Presumed Chechen resistance fighters carried out a series of attacks in Nalchik, capital of the Russian Federation's Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, on the morning of Oct. 13. Facilities targeted included the local headquarters of the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the city's airport. A statement posted on the kavkazcenter.com website identified the attackers as fighters from the Kabardino-Balkar sector of the [Mujahedeen of the] Caucasus Front.

US immigration judge William L. Abbott issued a written ruling on Sept. 26 in El Paso, TX, that the Convention Against Torture (CAT) bars the US from deporting Cuban-born right-winger Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela. Abbott accepted the contention by Posada's legal team that he might be tortured in Venezuela, where he is a naturalized citizen. Abbott also ruled out Cuba as a destination for Posada but didn't rule out deportation to a third country.

On Oct. 5, a group of seven Mapuche indigenous students from the Frontier University in Temuco, Chile—on hunger strike since Sept. 29—began an occupation of the Temuco cathedral. Another two hunger strikers did not participate because they were hospitalized on Oct. 4. The action was the latest in a series of protests started at least three weeks earlier by some 120 students demanding repairs to the Las Encinas Mapuche student residence, where they live, and autonomy in its administration.

On Oct. 3 some 300 Paraguayan indigenous people from the departments of Canindeyu, Alto Paraguay, Caaguazu, San Pedro and Caazapa arrived in Asuncion and began a protest encampment in the Plaza Italia to demand that Congress approve reforms to Law 904/81, the Statute of Indigenous Communities. The Chamber of Deputies is currently debating the reforms, which would allow the country's indigenous communities to participate in decisions affecting them; an indigenous council's role in decision-making was eliminated under a separate law passed last year.

On Sept. 26 Puerto Rican governor Anibal Acevedo Vila told reporters that US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller had ordered an inquiry into the fatal Sept. 23 shooting of nationalist leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios by FBI agents in the western town of Homigueros. The announcement came as questions grew about how and why Ojeda Rios died when FBI agents assaulted the farmhouse where he was living, ostensibly to arrest him for his role in a 1983 robbery of a Wells Fargo depot in Connecticut.

Three unidentified men armed with two AK-47 assault rifles and a 9-mm pistol shot and killed former political prisoner Miguel Angel Mesino in broad daylight on Sept. 18 in the town center of Atoyac municipality in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. The killing took place 100 meters from the police headquarters.

From New York Newsday, Oct. 11, this harrowing report by staff writer John Riley from New Orleans' devastated Lower Ninth Ward:

Six weeks after the storm, no neighborhood in this ravaged city faces longer odds than the financially impoverished but culturally rich Lower Ninth -- and none better reflects the fault lines of race and class, nature and economics tangled together in the debate over New Orleans' future.

Another courageous strike by the heroic Iraqi resistance against the US occupation forces... oops, we mean against Shi'ite civilians. From AP, Oct. 5, via TruthOut:

A bomb exploded at the entrance of a Shiite Muslim mosque south of Baghdad as hundreds of worshippers gathered for prayers on the first day of Ramadan and for the funeral of a man killed in an earlier bombing. At least 25 people were killed and 87 wounded.