On Dec. 16 the body of an unidentified man was found in a motel in the southern Puerto Rican city of Ponce; he had been stabbed 20 times and partly decapitated. Julio Serrano, spokesperson for the National Association for the Defense of Homosexuals, said the police should investigate the possibility that this was a hate crime against gays. Serrano added that no one has ever been charged with an anti-gay hate crime in Puerto Rico and that "not doing anything creates a climate of homophobia, hate and persecution." (Univision, Dec. 17)

The US-based Colombia Support Network (CSN) is calling for letters to Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot (wsj.ltrs@wsj.com) to protest a Dec. 14 opinion piece about the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in the northwestern Colombian department of Antioquia. In the article the paper's Latin America correspondent Mary Anastasia O'Grady repeated charges from a former rebel commander, Daniel Sierra Martinez AKA "Samir", that despite the community's claim of rejecting the presence of all weapons and armed groups, it is really a "safe haven" for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). "Samir" also claimed that when he was a rebel leader, "the supposed peaceniks who ran the local NGO"—the faith-based human rights group Justice and Peace—"were his allies and an important FARC tool in the effort to discredit the military," O'Grady wrote.

Dole Food Company and Chiquita Brands International paid a Colombian terrorist organization to perform protection services that included murdering trade unionists, demobilized paramilitary José Gregorio Mongones said in an affidavit released Dec. 6. The testimony is the centerpiece of two civil lawsuits against Chiquita and Dole filed by family members of victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia. Both lawsuits accuse the companies of funding the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the country's largest paramilitary organization, formally demobilized in 2006.

Ramiro Rivera Gómez, vice-president of the Environmental Committee of Cabañas (CAC) and a local leader in the community struggle against the gold mining projects proposed by Pacific Rim, was assassinated on Dec. 20 in the Trinidad neighborhood of Ilobasco, in El Salvador's Cabañas department.

Indonesia's National Police announced Dec. 16 that they had shot Kelly Kwalik, leader of the Free Papua Movement. Authorities said Kwalik was killed as he resisted arrest during a police raid on a house in Timika, Papua. Five others, including a 10-year-old boy, were also arrested in the raid. Authorities charge that Kwalik was behind a 2002 ambush of a convoy of buses that killed a US national near the Freeport McMoRan gold and copper mining operation. They also claim Kwalik was behind a string of armed attacks in the Freeport area that left eight people dead, three of them foreigners, between June and November this year.

Palestinian security forces that have been detaining and apparently torturing Hamas supporters on the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the UK Guardian reports, citing anonymous official and diplomatic sources. The two named Palestinian agencies are the Preventive Security Organisation (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI). One senior western official said: "The [Central Intelligence] Agency consider them as their property, those two Palestinian services." A diplomatic source added that US influence over the agencies was so great they could be considered "an advanced arm of the war on terror."

A House committee has launched an investigation into claims that US military contractors in Afghanistan are paying the Taliban to guarantee the safety of their transportation convoys, an allegation that could mean American taxpayers are indirectly funding the insurgency that has killed more than 900 American soldiers so far.

Iran and Iraq have decided to establish an arbitration commission to clear up the conflict over an oil well in the border region. In a telephone conversation between Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari Dec. 19, the two sides agreed to settle border disputes. The de-escalation came one day after Iraq accused Iranian forces of seizing an oil well in Iraqi territory, and mobilized its own forces to the scene.