Egypt’s Bedouin, who say they are treated as second class citizens in their Sinai desert homeland, are starting to organize for equal rights. They have long been stigmatized as having collaborated with the Israeli occupation in 1967.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou announced he would dissolve his cabinet as a general strike shut Athens in protest of his new austerity plan and protesters blockaded the doors of parliament.
Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his involvement with a terrorist training camp in the province of Aceh to prepare Islamic radicals to carry out attacks in Jakarta.
The US is building a secret airbase “somewhere in the Middle East” from which the CIA can launch drone attacks against al-Qaeda targets in Yemen, in a hedge against the CIA being kicked out in a post-revolutionary situation.
Protesters called off their roadblocks in the Peruvian province of Carabaya as the government announced a suspension of the Inambari hydro-compex—after the project’s contractor expressed concerns about regional unrest.
Walter Aduviri, leader of the Aymara protest movement in Peru’s southern Andean region of Puno, is under siege in the studios of Lima’s Panamericana TV station, with police surrounding the building to carry out arrest orders.
Officials in Peru this week denied claims by UK-based Survival International that the government plans to abolish the Murunahua Territorial Reserve, created in 1997 to protect “uncontacted” bands of the Murunahua and other native peoples.
A court in St. Petersburg, Russia, sent two members of a neo-Nazi group behind bars for life for the murder of several African immigrants, North Caucasians and anti-fascist activists in St. Petersburg and Moscow over the past several years.
A NATO official said the alliance is considering air-strikes on Libya’s ancient Roman ruins of Leptis Magna, sparking statements of concern from the UN. Qaddafi’s forces have already reportedly shelled the World Heritage Site of Ghadamès.
We noted last year the FBI raids on activists in the midwest over their alleged ties to the PFLP and the FARC. We’ve also noted the hardline proclivities of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, whose harsh “anti-terrorist” measures have bottlenecked free… Read moreActivists protest FBI raids in FARC-PFLP case
Haitians left homeless by the January 2010 earthquake demonstrated in Port-au-Prince to demand action on the housing situation and an end to forced evictions from the displaced persons camps.
US cables released by WikiLeaks show that “[t]he US embassy in Haiti worked closely with factory owners…to aggressively block a paltry minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers” in 2009.
