On Oct. 16 in Lima, a delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) met with Ydelso Hernández, president of the Unitary Struggle Command in Peru's northern region of Cajamarca, who is seeking an order from the IACHR halting the controversial Conga mining project. Hernández said a group representing rondas campesinos (peasant self-defense patrols) in Cajamarca will travel to Washington DC at month's end to testify before the IACHR about rights violations associated with the project.

It was the South Korean government that attempted on Oct. 22 to halt the planned balloon-drop of some 200,000 anti-North Korea pamphlets across the border into the DPRK by activists (similar to the parachute-drop of teddy bears into Belarus earlier this year). North Korea had threatened military action if the South Korean activists carried out their plan. In a post to its official Korean Central News Agency site, North Korean authorities stated that the plan "was directly invented by the group of traitors and is being engineered by the [S]outh Korean military," pledging that if any leaflets were detected on the north side of the border to respond with a "merciless military strike." So South Korean police closed roads and evacuated residents from the border zone—but activists nonetheless were successful in releasing the balloons, and no military response from the North has been initiated (yet).

The interminable divide-and-rule game between Muslims and Jews worldwide goes on, with the latest maddening development in France. We noted last month that a bomb attack on a kosher grocery store in a Paris suburb was met with equivocation by the authorities and media, with an unseemly reluctance to acknowledge the incident as anti-Semitic—and only right-wing Zionist commentators rose to the occasion of calling it out. (Except us, of course.) Now those same right-wing Zionist commentators—namely, Jewish Policy Center on Oct. 19—weigh in on new developments in the case, as well as an anti-Semitic outburst in Malmo, Sweden. The statement ironically mimics the time-honored tactic of anti-Semites, of mixing up legitimate points with cynical shots, confusing the gullible. To wit:

The Sudanese government charged Oct. 23 that Israeli airstrikes were responsible for explosions overnight at the Yarmouk Military Industrial Complex, an armaments plant in the south of the capital Khartoum. Information Minister Ahmed Bilal Osman said four Israeli warplanes struck the factory, causing a huge fire and killing two. The Israel Defense Forces said that the military "will not comment on the report"; while the Prime Minister's office refused to say anything at all. Israel's daily Haaretz cited "opposition sources" in Sudan as saying the Yarmouk complex belongs to Iran's Revolutionary Guard, and is producing arms intended for use by Hamas. The account also claims that after the fall of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi last year, the Revolutionary Guard's elite al-Quds Force succeeded in smuggling dozens of anti-aircraft and SA-24 missiles from the Libyan army's crumbling arsenals to Sudan, in order to later pass them on to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (BBC News, YNet, Haaretz, Oct. 24)

A Bahrain appeals court upheld verdicts against two teachers on Oct. 22 for organizing a teachers' strike early last year to support anti-government protests. At their first hearing in front of a military tribunal, the pair were convicted of using their positions as vice-president and president of the Bahrain Teachers' Association (BTA) to attempt to overthrow the Bahraini government through a teachers' strike that halted the educational process and "incited hatred" against the regime. No evidence has been presented that they used or advocated violence of any means, according to an Amnesty International backgrounder. Mahdi 'Issa Mahdi Abu Dheeb was sentenced to five years in prison while Jalila al-Salman was given a six-month sentence. Abu Dheeb has been detained for 18 months. Al-Salman was in confinement for five months but was released on bail. However, al-Salman has alleged torture while being detained.

Egyptian Prosecutor-General Abdel Maguid Mahmoud on Oct. 22 ordered an investigation into allegations of forgery during the recent presidential elections. The order came after former Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Shafiq made allegations that ballots were forged and votes were bought by current president Mohammed Morsi. Shafiq added that previous investigations into the allegations were stopped without justification by the presidential election commission. Shafiq, who left for the United Arab Emirates right after his loss in the elections, has faced corruption charges of having misused public funds while in office as minister of civil aviation during the 30-year regime of ousted president Hosni Mubarak. Shafiq has argued that the charges against him are politically motivated. He has also noted that he will remain politically active and return to Egypt soon. The call for the investigation came after Egyptian authorities seized Shafiq's assets as part of his corruption investigation.

Guantánamo Bay detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri on Oct. 23 boycotted his pretrial hearing at the facility. Al-Nashiri is accused of bombing the USS Cole while it was in port in Yemen in October 2000. Al-Nashiri objected to the use of belly chains while he was brought from his cell to the courtroom for the proceedings. Navy officials have stated that while belly chains are used when moving certain detainees within the facility, they would not have been used on al-Nashiri before this week's hearing. The hearing was to determine if Yemen was at war with the US at the time of the bombing, a decision that will be used to determine al-Nashiri's status as an enemy combatant.

United Nations independent human rights experts on Oct. 22 urged Colombian authorities to reconsider proposed constitutional reforms affecting the military criminal law. Eleven experts, comprising the Special Procedures mandate-holders of the Human Rights Council of the UN, wrote an open letter to the government of Colombia expressing their concern that the proposed reforms could prove harmful to administering justice for alleged violations of human rights by allowing military or police institutions rather than independent investigators to be the first to determine the existence of elements of crimes: