Lebanon’s hashish heartland of the Bekaa Valley is increasingly embroiled in the civil war raging across the border in Syria, with a wave of sectarian clashes and abductions.
Gangland street shoot-outs in Tamaulipas left scores dead this past week just south of the Texas border—without a word of coverage in Mexico’s media, due to cartel threats.
Hamid Karzai barred US Special Forces from two strategic provinces following reports of atrocities, as US Marines level similar charges against Afghan police they are training.
Security forces in Malaysian Borneo are in a stand-off with some 100 men they say are insurgents from the Philippine island of Sulu raising an ancestral claim to the territory.
Kurdish militias in Syria—some linked to the PKK—are battling jihadist rebels, but it is uncertain if they necessarily back the Damascus regime.
Authorities in India say that the Naxalite guerillas, following a series of reversals, have taken refuge in the northeast, where they are trading opium for guns from Burma.
Juventina Villa Mojica, an environmental activist in Mexico's southern state of Guerrero, was killed along with her 10-year-old son in a mountaintop attack by 30 gunmen.
Mexican think-tanks say that state measures for cannabis legalization in the US will undercut cartel profits, and note that personal users bear the brunt of enforcement.
In a landslide victory, Montana voters approved an initiative stating “that corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights because they are not human beings.”
Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos on Día de La Raza issued an official apology to indigenous communities in the Amazon for devastation caused by the rubber boom.
Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos rejected a proposal by the FARC for a ceasefire during talks set to begin in Oslo next mont to end to the country's long civil war.
Under pressure to address the ongoing wave of targeted assassinations in Colombia, President Iván Duque for the first time spoke before the National Commission to Guarantee Security, formed by the previous government to address continuing violence in the country—which has only worsened since he took office last year. Duque said 4,000 people are now under the government's protection program for threatened citizens. But his office implied that the narco trade is entirely behind the growing violence. Interior Minister Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez told the meeting: "This great problem is derived from the 200,000 hectares of illicit crops that we have in Colombia." However, it is clear that the narco economy is but part of a greater nexus of forces that fuel the relentless terror—all related to protecting rural land empires and intimidating the peasantry. (Photo via Contagio Radio)
