The Oct. 2 passing of Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has occasioned respectful but generally sanitized eulogies in the world Jewish press—with few exceptions, neatly avoiding any mention of his anti-Zionist politics. An Oct. 6 remembrance in New York's Jewish Week is typical in dodging the issue entirely.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay endorsed the Goldstone report on alleged war crimes in Gaza at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva Oct. 15. Pillay stated that steps to hold war criminals accountable "are not obstacles to peace, but rather the preconditions on which trust and, ultimately, a durable peace can be built."

In an Oct. 15 New York Times story, "Crossroads of Islam, Past and Present," Robert F. Worth reports from Tarim in Yemen's Hadramawt region, where a thriving Sufi school is attempting to reclaim the area's reputation from the media moniker of "the ancestral homeland" of Osama bin Laden. Is this a long-overdue corrective to demonized portrayals of Islam—or more propaganda in an imperial divide-and-conquer ploy to groom Sufis as domesticated "good Muslims"?

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Oct. 14 that the UK is sending 500 additional troops to Afghanistan. The announcement comes as President Barack Obama weighs proposals for up to 60,000 more troops. (AP, Oct. 15) The Taliban are rapidly seizing control in large areas of Afghanistan's countryside—most recently taking several villages in Kunduz province, riding around in pilfered police vehicles fixed with sound systems blaring Islamic songs. "We have control only over the governor's office," said the district governor of Chahr Dara, Abdul Wahid. "Outside those walls we have no jurisdiction at all. People do not come to the governor's office to solve their problems—they go to the Taliban." (IWPR, Oct. 12)

Streams of civilians jammed into cars and trucks to flee South Waziristan as Pakistan's air force pounded the area with air-strikes ahead of an expected ground offensive against the Taliban. On Oct. 15, a suspected US missile strike hit neighboring North Waziristan, killing four alleged militants, Pakistani officials said. Since the weekend, some 80 vehicles a day have carried fleeing families past one checkpoint at Chonda on the edge of Dera Ismail Khan, said a local police official. (AP, Oct. 15)

The number of planes smuggling cocaine through Honduras has surged since the US suspended drug cooperation after the June coup d'etat, the de facto government's drug policy chief Julián Arístides González said Oct. 13. Honduras lost $16.5 million of US military aid after the coup. In the last month alone, de facto authorities say they have found 10 planes abandoned on runways and remote highways, compared with just four last year. "These are the facts, the flights have intensified," said Arístides, head of the National Directorate for the Struggle Against Narco-traffic (DNLN).

At around 11 PM the night of Oct. 10, Mexican soldiers and federal police agents occupied facilities of the government-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC) in Mexico City and several central Mexican states, reportedly using force to remove workers on the night shift. About an hour later Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's center-right administration published a decree liquidating the company and terminating some 41,000 active employees. The decree promised respect for the workers' labor rights: the government said it would guarantee severance pay and pensions, at an estimated cost of some $20 billion pesos ($1.512 billion).

On Oct. 6 Haiti's WIN Group conglomerate and the US-based Soros Economic Development Fund announced plans to build a $45 million industrial park named "West Indies Free Zone" near Port-au-Prince's impoverished Cité Soleil neighborhood. The 1.2 million square foot facility, to be completed in 2012, will "offer tax, customs and processing advantages to tenants" and is expected "to create 25,000 jobs and improve the standard of living for the 300,000 residents" of Cité Soleil, according to a WIN Group press release. The free trade zone's executives "are already in preliminary discussions with North American and European apparel manufacturers."