Hundreds of Vietnamese turned out to protest against Chinese naval operations in disputed waters of the South China Sea on June 5. the protesters in Hanoi marched on the Chinese embassy, shouting slogans including "The Paracels and Spratlys belong to Vietnam"" and "Stop Chinese invasion of Vietnam's islands." The demonstrations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City follow a May 26 confrontation between a Vietnamese oil and gas survey ship and Chinese patrol boats. Hanoi accused the Chinese vessels of cutting the cables of the Vietnamese ship conducting seismic research about 120 kilometers off Vietnam's south-central coast. (BBC News, June 5)

At least 20 people, eight of them army troops, were killed when Taliban militants attacked a security post at Wakeen in Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal region on June 9. The attack came five days after Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, commander of Harkat-ul Jihad al Islami (HUJI), was killed in an apparent US drone strike near Wana, South Waziristan. He was believed to be the mastermind of an audacious May 23 militant attack on Pakistan's Mehran naval base in Karachi, which was repulsed after an indeterminate loss of life. (RTT, June 9; Dawn, June 4; Dawn, May 23)

On May 24, a massive explosion and fire at a newly inaugurated oil refinery in Abadan led to the deaths and injuries of an unknown number of workers. The explosion, caused by technical problems, occurred during a facility inauguration ceremony that had prompted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to boast of Iran's growing capacity to refine oil. According to Hamid Reza Katouzian, head of the Energy Commission of the Majles, Iran's parliament, "experts had forewarned that the Abadan refinery was not ready to be inaugurated." The explosion underscored once again the lack of safe working conditions in Iran's oil and petrochemical industry. In addition, recent labor strikes have challenged the industry's reliance on temporary contracts for its labor force. In March, 1,800 contract workers at the Tabriz Petrochemical Complex demanded that they be hired directly in order to receive the benefits and job security provisions to which permanent employees are entitled. In April, 1,500 striking workers at the Imam Khomeini Port Petrochemical Complex in Khuzestan made similar demands.

We've already noted claims that mercenaries recruited by an Israeli firm are fighting for the embattled regime of Moammar Qaddafi in Libya. Now a Reuters report of June 3 cites unnamed officials saying that "private contractors" are hiring mercenaries for the rebels. Although the officials asserted that no actual US government funds are involved, the report cites a classified "covert action finding" signed by President Barack Obama earlier this year as authorizing the CIA to conduct a wide spectrum of operations in support of the rebels. From the report:

Afro-Colombian community leader Ana Fabricia Córdoba, from the Santa Cruz neighborhood in Medellín, was shot dead by an unidentified gunman on a bus in the city June 7. Córdoba was a leader of communities displaced to Medellín by political violence in the Pacific coastal department of Chocó. She arrived in the city in 2001 when she was forced to flee after paramilitary groups killed her son in Urabá, the violence-torn region that straddles the north of Chocó and Antioquia departments. A second son was killed at the hands of presumed paramilitaries just last year. With her organization, Ruta Pacifica de las Mujeres, she was a leading advocate for the recovery of usurped Afro-Colombian lands in the coastal region.

The mosque in the West Bank village of Maghayer (also rendered al-Mughayyir) suffered damage and threatening graffiti in a vandal attack in the wee hours of June 7. Burning tires were rolled into the mosque near Ramallah, setting rugs in the building on fire, and the walls were scrawled with anti-Arab slogans. The words "Alei Ayin" were also spray-painted on the walls, which is the name of a nearby Jewish settlement outpost demolished by Israeli police last week, sparking clashes with the settlers. Other slogans spray painted on the wall include "Price Tag," and "This is only the beginning." "Price tag" refers to the strategy extremist settlers have adopted to exact a price in attacks on Palestinians in retribution for moves against settlements or incidents such as the Itamar attack. Several West Bank mosques have been torched in the past year; most incidents were blamed on Jewish settlers. Israeli authorities say they are investigating the Maghayer attack. (Ma'an News Agency, JTA, June 7)

Ecuador's government sent in army troops backed up by helicopters into the jungles of the northwest coastal province of Esmeraldas to shut down illegal gold mining operations last week, saying the highly polluting activity is associated with drug trafficking and protected by armed militias. Several back-hoes, diesel generators and dredges were destroyed in controlled explosions. The small-scale mining operations in the cantons of Eloy Alfaro and San Lorenzo near the Colombian border were "totally illegal" and violated the country's mining, environmental and tax codes, Minister of Non-Renewable Natural Resources Wilson Pástor and Environment Minister Marcela Aguiñaga said in a press conference. Aguiñaga reported that arsenic and heavy metals like mercury are found in the waters of tributaries of the Rio Santiago. "This will cause cancer and other diseases in the short term," she said. Added Pástor: "Ecuador is not a no man's land. Illegal mining has to stop. We have to put a stop to exploitation of the local workforce. We have to put a stop to drug money laundering. And we're tired of the plundering of our natural resources." (IPS, June 1)

The WikiLeaks group is releasing a total of 1,918 previously unpublished US diplomatic cables concerning Haiti to the weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté, which is published in New York and Port-au-Prince. The cables cover a period of seven years, from April 17, 2003 to Feb. 28, 2010, shortly after the January 2010 earthquake that shattered much of southern Haiti. The newspaper is planning a series of articles based on the cables. The first article, which appeared in the May 25-30 edition, details US diplomats' unsuccessful efforts to keep former president René Préval (2006-2011) from having Haiti join PetroCaribe, a program through which Venezuela supplies oil to Caribbean Basin countries on favorable terms. Later articles are to show how the US government backed assembly plant owners fighting an increase in the minimum wage and how the US militarized the distribution of aid after the earthquake. (Haïti Liberté, May 25-May 30; AlterPresse, Haiti, May 31)