Riot police beat back some 15,000 protesters attempting to block a train carrying nuclear waste from western France to a disposal center at Gorleben in Germany Nov. 9. In Germany's largest and most violent anti-nuclear protest since 2001, activists set fire to barricades across the tracks, which police extinguished with water cannon. A caravan of some 300 tractors also blocked the tracks. Several protesters and police were injured in the confrontation. "This is a strong sign of the renaissance of the anti-nuclear movement," said Jochen Stay of the anti-nuclear group X-tausendmal quer, which organized the protests. (AFP, Nov. 10)

Miriam Makeba, the South African singer who became a world symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, died Nov. 10 after performing at an anti-Mafia concert in southern Italy. The 76-year-old singer died after being brought to the hospital at Castelvolturno at the end of a concert in support of Roberto Saviano, an Italian journalist threatened with death by the Naples crime machine following of his exposure of the mob in his bestselling book.

Russia has asked the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe for an inquiry into the findings of military observers stationed in Tskhinvali on the night of August 7-8, when South Ossetia's separatist capital was shelled by Georgian military forces. A Nov. 7 article in the New York Times described newly available accounts by three observers stationed in Tskhinvali for the OSCE, which has monitored the Georgia conflict since the 1990s.

Thousands of Colombians rioted around the country Nov. 12, demanding their money back after being defrauded in a series of pyramid schemes. In some of the nine cities where the protests erupted, police used batons and tear gas. In recent months, several phony loan companies have vanished along with millions of dollars in deposits after promising interest rates of up to 150 percent.

Bolivian officials Nov. 11 formally requested that the US issue extradition orders for former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to face "genocide" charges for his repression of October 2003 protests over corporate exploitation of the country's natural gas resources that left at least 60 dead. The officials called for the extradition of Sánchez de Lozada's former defense and energy ministers under a 1995 extradition treaty with the US.

Berlin's ambassador to Rwanda was given 24 hours to leave the country Nov. 11 in response to the Nov. 9 arrest of a Rwandan presidential aide in Germany in connection with the 1994 assassination of then-president Juvenal Habyarima that touched off the Rwanda genocide. Rose Kabuye, an aide to Rwandan President Paul Kagame and an official in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), was arrested in Frankfurt under a 2006 European warrant issued by French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière.

Headlines from Iraq Nov. 12 were dominated by the re-opening of Baghdad's Two Imams Bridge, which links the Sunni district of Adhamiya and the Shi'ite area of Kadhimiya, and had been closed due to sectarian violence since 2005. (E.g. LAT) But on that same day, at least 23 people were killed in a string of attacks across Iraq. In the deadliest single attack of the day, a car bomb exploded, followed by another blast at a bus station in a working class district of Baghdad, killing 12 and wounding 60.

Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe predicted that his Mexican counterpart Felipe Calderón's controversial efforts to combat the drug cartels with the military will be successful. "When you live in a country like Colombia that has already faced that intense fight against crime, one is very happy to see efforts like those of President Calderón," Uribe told business leaders in the Mexican industrial city of Monterrey Nov. 9.