The US Justice Department announced on Aug. 30 that Kenneth Melson, the acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), had been reassigned to another position in the department and that Dennis Burke, the US attorney for Arizona, was resigning from his post. The department didn't explain the reason for the changes, but they were clearly fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled ATF program that allowed some 2,000 weapons to go from the US to Mexico, where they were probably used in drug cartel violence.

Cars and buses were taken off the streets of Bolivia as the country held its first "National Day of the Pedestrian" on Sunday Sept. 4. All motor vehicles, including public transport, were banned for the day in cities across the country, as the streets were given over to youth festivals and sporting events. Said La Paz Mayor Luis Revilla: "We are enjoying this day in homage to the environment, but also and above all in homage to pedestrians. The city is not only for vehicles, but also for people."

Two Shipibo indigenous communites in the Peruvian Amazon have broken off negotiations with Maple Gas Corporation del Peru SRL., over the health and environmental impacts of six oil spills on their territory over the past three years. The move comes just one month after 32 Shipibo were forced to clean up a spill with their bare hands. The July 10 pipeline rupture in Maple Energy's Oil Block 31-E, 75 miles north of the city of Pucallpa, spilled crude oil into the Río Mashiria, a tributary of the Ucayali. The Shipibo communities of Nuevo Sucre and Canaán de Cachiyacu officially terminated the negotiations on Aug. 11, charging that Maple Gas, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ireland-based Maple Energy (MPLE) was not acting in good faith.

An NGO has released a report condemning Colombia’s human rights record as part of a series of articles analysing the relationship between anti-terrorism policies and human rights since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) report notes how shortly after September 11, the US financial aid from Plan Colombia, which had previously been earmarked for fighting drug trafficking, was also used to combat terrorism. At the same time the FARC, the ELN and paramilitary groups were added to the US list of terrorist organizations.

Residents of Kington's poor district of Tivoli Gardens reacted with shock and disbelief to the news that extradited accused drug kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke arranged a plea bargain this week at Federal District Court in Manhattan. "I'm devastated," one anonymous member of the Coke clan told the Jamaica Gleaner. Scores were killed in days of street-fighting in the district last year as police and army troops were deployed to hunt down Coke for extradition to the US. But in the end he cut a deal in which he pleaded guilty to trafficking large quantities of marijuana and cocaine, and approving the stabbing of a marijuana dealer in the Bronx in 2007, who apparently survived. Five murder charges that could have landed him life in prison were dropped. Coke faces a maximum term of 23 years; the plea deal does not require him to cooperate or testify on behalf of the government in any proceeding. (NYT, Jamaica Gleaner, Sept. 1)

From Human Rights Watch, Sept. 4:

The de facto authorities in Tripoli, the National Transitional Council (NTC), should stop the arbitrary arrests and abuse of African migrant workers and black Libyans assumed to be mercenaries, Human Rights Watch said today. They should release those detained as mercenaries solely due to their dark skin color, Human Rights Watch said, and provide prompt judicial review to any for whom there is evidence of criminal activity.

More information emerges on the notorious Abdel Hakim Belhaj—recently an "al-Qaeda-linked terrorist" and now a military commander of Libya's NATO-backed rebels. A Sept. 3 account in The Guardian informs us that he was actually "renditioned" by the CIA from Malaysia to Libya back in 2004, when he was going by the alias Abdullah al-Sadiq:

The indigenous Telengit people in Russia's Altai Republic (see map) are turning to the international community to help stop a new gas pipeline to China that would cut through their sacred lands and a UN-recognized World Heritage Site. When first announced in 2006 by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the 2,700-kilometer Altai Pipeline was slated to be complete by the end of 2011, but construction is only about to begin now due to cost disputes. Cultural Survival warns that the pipeline would bisect the Ukok Plateau, sacred to the Telengit, and the Golden Mountains of Altai, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as Kanas National Park in China's Xinjiang province, one of that country's last undeveloped wilderness areas.