"Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid has been convicted of genocide and sentenced to death by hanging for his role in the 1988 "Anfal" counter-insurgency campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan, in which up to 180,000 Kurds were killed—some in poisonous gas attacks, some gunned down en masse at detainment camps. Majid is to be the seventh associate of Saddam Hussein to face the gallows. The location of the trial and identity of the prosecutors were secret.

A number of Sunni tribal leaders from the Anbar Salvation Council are among 12 people killed in a suicide bombing at the Mansour Hotel in central Baghdad June 25. Although the hotel is also home of the Chinese embassy and several political parties, the meeting of the Anbar sheikhs is believed to have been the target of the attack. The hotel bombing was one of five such attacks in Iraq today that killed more than 40 and injured scores. In the deadliest incident, suicide car bombers detonated outside the Baiji police station, killing 22, some 12 of them police officers. Eight people were killed in a blast in the southern city of Hilla. None of the bombings appeared to cause any US deaths. But the US military reported that one of its soldiers was killed in a small-arms attack. (BBC, WP, June 25)

Aborigine community leaders in a remote Northern Territory town set to receive the first police and army troops under an Australian federal government's plan to combat a reported wave of domestic and sexual abuse are questioning the need for "military occupation." The government last week seized control of 60 NT Aboriginal communities, including Mutitjulu, as Prime Minister John Howard declared the problem of child abuse a "national emergency."

Management of an auto parts plant operated by New York-based Alcoa, Inc. in El Progreso, Honduras, fired more than 50 union leaders and activists from June 8 to June 15, according to the National Labor Committee (NLC), a US labor rights organization. The Alcoa factory—located in El Porvenir Free Trade Zone, an industrial park for the tax-exempt assembly plants known as maquiladoras—assembles electrical wiring harnesses exclusively for export to the US-based Ford Motor Company.

Late on June 21 the US House of Representatives voted 214-203 against an amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill that would have closed the US Defense Department's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), a combat-training school for Latin American soldiers, formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA). Critics say that since its founding in 1946, SOA/WHINSEC has trained many of the region's worst human rights violators.

Early on May 31, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Benito A. Gonzalez after trying to handcuff him in an unincorporated area north of Escondido, California, just east of Interstate 15. Gonzalez was an out-of-status immigrant who lived in Sun City in Riverside County. The incident began when undercover Border Patrol agents pulled over a van suspected of carrying unauthorized immigrants, arrested the driver and 11 passengers and took them to a Border Patrol station. Gonzalez arrived in a separate vehicle and according to officials, confronted the lone undercover agent who had stayed behind to wait for a tow truck. The agent and Gonzalez scuffled in a parking lot and again in an adjacent lot after Gonzalez tried to run away, sheriff's investigators said. It was unclear whether Gonzalez was linked to the van stopped earlier. (San Diego Union Tribune, May 31; AP, June 5)

On June 15, a federal judge in Trenton, New Jersey, ruled that officials at the Monmouth County jail in Freehold can use intravenous or feeding tubes to force feed immigration detainee Samuel Izrailovich Shevaniya, who is on hunger strike. Shevaniya arrived at Monmouth County jail on June 7 and stopped eating on June 9. According to a petition filed on June 14 by the US Attorney's Office in Newark and obtained by The Star-Ledger, Shevaniya has "steadfastly indicated he has no intention of eating," and if he doesn't get food soon "his health will continue to deteriorate and he will ultimately die." Undersheriff Cynthia Scott, a spokesperson for the Monmouth County Sheriff's Department, said Shevaniya was cooperating with doctors, who will use either an intravenous tube or a feeding tube to deliver nourishment.

From Long Island Newsday, June 23:

Boy on a bike is killed
An 11-year-old Wyandanch boy was killed Friday when he biked into the path of a tractor-trailer, which then struck an oncoming minivan, critically injuring two children, police said.