The Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) issued a "call for a popular peaceful insurrection" Dec. 1 if the state's governor, Ulises Ruiz, has not stepped down by then. The call steps up pressure on president-elect Felipe Calderon, already facing pledges from the left-opposition to resist his Dec. 2 inauguration with civil disobedience actions. Under the slogan "Si Ulises no se va, Calderón no pasará" (If Ulises does not go, Calderon will not pass), APPO pledged to organize a general strike throughout the state of Oaxaca. The statement said that even if the state's striking teachers vote to return to classes, new strikes will extend to other labor sectors. The statement also demanded federal criminal charges against Ruiz for the assassinations of several APPO activists since the movement for his ouster was launched earlier this year. (La Jornada, Oct. 25 via Chiapas95)

File under "Well, duh." From Reuters, Oct. 22:

HOUSTON - Halliburton Co , the world's No. 2 oilfield services group, on Sunday posted a 25 percent rise in earnings, beating Wall Street forecasts, on robust spending by producers on oil and gas output, particularly in North America.

Can you say deja vu? How about chutzpah? From BBC, Oct. 24:

North warns against Ortega vote

Ex-White House aide Oliver North—at the centre of a 1980s scheme to finance Contra rebels in Nicaragua—has warned the country not to return to the past.

Arthur Neslen on the UK Guardian's Comment is Free blog Oct. 25 outlines various intellectual responses to the ascendance of the frightening Avigdor Lieberman to the Israeli cabinet. One which he overlooks is the "smokescreen" response, put forth by the lefter-than-thou who maintain that the Israeli "moderates" are actually the greater threat because they lull the naive into a false sense of security. Perhaps Nelsen can be forgiven for overlooking this tendency, as some of these ideologues have actually found Lieberman's ascendance unworthy of comment, as if warning of the danger he represents somehow lets Olmert and Peretz off the hook.

If this turns out to be true, we wager the beneficiary will be Iyad Allawi. From UPI, Oct. 23:

CAIRO -- Iraqi army officers are reportedly planning to stage a military coup with U.S. help to oust the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Continuing on his tour of Mexico's north, Zapatista Subcommander Marcos stopped in Sonoyta (the Sonora border town across from Lukeville, AZ), where his caravan drove into the desert and stopped at the fence demarcating the international border, where signs warned "Prohibited to cross the line." There, he got out of his minivan and purposefully hopped the fence, spending some two minutes on the northern side of the frontier.

Even Donald Rumsfeld is starting to make cut-and-run noises. As the Bush White House holds a high-level strategy session on Iraq Oct. 21, the Defense Secretary told reporters: "It's their country, they're going to have to govern it, they're going to have to provide security for it, and they're going to have to do it sooner rather than later. The biggest mistake would be to not pass things over to the Iraqis, create a dependency on their part, instead of developing strength and capacity and competence." (GulfNews, UAE, Oct. 21) But we say such talk is purely for public consumption.

Uribe uses this as an excuse to call for a military rather than negotiated solution to the hostage crisis. But the families and supporters of some of the FARC's hostages aren't buying it. From Merco Press, Oct. 21: