Hundreds of police officers, sheriffs' deputies and military servicemen from across the country—many donning battle fatigues—converged on downtown Oakland's Marriott Hotel Oct. 25 for the opening of the Urban Shield security confab and weapons show. National and international law enforcement agencies joined with defense industry contractors to attend seminars and display wares for three days. Outside the Marriott, scores of community activists protested the event. United under the name Facing Urban Shield, the coalition said the militarist tone of the event highlighted the worsening human rights records of police forces around the US, and the waste of billions of tax-dollars on prisons. They also charged that the showcasing of arms dealers undercut crime-plagued Oakland's efforts to stem gun violence.

Riot police in Warsaw used rubber bullets on Nov. 11 to break up groups of masked far-right youths who threw fire-crackers and set fire to parked cars during a march marking Poland's Independence Day. It was the third year running that the annual thousands-strong nationalist march turned violent as extremists broke off to carry out attacks. As the throngs of marchers chanted "God, honor, fatherland!",  the break-away militants this year singled out for attack two squatter buildings run by left-wing youth as community centers. A statement from the Syrena (Siren) and Przychodnia (Clinic) squatter collectives said: "They came well-prepared: hammers, bolt cutters and pipes in hand, they cut the lock on our gate, forced the doors, broke the windows, burned two cars and wounded our friends." The statement accused police of holding back and giving the attackers a free hand. The rioters also targeted Zbawiciela Square, Warsaw's bohemian district, where they set fire to an arch across the square, which residents had decorated in rainbow colors as a symbol of tolerance, diversity and esepcially gay rigts. The arch was a reduced to its charred skeleton. 

Nearly half a million were left without electricity for 15 hours after 18 substations were blown up Oct. 27 in a wave of coordinated attacks across Mexico's west-central state of Michoacán, the latest battleground in the country's relentless cartel wars. Six gasoline stations were also burned down near the state capital Morelia, in what authorities said was a terror campaign by the Knights Templar cartel. Gov. Fausto Vallejo Figueroa of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) said the violence was set off by the Jalisco Cartel, based in the neighboring state of that name, seeking to "seize territory" controlled by the Knights Templars in Michoacán, and warned of a "great massacre" (matazón).

Ethnic Uighurs from around the world gathered in Washington DC this week to commemorate the anniversary of two short-lived independent republics set up by their forefathers within what is today the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. Around 100 Uighurs attended a ceremony Nov. 12 at Capitol Hill to remember the establishment of the East Turkestan republics on Nov. 12 in 1933 and 1944. Rebiya Kadeer, president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, praised  those who founded the republics, and called on the Uighur people to remain strong in the face of what she called a policy of "repression" under the current Chinese government. "The Uyghur people have been suffering under the oppressive government of China since the destruction of the Uyghur republics; however, the level of repression has since been extended to our beliefs and customs," she said at the ceremony at the Rayburn House of Representatives Office Building. 

A new riot between rival gangs in the dangerously overcrowded prison at  Altamira, in the Mexican border state Tamaulipas, left seven inmates dead Oct. 26.  State authorities said the prisoners were killed with makeshift knives in a fight in one cellblock at the facility, officially known as the Execution and Sanction Center (CEDES). Thirty-one inmates died in a riot in the same prison early last year, pointing to a crisis rooted in the confluence of teeming lock-ups and the bloody narco wars being waged in Tamaulipas both inside and outside the prisons. The state is currently Mexico's most violent. The CEDES was designed to hold 2,000 inmates, but now has a population of more than 3,000. (AP, Notimex, Oct. 26)

The current expansion of the Panama Canal will allow close to 90% of the world's 370-vessel liquified natural gas (LNG) fleet to pass through by 2015, the Panama Canal Authority announced Oct. 30. Currently the canal can accommodate only 8.6% of the global LNG fleet. Voyages to Asia from the US will cost 24% less than longer routes, according to the authority. The US, now the world's top natural gas producer due to extraction from shale rock, is projected to  become the third-largest LNG exporter by 2020. Excavation to double the Panama Canal's capacity, which began in 2007, is said to be 64% complete. (Bloomberg, Nov. 4; Platts, Oct. 30; IBT, Sept. 20)

Directors of the Americas sections of Amnesty International on Oct. 30 sent an open letter to Paraguay's senators demanding immediate restitution of usurped lands to the Enxet indigenous community of Sawhoyamaxa in the Gran Chaco region, charging that a 2006 ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CIDH) in favor of the community is going unenforced. In August, the government issued a decree calling for purchase of 14,000 hectares of usurped Sawhoyamaxa lands from a local rancher and their return to the community, but the rancher has refused to negotiate. Enxet communities began legal action for return of their lands in 1991, after which they were evicted from the usurped lands, where many had been employed as ranch hands. The Sawhoyamaxa community was forced to relocate to unused lands on the side of a highway, where they have since been living in poverty, with no access to basic services. The CIDH decision alo called for the restitution of Enxet communities Yakye Axa and Xámok Kásek—cases which likewise remain outstanding. (ABC Color, Nov. 8; Ultima Hora, Oct. 30; AI, Sept. 29, 2011)

Colombia's government and the FARC rebels signed a landmark agreement on Nov. 6 that is supposed to guarantee the guerrilla group's political participation. The accord is the second of six foreseen pacts to end nearly 50 years of civil war in Colombia. "We have come to a fundamental agreement about the second point of the agenda," FARC and government negotiators said in a joint statement read by the Norwegian delegate, one of the mediators at the peace talks in Havana. The pact, which comes just two weeks before the one-year anniversary of the opening of the talks, outlines "guarantees for the exercise of the political opposition in general and in particular for the new movements that arise after the signing of the Final Agreement." Details are not be made public until a final deal has been signed.