Ecuador's national indigenous alliance CONAIE announced an "indefinite" paro (general strike) June 13, in response to a sudden jump in petrol prices. Things escalated the following day, when prominent CONAIE leader Leonidas Iza was arrested at Pastocalle, Cotopaxi province, where he was apparently participating in a blockade of the Panamerican highway. He was held at a military base at Latacunga, but released the next day following angry protests over his detention and a CONAIE call for "radicalization" of the campaign. Roadblocks are reported in at least 14 of the country's 24 provinces, including Pichincha, where the capital Quito is located. CONAIE has presented the government of President Guillermo Lasso with a list of 10 demands. These include, in addition to a drop in fuel prices, a moratorium on new oil and mineral leases, and reparations to communities impacted by extractive projects. (Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, EFE, El Comercio, Quito; El Universo, Guayaquil)

From Anarchist Black Cross Belarus, June 10:

A full-scale war in Ukraine has been going on for over three months now. The anarchist movement has responded to the Russian invasion in different ways during these three months—some have begun unconditionally supporting their comrades in Ukraine, while others continue to repeat the story of NATO aggression in the region. We also felt it necessary to make a statement about our view of events.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv by indiscriminate Russian shelling using widely banned cluster munitions and inherently inaccurate rockets, Amnesty International said June 13. A new report, entitled 'Anyone Can Die at Any Time', documents how Russian forces have shelled residential neighborhoods in Ukraine's second largest city almost daily since the start of the invasion, causing "wholesale destruction." Amnesty found evidence of Russian forces repeatedly using 9N210 and 9N235 cluster munitions as well as scatterable mines, both of which are subject to international treaty bans because of their indiscriminate effects.

US President Joe Biden issued an executive order May 23 that designates Colombia as a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) of the United States, under terms of the Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act. The designation will facilitate further weapons transfers from the US to Colombia, and increased military cooperation between the two countries. Colombia is now the third MNNA in Latin America, after Brazil and Argentina. Other MNNAs include Egypt, Morocco, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. On May 2-6, a delegation of NATO staff visited Colombia to discuss the South American country's participation in the alliance's Defense Education Enhancement Program (DEEP). Colombia became NATO's newest "global partner" in 2018, but this relationship was reinforced last December, when it became a member of the NATO Individually Tailored Partnership Program (ITPP). (More at El Espectador)

A group of 33 legal scholars and genocide experts on May 27 released a report accusing Russia of incitement to genocide in Ukraine, and calling on the international community to prevent a genocide from occurring. The report, released by the New Lines Institute for Strategy & Policy n Washington DC and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal, used "open-source evidence" to assert that Russia has breached the UN Genocide Convention, a treaty to which Russia and Ukraine are both parties.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Órban on May 24 declared a state of emergency, citing threats originating from the war in Ukraine. The declaration, allowing him to rule by decree, came days after his Fidesz party used its supermajority in parliament to pass a constitutional amendment allowing the government to impose a state of emergency in the event of a war in a neighboring country. Órban declared a similar emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and those assumed special powers, having been extended by the National Assembly multiple times, were set to expire just days before the new declaration.   

In Episode 125 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues his deconstruction of the increasingly sinister, aggression-abetting politics of Noam Chomsky. In his recent interview with Current Affairs, Chomsky echoes Henry Kissinger's lecturing to the Ukrainians that they must capitulate to Russian aggression in the interests of global stability—a directive promptly repudiated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Chomsky has long been peddling historical revisionism on Ukraine, but his current convergence with Kissinger is a case study in imperial narcissism—an internalization of the imperialist perspective he has ostensibly dedicated his life to opposing. Fortunately, there is growing dissent on the left to Chomsky's paradoxical Kissingerian line, including from Ukrainian-American scholars—and from Chomsky's own Ukrainian translator, Artem Chapeye.

According to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide rose to 90 million by the end of 2021, propelled by new waves of violence or protracted conflict in countries including Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Burma, Nigeria, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2022, the war in Ukraine has displaced 8 million within the country and forced some 6 million to flee the country as refugees. This has pushed the total displaced to over 100 million for the first time.