A week after border skirmishes were reported, Djibouti has accused neighboring Eritrea of illegally intruding into its territory. Djibouti's Foreign Minister Mahmoud Ali Youssef told AlJazeera June 20 that Eritrean troops crossed the border on the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait. "Eritrean troops entered Djiboutian territory and took more land," he said. "Right now, Eritrean troops are stationed inside Djiboutian territories."

In a bizarre irony for a state that rules in the name of Arab nationalism, Mauritanian authorities detained Mohamed Nema Oumar, publisher of Al-Houriya weekly, June 12, holding him for some 30 hours at a police station in the the capital Nouakchott—after an article he wrote criticized a politician for participating in festivities marking Israel's 60th anniversary.

More Nigerian government troops are being mobilized to the Niger Delta region, in preparation for military action against the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), after a militant attack on Royal Dutch Shell's Bonga oil field forced the company to halt production June 19. In a statement, President Umaru Yar'Adua said that the mobilization "does not amount to a declaration of war in the region but that the offensive by the military will be against criminality and criminals who take advantage of the situation in the Niger Delta to perpetrate criminality." (Nigerian Tribune, June 21) He appears to be indicating that the MEND are criminals, no?

Sri Lanka's air force launched helicopter attacks on rebel-held territory in the island's north June 21, as ground troops killed at least four guerrillas of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Mannar district. "Sri Lanka air force MI-24 helicopter gunships raided a gathering place of the LTTE," the Defense Ministry said in a statement. The LTTE made no statement, and there was no word on civilian casualties. (AFP, June 21)

In a brief Associated Press account of the sentencing of supposed ELF operative Briana Waters, the New York Times June 20 uncritically uses the loaded term "ecoterrorist" in the headline. If you actually read the blurb, it turns out she is accused of serving as a look-out in an arson attack on a research center at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens. Nobody was killed, nobody was injured. Was this an act of "terrorism"?

Little more than a week after the Canadian government announced the completion of free trade talks with Colombia, that country's national daily, El Tiempo, reports [June 14] that the Águilas Negras (Black Eagles), a violent right-wing paramilitary organization, has sent threatening emails to the Canadian Embassy in Bogotá.

Two weeks after completing the exhumation of the largest mass grave found in Peru's history, the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF) returned to Putis [June 18] to begin work on exhuming four additional graves from a December 1984 massacre. As the Peruvian government faces renewed pressure from the human rights community to divulge the names of those responsible for the massacre, EPAF returned to the remote site high within the Andes where 123 men, women, and children were shot more than two decades ago by the Peruvian military.

Chinese mining company Chinalco has gained rights to exploit copper at Peru's Mount Toromocho, to be used in electrification projects in China. The $3 billion project will entail the removal of the entire town of Morococha (Yauli province, Junín region). Residents voted to approve the relocation across the valley last year, on promises of government aid. But nearly half the residents supported a "no" campaign, rejecting the terms as inadequate. (BBC, June 17)