Police in the Mexican Gulf Coast city of Villahermosa rescued at least 23 Honduran undocumented immigrants, including six children, who were kidnapped for ransom, the Tabasco state prosecutor's office said Oct. 28. Two Mexico citizens were also arrested and charged in the kidnapping. The migrants were reportedly intercepted in the town of Palenque in in neighboring Chiapas state, near the Guatemalan border. At the time of their abduction, the hostages were forced to hand over information about their relatives in Honduras so that they can be forced to deliver ransom money, authorities said. (AFP, Oct. 28)

A three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Oct. 25 struck down a portion of an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. The court held that the law, Proposition 200, was inconsistent with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), which was passed with the intent of increasing voter registration and removing barriers to registration imposed by the states. The NVRA requires voters to attest to the validity of the information on their registration form, including their citizenship, but does not require them to provide additional proof of citizenship. Proposition 200 went beyond the federal statute, requiring applicants to show proof of citizenship before registering to vote.

Prosecutors investigating the secret CIA prison in Poland on Oct. 27 gave Saudi terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri victim status, recognizing the validity of his claims that he was mistreated by interrogators. According to ex-CIA officials, al-Nashiri, accused of bombing the USS Cole, was tortured by the agency at the secret prison in Poland. Granting al-Nashiri victim status will grant the detainee more rights and allow his lawyers to participate in the proceedings.

In Mexico's third mass shooting in less than a week, gunmen who arrived in SUVs opened fire Oct. 27 at a carwash in Tepic, capital of the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, killing at least 15. All but two of the victims worked at the carwash, and most were clients of the same drug treatment center, Alcance Victoria (Victory Outreach). Three victims wore matching T-shirts emblazoned with "Fe y Esperanza," or "Faith and Hope." (LAT, Oct. 28)

A group of 15 Spanish police officers went on trial Oct. 26 in Guipúzcoa Provincial Court, in the northern Basque country, for the torture of two ETA activists. The alleged victims, Igor Portu and Mattin Sarasola, were convicted and sentenced to 1,040 years in prison in the 2006 Madrid airport bombing that killed two people. Portu and Sarasola claim police mistreated them physically and psychologically. The Guardia Civil police force maintains the two were trying to escape, and that limited use of force was necessary. Prosecutors seek two to three years in prison for the accused officers.

A 14-year-old boy was killed Oct. 24 when Moroccan security forces intervened in a protest encampment established by indigenous Sahrawi residents about 14 kilometers outside Laayoune, capital of the occupied territory of Western Sahara. Tens of thousands of Sahrawis have erected tents to protest the social policy of Morocco in the territory, and to demand their right to employment, housing and a decent living. (Magharebia, Oct. 25)

In New York's "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy, xenophobes are ironically protesting construction of a Sufi community center—even as Sufi mosques and shrines are getting blown up regularly in Pakistan by the same political forces that were behind 9-11. Imam Rauf of the planned center (the Cordoba Institute), meanwhile, is being paid by the State Department to go on good-will tours of the Islamic world.

Dr. Gabriel Timothée, the head of Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP), announced on Oct. 23 that there were 208 confirmed deaths so far from a cholera epidemic that apparently broke out in the Lower Artibonite River region just a few days earlier. Of these, 194 deaths were in the western Artibonite region and 14 in Mirebalais in the Central Plateau, including three detainees in the Mirebalais prison. Fifty prisoners were infected, and a total of 288 people were hospitalized in Mirebalais; the number of people hospitalized in the northwest was 2,394. (Radio Kiskeya, Haiti, Oct. 23)