A year ago, El Salvador's baseball cap-donning president Nayib Bukele declared Bitcoin legal tender in the country—a global first that has been a flop. Since then, Bitcoin has lost half its value. Many Salvadorans, who were dubious on the plan to begin with, cashed in on a $30 government bonus offered as an incentive to download a dedicated Bitcoin app, only to delete it once they received the money. The lack of enthusiasm may have protected people from losses due to Bitcoin's volatility. But many in the country have still sunk deeper into poverty in the past year. One reason—in addition to the country's overall financial struggles—is a crackdown on gang violence by the self-described "dictatorial" president that has seen more than 52,000 alleged gang members rounded up since March. Instead of catching criminals, innocent people are being arrested to meet quotas. The majority of those detained may not even have links to gangs, according to local media, and the arrests have left many poor families without breadwinners.

A German court on Sept. 13 rejected a lawsuit filed by environmental group Deutsche Umwelthilfe (Environmental Action Germany) seeking to bar Mercedes-Benz from selling cars with combustion engines that emit greenhouse gases after 2030. Deutsche Umwelthilfe asserted that Mercedes-Benz must comply with the Paris Climate Protection Agreement and the German Climate Protection Act regarding reduction in its vehicles' CO2 emissions. Deutsche Umwelthilfe charged that the "new vehicles from Mercedes have the highest CO2 emissions of all manufacturers in Europe," and "German car manufacturers have been preventing effective climate protection laws for decades."

Drone strikes and unexplained explosions on the Russian-annexed Criman Peninsula have prompted the Moscow-controlled administration to urge citizens to hunt for possible saboteurs. This comes amid widening repression on civil society, especially targeting the Crimean Tatar people. On Sept. 15, a local court jailed at least four people involved in a Tatar wedding in Bakhchysarai for performing a Ukrainian patriotic song, "Red Kalyna." Each accused performer was held for several days.

In Episode 141 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg defends the notion that he lives on New York's Lower East Side, repudiating those who would insist that his neighborhood is actually the East Village or (worse) NoHo. Weinberg traces the nomenclature controversies going all the way back to the Lenape indigenous villages of the area, Dutch and English colonial settlement, the riots and uprisings of the "Gangs of New York" era, the neighborhood's Puerto Rican identity as Loisaida, the origin of the name "East Village" in the hippie explosion of the 1960s, its cooptation by the real estate industry in the gentrification of the 1980s, and the resultant last gasp of anarchist resistance. Weinberg counts himself among a surviving coterie of old-timers who still consider the entire area to be the Lower East Side. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

An Iranian government entity enforcing Islamic rules says the Intelligence Ministry has arrested 300 anti-hijab activist "ringleaders" working "for the enemy." A spokesman of the Enjoining Good & Forbidding Evil Headquarters said Sept. 11 that the activists were arrested in accordance with the new Hijab & Chastity Regulations, which officially extend the mandatory hijab to social media posts. This is to be monitored by the government's facial recognition software that was previously used during the pandemic to track if people were wearing face masks.

Dozens of municipal deputies from Moscow and St. Petersburg on Sept. 12 issued a public statement calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to resign. "President Putin's actions are detrimental to the future of Russia and its citizens," reads the petition shared on Twitter by Xenia Torstrem, a deputy for St. Petersburg's Semyonovsky district. The call comes amid claims of vote-rigging in the previous week's local and regional elections—as well as a dramatic advance by Kyiv's forces that marks the most significant setback yet in Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. Several towns have been liberated in the Ukrainian counter-offensive in northeastern Kharkiv region.

New clashes broke out on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan Sept. 13, with each side accusing the other of violating the ceasefire. Fighting was first reported near the Lachin Corrdior, which connects Armenia to the autonomous ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh. But attacks on the Armenian border have also been launched from the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan (also rendered Nakhichevan or Naxçıvan), which is cut off from the rest of Azerbaijan by Armenian territory. A land corridor through Armenia to Nakhchivan is one of Azerbaijan's key outstanding demands in the conflict. (See map)

More than 500 indigenous leaders from across the Amazon, meeting in Lima Sept. 7, issued an urgent call for the world to act against the destruction of the planet's largest rainforest. The statement, "Amazonia Against the Clock," was approved by the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), at a summit of representatives from nine countries. (EFE) The statement invokes the Emergency Motion 129 issued in September 2021 in Marseille by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), calling for "permanent protection" of the remaining 80% of intact rainforest by 2025. (InfoRegion)