At least six militants were killed in a presumed US drone strike in Miranshah, in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region. The missiles hit a small convoy of vehicles minutes before the scheduled iftar time, when the Ramadan fast is broken. After the attack, Taliban militants barricaded the site and shifted the bodies to an undisclosed location. At least four drones continued to hover over the region for an hour after the attack. Over 900 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in more than 200 drone strikes in Pakistan's northwest tribal areas since 2008. (ANI, Aug. 22)

Ecuador announced Aug. 17 it will renegotiate contracts with foreign oil companies, seeking up to 90% of revenues for the state. The OPEC member has 33 foreign oil contracts, and the largest ones—with Spanish-Argentine YPF and Chile's Enap—will be the first to be reworked, Non-Renewable Resources Minister Wilson Pastor told a press conference. President Rafael Correa's government on July 26 signed a legal reform under which the state is 100% owner of crude oil resources. Under the new contracts, foreign firms will no longer own what they pump, but will have to purchase it from the state. The new contracts are to be ironed out by Jan. 23, 2011, Pastor said. Ecuador currently produces 472,000 barrels per day. (AFP, Aug. 17)

The decapitated bodies of four men were hung from a bridge Aug. 22 in the south-central city of Cuernavaca, Morelos. The Beltran Leyva Cartel claimed responsibility for the killings in a message left with the bodies. The beheaded and mutilated bodies were hung by their feet from the Tabachines bridge in the south of the city, near an on-ramp to the Mexico City-Acapulco highway. The message threatened: "This is what will happen to all those who support the traitor Edgar Valdéz Villarreal"—a reference to the former high-level Beltran Leyva operative code-named "la Barbie" who has broken with the cartel and is now the subject of a massive manhunt by Mexican federal police. On Aug. 10 a condo complex in Mexico City's posh Bosques de las Lomas district was besieged by a massive federal police contingent backed up helicopters on an apparently erroneous tip that "La Barbie" was there. In an incident that failed to make headlines outside Cuernavaca, the day before the bodies were found the home of a purported Valdéz Villarreal supporter in the city was torched by unknown assailants. A note left by the "Pacifico Sur Cartel" threatened to target more properties. (AP, La Jornada, Aug. 22; Diario de Morelos, Aug. 21; Poder360, Aug. 10)

Pablo López Alavés, a Zapotec leader of the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magón" (CIPO-RFM), was abducted Aug. 15 by a group of some 20 masked and black-clad men armed with rifles who stopped his car outside his pueblo of San Isidro Aloapam when he was going to gather wood with his wife, two daughters and five-year-old son. The gunmen broke his car window before forcing him from his vehicle and transferring him to their own unmarked truck. The family members returned to the pueblo and alerted his CIPO-RFM comrades, who in turn alerted the authorities and began a search. It was initially assumed he was kidnapped by paramilitaries in league with local talamontes, or illegal timber exploiters, whose operations CIPO-RFM has long opposed. But the following day authorities revealed he is being held at the state prison at Etla, apparently on assault charges. In 2000, López Alavés had faced charges of "attacking the means of communication" related to roadblocks protesting the talamontes, but was acquitted. CIPO-RFM calls the current charges politically motivated and is demanding his release. (CIPO-RFM communique, Aug. 18; CIPO-RFM communique, Aug. 17)

Venezuela and the US are both seeking the extradition of Walid Makled, a notorious drug lord known as "The Arab" or "The Turk," who was arrested in a joint operation by Colombian police and the DEA in the city of Cúcuta near the Venezuelan border Aug. 19. A federal court in Manhattan has indicted Makled on charges of drug trafficking—allegedly in cooperation with Colombia's FARC guerillas. Venezuela is meanwhile seeking him on multiple murder counts.

President Evo Morales declared a state of emergency Aug. 19 in Bolivia's Santa Cruz department, one of four in the nation where wildfires are consuming the eastern rainforests. Firefighters are reportedly battling some 25,000 separate blazes across the country. The fires have burned more than 3.7 million acres (1.5 million hectares) in the past weeks and are advancing "dangerously" in the departments of Pando, Beni and La Paz. Some 20 airport ahve been closed due to lack of visibility. The fires were set by peasants clearing land in the forests, but have spread by high winds and arid conditions following a drought. The Environment and Water Ministry asked the farmers and herders to stop the annual practice of burning undergrowth. (AlJazeera, CNN, Aug. 20)

Six city police officers were arrested Aug. 20 in connection with the killing of a mayor in a suburb of Monterrey, Mexico. The suspects included the officer who guarded the house where Santiago Mayor Edelmiro Cavazos was seized on Aug. 15. The officer was supposedly abducted with the mayor, but later freed unharmed. The body of the 38-year-old mayor was found bound, gagged and blindfolded three days later on a road outside town. The officers confessed to involvement in the Cavazos' killing, said Nuevo León state Prosecutor General Alejandro Garza y Garza, who added that other suspects are still being sought.

The United Nations has issued an urgent call for the lifting of Israeli military restrictions on civilian access to the Gaza Strip. Over the past 10 years, the Israeli military has expanded restrictions on access to farmland on the Gaza side of the 1949 Armistice Line between Israel and Gaza—also known as the "Green Line"—and to fishing areas along Gaza's coast, with the stated intention of preventing attacks by Palestinian militants. "This regime has had a devastating impact on the physical security and livelihoods of nearly 180,000 people, exacerbating the assault on human dignity triggered by the blockade imposed by Israel in June 2007," states the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the World Food Programme (WFP), which carried out a study on the impact of the restrictions.