Spain's conservative-led parliament, the Cortes, passed an anti-protest bill on Dec. 11 despite harsh criticism from opposition politicians and activist groups, who say it violates the right to demonstrate, limits freedom of expression, and gives undue power to police. The measure, dubbed the "Ley Mordaza" (Gag Law), limits demonstrations to officially permiited gatherings and imposes heavy fines on unauthorized protesters. It also bans taking photos of police during protest demonstrations. Spain has seen a rising tide of mostly peaceful street protests and strikes against Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's austerity program, which includes harsh cuts to public health and education.

The head of the Palestinian Authority committee against the separation wall and settlements died Dec. 10 after Israeli soldiers assaulted him in a village near Ramallah, committee sources said. Ziad Abu Ein, 55, died after a soldier beat him on the chest with his helmet in the village of Turmsayya, Ramallah district, the director of the committee's information center, Jamil al-Barghouthi, told Ma'an News Agency. Abu Ein also suffered severe tear gas inhalation as soldiers fired canisters in the area. A Palestinian security source told AFP that Israeli forces beat Abu Ein with the butts of their rifles and their helmets during a protest march. He lost consciousness and was taken to Ramallah's hospital where he was later pronounced dead. 

The so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" employed during the Bush administration were "ineffective," according to a long-awaited report (PDF) released Dec. 9 by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. According to the report, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deliberately misled Congress and the White House about information obtained using "enhanced interrogation techniques" between 2002 and 2007, which were more brutal than the public was led to believe. The more than 600 pages of materials that were released to the public are based on millions of internal CIA documents and took over five years to produce. The full report, totaling more than 6,700 pages, remains classified but has been shared with the White House.

Air-strikes on landmark buildings at the tail end of the Israeli military's "Operation Protective Edge" in Gaza in August were a deliberate and direct attack on civilian buildings and amount to war crimes, Amnesty International charges in a new report. Entitled "Nothing is Immune: Israel's Destruction of Landmark Buildings in Gaza," the report (PDF) provides evidence that attacks on four multi-storey buildings during the last four days of the conflict were in contravention of international humanitarian law, and calls for them to be independently and impartially investigated. "All the evidence we have shows this large-scale destruction was carried out deliberately and with no military justification," said Philip Luther, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Amnesty International. "Both the facts on the ground and statements made by Israeli military spokespeople at the time indicate that the attacks were a collective punishment against the people of Gaza and were designed to destroy their already precarious livelihoods."

The remains of one of 43 students abducted the night of Sept. 26-27 in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero have been identified by DNA tests, parents of the missing students said on Dec. 6. Technicians in Innsbruck, Austria, established that one of 14 bone fragments sent them by the Mexican government came from the body of Alexander Mora Venancio, a 19-year-old student at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa; gang members and municipal police had detained him along with 42 other Ayotzinapa students in Iguala de la Independencia during attacks which also left three students and three bystanders dead. The bone fragments were found in a dump near Iguala in Cocula municipality after three members of the Guerrero Unidos ("United Warriors") gang told federal authorities they had helped burn and dispose of the bodies there.

Hundreds of Mexican immigrants and other activists held actions in at least 47 US towns and cities on Dec. 3 to protest the abduction of 43 teachers' college students by police and gang members in Mexico's Guerrero state in September; each of the 43 students had one of the actions dedicated to him. The protests were organized by UStired2, a group taking its name from #YaMeCansé ("I'm tired now," or "I've had it"), a Mexican hashtag used in response to the violence against the students, who attended the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa. The protesters focused on US government financing for the Mexican government—especially funding for the "war on drugs" through the 2008 Mérida Initiative—but they also expressed outrage over the US court system's failure to indict US police agents in two recent police killings of unarmed African Americans.

A decree by Costa Rican president Luis Guillermo Solís authorizing payments to former banana workers sickened by the pesticide Nemagon became official on Dec. 1 with the measure's publication in the government's gazette. Under the decree the government's National Insurance Institute (INS) will pay out from 25% to 100% of the medical bills for workers who suffered physical or psychological damage from Nemagon, with the percentage based on their years of exposure to the pesticide. The decree currently covers 13,925 former banana workers; cases are pending for 9,233 of the workers' children and 1,742 of the workers' spouses. More than 11,000 other applications were dismissed.

On Dec. 1 Nieves Ayress Moreno, a Chilean-born naturalized US citizen, formally joined a criminal complaint filed earlier by three other Chilean women over sexual political violence that they say they suffered under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Chilean law doesn't treat sexual violence as a separate complaint; instead, the crimes are considered "illegitimate pressure," allowing some of the perpetrators to escape justice. The complaint seeks to have the crimes "incorporated into the penal code and those responsible for them to be able to be punished," according to another of the plaintiffs, Alejandra Holzapfel. Ayress Moreno, who lives in New York, delayed joining Holzapfel and the remaining two plaintiffs, Soledad Castillo and Nora Brito, in the complaint until she could travel to Chile.