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):

Libyan rebels on June 13 broke through the Qaddafi-loyalist forces besieging Misrata and once again advanced toward Tripoli, some 140 miles to the east. Meanwhile, rebels are reported to have pushed Qaddafi's forces out of several villages in the Jebel Nafusa, the mountain range southwest of Tripoli, where they had been carrying on an offensive for weeks. If the advances from both Misrata and the Nafusa continue, Tripoli could be besieged by the rebels soon.

A judge for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on June 10 overturned the release of Yemeni Guantánamo Bay detainee Hussein Salem Mohammed Almerfedi. After his capture in 2001 and detention at Guantánamo Bay, Almerfedi filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus which was granted by a lower court. The government had argued that Almerfedi was a supporter of al-Qaeda because of his travels to Pakistan that indicated strong ties to the group. However, the court concluded that the government had not met its burden to show by a preponderance of the evidence that Almerfedi was part of al Qaeda. The appeals court, however, found that the government had met its burden of proof by a preponderance of evidence that Almerfedi was, in fact, part of al-Qaeda:

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaeda mastermind said to be behind the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was killed this week at a security checkpoint in Mogadishu, Somalia, by government troops who didn't immediately realize he was the most wanted man in East Africa, officials said June 11. Mohammed, a native of the Comoros Islands, was carrying sophisticated weapons, maps and other "operational materials," as well as tens of thousands of dollars when he was killed, Somali Information Minister Abdulkareem Jama said. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, then on a visit to Tanzania, called the killing a "significant blow to al-Qaeda, its extremist allies, and its operations in East Africa."

A "peace caravan," which has spent a week travelling through Mexico to protest against drug-related violence and the "war on drugs," crossed the border into the US at Juárez-El Paso on June 11. Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who led the National Citizen Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity, appealed for a similar citizen mobilization in the US. "The US has a grave responsibility in all this, when its citizens remain silent, they are imposing war on us," said Sicilia, whose son was recently killed in drug-related violence. "Americans have to realize that behind every puff of pot, every line of coke there is death, there are shattered families." Sicilia and his convoy of about 20 vehicles began their journey in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, and have criss-crossed the country, holding rallies against the escalating violence and militarization along the way. (RFI, Spain, June 12; BBC News, AP, June 11)