We've already noted claims that mercenaries recruited by an Israeli firm are fighting for the embattled regime of Moammar Qaddafi in Libya. Now a Reuters report of June 3 cites unnamed officials saying that "private contractors" are hiring mercenaries for the rebels. Although the officials asserted that no actual US government funds are involved, the report cites a classified "covert action finding" signed by President Barack Obama earlier this year as authorizing the CIA to conduct a wide spectrum of operations in support of the rebels. From the report:

Afro-Colombian community leader Ana Fabricia Córdoba, from the Santa Cruz neighborhood in Medellín, was shot dead by an unidentified gunman on a bus in the city June 7. Córdoba was a leader of communities displaced to Medellín by political violence in the Pacific coastal department of Chocó. She arrived in the city in 2001 when she was forced to flee after paramilitary groups killed her son in Urabá, the violence-torn region that straddles the north of Chocó and Antioquia departments. A second son was killed at the hands of presumed paramilitaries just last year. With her organization, Ruta Pacifica de las Mujeres, she was a leading advocate for the recovery of usurped Afro-Colombian lands in the coastal region.

The mosque in the West Bank village of Maghayer (also rendered al-Mughayyir) suffered damage and threatening graffiti in a vandal attack in the wee hours of June 7. Burning tires were rolled into the mosque near Ramallah, setting rugs in the building on fire, and the walls were scrawled with anti-Arab slogans. The words "Alei Ayin" were also spray-painted on the walls, which is the name of a nearby Jewish settlement outpost demolished by Israeli police last week, sparking clashes with the settlers. Other slogans spray painted on the wall include "Price Tag," and "This is only the beginning." "Price tag" refers to the strategy extremist settlers have adopted to exact a price in attacks on Palestinians in retribution for moves against settlements or incidents such as the Itamar attack. Several West Bank mosques have been torched in the past year; most incidents were blamed on Jewish settlers. Israeli authorities say they are investigating the Maghayer attack. (Ma'an News Agency, JTA, June 7)

Ecuador's government sent in army troops backed up by helicopters into the jungles of the northwest coastal province of Esmeraldas to shut down illegal gold mining operations last week, saying the highly polluting activity is associated with drug trafficking and protected by armed militias. Several back-hoes, diesel generators and dredges were destroyed in controlled explosions. The small-scale mining operations in the cantons of Eloy Alfaro and San Lorenzo near the Colombian border were "totally illegal" and violated the country's mining, environmental and tax codes, Minister of Non-Renewable Natural Resources Wilson Pástor and Environment Minister Marcela Aguiñaga said in a press conference. Aguiñaga reported that arsenic and heavy metals like mercury are found in the waters of tributaries of the Rio Santiago. "This will cause cancer and other diseases in the short term," she said. Added Pástor: "Ecuador is not a no man's land. Illegal mining has to stop. We have to put a stop to exploitation of the local workforce. We have to put a stop to drug money laundering. And we're tired of the plundering of our natural resources." (IPS, June 1)

The WikiLeaks group is releasing a total of 1,918 previously unpublished US diplomatic cables concerning Haiti to the weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté, which is published in New York and Port-au-Prince. The cables cover a period of seven years, from April 17, 2003 to Feb. 28, 2010, shortly after the January 2010 earthquake that shattered much of southern Haiti. The newspaper is planning a series of articles based on the cables. The first article, which appeared in the May 25-30 edition, details US diplomats' unsuccessful efforts to keep former president René Préval (2006-2011) from having Haiti join PetroCaribe, a program through which Venezuela supplies oil to Caribbean Basin countries on favorable terms. Later articles are to show how the US government backed assembly plant owners fighting an increase in the minimum wage and how the US militarized the distribution of aid after the earthquake. (Haïti Liberté, May 25-May 30; AlterPresse, Haiti, May 31)

The Guatemalan government is planning not to honor a year-old order from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) to suspend operations at the Marlin gold mine in the western department of San Marcos, according to members of the Sipacapa and San Miguel Ixtahuacán Mayan communities. The IACHR, a Washington, DC-based agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued the order in May 2010 in response to charges from the two communities that the mine was causing significant damage to residents' health and the local environment. The Marlin mine is owned by Montana Exploradora de Guatemala, SA, a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company Goldcorp Inc.

As of May 23 negotiations were continuing between the Argentine federal government and representatives of the indigenous Qom community of the Toba ethnic group over disputed land in the northern province of Formosa. The government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner finally agreed to negotiate seriously on May 2 after 16 Qom community members started an open-ended hunger strike in Buenos Aires and well-known activists like Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, 1980 Nobel peace prize winner, took up the cause.

Acting on what military authorities said was an anonymous tip, Mexican soldiers raided the home of casino and off-track betting magnate Jorge Hank Rhon the early morning of June 4 in Tijuana, in the northwestern state of Baja California. The military reported finding 88 firearms, 9,298 rounds of ammunition, 70 chargers and one gas grenade. Hank Rhon, a politician in the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Tijuana's mayor from 2004 to 2007, was arrested on charges of illegal possession of weapons, a federal crime, along with 10 bodyguards and other employees. The authorities flew Hank Rhon to Mexico City late in the day for questioning.