A NATO official acknowledged June 14 that the alliance is considering air-strikes on ancient Roman ruins in north Libya, sparking statements of concern from the United Nations. The anonymous official told CNN the alliance would bomb the ruins of Leptis Magna, between Tripoli and Misrata, if it confirmed that war material is being sequestered there by the Qaddafi regime. Rebel sources claim that Qaddafi-loyalist troops have stashed rocket launchers and other military equipment at the site. (CNN, UPI, Time magazine's Global Spin blog, June 14)

We noted last year the FBI raids on activists in the midwest over their alleged ties to the PFLP and the FARC. We've also noted the hardline proclivities of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, whose harsh "anti-terrorist" measures have bottlenecked free speech before. Now, this story from the Washington Post of June 13 connects the dots. We are not privy to the details, but it certainly doesn't sound good...

A group of Haitians left homeless by a January 2010 earthquake demonstrated in Port-au-Prince on June 10 to demand action on the housing situation and an end to forced evictions from the displaced persons camps. "We've had enough of living in tents, we want decent housing" was one of the slogans. The protest followed violent evictions from camps in the Delmas section of Port-au-Prince carried out on May 23 and May 25 by Delmas municipal authorities and agents of the National Police of Haiti (PNH).

Leaked US diplomatic cables show that "[t]he US embassy in Haiti worked closely with factory owners contracted by Levi's, Hanes, and Fruit of the Loom to aggressively block a paltry minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers" in 2009, according to an article in the New York and Haiti-based weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté. The article, published jointly with the US weekly magazine The Nation, is based on some of the 1,918 previously unpublished cables concerning Haiti that the WikiLeaks group has released to Haïti Liberté.

Statistics given to US senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) confirm claims that a high percentage of the illegal firearms in Mexico are smuggled from the US, although less than the 90% sometimes claimed in the past. The availability of illegal weapons in Mexico is a major factor in the more than 35,000 drug-related deaths in the country since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa began militarizing the fight against drug cartels in December 2006.

Campesino organizations from the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras marched in Tegucigalpa on June 9 to protest the killings of Aguán campesinos and to demand that the government act on its promise last year to distribute 3,000 hectares of land to campesino families. The Honduras section of the international campesino group Vía Campesina joined in the demonstration, along with the Alliance for Food Sovereignty and Agrarian Reform (SARA) and members of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), the country's main alliance of social movements. The groups say 39 campesinos have been murdered in the course of a longstanding land dispute in the valley.

On June 9 four Mapuche activists imprisoned in Chile's central Araucanía region decided to end a liquids-only hunger strike they started on March 15 to protest their convictions in what they considered an unfair trial. The prisoners—José Huenuche Reimán, Jonathan Huillical Méndez, Héctor Llaitul Carillanca and Ramón Llanquileo Pilquimán—stopped the fast after relatives, human rights organizations and members of the Catholic church made an agreement to form a Commission for the Defense of the Rights of the Mapuche People to promote and defend indigenous rights.

Glenn Greenwald (who, as we have noted, has become rather annoying of late) has a sneeringly sarcastic screed in his Salon column of June 11, "In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war," the crux of which is a lengthy quote from a story in the Washington Post of the previous day, "Conflict in Libya: U.S. oil companies sit on sidelines as Gaddafi maintains hold." After fulminating about how the US is really seeking "regime change" in Libya (which, as Greenwald himself says, is obvious), he presents the following text from the WP story (Greenwald's emphasis):