Media accounts widely differ on an offer apparently being extended by Seychelles for naval forces of the People’s Republic of China to have access to the African island nation to police the region against pirates operating out of Somalia.
Tutsi rebels who control army units in Congo’s east may take up arms again if Joseph Kabila does not prevail in the contested presidential elections. Corporate designs on eastern Congo’s vast mineral resources continue to fuel the conflict.
Ayman Joumaa AKA “Junior,” a Lebanese drug kingpin with alleged connections to both Hezbollah and Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel, was charged with drug trafficking and money laundering, the Justice Department and DEA announced.
Three inmates at Corcoran state prison’s supermax Secure Housing Unit who participated in this year’s California prisoner hunger strike issued a statement proposing “10 core demands” for the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In a day of action dubbed “Shutdown Wall Street on the Waterfront,” thousands of protesters blocked cargo trucks at West Coast ports from San Diego to Anchorage, forcing terminals in Oakland, Portland and Longview to halt operations.
The opposition has called an ongoing general strike, civil disobedience campaign and election boycott in a bid to bring down the Assad regime—but called for the Free Syrian Army to halt attacks on the security forces.
The Colombian Armed Forces have created three new “joint task forces” aimed at targeting the core of the FARC guerilla army, in what the government is plugging as a final offensive against Latin America’s oldest insurgency.
A deliberate strategy by Colombia’s former intelligence agency to undermine NGOs and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been revealed in secret documents. The Administrative Security Department (DAS) was recently disbanded.
Climate Justice Now!, a broad coalition of social movements that coordinated protests at the Durban summit, assailed the last-minute agreement, charging that “the richest nations have cynically created a new regime of climate apartheid.”
Reports in the North African press indicate that the US and France have jointly established a secret drone base in the Libyan desert, to seek out Saharan arms trafficking networks of al-Qeada in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
Peru’s Prime Minister Salomón Lerner resigned after failed attempts to negotiate an end to the Cajamarca protests—to be replaced by Oscar Valdés, a former army officer who as interior minister has overseen the police repression in Cajamarca.
El Salvador's government held a ceremony at El Mozote village to ask survivors' forgiveness—just as an ex-military commander takes over as Public Security Minister in a move apparently prompted by the US embassy.
