President Barack Obama denied a permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline Jan. 18, saying the deadline imposed by Congress did not leave sufficient time to conduct the necessary review. "The rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline's impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment," Obama said in a statement. Late last year, Republicans attached to an unrelated short-term payroll tax cut extension a provision that compelled the White House to make a decision on the pipeline within 60 days.

Does it get any murkier than this? The conspirosphere is abuzz with claims aired in Foreign Policy magazine Jan. 13 that Mossad agents recruited militants from the Iranian terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as CIA agents in a "false flag" operation. Iran's Press TV and Pakistan's The Nation as well as stateside conspiranoids like Prison Planet and Antiwar.com have jumped all over it. But, predictably, the actual original report is fuzzy on the details and raises more questions than it answers. Here's the salient passage:

One solider was killed in northern Mali Jan. 17 in a clash with Tuareg fighters of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA)—who authorities said were backed up by former pro-Qaddafi Libyan soldiers. The army said it beat back the Tuaregs and Libyans with a helicopter assault, destroying six vehicles in the skirmish at Menaka in the Gao region. (Reuters, Jan. 17) National Transitional Council forces in Tripoli are meanwhile preparing an offensive against Qaddafi-loyalist strongholds in Libya's south. Rival militias clashed near the town of Gharyan left four dead and 50 wounded before a prisoner swap was brokered to end the fighting. The clash began when a man was stabbed and stripped naked at a vegetable market. The fighting pitted the Martyrs Brigade of Gharyan against the Assaba militia, said to be Qaddafi loyalists. (AFP, BBC World Service, Jan. 17)

On Jan. 12 ballistics experts and investigators from Mexico's governmental National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) carried out a reconstruction of a confrontation last month between student protesters and police on a highway in the southwestern state of Guerrero. Two students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College in the nearby village of Ayotzinapa were killed on Dec. 12 when state and federal police tried to disperse some 500 protesters blocking the highway; a worker at a gas station near the road also died, in a fire reportedly caused by a Molotov cocktail thrown by a student.

Agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) worked with an informant and with Mexican enforcement agents in 2007 to launder millions of dollars for Mexico's Beltrán Leyva cartel, according to reports in the New York Times and the Mexican magazine emeequis. The information comes from the Mexican government's response to a US request for the extradition of Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, a Colombian drug trafficker arrested in Mexico in November 2010.

Eight people, including four children, were murdered in the village of Regaderos, in Sabá municipality in the northern Honduran department of Colón, on the evening of Jan. 9. Seven of the victims were members of the same campesino family; the eighth was a man running errands. The attackers took the victims from the family's home to a field and killed them there with machetes and firearms. The youngest of the children was one year old; the others were seven, 12 and 15 years old. The attackers cut a part of the ear off each of the eight bodies. (El Tiempo, San Pedro Sula, Jan. 10)

A series of raids and house fires in southern Chile followed the filing of a criminal complaint on Jan. 6 by the government of right-wing president Sebastián Piñera implying that indigenous Mapuche activists were responsible for recent major forest fires in the Biobío and Araucanía regions. The complaint was based on an "anti-terrorism" law passed during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and used repeatedly to repress protests by Mapuche activists seeking to regain control of ancestral lands being exploited by timber companies.

The Ethiopian government under its "villagization" program is forcibly relocating approximately 70,000 indigenous residents from the western Gambella region to new villages that lack adequate food, farmland, healthcare, and educational facilities, Human Rights Watch said in a report Jan. 16. State security forces have repeatedly threatened, assaulted, and arbitrarily arrested villagers who resist the transfers. "The Ethiopian government’s villagization program is not improving access to services for Gambella's indigenous people, but is instead undermining their livelihoods and food security," said Jan Egeland of Human Rights Watch. "The government should suspend the program until it can ensure that the necessary infrastructure is in place and that people have been properly consulted and compensated for the loss of their land."