Some 17,500 banana workers in Colombia ended a strike they began on May 8, winning raises in pay and benefits, but not a fund to compensate victims of company-sponsored paramilitary activity.
In the wake of the financial crisis and Swine Flue scare, Mexico has lost 300,000 jobs, leading ex-finance secretary José Ángel Gurría Treviño to warn, “this isn’t a cycle, it’s a disaster.”
Venezuela’s economic growth is at a virtual stand-still, as the price of oil has dropped from an average of $87 per barrel last year to an average $42 per barrel so far in 2009.
Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report accusing the South American countries of violating UN sanctions.
Thousands of Sikh protesters rioted across India’s Punjab region following the slaying of dissident Sikh guru Sant Ramanand, who was attacked at a gurdwara (Sikh temple) in Vienna.
A total of nine people have been kidnapped in Colombia by victims of pyramid schemes trying to recoup their losses. Kidnappings rose in Colombia in the second half of 2008, as the pyramids collapsed.
Colombia’s second largest guerrilla army, the National Liberation Army (ELN), asked the rival Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to end hostilities between the two groups.
Colombian President Álvaro Uribe named armed forces chief Gen. Freddy Padilla as his new defense minister. Padilla was named by rights groups as a likely overseer of army-paramilitary collaboration.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed at a ceremony marking the annexation of East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War that the city would “forever” remain Israel’s capital.
The Bolivian Senate announced an impeachment trial for Chief Justice Dr. Eddy Walter Fernández over his refusal to hear a genocide case against ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.
Venezuelan soldiers raided a property belonging to Guillermo Zuloaga, president of the opposition Globovisión network, amid a confrontation between the station and President Hugo Chávez.
An Argentine district attorney requested an international arrest warrant for a Colombian suspected of plotting the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires with Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
