Having dismissed a case brought under CAFTA, a World Bank tribunal granted Pacific Rim Mining jurisdiction under El Salvador’s own investment law to sue the Central American republic for failure to approve a mine opposed by local campesinos.
Three prominent lawmakers publicly resigned from President Ollanta Humala’s ruling Gana Perú coalition over the government’s violent suppression of protests against the Xstrata Tintaya copper mine in Cuzco’s Espinar province.
Twelve children were injured in a police raid on an “illegal” Islamic school at Hotan, in China’s restive Xinjiang province. Authorities say school staff set off an explosive, but rights groups say the casualties were caused when police used tear gas.
Amnesty International urged Israel to release all “administrative detainees” or immediately try them under international fair trial standards. The report protests that Israel continues to use “emergency measures” dating to the British Mandate period.
Former Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan told the current government to abandon nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, comparing the nuclear industry’s hold on society to that of the Imperial military during World War II.
Tokyo’s notoriously nationalist governor Shintaro Ishihara is pushing a plan for the metropolitan government to purchase and annex the China-claimed Senkaku Islands in the hydrocarbon-rich East China Sea—without consulting local Okinawa officials.
The official US hand-wringing is all for public consumption. On June 4, 1989, China’s rulers proved to the world that they were willing to slaughter their own citizens in the interests of “stability.” They were rewarded with massive investment.
The Guatemalan government has begun a process virtually closing down the agency in charge of preserving and investigating military and police records from the country’s bloody 1960-1996 civil war.
The body of indigenous teacher and activist Teódulo Santos Girón was found in Mexico’s Michoacán state, the night after he was abducted. He was the 29th murder victim from the rural community of Ostula, site of an ongoing land dispute.
Harassed by student protests, Enrique Peña Nieto of the former entrenched PRI political machine is still favored to win Mexico’s July 1 presidential elections, but polls released at the end of May showed his lead slipping.
The deal between Tuareg rebels of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and the jihadi faction Ansar Dine for creation of an “Islamic state” in Mali’s northern breakaway region has reportedly collapsed.
Amid a wave of anti-immigrant protests and harsh new laws, Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishaii complains that most of the “Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man.”
