Gunmen ambushed and killed 24 Algerian paramilitary police in the country's deadliest insurgent attack in nearly a year, the local newspaper Echorouk reported June 18. The militants attacked the previous evening with roadside bombs and rifles when the police passed in a convoy along a highway about 180 kilometers east of the capital. When they left the scene of the attack they took with them six police off-road vehicles as well as weapons and police uniforms.

The UK-based advocacy group Survival International has published an eyewitness account of the killings in the Peruvian Amazon that caused shockwaves around the world. The report contains dramatic photos by two Belgians, Marijke Deleu and Thomas Quirynen, who were caught up in the June 5 police attack on the roadblock in Bagua province and were themselves shot at.

Local residents in the Mexican village of Xico blocked roads for several days to prevent construction of a cellphone tower at the local pueblo of San Marcos. Following violent confrontations at the roadblocks between pro- and anti-antennae residents, Xico mayor Rogelio Soto Suárez called in elite anti-riot forces from the Veracruz state Auxiliary Police Institute (IPAX) to permit construction of the tower "by force." Activists say they petitioned town authorities to have the tower relocated further away from the pueblo and its schoolhouse, fearing the health impacts on their children. (Marcha news agency, Xalapa, June 16)

A WHO study finds (unsurprisingly) that non-motorists disproportionately bear the brunt of traffic fatalities. Car accidents are the 10th leading cause of death in the world, and are on track to become the fifth leading cause by 2030. And the Washington Post (June 17) headlines the story "Fewer Cars, More Traffic Fatalities"—as if the problem were too few cars!

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.