Twenty-one protesters who were arrested at an anti-trade protest in Halifax, Nova Scotia, June 15 were released on the 18th on conditions that they do not return to the protest lines. Authorities said they faced a variety of charges, including assaulting police, mischief and weapons-related offences. Protests against a Halifax conference to promote the "Atlantica" free trade zone proposal turned violent when about 50 yooung people dressed in black and wearing balaclavas broke away from the larger group. Running through downtown Halifax, the youth hurled paint-filled light bulbs, fire-crackers and rocks at police, businesses and journalists. Police used pepper spray and electric stun- guns to subdue the protesters. Some protesters said the break-away faction was provoked after police started using stun-guns on others. (Canadian Press, June 19)

International aid agency Oxfam has announced it is pulling out of Gereida, the largest camp in Darfur, where more than 130,000 have sought refuge. The agency cited inaction by local authorities from the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), which controls the region, in addressing security convers and violence against aid workers. Oxfam urged the international community to do more to pressure all parties to the Darfur conflict to end attacks on civilians and aid workers.

From the AP, June 19:

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican on Tuesday issued a "Ten Commandments" for motorists to keep them on the road to salvation, warning drivers against the sins of road rage, abuse of alcohol or even simple rudeness.

From Reporters Without Borders, June 18, via International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX):

Reporters Without Borders has voiced deep outrage at the murder of Filaih Wadi Mijthab, editor of the daily "al-Sabah", whom kidnappers snatched from his car on 13 June 2007 as he was driving to work.

A lawyer for the United Steelworkers has asked the US State Department to investigate infiltration by Colombia's illegal paramilitaries into President Alvaro Uribe's first electoral campaign, based on a video showing then-candidate Uribe meeting with a group that included a man identified as Frenio Sánchez Carreño, leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) in the violence-torn city of Barrancabermeja.

Veracruz state police detained 47 members of local campesino group "Los Dorados de Villa" at the community of Ixhuatlán de Madero, in the mountainous Huasteca region. The campesinos, adherents of the Zapatista "Other Campaign," had been peacefully occupying a 513-hectare piece of land at Lomas del Dorado, from which they say they had been illegally evicted by the army 23 years ago. They say the occupation was undertaken after a generation of fruitless petitions for redress. An observer at the scene from the local United Human Rights Network (RUDH) is said to have been "disappeared." (La Jornada, June 16; LIMEDDH, June 15)

Federal judicial authorities in Mexico have granted an injuction to a group of Zoque indigenous campesinos in the Chimalapas region straddling the border of Chiapas and Oaxaca states, halting construction of a road through their territory. The petitioners, from the village of Santa María Chimalapa, Oax., say the project undertaken by the Chiapas state government, extending the Cintalapa-Rafael Cal y Mayor highway to the Valle de Uxpanapa highway in Oaxaca, would illegally impact communal lands. Complicating the matter is that some of the impacted lands are contested between Santa María Chimalapa, which claims them as traditional communal lands, and communities on the Chiapas side of the border which claim them as ejidos (redistributed lands). "The community is ready to defend its territory and seek a solution to these ancient conflicts," said Miguel Hernández Jacinto, comisariado of communal lands for Santa María Chimalapa. Peasant colonists from Chiapas have apparently been settling the communal forest lands, and petitioning the agrarian reform authorities for reconition as ejidos. These forests are said to protect jaguars, tapirs, tepezcuintles and other species threatened with extinction. (La Jornada, June 13)

At least 35 have been killed in a suicide attack on a police bus in Kabul June 17—the deadliest attack since the Taliban regime fell. Most of the dead were instructors going to work at the city's police academy, but an undetermined number of by-standers were also among the dead. In a separate attack, a roadside bomb tore through a military vehicle in Kandahar province, killing three soldiers with the US-led coalition and an Afghan interpreter. The nationalities of the soliders were not disclosed, but the attack brings to 84 the number of international troops killed in Afghanistan this year. (AP, AFP, June 18) On June 16, a suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of DynCorp contract workers in Kabul, killing at least four civilians. A US soldier opened fire on the crowd that gathered afterward, killing one more civilian and sparking an angry protest. (AP, June 16) On June 15, a suicide attack on a NATO convoy in Uruzgan province killed 10, including five children, four other civilians and a Dutch soldier. Later, a second suicide attack targeted another NATO convoy in Kandahar, wounding five civilians. (VOA, ANC, June 15)