Paraguayan foreign minister Ruben Ramirez announced on Oct. 2 that in 2007 Paraguay will stop granting US troops immunity from prosecution. The change in policy is an effort to coordinate policies with the other member nations in the Mercosur economic bloc--Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and most recently Venezuela.

Late on Oct. 4, Julian Andres Hurtado Castillo was shot to death outside his home in the Las Granjas neighborhood of the Colombian city of Cali, in Valle del Cauca department. The killers--apparently paid professionals--were a man and a woman who approached on foot and killed Hurtado with a single shot to the head before fleeing in a public service vehicle. The taxi driver who had just dropped Hurtado off at the residence picked him back up and rushed him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. On Oct. 6, students held a funeral march for Hurtado through the streets of Cali. The local student association blames rightwing paramilitary groups for the murder.

Arthur Neslen on the UK Guardian's Comment is Free blog Oct. 25 outlines various intellectual responses to the ascendance of the frightening Avigdor Lieberman to the Israeli cabinet. One which he overlooks is the "smokescreen" response, put forth by the lefter-than-thou who maintain that the Israeli "moderates" are actually the greater threat because they lull the naive into a false sense of security. Perhaps Nelsen can be forgiven for overlooking this tendency, as some of these ideologues have actually found Lieberman's ascendance unworthy of comment, as if warning of the danger he represents somehow lets Olmert and Peretz off the hook.

From Reuters, Oct. 25:

Berlin: IAF jets fire shots over German ship off coast of Lebanon
Two Israel Air Force warplanes and a German navy vessel have clashed off the Lebanese coast, the Defense Ministry in Berlin said on Wednesday without giving further details.

If this turns out to be true, we wager the beneficiary will be Iyad Allawi. From UPI, Oct. 23:

CAIRO -- Iraqi army officers are reportedly planning to stage a military coup with U.S. help to oust the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

In a class-action lawsuit filed on Sept. 25, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project and the Stanford Law School Immigrants' Rights Clinic charged that ICE routinely holds immigrants longer than six months in defiance of the Supreme Court's June 2001 ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis. "These people have been kept away from their families, their communities and their lives for years--without even a hearing to determine if their prolonged detention is justified," said ACLU staff attorney Ahilan Arulanantham.

Continuing on his tour of Mexico's north, Zapatista Subcommander Marcos stopped in Sonoyta (the Sonora border town across from Lukeville, AZ), where his caravan drove into the desert and stopped at the fence demarcating the international border, where signs warned "Prohibited to cross the line." There, he got out of his minivan and purposefully hopped the fence, spending some two minutes on the northern side of the frontier.

After a heated all-night assembly, on the morning of Oct. 22 delegates of 70,000 teachers in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca voted down a proposal to end a strike that has paralyzed the capital city, also named Oaxaca, for five months. At the beginning of the assembly, Enrique Rueda Pacheco, general secretary of Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), announced that in a membership consultation held Oct. 19-20, teachers had voted 26,000 to 15,000 to accept an agreement negotiated with the federal Governance Secretariat (interior ministry) and return to teaching on Oct. 30. But union delegates charged that the voting was "rigged" because of the way the questions were presented, and decided to hold a new consultation Oct. 23-24. Many denounced Rueda as a "sellout" and "traitor." Anger at Rueda is so intense that he tried to slip into the assembly through a back entrance while wearing dark glasses. (Reuters, Oct. 22; La Jornada, Oct. 21, 22)