The Peruvian government is aggressively touting claims that international oil majors are about to return to the country's hydrocarbon-rich Amazon region after being scared off by political instability for nearly a generation. Daniel Saba, president of the state energy company PetroPeru, told reporters Nov. 10 that the French Total, one of the world's four top oil companies, is currently evaluating potential contracts. "They are interested in entering the zones where hydrocarbon discoveries are occurring, whether gas or petroleum; they are investigating the Peruvian market," he said.

The Peruvian government's unprecedented attempt to destroy the country's Amazon indigenous movement has been condemned by indigenous leaders around the world. The wave of condemnation comes after it was revealed that the government plans to disband Peru's national organization for Amazonian indigenous peoples, the Inter-ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP).

The organization representing Iraq's Sunni religious leadership is the latest voice to protest the deal finalized last week between the Iraqi Oil Ministry and partners BP and the Chinese National Petroleum Corp. The statement from the Association of Muslim Scholars called the deal to develop the Rumaila field "at the very least suspicious." The Rumaila field currently produces just below 1 million barrels per day (bpd). Under the 20-year contract this figure is to be boosted to 2.85 million bpd within seven years. BP and CNPC would hold 75% of the project, with the Iraqi state owning 25%.

A front-page New York Times story Nov. 12 brings to light that veteran US diplomat Peter W. Galbraith, "a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry," stands to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars from oil contracts in Iraqi Kurdistan—thanks to broad Kurdish autonomy and control of subsoil resources that he helped craft and negotiate as an advisor to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq drafted its constitution.

US Attorney General Eric Holder on Nov. 13 announced that the government will pursue federal charges against five men accused of conspiring to commit the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Bin Al Shibh, Walid Bin Attash, Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Al Hawsawi—all currently detained at Guantánamo Bay—will be tried in a Manhattan district court by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia. Holder said that he recommended that the men be tried in civilian court after a case-by-case review conducted by the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense according to a new protocol announced in July. Addressing concerns that the civilian court system would be unable to prosecute high-level terrorism cases, Holder said he is "confident in the ability of our courts to provide these defendants a fair trial, just as they have for over 200 years."

The US government on Nov. 12 amended a complaint against Islamic charity the Alavi Foundation to include a request for the seizure of assets, including four mosques, claiming that the organization is actually controlled by the Iranian government. The amended complaint, originally filed in 2008, alleges that Alavi is funneling assets to fund Iran's nuclear program in violation of US law. The government had already sought to seize Alavi's 40% interest in a New York office building, but the amended complaint adds properties in Maryland, Texas, California, New York, each of which contains an Islamic center or mosque; 100 acres of land in Virginia; and nine US bank accounts.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell nearly 46% to the lowest annual loss on record in 2009, the government reported Nov. 12. The government's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) found that 7,008 square kilometers (2,705 square miles) of forest were cleared during the 12-month period ending July 2009, the lowest extent since annual record-keeping began in 1988. "The new deforestation data represents an extraordinary and significant reduction for Brazil," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a statement.

A new report in the journal Science finds that the contraction of Greenland's ice sheet has accelerated over the past years. Using computer modeling and satellite data, the team concluded that the ice mass shrank by 273 billion tons a year during the warm summers from 2006 to 2008—a roughly a 70% increase over the average 166 billion tons a year from 2000 to 2008. "It is clear from these results that mass loss from Greenland has been accelerating since the late 1990s and the underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future," said researcher Jonathan Bamber, one of the authors of the study. The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest in the world after Antarctica, and could increase sea level by 7 meters were it to completely melt. (Planet Earth Online, AFP, Nov. 13)