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)

On Oct. 22 three Costa Rican environmental activists marked two weeks on hunger strike against the projected Las Crucitas open-pit gold mine in San Carlos in the north of the country. Some 14 activists from two organizations, the North Front Against Mining and the Not One Mine Coordinating Committee, began the action on Oct. 8 in an encampment in front of the Presidential Residence in San José. Most of the 14 ended their fast for medical reasons but continued to support the three remaining strikers.

Thousands of Argentines rallied in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires on Oct. 21 to protest the killing of the student Mariano Ferreyra during a demonstration the day before. Ferreyra, a member of the Trotskyist Workers Party (PO), was shot in the chest in what appeared to be a clash between armed members of the Railroad Workers Union (UF) and temporary workers demanding that laid-off workers get permanent employment with the Roca Railroad, which was privatized in the 1990s. Three others were wounded in the incident, one seriously. There were reports that the police did nothing to stop the supposed UF members when they attacked the protesters.

Two unidentified men shot and killed Catarino Torres Pereda, general secretary of the Citizen Defense Committee (Codeci), at the indigenous rights group's office in Tuxtepec in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on the afternoon of Oct. 22. The murderers escaped in a car waiting for them nearby. In the evening members of Codeci and other organizations protested the assassination with a demonstration at the Alameda de León plaza in the city of Oaxaca, the state capital.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, on an official visit to Iran, said Oct. 25 that the Islamic Republic and Bolivia pursue a common objective in fighting against imperialism and injustice in the world. "Iran and Bolivia have identical revolutionary conscience which allows for the expansion of relations and accounts for the closeness of the two states," IRNA reported the Bolivian leader as saying in the northwestern Iranian city of Tabriz.