At least 63 people were killed in bombings and armed attacks by the Islamist movement Boko Haram in the northeastern Nigerian town of Damaturu Nov. 5. Bombs went off at both civilian targets and the headquarters of the Yobe state police. A Roman Catholic parish priest told the BBC his church had been burnt down and eight other churches also attacked. Suicide attacks also targeted a military headquarters and Christian theological school in Maiduguri, capital of neighboring Borno state. Boko Haram contacted called Nigeria's Daily Trust newspaper to say it carried out the attacks. The attacks come days after Yobe police commissioner Suleimon Lawal denied that Boko Haram had any presence in the state.

Colombia's Defense Ministry announced Nov. 4 that the army has killed Guillermo Leon Saenz AKA "Alfonso Cano"—the supreme leader of the FARC guerillas. According to Colombia's Radio Caracol, Cano was killed in a bomb raid and found by ground forces in a rural area of the Suárez municipality, Cauca department. The BBC later reported his body had multiple bullet wounds, suggesting he had been killed by ground forces. Cano, 63. assumed leadership of the FARC in May 2008 after the death of founder "Manuel Marulanda."

In a 122-page report, "'You'll Be Fired If You Refuse': Labor Abuses in Zambia's Chinese State-owned Copper Mines," Human Rights Watch charges that despite improvements in recent years, safety and labor conditions at Chinese owned mines in Zambia are worse than at other foreign-owned mines, and that Chinese mine managers often violate government regulations. The report details persistent abuses at four Chinese-run mines, including substandard health and safety conditions, 12- to 18-hour shifts of strenous labor, and anti-union activities. The violations were based on interviews with more than 170 mine workers, from both the four Chinese-run companies and from other multinational copper mining operations. The Chinese companies are subsidiaries of China Non-Ferrous Metals Mining Corp., a state-owned enterprise.

Two days after two Spanish aid workers and one Italian were abducted by suspected al-Qaeda militants at the Sahrawi refugee camps of Tindouf in western Algeria, Spain on Nov. 1 called for a UN investigation to evaluate the security situation in the camps, and to probe possible corruption in the distribution of international aid there. "We have asked the United Nations to send a mission to Algeria to assess the security situation in the camps of Tindouf," Spanish Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez told reporter after talks in Rabat with her Moroccan counterpart Taieb Fassi Fihri. The camps are under the control of the Polisario Front, which seeks the independence of neighboring Western Sahara from Morocco. Algeria, which traditionally backs the Polisario Front, has reportedly deployed both ground and air forces in an "urgent" operation in the remote Saharan region to prevent the escape of the kidnappers. (Al-Arabiya, Oct. 25)

Indigenous and peasant communities in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao are protesting the armed forces' proposal to allow mining companies to establish their own militia force to secure their operations. The Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center is calling on President Benigno Aquino to bar private companies from forming what are to be known as Special CAFGU Armed Auxiliary (SCAA) units, arguing that it is the indigenous peoples and rural communities that are in dire need of protection from violence and attacks, not mining corporations.

Tanzania's last remaining hunter-gatherer tribe won an unprecedented victory over development interests who claimed they were extinct, acquiring a certificate of "customary rights of occupancy" (CCRO) to their communal lands in the Yaeda Chini area of the Great Rift Valley. In announcing the move Oct. 30, Doroth Wanzala, assistant commissioner for land in Tanzania's Northern Zone, said: "We have resolved that the Hadzabe should be given official title deeds to ensure that the country's last hunter-gatherers are not troubled by land-hungry-invaders particularly in the wake of scramble for land." The United Arab Emirates' Safaris Ltd has been seeking to buy the 2,267 square kilometers of virgin bush in northern Tanzania for commercial hunting and tourism. The Hadzabe have resisted efforts to relocate them and "civilize" them since the 1960s by fleeing deeper into the bush.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said Nov. 1 it had begun injecting water and boric acid into Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, after detecting signs of fission. The injection was ordered after analysis of gas samples from the reactor building indicated the presence of xenon 133 and xenon 135, byproducts of a nuclear reaction. "We cannot deny the possibility of a small nuclear fission reaction," TEPCO spokesman Hiroki Kawamata said. The temperature in reactor No. 2 had been brought to below 100 degrees C, one of the conditions for the utility to declare "cold shutdown." TEPCO and the government had said they were on track to bring the damaged reactors to cold shutdown by the end of the year. (AFP, Bloomberg, Nov. 2)

Abdurraheem el-Keib, a dual US-Libyan citizen, was elected prime minister of Libya by leaders of the National Transitional Council who voted in a televised event Oct. 31, dropping ballots into a transparent box. Keib, described favorably as a "technocrat" by the Washington Post, attended the University of Tripoli in 1973, earned his MS at the University of Southern California in 1976, and his Ph.d. at North Carolina State University in 1984. He has taught at the University of Alabama and the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Most recently, he served as chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at the UAE's Petroleum Institute before joining Libya's interim council in the spring. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the US Department of Energy (DoE), Southern Company Services (SC), and the Alabama Power Company (APCO). (AntiWar.com, Nov. 1; WP, Oct. 31; The Petroleum Institute)