Six days before President Nicolas Sarkozy is to visit Algiers, the Algerian veterans' minister Mohamed Cherif Abbas was quoted in the daily Al-Khabar Nov. 26 attributing Sarkozy's rise to a "Jewish lobby" that holds sway over French politics, and implying the president—whose maternal grandfather was Jewish—exploited family connections. (AFP, Nov. 28) The comments came as the new violence in Paris' suburbs reached a height—and spread to Toulouse, where a library was set on fire and a dozen cars were torched. The riots, sparked by the deaths of two teenagers in a police car collision with a motorbike Nov. 25, this time saw North African youth firing on police with shotguns. "This is a real guerrilla war," senior police union official Patrice Ribeiro told RTL radio. (AFP, NYT, Nov. 28)

Japan's House of Councillors passed a bill Nov. 28 to end the nation's air force mission in Iraq. Japan withdrew its ground troops from Iraq in July 2006, but a Japanese unit stationed in Kuwait still provides air support for the Multi-National Force-Iraq. The bill, which passed 133-103, is supported primarily by the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)—and is not expected to pass the more powerful House of Representatives, dominated by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). (Jurist, Nov. 28)

A suicide car bomber Nov. 27 detonated his payload near two armored vehicles used by US-led coalition troops in Kabul, killing at least two civilians and destroying the wall of a nearby house. The Hezb-i-Islami claimed responsibility for the attack. (AP, Nov. 27) (Hezb-i-Islami is led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the primary beneficiaries of US aid in the 1980s.) That same day, US air-strikes killed 12 civilian road workers, the governor of Nuristan province charged. "So far we know that 12 people have been killed by US bombardment," Gov. Tameem Nuristani told Reuters. "They were only poor and innocent road construction workers." The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed there had been fighting in the area, but said no air-strikes had been launched. BBC reported the workers were building a road for the US military under a local contractor. (Reuters, BBC World Service, Nov. 28)

At least 27 women have died in "honor killings" over the past four months in Kurdish Iraq, an official from the regional government said Nov. 26. Aziz Mohammed, human rights minister in the Kurdish administration, said 10 of the murdered women were from Arbil, 11 from Dohuk and six from Sulaimaniyah—the three provinces making up the Kurdish region. "We can say that the violence against women continues" in Iraqi Kurdistan, Mohammed said. He also said 97 women had attempted suicide by self-immolation during those four months.

On Nov. 16, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Wilfredo Vazquez was arrested by federal agents in Tampa, FL, and charged with three counts of knowingly causing a detainee under his supervision to engage in a sexual act. According to the accusation, Vazquez was driving a Jamaican woman, identified in an ICE press release only with the initials "M.C.," from ICE's Krome Service and Processing Center in Miami-Dade to the Broward Transition Center in Pompano Beach on the afternoon of Sept. 21 when he took a detour to his home in Tamarac and raped her there.

On Nov. 13, in its second day of deliberations, a federal jury in Newark, NJ, awarded former asylum seeker Hawa Abdi Jama of Somalia $100,000 in damages after finding the private company that ran an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth negligent in its hiring and training. The jury rejected a claim that Jama's international human rights were violated during her 11-month detention at Elizabeth in 1994-95.

Over 20,000 people gathered outside the gates of Fort Benning, GA, on Nov. 18 to demand the closing of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), a US Army training school for Latin American military and security personnel formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA). Eleven protesters were arrested as they crossed into the grounds of the fort.

Meeting in a heavily guarded military academy on the outskirts of Sucre, Bolivia's Constituent Assembly approved a new Constitution late on Nov. 24 with the support of 136 of the 255 delegates. Two delegates abstained, and the majority of the opposition, led by the Democratic and Social Power (PODEMOS) party, boycotted the session. Most of the votes for the new Constitution came from the leftist Movement to Socialism (MAS) of President Evo Morales, but some opposition delegates backed it, including three from PODEMOS. The Constituent Assembly, which has been meeting for 15 months, approved the document "as a whole" but left some details to be worked out.