The UN High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) has welcomed a decision by the Mauritanian government to allow some 20,000 refugees to return from neighboring Mali and Senegal, where they have spent almost two decades in exile. The Mauritanian decision was announced on World Refugee Day, June 20.

Following the recent revelations about Ethiopia, a second African country has been named as hosting secret US detention center for terror suspects. Seymour Hersh's latest in the June 25 New Yorker, "The General's Report"—a reference to Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal—includes some quotes from a "recently retired high-level C.I.A. official" (anonymous, and therefore unverfiable, of course) about the "wrangling" over interrogation guidelines in the wake of the scandal. Writes Hersh:

At least eight people, including three children, died in Mogadishu in clashes between insurgents and Somalian interim government and Ethiopian occupation forces June 20. One of the dead was a Somalian police officer killed in an attack on a military camp. Hours earlier, seven were killed when Ethiopian soldiers opened fire after a roadside bomb exploded near one of their two passing trucks, residents said. Resident Adan Hussein told Reuters: "Ethiopian troops riding from the other truck started firing indiscriminately, killing three children. The children were in a house made of iron sheets." (Reuters, June 20)

Israeli police detained an Orthodox Jewish man carrying a small homemade bomb in Jerusalem June 21, as thousands marched in support of gay rights in defiance of religious protesters. Some 2,000 Israeli gays marched in the event by police estimates, while behind police barriers Orthodox protesters in traditional black and white garb intoned prayers against the march. One man approached the marchers yelling: "Filth! Get out of Jerusalem!" In 2005, an Orthodox Jew stabbed and wounded three marchers and fears of violence caused a march to be cancelled last year. (Reuters, June 21)

Two were killed and four injured in an ambush at San Miguel Aloapam in the Ixtlán de Juárez district of southern Mexico's Oaxaca state, according to the municipal president Alejandro Cruz Pablo. State authorities said five men had been arrested at neighboring San Isidro Aloapam for their role in the attack. (Olor a mi Tierra, June 18) However, the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca—Ricardo Flores Magón (CIPO-RFM) said in a communique that PRI-affiliated armed campesinos from San Miguel Aloapam had entered San Isidro's communal forest lands to illegally cut trees and fired upon residents who tried to bar their way. They said the five men taken from their community were not arrested by legitimate authorities, but "kidnapped" by "paramilitaries." (CIPO-RFM, June 20)

A petition from O'odham Voice Against the Wall, posted to journalist Brenda Norrell's Censored, blog, June 15:

We Demand the Return of Human Remains Unearthed During a Recent Desecration of a Sacred Burial Ground
On May 17th and May 21st of 2007 the remains of at least three humans were unearthed during the construction of a border zone "Vehicle Barrier" wall.

The World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) has condemned the incommunicado detention and apparent "disappearance" in Mexico's conflicted Oaxaca state of Raymundo Rivera Bravo, 55, and Edmundo Reyes Amaya, 50, two militants of the Popular Democratic Revolutionary Party (PDPR). According to the OMCT, the two men were arrested in Oaxaca City by the state police May 25. The organization said in a statement it has been unable to determine the whereabouts of the detained men, and and is demanding guarantees for their "personal integrity," expressing concern over the risk of torture. (La Jornada, June 17)

Leaders of the Section 50 health workers union in Mexico's conflicted and impoverished southern state of Chiapas issued an urgent call to state and federal authorities to establish dialogue with the Zapatista Nation Liberation Army's regional authorities at the highland village of Oventic to exchange information about an outbreak of whooping cough. However, state authorities denied claims of 11 deaths from whooping cough in the Highland region. (Cuarto Poder, June 17)