A court in China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Dec. 31 handed down prison terms to six herders who protested the seizure of local grazing land by a forestry company. Four received suspended sentences and were released, while two remain behind bars because they refused to plead guilty, rights groups and relatives said. The trial took place in Ongniud (Chinese: Wengniute) banner (county), which was the scene of protests last year when traditional lands of the local at Bayannuur gachaa (village) were turned over to the state-run Shuanghe Forestry Co. The six were arrested in June on charges of "sabotaging production management"—apparently a reference to blocking company equipment. The four who were released had to pay "compensation" to the company. The remaining two, named as Tulguur and Tugusbayar, each received terms of two years. The trial was closed to the public, and their relatives were only told of the sentence several days later.  Nearly 200 herders staged protests in front of Ongniud city hall in late December as the case drew to a close. "The verdict is clearly unjust, this is a land dispute and not a criminal case," a lawyer for the defendants told Reuters by telephone, declining to be identified for fear of retribution.

Detained Uighur scholar and activist Ilham Tohti was accused by Chinese authorities of "separatism" in Jan. 25 statement, and formal charges against him are expected imminently. The Bureau of Public Security in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province, said Tohti recruited followers through his website to incite ethnic hatred and spread separatist ideology. In an online statement, the bureau charged that Tohti told his students that Uigurs should use violence and oppose the government as China opposed Japanese invaders during World War II. It also claimed Tohti told his students that those who attacked Xinjiang police in previous incidents were heroes. "Ilham Tohti made use of his capacity as a teacher to recruit, lure and threaten some people to form a ring and join hands with key people from the East Turkestan Independence Movement to plan and organise people to go abroad to take part in separatist activities," according to the statement posted to the bureau's official Weibo feed.

The Turkish armed forces on Jan. 29 attacked a convoy of al-Qaeda-linked rebel group ISIS in Syria in, destroying three vehicles, according to Turkish media reports. Turkish F-16s apparently struck the convoy "after militants opened fire on a military outpost" on the Turkey-Syria border. (Al Jazeera, Jan. 29) The skirmish comes amid reports that both ISIS and the Nusra Front, both al-Qaeda affiliates, have seized control of most of Syria's oil and gas resources, which lie in the country's north near the Turkish border, and are using the proceeds to underwrite their wars against both rival rebels and the Bashar Assad regime. While the oil and gas fields are in decline, control over them has been key to the growing power of the two groups. ISIS is even said to be selling fuel to the Assad government—lending weight to claims by opposition leaders that the regime is secretly backing the Qaedists to weaken the other rebel armies and discourage international support for their cause. (NYT, Jan. 28; The Telegraph, Jan. 20) 

World War 4 Report has been keeping a dispassionate record of Barack Obama's moves in dismantling, continuing and escalating (he has done all three) the oppressive apparatus of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) established by the Bush White House. On the day of his 2014 State of the Union address, we offer the following annotated assessment of which moves over the past year have been on balance positive, neutral and negative, and arrive at an overall score:

Peru's Yanacocha mining company is implicated in another forced eviction of a campesino family in the northern Cajamarca region. Campesino Segundo Lindorfo Bolaños Atalaya said that on Jan. 19, a mixed force of National Police and Yanacocha security personnel ejected him from his plot within a predio (collective land holding) at Tragadero Grande, Sorochuco district, Celendín province. Bolaños insisted that, contrary to company claims, his plot of six hectares had never been sold to Yanacocha. The plot lies near Laguna Azul, which Yanacocha hopes to convert into a waste pit for the pending Conga project, a new expansion of its massive gold operations in the area. Bolaños charged that Yanacocha's exploration activities on the Conga site had contaminated his plot, which he has long worked with his family. (Celendín Libre, Jan. 23) 

A state prosecutor on Jan. 24 cleared Peru's imprisoned ex-president Alberto Fujimori of charges that he was responsible for the forced sterilization of thousands of indigenous peasant women in the 1990s. Marco Guzmán Baca of Lima's Second Subprovinicial Penal Prosecutor also announced that no charges will be brought against former health ministers Alejandro Aguinaga, Marino Costa Bauer and Eduardo Yong Motta. Speaking to Comercio newspaper, he said his investigation failed to find a "hierarchical and rigidly vertical power structure" in the Health Ministry such as exists in the military. He also said that while the "physical integrity" of women had sometimes been improperly threatened, in no cases were sterilizations actually forced. The only charges will be brought against six doctors implicated in the death of a woman who was sterilized in Cajamarca. (Peru This Week, Jan. 25; Comercio, La Republica, Peru.com, Jan. 24)

Bogotá Mayor Gustavo Petro, ordered to step down last month by Colombia's Prosecutor General Alejandro Ordóñez, won a reprieve Jan. 14, when Magistrate José Armenta of the Supreme Tribunal of Cundinamarca department ruled that the order should not be carried out until it has been established that it complied with the law. Petro, who is allowed to remain in office while the case is on appeal, responded to the ruling by saying "justice had won." But Ordóñez did not say that he would honor the court's ruling, and Petro told supporters in the Plaza de Bolívar just one week later that he believed he will be ordered to step down by the end of January. He suggested he would acquiesce, saying: "This is the final week; this story is over." (Caracol Radio, Jan. 23; BBC News, Jan. 15; El Tiempo, Jan. 14)

Rights groups warn that Embera Chamí indigenous leader Flaminio Onogama Gutiérrez is at risk following the killing of his two nephews in southwestern Colombia. On Jan. 1, Berlain Saigama Gutiérrez and Jhon Braulio Saigama, themselves leaders at the Embera Chamí community of La Esperanza, El Dovio municipality, Valle del Cauca, were found stabbed to death. The bodies were discovered with multiple wounds and signs of torture in different places from where they had been abducted on Dec. 30 and 31. The presumed paramilitary gunmen who seized them first demanded to know the whereabouts of Onogama Gutiérrez. (Amnesty International, Jan. 17) A sample letter to send to Colombian authorities demanding action in the case is online at I Save Lives.