Israel has started building at least 544 apartments since a 10-month construction freeze expired late last month. Palestinians charge that construction in the settlements is aimed at preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the issue has brought recently renewed US-brokered peace talks to a halt. In a statement, UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace Robert Serry called the construction activity "alarming," saying it is "illegal under international law" and "will only further undermine trust."

A US soldier is being held in connection with the fatal shooting on Oct. 17 of a Taliban detainee, who was found dead in a holding cell in Kandahar province. The US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and Afghan officials have launched separate investigations into the death. Officials stated that detainee, Mullah Muhibullah, was a senior leader of the Taliban network in Arghandab district of Kandahar province. Arghandab is currently the focus of a major US-led military offensive to dislodge the Taliban from its strategic stronghold in Kandahar province. Mullah Muhibullah was detained during a Taliban operation the day before he was killed.

Representatives of social and humanitarian organizations in Chile marked 518 years since the arrival of European colonizer Christopher Columbus by marching on Oct. 12 in the southern Araucanía region in solidarity with Chile's indigenous peoples. About 5,000 people had held a similar solidarity march in Santiago the day before. The marches had a special focus on the situation of the Mapuche, Chile's largest indigenous group, and a liquids-only hunger strike by Mapuche prisoners that ended on Oct. 8 after more than 80 days. A group of the prisoners released a communiqué on Oct. 12 calling on the government to fulfill the promises it made to them in negotiations to end the hunger strike. "A new process of struggle will begin," the prisoners wrote. (Prensa Latina, Oct. 12)

While the world media focused on the successful rescue of 33 Chilean miners on Oct. 12 and 13—69 days after they had been trapped by a collapse in the San José gold and copper mine in the northern Atacama region, Chilean union leaders charged that persistent problems with safety in the country's mines were being downplayed.

On Oct. 15 about 60 Haitians protested an extension of the mandate for the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) by blocking the entrance to the mission's main logistics base near the Port-au-Prince airport. The Associated Press reported that the protesters, many of them people left homeless by a major earthquake on Jan. 12, spray-painted slogans on cars and burned the Brazilian flag; Brazilian troops lead the joint military-police mission, which has occupied Haiti since June 2004.

After 90 days of negotiations with unions and other social organizations, on Oct. 10 the government of right-wing Panamanian president Ricardo Martinelli approved an agreement to rescind a controversial law and replace it with a package of six separate laws. The original Law 30—which was passed in June and quickly became known as the "sausage law" because so many different measures were stuffed into it—ignited strikes and protests by unions and environmental groups that resulted in at least two deaths in July and forced the Martinelli government to negotiate.

After almost 20 years, a former Colombian army officer was sentenced Oct. 14 to 44 years in prison for his role in the deaths of over 245 civilians in the Trujillo Massacres between 1986 and 1994. Retired major Alirio Antonio Urena, a School of the Americas graduate, was a commander of an army brigade that evidently collaborated with paramilitaries in Valle del Cauca department at the time of the killings. The dead included Tiberio Fernández, a popular Catholic priest and political organizer whose body was found castrated and decapitated in the Río Cauca. The verdict was the first by the Colombian justice system in the notorious case, which was reopened in 1991 after justice officials had initially absolved the Urena and his co-defendants.

The severed head of Rolando Flores, a Mexican investigator looking into the disappearance of Texas reporter David Hartley, was delivered to authorities in northern Mexico's Tamaulipas state, according to Sheriff Sigifredo González of Zapata County, who is leading the investigation on the US side. Hartley was attacked by gunmen in speedboats while using Jet Skis on Sept. 30 with his wife on Falcon Lake, which stretches into Mexico. His body has still not been found. Flores, commander of state investigators in Ciudad Miguel Aleman, was part of a group assigned to the Hartley case. A spokesman for the Tamaulipas prosecutor's office confirmed that Flores had been killed, but said the death was unrelated to the Hartley investigation. (AP, Oct. 14; MSNBC, Oct. 13)