Members of Congress July 13 called for an investigation into a secret CIA program designed to kill al-Qaeda members. The call follows the recently publicized information that former vice-president Dick Cheney directly ordered the CIA to withhold information about the program from Congress and kept it secret for eight years.

President Barack Obama says he is collecting facts about the killing of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners in November 2001, reportedly by fighters of a US-backed warlord in northern Afghanistan, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum. But rights observers say they believe US forces could have been directly involved in the mass slaying.

The bombing of the Virgin Fatima Church in Mosul July 12—hours after a wave of attacks on churches in Baghdad—brings the total to seven churches bombed in Iraq over the weekend. The bombings came even though Assyrian Christian sources warned of the impending attacks days ago. Four have been killed and more than 30 injured in the apparently coordinated terror campaign.

On the evening of July 11 a group of men entered the home of Honduran activist Roger Bados in the 6 de Mayo neighborhood of the northern city of San Pedro Sula and shot him dead. Bados was the former president of the union at a local cement factory and a member of the leftist Democratic Unification Party (UD) and of the Popular Bloc, a coalition of grassroots organizations active in the struggle against the military coup that overthrew President José Manuel Zelaya Rosales on June 28. Erasto Reyes, another grassroots leader, told the Venezula-based television network TeleSUR that the murder came at "a moment in which the political crisis is aggravating the security situation for leaders." But he said the organizations will continue to carry out "peaceful, nonviolent" mobilizations. "We're not letting down our guard; we're continuing in the struggle."

The appearance of unity within the Honduran military and the de facto government is deceptive, according to statements by Argentine deputy defense minister Alfredo Forti published in the Buenos Aires daily Clarín on July 11. "People with the rank of colonel have been sending messages to the outside saying that they're at the limit of their ability to withstand the pressure and that they think a moment is coming when they'll have to separate themselves from the current position because otherwise there might be a bloodbath," said Forti, who was ambassador to Honduras from 2004 to 2007. "These are expressions of fractures within the armed forces. We don't know if it's because there are military people who support the Constitution or because they see it's a situation that's lost and they're trying to find a way out."

On July 10 the de facto government in Honduras received support from a city council member in Santiago, Chile. "It appeared to be a common, ordinary coup" at first, Lucía Pinochet Hiriart said, according to the satirical and investigative Chilean weekly The Clinic, but later it turned out that "the one who wanted to carry out the coup d'état was Zelaya." He "makes himself out to be the victim," she said, but his own allegedly unconstitutional acts left the military no choice but to do "something unconstitutional." Pinochet Hiriart, who represents the exclusive Vitacura neighborhood in eastern Santiago, is a daughter of late Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who seized power from elected president Salvador Allende Gossens in a bloody 1973 coup. (Qué, Spain, July 10 from EFE)

On July 11 seven US trade associations—including the American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA), the US Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel (USA-ITA) and the US Chamber of Commerce—sent a letter to US president Barack Obama on the situation in Honduras. The letter stressed the "particular importance" Honduras has "for the US textile and apparel supply chain" and called it "the linchpin to the Western Hemisphere supply chain for this sector. Honduras is the third largest market for US textile mill products (US exports were $1.4 billion in 2008), the fourth largest supplier of apparel to the US market and the largest DR-CAFTA [Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement] supplier to the United States."

Two men armed with pistols shot Colombian indigenous leader Héctor Betancur Domicó dead the night of July 6 as he was leaving the offices of an indigenous organization in Tierralta in the northwestern department of Córdoba. Betancur Domicó was the leader of the Katío Embera community of Changarra, one of 17 small communities in the region, which has a total population of about 5,000 Katío Embera. The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) reported that more than 1,254 indigenous people have been killed by armed groups in Colombia since January 2002. (La Raza, Chicago, July 11 from AP)