Well, it finally came to an actual clash—albeit, thank goodness, with water cannon, not actual munitions—over the contested East China Sea islands, and it was not China but Taiwan that provoked the escalation. On Sept. 25, some 40 Taiwanese fishing vessels accompanied by 12 patrol boats dispatched by Taipei entered waters off the islets that the Chinese call Diaoyu, the Japanese call Senkaku, and the Taiwanese call Diaoyutai or Tiaoyutai. When a Japanese Coast Guard ship fired a water cannon to disperse the fishing boats, a Taiwanese patrol ship fired its own water cannon at the Japanese ship. The Taiwanese ships were apparently given a warning to clear off but refused, asserting that they had the right to be in their own territorial waters. Many of the Taiwanese ships were flying banners declaiming their national right to the islands. The Taiwanese fleet, which approached the islands at around 8 AM, departed by midday, according to Japanese authorities. (Japan Times, Sept. 26; The Telegraph, Sept. 25)

Aung San Suu Kyi's visit to the US last week won wide media attention as she met with Hillary Clinton, was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, and addressed the US Institute of Peace. (VOA, Daily Beast, Sept. 18) The world paid little note as, simultaneously, fighting flared in Burma's northern Kachin state between government troops and the Kachin Independence Army, leaving at least 150 displaced. Villagers fleeing the fighting have taken refuge in the town of Hpakant in the west of the state, with local relief groups struggling to provide assistance to displaced residents. Pastor Naw Ja of a Catholic church in Hpakant said there are about 1,000 displaced persons being sheltered in his parish after fleeing fighting in nearby villages over the past months. "There are many difficulties—there are outbreaks of diseases such as flu, diarrhea, malaria and it's getting increasingly difficult to continue providing them with food and shelter," said Naw Ja. (Democratic Voice of Burma, Sept. 25)

Six men accused of murdering 13 crew members of two Chinese merchant ships on the Mekong River last year pleaded guilty Sept. 20 at their trial in Kunming, capital of China's Yunnan province. The defendants included Naw Kham (also rendered Nor Kham), purportedly one of the most powerful warlords in the Golden Triangle opium-growing region that straddles the borders of Burma, Thailand and Laos. The crew were massacred by an armed gang that attacked two cargo ships last October. Chinese media said the gang was involved in kidnapping as well as international drug running.

In other news, the Mexican government continues to play down an Aug. 24 incident in which Mexican federal police in at least four vehicles shot up a US embassy van carrying two US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents to a Mexican Navy installation; the two agents were wounded and are being treated in the US. On Sept. 17 a Mexican official suggested that the attack was the result of simple confusion. The police agents were looking for a gang that had kidnapped an employee of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in the same area, the official said. They were focused on the unusual presence of an armored van traveling at high speed on a country road, and they didn't notice that the vehicle had diplomatic license plates, according to the official, who said he couldn't be cited by name. (Associated Press, Sept. 17, via Terra Argentina)

On Sept. 19 Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the US Department of Justice, released a 471-page report on Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled program in which the Arizona office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) inadvertently let about 2,000 firearms pass into Mexico during 2009 and 2010, with many of the weapons apparently going to Mexican drug traffickers . The inspector general, a sort of internal auditor for the Justice Department, found that the ATF and US prosecutors in Arizona were at fault in the operation, along with Justice officials in Washington who were responsible for supervising the ATF and the federal prosecutors.

Several thousand people took to the streets of Cap-Haïtien, Haiti's second largest city and the capital of North department, on Sept. 21 to protest a rise in the cost of basic foods and what they perceived as corruption and nepotism in the government of President Michel Martelly ("Sweet Micky") and Prime Minister Laurent Salvador Lamothe. The day of protests was called by various grassroots organizations and local opposition politicians, notably Senator Moïse Jean-Charles of the Unity party of former president René Préval (1996-2001, 2006-2011).

As of Sept. 18 six students at the Fusagasugá campus of the University of Cundinamarca, in the central Colombian department of Cundinamarca, were continuing a hunger strike they began on Sept. 10 to demand university authorities negotiate with students on educational issues. The strikers say tuition is too high and sometimes is higher than the legal minimum wage; they are also protesting the university's use of professors with four-month contracts rather than permanent teaching staff, and the reduction of the semester to just 16 weeks.

Activist Honduran attorney Antonio Trejo Cabrera was killed by unknown assailants the evening of Sept. 22 in Tegucigalpa's América neighborhood near the Toncontín International Airport. Trejo, who was also a Protestant minister, received a call on his telephone while he was in a church attending a wedding; he stepped outside and was gunned down. He died an hour later in a teaching hospital. Trejo was active in two major political conflicts: a long-standing dispute over land in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras and a new struggle over the Special Development Regions (RED, also known as "Model Cities"), a neoliberal project for creating several privatized semi-autonomous zones near ports.