléndez, interviewed the brothers Flavio and Horacio Sosa Villavicencio, leaders of the Popular People’s Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO), at the maximum security prison of Altilplano, in the state of Mexico,… Read moreOaxaca: state government reprimanded on human rights
Mexican federal agents and Chiapas state police evicted several families Aug. 19 from the predios (collective farms) of Nuevo Salvador Allende and El Buen Samaritano, in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. Six family heads were detained, accused of environmental crimes… Read moreChiapas: more evictions from Montes Azules
The Colombian Army’s Third Brigade, based in Cali, was deeply penetrated by drug trafficking mafia, according to a recent criminal investigation. “What the prosecutors’ investigation has shown as it progresses,” reported Bogota’s Semana magazine Aug. 4, “is that ‘Don Diego‘… Read moreColombia: SOA instructors served narco mafia
Starting Aug. 20, Presidents George W. Bush and Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met in Montebello, Canada, to discuss North American integration. The purpose was to advance the little-known second phase of the North American Free Trade… Read moreEnergy, security top secretive NAFTA talks
On Aug. 9, 98 detainees at the federal immigration detention center in San Pedro, California refused to return to Pod 5 in an act of peaceful protest for health and dignity in their living conditions. Over 100 police, immigration and… Read moreICE detainees protest as deaths mount
On the afternoon of Aug. 19, ICE agents arrested activist Elvira Arellano on a city street in downtown Los Angeles and deported her to Tijuana, Mexico within hours. Arellano became an activist shortly after she was arrested in 2002 during… Read moreICE deports sanctuary activist
The LA Times reports Aug. 25: U.S. forces firing from helicopters Friday pursued militiamen loyal to a radical anti-U.S. Shiite cleric into a west Baghdad district, killing at least 18 people, reportedly including some civilians… U.S.-led forces said Friday’s predawn… Read moreIraq: US bombs Shi’ites, tilts to Sunnis?
The New York Times reports Aug. 25: “The number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today… Read moreIraq: detained, displaced rise along with “surge”
A string of blasts tore through the southern Indian city of Hyderabad Aug. 25, killing at least 38 people and injuring 60. Three bombs exploded in a packed auditorium where a laser show was under way at Lumbini Park, an… Read moreMore terror in Hyderabad
