The Iraqi Bar Association has officially urged lawyers to suspend cooperation with the special court hearing the case against Saddam Hussein until the murder of a member of the defense team is solved. The association also passed a resolution calling a one-day strike for Oct. 26 to protest the killing of Saadoun Janabi, who was bundled out of his Baghdad office Oct. 20 by heavily-armed men and later found dumped on a roadside, dead of gunshot wounds.

Five people were injured when two ambulances crashed into each other in Naples Oct. 22 during a drill designed to test emergency services' response to a terrorist attack. Special anti-terrorism police, helicopters, fire engines, sniffer dogs and Red Cross volunteers took part in the exercise, which had recruited over 100 actors to play dead and injured. Two ambulances rushing to help the "injured" slammed into each other, resulting in five real injured, and two hospitalizations. Another casualty was a woman civil defence volunteer who had to be treated for a panic attack. The "Autumn Emergency 2005" drill followed similar exercises in Rome and Milan organized in the wake of the July 7 London bombings. (Reuters, Oct. 22)

Authorities in Uzbekistan are threatening to force dissident Elena Urlaeva to submit to immediate treatment with powerful psychotropic drugs—even though an initial psychiatric commission had declared her sane. The case against Urlaeva is the latest in the Uzbek government's deepening repression of human rights defenders and independent political activists in the aftermath of the May 13 massacre at Andijan.

A sudden surge in violence in the Mexican Pacific resort of Acapulco is baffling authorities. In the last year, nine police officers have been killed in Acapulco, a city of 700,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. Since January alone, there have been 20 execution-style killings, among them the municipal police chief, two Mexican tourists, a prominent disco owner and an investigator for the state attorney general's office.

"Plan Colombia," Bogotá's US— backed program to reduce drug production in that Andean nation, "isn't working," charges Luis Correa, leader of Venezuela's National Commission Against Illicit Drug Use (Conacuid). Luis Correa said there had been "a huge increase" in illegal crop production in areas of Colombia near the Venezuelan border. "In July, we were able to prove it through satellite photos provided by the OAS, which even revealed new landing strips," the Conacuid chief told reporters. "In my opinion, this shows that Plan Colombia isn't working, because — according to what they said — the purpose was to eliminate the crops and reduce drug production."

From Chile's English-language Santiago Times, Oct. 14:

Second-To-Last Yagana Woman Dies Of A Heart Attack
The second-to-last member of Chile's pre-colonial Yagán tribe, 84-year-old Emelinda Acuña, died on Wednesday, taking with her the traditions, stories, and secrets of a little-known indigenous population. The only remaining pureblooded member of the Yagán tribe is now Acuña's sister-in-law, Cristina Calderón.

Ten years after Niger's government and insurgents signed an accord to end the Tuareg rebellion, authorities have launched an economic assistance program for more than 3,000 ex-combatants in the country's north—the final phase as laid out in the peace pact. Under the project, 3,160 former combatants will be granted around US $300 each in the form of micro-loans for projects in animal husbandry, local crafts and vegetable gardening, said Michele Falavigna, Niger representative of the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

On Oct. 11, unidentified gunmen shot dead Francisco Antonio Cuchillo Baltazar, a 57-year indigenous governor of Ginebra municipality of the southwestern Colombian department of Valle del Cauca, the authorities said. Cuchillo was hit by three bullets when he was waiting for a bus to return home. His daughter, Lili Cuchillo, said her father "was shot three times, one in the head and two in the chest, by an assault rifle. To this moment we do not have information about which armed group committed this crime." She said this murder "represents an attack on our communities. They took a leader away from us." On Sept. 5, Jorge Eduardo Cuchillo Baltazar, the governor's brother, was kidnapped and shot dead. His body was found near Ginebra. (Xinhua, Oct. 13)