The US-led coalition carried out air-strikes against both ISIS and Nusra Front positions in Syria on Sept. 23. At the same time, US planes took unilateral action against the so-called "Khorasan Group" of ex-Qaeda members "to disrupt the imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests," as a Central Command statement put it. The statement provided no details on the plotting. The Khorasan Group targets were said to be near Aleppo. Reports indicate the group is led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, a Qaeda operative who was supposedly privy to Osama bin Laden's 9-11 plans prior to the attack. The US State Department calls al-Fadhli a "senior facilitator and financier" for al-Qaeda. (Times of Israel, MJ) Meanwhile, the Israeli military shot down a Syrian MiG-21 fighter jet that it said had infiltrated it airspace over the Golan Heights. The wreckage fell on the Syrian-controlled side of the plateau. (Al Jazeera)

A confrontation between indigenous Guatemalans in the early morning of Sept. 20 over the construction of a cement factory and a highway left eight dead in Loma Blanca community, San Juan Sacatepéquez municipality, about 30 km northwest of Guatemala City in Guatemala department. Several others were injured, and three houses and five vehicles were set on fire. According to Daniel Pascual, the leader of the Campesino Unity Committee (CUC), several armed men, some of them employees of the Cementos Progreso cement company, fired on residents who oppose the two construction projects. A Cementos Progreso representative, José González Merlos, blamed factory opponents. "These acts of violence aren't new," he said, charging that construction workers "have frequently been harassed and attacked in their homes." Factory opponents "respect absolutely nothing," according to González Merlos.

Members of Honduras' Tolupan indigenous group in the community of San Francisco Locomapa in the northern department of Yoro have been threatened by armed men linked to organized crime, some residents charged in a video posted on YouTube on Sept. 10. There have been protests for more than a year against illegal logging in the area and against an antimony mine which the protesters say is operating without a permit. Locomapa residents María Enriqueta Matute, Armando Fúnez Medina and Ricardo Soto were killed by two mine employees during a protest on Aug. 23, 2013. The Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH) and other Honduran organizations say the government has failed to arrest the killers or take other actions required by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), the human rights agency of the Organization of American States (OAS). The CID ordered protective measures for 38 community members last year on Dec. 19. (Adital, Brazil, Sept.18)

The State Civil Protection Unit (UEPC) of the northern Mexican state of Sonora issued a new alert on Sept. 21 warning some 25,000 residents about likely contamination in the Bacanuchi and Sonora rivers from the giant Buenavista del Cobre copper mine in Cananea. According to Arizpe municipality president Vidal Vázquez Chacón, who reported the contamination a day earlier, the source was a leak in the temporary dam set up to stop the overflow of toxic substances after 40,000 cubic meters of copper sulfate acid solution spilled from the mine into the two rivers on Aug. 6. Spokespeople for Grupo México, the company that owns and operates the mine, said the latest overflow was caused by heavy rains associated with Hurricane Odile in mid-September. The 115-year-old mine makes $1 billion annually by producing some 200,000 tons of copper each year. (La Jornada, Mexico, Sept. 21; Associated Press, Sept. 21, via Salon)

On Sept. 18 Chilean authorities arrested three supposed anarchists, Juan Alexis Flores Riquelme, Nataly Casanova Muñoz and Guillermo Durán Méndez, on charges of participation in the Sept. 8 bombing at a shopping center in Santiago's Escuela Militar subway station; 14 people were injured in the lunchtime blast. Public defender Eduardo Camus, who is representing the defendants, said they denied involvement. The arrests took place during an operation by more than 200 agents of the carabineros militarized police which included searches in six homes in the working-class Santiago-area communes of La Granja, San Bernardo and La Pintana. So far there have been some 200 bombings and attempted bombings in Chile in the past 10 years; most caused no injuries.

The US carried out its first air-strikes against ISIS targets in Syria on Sept. 22. In a statement, Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said the US used "a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles" launched from the USS George HW Bush in the Persian Gulf. Kirby said that because these strikes are ongoing, he could not give details about where they took place. But an unnamed Pentagon official told NPR the strikes targeted positions near Raqqa, the ISIS de facto capital. Planes from five Arab countries participated in the strikes—also not named by Kirby, although FoxNews identified them as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain and Qatar. There was no indication that the Syrian government had been consulted on the strikes, as Damascus had demanded.

Amid growing concern about horrific human rights abuses by Mexico's security forces, Amnesty International on Sept. 4 issued a report, aptly entitled "Out of Control," harshly criticizing the Mexican government for its failure to adequately investigate allegations of torture and other "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" at the hands of the military and police. The report finds that such practices are condoned, tolerated or ignored by superior officers, prosecutors, judges and even official human rights bodies. The report calls on Mexico to enforce its own human rights laws—echoing similar demands made by Amnesty last year, urging the Mexican Senate to adopt legislation to protect against rights violations by the military. (Jurist, Sept. 5)

Amid the current UN climate talks and massive march for action on climate change in New York City, the New York Times runs an oh-so-naughty op-ed by Nadine Unger, an assistant professor of atmospheric chemistry at Yale, entitled "To Save the Planet, Don't Plant Trees." Now, if she had reversed the title as "Don’t Plant Trees To Save the Planet," she might have had a bit of a case. We ourselves reject the "carbon trading" scam that gives corporations a license to pollute if they plant trees—despite the fact that they often don't even plant the trees, but just grab forested lands from indigenous peoples, and (worse) the burninng of fossil fuels releases carbon that had been more thoroughly "locked" than that in trees, which do eventually die and rot. This is indeed a point that "carbon trading" and "biofuels" boosters seek to obfuscate. But this is not Unger's point. Instead, she is literally loaning legitimacy to Reaganoid nonsense that "trees cause pollution." To wit: