On December 16 the Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights (LIMEDDH) reported that a campesino active in the environmental movement in the southern state of Guerrero, Diego Bahena Armenta, hasn't been seen since November 8, when he was kidnapped by eight hooded men in a Nissan van without license plates as he was working with his nephew cleaning the road near the Riscalillo ranch, in Zihuatanejo municipality. His family reported his disappearance immediately to the state police but has received no information on him.

A group of 25 US Catholic peace protesters held a three-day fast starting on Dec. 12 near the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to protest the situation of 500 male Muslim detainees held there for three years as "enemy combatants." The group began the 66-mile walk from Santiago de Cuba to Guantanamo on Dec. 7 and arrived near the base Dec. 11.

From the front page of the New York Times, Dec. 28, via Bellaciao:

Defense lawyers in some of the country’s biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.

Tensions are mounting between Russia and Ukraine over the former's massive hike in the price of natural gas it sells to the latter. Ukraine has until now received cut-price gas in return for allowing Russia to pipe fuel across its territory to western Europe. But Gazprom, the state-owned Russian fuel company, has announced it is raising the price for gas supplied to Ukraine by more than 400%.

A very enlightening piece from the Dec. 28 Christian Science Monitor, "Kremlin reasserts control of oil, gas" by Fred Weir, points to Moscow designs to reassert its power in Eurasia, and possibly eventually on the global stage. This, in turn, sheds much light on why the US is really in Iraq...

More than 3,500 Congolese soldiers, supported by 600 UN troops and helicopter gunships, launched attacks Dec. 24 on guerillas operating in the eastern Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sixteen government troops and some 35 guerillas are reported killed in fighting near the city of Beni in Nord-Kivu province. An Indian blue beret peacekeeper was killed and four of his colleagues wounded when their camp was hit by a guerilla rocket-propelled grenade. But 300 Nepalese peacekeepers and 1,500 government troops captured the guerilla-held village of Nioka, 50 miles north-east of Bunia, the main town in Ituri district. The guerilla militia the operation was launched to uproot, the ADF/NALU (Allied Democratic Forces/National Army for the Liberation of Uganda), is seeking the overthrow of President Yoweri Museveni's regime in Uganda, across the eastern border.

From AP, Dec. 23:

PARIS — A French military tribunal opened an investigation Friday into allegations that French peacekeepers facilitated attacks on ethnic minority Tutsis during the 1994 genocide of more than half a million Rwandans, judicial officials said.

From Indian Country Today, Dec. 16:

PORTLAND, Maine - American Indian leaders from four tribes in Maine met with representatives of the Venezuelan Embassy and became the first tribes in the nation to begin working out details for the delivery of low-cost heating oil to tribal members.