Last weekend, Shawna Forde, 41, leader of the Minuteman American Defense (MAD) group, and two of her associates were arrested in connection with the murder of a 9-year-old girl, Brisenia Flores, and her father, Raul, in Arivaca, Arizona. Local police are reporting that Forde and her posse broke into the Flores home dressed as law enforcement officers looking for money and drugs to finance her border-watch group—with the intention of leaving no witnesses behind.

In a new report issued after a a 10-day fact-finding trip to Colombia, a UN investigator accuses the country's military of killing hundreds of civilians over the past six years and falsely identifying the dead as guerilla fighters. Philip Alston, UN rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said June 19 that the killings, which mostly took place since 2002, were part of a widespread systematic practice (known in Colombia as "false positives").

Colombia's Supreme Court will not allow captured FARC operative Heli Mejia Mendoza AKA "Martin Sombra"—known as the guerilla army's "jailer"—to be extradited to the United States. The high court found he committed no border-crossing crimes. "Sombra" spent 40 years of his life in the ranks for the guerrillas and managed several FARC prisoner camps. He was arrested in February 2008. The US want to try him for his alleged responsibility in the captivity of three US military contractors, who were held in the Colombian jungle for more than six years.

In the latest outrage on Mexico's grisly narco-wars, gunmen in Morelia, Michoacán, June 19 tossed a grenade at an ambulance and then opened its doors to kill a patient who had narrowly survived an earlier shooting, as paramedics ran for their lives. Vehicles carrying four masked gunmen cut off the ambulance around 2 AM. After the grenade blast set the ambulence on fire and the two paramedics fled, the gunmen opened the back doors and fired on the man and his wife, who was accompanying him. The 20-year-old woman is in serious condition at a local hospital, police said.

Indigenous groups in Peru have called off protests after two controversial laws, decreed by President Alan García to implement a free trade agreement with the US, were revoked by the country's Congress in an 82-12 vote late June 18. "This is an historic day for indigenous people because it shows that our demands and our battles were just," said Daysi Zapata, vice president of AIDESEP, the Amazonian indigenous alliance that led the protests.

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his Friday prayers address on the crisis in the country, blamed a world media controlled by "dirty Zionists" and "most evil" British for fomenting divisions, and called upon all Iranians to accept the election results, saying that a gap of 11 million votes is infallible. But his words also revealed a clear fault line within Iran's political elite. In his lengthy discourse on former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei made insubstantial charges of corruption, and implicated the entire Rafsanjani family as "problematic."

In a scene recalling the 1979 Revolution, tens of thousands of black-clad mourners made their way silently through the streets of Tehran June 18, commemorating the lives of those slain in six straight days of protests since the announcement of President Ahmedinajad's election victory. At Imam Khomeini square, the huge plaza named for the founder of the revolution, where they were joined by defeated opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the crowd broke into chants of "Death to the dictator!" and "Where are our votes?" Mousavi, addressing the crowd, repeated his call for new elections. (London Times, June 18)

By the end of June, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain Shahristani is scheduled to award service contracts to foreign oil companies to develop six of the country's largest oil-fields over the next 20 to 25 years. But senior figures within the Iraqi oil industry have denounced the deal. Fayad al-Nema, director of the South Oil Company, said: "The service contracts will put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle its independence for the next 20 years. They squander Iraq's revenues." Nema is reported to have since been fired because of his opposition to the contracts, which he says is shared by many other officials in Iraq's state-owned oil industry. (The Independent, June 18)