Iranian authorities on Jan. 2 advised the 1.5 million residents of Isfahan to leave the city if they can because air pollution has reached emergency levels. (BBC Radio, Jan. 2) Tehran's Air Quality Control Company also warned Jan. 2 that air pollution in the capital has also reached alarming levels, and ordered elementary schools and daycare centers closed in the city due to heavy smog. (Mehr News Agency, Jan. 1) Early last month, Tehran residents were likewise urged by authorities to lave the city in response to "dangerous" smog levels, blamed on nearly incessant bumper-to-bumper traffic. Similar edicts were issued for Isfahan and Arak. Schools were also ordered closed, and a cabinet meeting in the capital cancelled. Hospital admissions during the smog alert jumped by 15%, primarily due to people suffering headaches, respiratory problems and nausea. (AAP, Dec. 6; IBT, Dec. 5; AFP, Dec. 3)

Protesters supporting a Native Canadian chief's 23-day hunger strike blocked a rail line at Pointe-a-la-Croix in eastern Quebec Jan. 2. Theresa Spence of Ontario's Attawapiskat First Nation has been fasting to press her demands for a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss new legislation that weakens indigenous land rights and environmental protections. The new law, part of the Harper government's budget bill, sparked the #IdleNoMore movement, which has brought together First Nations and environmental activists in a wave of protests across Canada.

This New Year's Day marked the 150th anniversary of the Emanicpation Proclamation, with attendant media idolization of Abraham Lincoln. In the 10th YouTube edition of the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade, Kevin B. Anderson, author of Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and co-editor of the International Marxist-Humanist, discusses his article "Spielberg's 'Lincoln,' Karl Marx, and the Second American Revolution"—revealing the connection between the First International and Lincoln's radicalization, and tracing the legacy of freedom through the Arab Revolutions and Occupy movement.

Spanish national Angel Francisco Carromero Barrios, sentenced to four years in Cuba after being convicted of causing an automobile accident that killed Cuban dissidents Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero on July 22, was flown from Havana to Madrid Dec. 29 accompanied by four Spanish Interpol agents. Carromero will serve out his sentence in Spain under a 1998 agreement between Cuba and Spain. Another Spanish citizen, Miguel Vives Cutillas, was with Carromero on the flight; under the same agreement Vives will stay in Spain for the remaining 14 years of an 18-year sentence imposed by a Cuban court for drug trafficking.

Chilean judge Miguel Vázquez Plaza issued an order on Dec. 28 for the detention and trial of eight former military officers for their alleged participation in the murder of renowned singer and songwriter Víctor Jara during the military coup that established the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The leftist musician was one of the first and best known of the estimated 3,000 people murdered or disappeared by the dictatorship.

On Dec. 27 an Argentine federal appeals court upheld a lower court's decision to stay a possible prosecution of former president Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001) in connection with the deaths of 39 people during protests and massive looting after an economic collapse in December 2001. De la Rúa had been under investigation for the killing of five people and the wounding of 110 others by federal police when thousands of people defied the state of siege by demonstrating in Buenos Aires in the Plaza de Mayo and at the Obelisk in the Plaza de la República. The other 34 victims were killed in the provinces, where the police were not under the orders of the federal president.

Minera Argenta, the Argentine subsidiary of the Vancouver-based mining company Pan American Silver Corp., announced on Dec. 21 that it was suspending its Navidad silver mining project in the southern province of Chubut and would close its offices in Puerto Madryn and Trelew. The principal reason for the suspension was the failure of the province's governor, Martín Buzzi, to get the legislature to back his plan to circumvent Law 5001, which bans open-pit mines and the use of cyanide in mining operations in Chubut. Residents of the province had organized popular assemblies to oppose Buzzi's plan; dozens of mining opponents were injured when construction workers attacked them in Rawson, the province's administrative capital, on Nov. 27.

On the evening of Dec. 27, authorities in Mexico's Federal District (DF, Mexico City) released 13 men and one woman who had been in detention since Dec. 1 on charges of "attacks on the public peace" during protests that day against the inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. A total of 106 were arrested during the demonstrations, in which masked youths caused considerable property damage; 92 of the detainees were released within eight days, after human rights organizations and the DF's own Human Rights Commission (CDHDF) presented evidence that many were clearly not involved in the destruction.