The indigenous community of Huampami in the Peruvian Amazon is holding employees of a Canadian-backed mining concern hostage to protest what they say are illegal operations on their lands.
Campesinos in Peru blocked roads to protest provisions of the new free trade agreement with the US which would promote privatization of water resources.
Honduran teachers occupied the Education Secretariat to protest the government’s delays in paying salaries and its failure to pay full year-end bonuses.
Nine Dominican police agents should be tried for the Dec. 30 shooting deaths of five members of the country’s transport workers, a judicial report has found.
Barack Obama will eliminate some sanctions against Cuba but “it is not time to lift” the 47-year-old US economic embargo, Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
One of Barack Obama’s first moves as president is to be nomination of Sen. George Mitchell as Middle East envoy. Mitchell headed the 2000 committee to probe the roots of the al-Aqsa Intifada.
A tense calm prevails over Gaza as aid agencies take stock of the massive destruction, with some 4,100 homes destroyed, while on the West Bank “al-Basha’er Army” claimed a shooting attack on an Israeli settler.
Tehran’s Revolutionary Court convicted four Iranians in an alleged CIA plot to overthrow the Iranian government. The court said the four had confessed; the US State Department called the claim “baseless.”
Putin’s capitulation in the “gas war” with Ukraine may be motivated by fears that his intransigence was reviving impetus for the Nabucco pipeline, an EU-backed project that would bypass Russia.
Days after violent protests over deteriorating economic conditions in Latvia, riots broke out in neighboring Lithuania, with thousands battling the police in Vilnius. Meanwhile, “Kill the Jews” and a swastika were painted on a Lithuanian synagogue.
Israeli forces began withdrawing from the Gaza Strip following a tentative truce with Hamas. Palestinian factions agreed to honor the ceasefire on the condition that Israeli troops are out of Gaza within a week.
The Defense Department announced the transfer of six detainees from Guantánamo Bay to Iraq, Algeria and Afghanistan. Barack Obama last week pledged to issue an executive order closing the prison camp.
