Mexican President Felipe Calderón, speaking at the US Congress, urged reinstatement of the assault-weapon ban, saying violence in Mexico escalated when it expired six years ago.
In a harrowing report from Juárez, National Public Radio provides further evidence that the Mexican government is tilting to the Sinaloa Cartel in the country’s increasingly violent narco wars.
Retired Mexican army general Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, shot in an supposed mugging, is a veteran of counterinsurgency operations who was investigated for links to the Juárez Cartel.
Costa Rica’s Caribbean ports signed an agreement with the dockworkers union for privatization of the facilities. The move follows a “coup d’état” that purged union leadership.
The Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) reported that the police and military forcibly removed campesinos from at least four cooperatives in the northern Atlantic region of Honduras.
Several thousand people marched in Port-au-Prince in the latest and largest in a series of demonstrations against the government of Haitian President René Garcia Préval.
Haiti’s agriculture ministry accepted a “gift” of 523.6 tons of hybrid corn seeds and 2,067 kg of vegetable seeds from the Monsanto Company—despite activist fears that they are genetically modified.
Police took control of the entrances to the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan in an effort to cut off student protesters on the campus from supporters outside.
Afghan opium farmers are convinced that a fungus outbreak that has damaged poppy crops is US biological warfare. The Pentagon has considered using opium-eating fungi before.
A proposed strategy document dubbed “NATO 2020” calls for an expanded readiness and capacity to operate beyond the borders of member states, and names the campaign in Afghanistan as a top priority.
Iraq’s electoral commission announced that a partial recount of the parliamentary vote will not alter seat allocations. Delay in forming a new government may leave Iraq vulnerable to violence.
Former Mexican presidential candidate and a leader of the ruling National Action Party (PAN) Diego Fernández de Cevallos was declared missing, in an attack being blamed on narco gangs.
