Iraq's Oil Ministry said on Aug. 29 the agreement Germany's RWE public utility signed with the Kurdistan Regional Government, which included possible future gas supply for the Nabucco pipeline project, is illegal. RWE announced two days earlier that it had signed a gas cooperation agreement with Iraq's autonomous Kurdish government.

Our August issue featured the story BP: The Case for Public Ownership by Billy Wharton, a reprint from In These Times. Our multiple-choice Exit Poll was: "Should BP be nationalzied?" We received 16 votes. The results follow:

Private security firm Blackwater violated US arms trafficking regulations when training Colombian military personnel in 2005, a State Department report indicates. The controversial firm, renamed Xe Services LLC in 2009, is to pay $42 million for violating US law, including the unauthorized military training of Colombian soldiers—evidently for private service in Iraq and Afghanistan—in April and May 2005.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Aug. 28 promised to return 6 million hectares of farmland stolen by paramilitary groups after the original owners were forcibly displaced. The president said he will soon present congress with a Land Restitution Law aimed at restoring lands to the displaced, who now number more than 3 million. (Colombia Reports, Aug. 28)

Authorities in the south of Colombia on Aug. 29 found the bodies of two indigenous leaders who had been shot by unknown assassins. Ramiro Inampues and his wife, Maria Lina Galindez, were reported missing two days earlier, after Inampues failed to attend the regular session of the Guachucal Council in Nariño department, where he held a seat for the Indigenous Social Alliance (ASI). The bodies were found in a ditch in El Común, a pueblo near the border with Ecuador.

Four people were detained Aug. 25 for a deadly attack on Chinese military police last week in the far western region of Xinjiang, state media reported. In the Aug. 19 attack, a member of the Uighur minority apparently rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into a checkpoint at a highway intersection near the city of Aksu, some 400 miles west of the provincial capital Urumqi and 37 miles from China's border with Kyrgyzstan. Six police were killed and 15 injured in the first major terrorist attack in China since 2008. (Reuters, Aug. 25; CSM, People's Daily, Aug. 19)

In a New York Times op-ed Aug. 26, "China's Discreet Hold on Pakistan's Northern Borderlands," Selig S. Harrison of the Center for International Policy writes that Islamabad has effectively handed over de facto control of the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Beijing. Although the region is largely closed to the outside world, Harrison cites reports indicating a "simmering rebellion against Pakistani rule and the influx of an estimated 7,000 to 11,000 soldiers of China's People's Liberation Army." He describes the development as "a quiet geopolitical crisis" in the Himalayan borderlands of contested Kashmir.

An indigenous tribe in India has won a stunning victory over one of the world's biggest mining companies. In an unprecedented move, India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has blocked Vedanta Resources' controversial plan to mine bauxite on the sacred hills of the Dongria Kondh tribe. 
Ramesh said Vedanta has shown a "shocking" and "blatant disregard for the rights of the tribal groups." The Minister has also questioned the legality of the massive refinery Vedanta has already built below the hills.
 The news is a crushing defeat for Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, Vedanta's majority owner and founder.