UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon "has expressed his dismay at the continuation of demolitions, evictions and the installment of Israeli settlers in Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem," a statement said Dec. 2. Speaking from outside the Sheikh Jarrah home of the al-Kurd family, which was occupied by Israeli settlers earlier in the day, Richard Miron, spokesperson for the UN special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, reiterated the concerns of the secretary general at the continued Israeli violations in Jerusalem.

Egypt has become a police state where citizens receive no protection from torture, human rights groups said in a report published Dec. 3. "The basic feature of human rights in Egypt today is the prevalence of a policy of exception in which those responsible for violations usually escape punishment amid a climate of impunity intentionally created and fostered for several decades," said the report by 16 Egyptian human rights groups.

Deja Vu in Peru — 15 Years After NAFTA
For those following the cycle of free trade "reform" and resultant revolutionary upsurge in Latin America, there was a sense of deja vu in this year's bloody headlines from Peru. In 1993, in preparation for NAFTA, Mexico pushed through constitutional changes allowing privatization of communally held peasant lands. This was the key factor that led to the indigenous Zapatista uprising in Chiapas on New Years Day 1994, the exact moment NAFTA took effect. The Zapatistas anticipated—correctly—that the new policy would mean a massive expropriation of the peasantry from their ancestral lands and a flight to urban shantytowns and ultimately, north of the border. This history now appears to be repeating itself in Peru—where government plans to privatize the communally held indigenous lands of the Amazon rainforest to international oil companies in preparation for a new Free Trade Agreement with Washington has sparked a popular uprising and an unprecedented alliance between Amazonian peoples, highland campesinos and urban workers.

The US Department of Justice announced Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 the transfer of four detainees from Guantánamo Bay to three European countries, as the detainee population at the detention facility continues to be reduced. Two of the former detainees, Tunisian natives Adel Ben Mabrouk and Mohamed Riadh Ben Nasri, were transferred to Italy and will stand trial there. The other detainees include an unidentified Palestinian man transferred to Hungary, the first to be accepted under the agreement forged between the US and Hungary in September, and an Algerian, Saber Lahmar, who was transferred to France. It is unclear when the Italian trial will begin, though Italian authorities may be waiting for transfer of a third Tunisian man. (Jurist, Dec. 1)

Former US soldier Steven Green Nov. 30 challenged the law used to convict him in civilian court for his role in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family in Mahmudiya. Green filed an appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit seeking to overturn the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), which gives the US federal courts jurisdiction over cases involving crimes committed overseas by people serving in the US armed forces. He is arguing that he should not have been tried in civilian court but rather a military trial. Green is also challenging the validity of his discharge from the military, which enabled him to be tried in civilian court under MEJA.

President Barack Obama has ordered 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, but pledged he would begin to withdraw the military by 2011. The new deployment over six months will bring US troop strength in the country to more than 100,000. (Shortly after taking office, Obama doubled US troop levels in the country from 30,000 to 60,000.) Some 32,000 other foreign troops are serving in Afghanistan. In his Dec. 1 speech at the West Point military academy, Obama said any comparison with Vietnam was based on "a false reading of history." (BBC News, AlJazeera, Dec. 1)

At about 10 PM on Nov. 29, Honduras' Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) announced at a press conference that Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa of the center-right National Party (PN) had won the presidency in the general elections held that day; Hondurans also voted for deputies to the National Congress and the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN) and for members of the nation's municipal governments. With 8,682 ballot boxes counted, about 60% of the total, Lobo had won 52.29% of the votes, while his main rival, Elvin Santos of the badly divided Liberal Party (PL, also center-right), trailed with 35.74%. The remaining three candidates got less than 3% each; more than 6% of the votes were blank or invalid. The TSE projected that the turnout was 61.3% of the voting population, about six percentage points higher than in the 2005 elections.

Thousands of campesinos blocked highways in western Guatemala on Nov. 25 to press a demand for the government to allocate 350 million quetzales (about $42 million) to the National Lands Fund (Fontierras) for renting farmland to be used by more than 100,000 campesino families. The protesters stopped traffic on six highways in Cuatro Caminos, Totonicapán, Los Encuentros, and La Cumbre at kilometer 123 of the Las Verapaces and Las Victorias road, between Quetzaltenango and Colomba Costa Cuca. According to José Hernández—one of the leaders of the Coordinating Committee of Regional, Campesino and Independent Organizations, which called the protest—every two hours the protesters were opening the roads up and letting traffic pass for one hour. The organizers said 10,000 campesinos took part; the police estimate was 5,000.