At least five people are dead and several seriously injured after a group of club-wielding thugs attacked residents of Baijiamao village in Lin Xian county of central China's Shanxi province Oct. 12. The villagers were attempting to protect a local coal mine which they assert is their collective property when a mob of some 100 presumably hired by the mine's new private owner stormed the site in an attempt to remove the residents who had gathered there. The thugs set on the residents with broadswords, steel pipes and shovels, while one even drove a truck into a crowd of villagers.

From Human Rights Watch, Oct. 20:

The Chinese government should immediately account for all detainees in its custody and allow independent investigations into the July 2009 protests in Urumqi and their aftermath, Human Rights Watch said in a new report on enforced "disappearances" released today.

Prosecutors have re-opened an investigation into charges that Colombia's Vice President Francisco Santos attempted to organize illegal paramilitary groups, the office of the Fiscalía announced Oct. 19. The Fiscalía opened an initial investigation in 2007 after a former paramilitary boss, Salvatore Mancuso, testified that Santos had proposed creating the Bloque Capital paramilitary group in the late 1990s.

The Mexico Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) presented a report in Mexico City on Oct. 13 on the dangers facing human rights activists in Mexico. According to the report, "Defending Human Rights: Caught Between Commitment and Risk," the OHCHR found 128 cases of aggression against activists from January 2006 to August 2009, including 10 murders. OHCHR staff visited 10 of Mexico's 32 states to compile the report, interviewing non-governmental organizations (NGOs), human rights defenders, victims of aggression, journalists and government authorities.

At least 150,000 Mexicans joined a march from the Angel of Independence in downtown Mexico City to the central Zócalo Plaza in the late afternoon of Oct. 15 to protest the Oct. 10 seizure by Mexican soldiers and federal police of facilities of the government-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC). Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's center-right administration decreed the liquidation of the company and terminated its employees as the security forces were occupying the plants. The number of workers laid off is now said to be more than 43,000.

A one-day general strike protesting plans to lay off 16,970 of Puerto Rico's 180,000 public employees in November shut down all state-owned enterprises and the island's schools and colleges on Oct. 15; most private businesses reportedly remained open remained open, and ports and airports were said to be functioning normally. There were protests throughout Puerto Rico, with tens of thousands of people converging on San Juan's Plaza Las Américas, the biggest shopping mall in the Caribbean.

On Oct. 12 tens of thousands of indigenous people in the region marked 517 years since the arrival of European colonizer Christopher Columbus by protesting around current issues such as the seizure of traditional lands by businesses and the damage to the environment from mining and oil drilling.

A two-judge panel of the UK's High Court ruled Oct. 16 that US intelligence documents containing details pertinent to torture allegations by a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay should be made public. The former detainee, Binyam Mohamed, 31, says Britain's domestic intelligence agency, MI5, knew he was being tortured when it worked with the CIA on his case after he was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and taken to a prison in Morocco. The Foreign Office said it would appeal the ruling, delaying any release. Mohamed, who was born in Ethiopia, was flown to London in February from Guantánamo on the grounds that he was a legal resident in Britain before leaving for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001. (NYT, Oct. 16)