A Turkish air-strike killed seven family members in a Kurdish village in northern Iraq, a local official said Aug. 21. Qalat Diza mayor Hassan Abdullah said the strike hit two parents and their five children as they rode in a truck the village of Kortek, is located in Qalat Diza township, about 180 kilometers northeast of Sulaimaniya along the Turkish border. The Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq has expressed concern as Turkish warplanes carry out air-strikes against suspected rebel strongholds of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the Kandil Mountains along the border. On Aug. 19, the Turkish military said warplanes and artillery struck more than 100 targets in northern Iraq. Dozens of Turkish soldiers have been killed over the last month in fighting with the PKK. The air raids came in response to a PKK ambush on a Turkish military convoy at in Çukurca in Turkey's eastern province of Hakkari. (CNN, Aug. 21; Hurriyet Daily News, Aug. 20)

The government of Peru's newly elected President Ollanta Humala announced this week that it is suspending the US-backed coca eradication program in the Upper Huallaga Valley, the only ongoing eradication campaign in the country. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Peru has surpassed Colombia as the world's top coca producer, although Colombia maintains a slight lead in cocaine production.

Egypt registered a formal complaint with Israel over the killings of three Egyptian officers at the Sinai border and demanded an immediate investigation on Aug. 19, one day after militants carried out deadly attacks near Israel's Red Sea resort of Eilat. Egyptian security officials said that the three officers were killed when an Israeli helicopter fired at suspected militants who had fled into a crowd of security personnel on the Egyptian side of the border. Dozens of Egyptians demonstrated outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo, burning the Israeli flag and chanting, "Close the embassy! Expel the ambassador!" (AlJazeera, NYT, Aug. 19)

Citing unnamed "Libyan and Arab sources," the pan-Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat on Aug. 17 reported that Moammar Qaddafi has sent one of his closest advisers, Bashir Saleh, to Mali and the Tunisian island of Djerba, to meet with British and French officials to discuss "securing a safe exit for Qaddafi and his family from Libya." Saleh reportedly met in secret with officials from the British Foreign Office and the French Presidency, in an effort to negotiate terms for the besieged strongman's exile.

Israeli air-strikes across the Gaza Strip on Aug. 18 killed at least seven—including Popular Resistance Committees official Khaled Shaath, but also his two-year-old son and a 13-year-old Palestinian boy. The air raids came after coordinated militant attacks left seven Israelis dead—six civilians and one soldier—near the Red Sea tourist town of Eilat. Palestinian gunmen attacked two buses and two cars traveling near the southern resort city just after noon. When Israeli troops arrived, roadside bombs planted by the militants were detonated. Seven militants were killed in subsequent firefights with the soldiers. Israeli officials said they believe that militants crossed from the Gaza Strip into Egypt in order to infiltrate Israel's border near Eilat. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the attacks "demonstrate the weakening of Egypt's control over the Sinai Peninsula and the expansion of terrorist activity there." (JTA, Maan News Agency, Aug. 18)

A Shell Oil spokesman in Aberdeen, Scotland, assured that "everything" possible is being done to contain a massive oil spill from a North Sea pipeline. The leak began Aug. 10 on the pipeline system that serves the Gannet Alpha platform in British waters. But UK authorities say that Shell did not report the leak for two days, and by then more than 200 tons of oil had entered the sea. Said company spokesman Glen Cayley: "This is a significant spill in the context of annual amounts of oil spilled in the North Sea. We care about the environment and we regret that the spill happened. We have taken it very seriously and responded promptly to it." However, officials acknowledged that the pipeline is still believed to contain up to 660 tons of oil.

The amount of radioactive material being emitted from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has fallen to one-fifth that of a month ago and one-10 millionth the levels in mid-March, the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said Aug. 17. Maximum radiation levels near the plant measured since the beginning of August were put at 200 million becquerels per hour—but Goshi Hosono, the cabinet minister in charge of the nuclear crisis, cautioned the 200 million becquerel reading is an estimate, and promised to seek ways of making precise measurements. TEPCO and the government said there is no major change in their timetable for bringing the plant under control. Containment efforts include building a wall of steel plates in front of the existing sea walls for units 1 through 4 to keep contaminated groundwater from entering the ocean. (ENS, Aug. 17)

US Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is promoting a bill to suspend Washington's assistance to three elite Israel Defense Forces units, alleging they are involved in human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Leahy wants aid withheld from the Israeli navy's Shayetet 13 unit, the undercover Duvdevan unit and the Israel Air Force's Shaldag unit. Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a long-time friend of Leahy, met with him in Washington two weeks ago to try to persuade him to withdraw the initiative. Leahy began promoting the legislation after protesters staged a rally outside office, demanding that he denounce the killing by Shayetet 13 commandos of nine Turkish activists who were part of the flotilla to Gaza in May 2011. Leahy, who heads the Senate Appropriations Committee's sub-committee on foreign operations, was the principle sponsor of a 1997 bill prohibiting the US from providing military assistance to foreign military units suspected of human rights abuses or war crimes.