Ecuador's government on April 6 declared US ambassador Heather Hodges "persona non grata" and expelled her from the country in response to a cable released by the Wikileaks whistle-blower web site. Hodges refused to repudiate the July 2009 confidential cable that bore her signature and was published by Spanish newspaper El País. In the document addressed to the State Department, Hodges said embassy officials believed President Rafael Correa was aware of supposed corrupt practices by former national police chief Jaime Hurtado, but that the president named him to the post anyway because it would make him more easily manipulated.

Ecuador's national indigenous organization announced last week that is filing a legal complaint against the government, including President Rafael Correa, for complicity with "genocide" against indigenous people in the Amazon. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) argues that expanding oil exploration and mining is imperiling the lives of "uncontacted" indigenous groups that have chosen voluntary isolation. Especially named are the Tagaeri, Taromenane, Oñamenane and Iwene ethnicities, all sub-groups of the Waorani nationality who are believed to live in the area of Yasuni National Park. The legal complaint argues that industrial exploitation of the Amazonian rainforest in Ecuador is causing a "cultural and physical disappearance" of these indigenous peoples, "which amounts to the crime of ethnocide or genocide." The move by CONAIE is unprecedented in Ecuador. (Mongabay, April 6; AFP, March 30; CONAIE, March 29)

Andrés Taipe Chuquipuma, 22, on April 4 became the first fatal casualty in the ongoing civil strike (paro) at Islay village in Peru's Arequipa region against the planned Tía María copper mining project. He died in the hospital hours after receiving a bullet in the stomach in a confrontation with the National Police. Two more protesters at Islay were killed April 7. The following day, Peru's government announced that the project was cancelled, with the mining ministry saying the environmental impact assessment presented by the Southern Copper Corp. was "inadmissible." (BBC News, April 9; Dow Jones, April 8; RPP, April 4)

AlJazeera on April 9 reports from a refugee camp in Tunisia, where African migrants who have fled Libya tell both of being threatened and expelled from the country by rebel forces—and being press-ganged by Qaddafi's military and forced to fight under pain of deportation. The interviewed migrants are from Nigeria, Niger, Mali and Ghana. One worker from Ghana said he was abducted by the Libyan military when soldiers stormed his house in Sirte: "They asked us why we were trying to leave the country and that we must stay to fight for when the Americans come." Some of the interviewed migrants had deserted Qaddafi's forces, while others were forced to flee by rebels under accusation of being Qaddafi collaborators.

Israeli actor and political activist Juliano Mer-Khamis, who ran a theater project in the West Bank's Jenin refugee camp, was shot dead by unknown masked men on April 4 outside the theater he founded there. Khamis, 52, had received threats for his work in Jenin, but continued to divide his time between the camp and his home in Haifa. Khamis appeared in a number of Israeli films after his first film role in the 1984 production of the John Le Carre novel The Little Drummer Girl, about Mossad's hunt for a PLO bomber. Born to a Jewish mother and an Arab Christian father, he established the Freedom Theater group in Jenin during the first Intifada to promote co-existence.

Israeli air-strikes and artillery fire struck Gaza nine times April 8, killing eight, and bringing the total number of dead over the past 24 hours to thirteen, some half of them civilians. A mother and daughter, and elderly man were killed in two separate strikes near Khan Younis, a fourth—identified as an al-Qassam Brigades fighter—was killed near Gaza City, and two unidentified men was killed when a shell hit his home east of Gaza City. A statement from the Israeli Defense Forces acknowledged civilian casualties, saying that the military "regrets that the Hamas terrorist organization chooses to operate from within its civilian population, using it as a 'human shield'."

A Somali pirate was sentenced by the US District Court for the District of Columbia on April 7 to 25 years in prison for attacking a Danish ship off the coast of Somalia in 2008, for which he and other pirates received a $1.7 million ransom. US Department of Justice officials say Jama Idle Ibrahim, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit piracy and conspiracy to use a firearm during a violent crime, and other Somali men were armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades when they seized the Danish vessel MV CEC Future and held its 13-member crew for ransom. Ibrahim's sentence will run concurrent with the 30-year sentence he received in November, stemming from a failed assault on the Navy's USS Ashland.

Friday prayers again exploded into protests in cities nearly across the Arab world April 8. In Syria security forces killed at least 10 people in the southern city of Deraa, while in the east, ethnic Kurds demonstrated for reform despite President Bashir Assad's offer this week to ease rules which bar many of them from obtaining citizenship. In Yemen, two people were shot dead and 25 wounded as security forces fired on protesters in the southern city of Taiz. (Reuters, April 8)