UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon condemned a Bahraini court for sentencing 21 human rights advocates, political activists and opposition leaders to lengthy prison sentences, including life terms.
Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who has led a national protest movement against the militarization of the “drug war” since losing his son to narco-violence, met at the Federal District’s Chapultepec Castle with President Felipe Calderón.
The US Border Patrol shot dead a Mexican national who was among three men allegedly attempting to cross the frontier at San Ysidro—almost exactly a year after a similar incident at El Paso.
Health workers in Colombia’s remote southeast report an outbreak of respiratory disease in the Nukak-Maku, one of the Amazon’s last nomadic tribes—whose numbers have already been decimated by flu, malaria and political violence.
Representatives of the Aymara protest movement in southern Peru’s Puno region met with leaders of the mining ministry in Lima, who agreed in principle to put a halt to the operation that sparked the protests.
Aerial photos released by Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency reveal evidence of one of the world’s last “uncontacted” tribes, in the Vale do Javari region of the Amazon. FUNAI warns that illegal timber operations threaten the tribe’s survival.
An appeals court in New York allowed a Con Edison suit against the Port Authority to proceed. The case concerns the destruction of an electrical substation at 7 WTC, and could help clear the air on the building’s controversial collapse.
A group of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the United States have written an open letter to Cynthia McKinney expressing their “severe disappointment” at her support for Moammar Qaddafi.
Obama and congressional leaders “are within striking distance of a deal” to ratify free trade accords with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, says Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Donohue.
More than 65 women have been murdered so far this year in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León. The victims included pregnant women and nine underage girls; the majority were sexually abused.
Tens of thousands of students, teachers and supporters protested Chile’s education policies with a huge demonstration in Santiago that the press called “the most massive march since the return of democracy” in 1990.
More than 5,000 agricultural workers blocked the Trans-Amazonian highway in the northern Brazilian state of Pará to push demands for land, government aid and an end to violence against activists.
