With just a month to go before scheduled presidential elections, a US-brokered agreement to return Manuel Zelaya to power in Honduras was announced Oct. 30, with the ousted president saying he hoped to be restored within a week. But the deal still needs to be approved by the Honduran congress, which has not set a date for voting on the plan. "Now it's in Congress' hands," said Armando Aguilar, a negotiator for de facto President Roberto Micheletti. (AP, Oct. 30)

Venezuelan authorities Oct. 30 announced the arrest of eight Colombians and two local residents suspected of paramilitary activities in western Táchira state near the border between the two countries. Interior Minister Tarek El Aissami said the detained Colombians included a known paramilitary leader. Two firearms were captured with them, he said. "All these people were intimidating the local population and especially threatening local businessmen," he told state TV. "These people were handing out pamphlets, as the paramilitaries do, saying social cleansing was going to start—that is to say murders and disappearances." (Reuters, Oct. 30)

The International Criminal Court (ICC) Oct. 30 warned both the Colombian government and illegal armed groups that it will not hesitate to prosecute those who commit war crimes in the country's violent conflict. "There are many crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC, including forced displacement, disappearances, the use of child soldiers, sexual violence, torture, killings and hostage-taking," Marcelo Pollack, head of Amnesty International Colombia, told the Bogotá daily El Espectador.

In a private ceremony, US Ambassador William Brownfield and three Colombian ministers signed an agreement Oct. 30 to expand Washington's military presence in the Andean country. Officials said the plan will increase US access to seven Colombian bases for 10 years for "counterterrorism and counternarcotics" operations—without increasing the number of personnel beyond the cap of 1,400 now specified by US law. A Colombian government statement said the pact "respects the principles of equal sovereignty, territorial integrity and nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states."

Noam Chomsky will speak at Queen's University in Belfast tonight as this year's guest for the annual Amnesty International lecture. In comments to students ahead of his lecture, Chomsky warned of the dangers of resurgent right-wing extremism in the wake of Obama's election: "The far-right is providing answers that are completely crazy: that rich liberals are giving their hard-earned money away to illegal immigrants and the shiftless poor. A common reaction in elite educated circles and much of the left is to ridicule the right-wing protesters, but that is a serious error... If the protesters are getting crazy answers from the hard-line right-wing extreme, the proper reaction is to provide the right answers..." (Belfast Telegraph, Oct. 30)

Specious terrorism busts in which a close reading of news accounts reveals that the supposed plot actually originated with police or FBI infiltrators continue to be alarmingly common, despite the change of administration in Washington. The headlines continue to imply that there was a real threat in these cases, while the actual text indicates otherwise. Here's the latest example, with the phrases that let slip the bogus nature of the pseudo-plot in bold. From AP, Oct. 26:

The Pakistani media have quoted Taliban and al-Qaeda sources denying responsibility for the car bomb that ripped through a market in Peshawar Oct. 28, killing 105 people, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived on a visit to Pakistan. The same day saw a dawn attack in Kabul, in which six UN employees and three guards were killed in a gunfight that also left three assailants dead. Islamist denials of a hand in the attacks have sparked a frenzy of conspiracy-theorizing in the Pakistani press.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a suspected player in the country's booming opium trade, has received regular payments from the CIA for much of the past eight years, according to a front-page New York Times account Oct. 28. The report claims the agency pays Karzai for "a variety of services," including helping to recruit a CIA-directed paramilitary group called the Kandahar Strike Force.