German activist Martin Kramer, en route to Japan to prepare for the Hokkaido G8 summit protests, was arrested by police in the city of Vanino in the Habarovsk region of the Russian Far East March 3. He was turned over the FSB agents, in whose hands he was harshly interrogated and beaten. Martin was accused of carrying "extremist" and "secret" documents. These included archival materials from the 1920s, long since made public, that Kramer had for research purposes. Also included were a copies of the Ukrainian anarchist paper Liva-Sprava and Udar, the paper of Vladivostok's Autonomous Action. After a few hours, he was put in a car and thrown out in a strange part of the city. On March 10, arriving in Sapporo via ship from Sakhalin, he was denied entry by Japanese authorities. As of the 11th, he remained on board the ship, while local activists appealed to the authorities. (Via No-G8 Action Japan mailing list)

A Chinese passenger jet en route to Beijing from the Xinjiang region (known as Uighurstan or East Turkestan to its indigenous inhabitants, the Turkic and Muslim Uighur people) was forced to make an emergency landing March 7 after the flight crew prevented at least two passengers from trying to crash the airplane, state media reported. Meanwhile, Chinese officials announced that a police raid in January against an alleged terrorist group in Xinjiang had uncovered materials that proved the group was plotting an attack on the upcoming Beijing Olympics. (IHT, March 9)

The Israeli government March 9 approved construction of a 330-unit housing project in Givat Zeev, a West Bank settlement already home to about 10,000 settlers. The project began in 1999 but was suspended when the second Intifada broke out the following year. Palestinian official Saeb Erekat called the project "another slap in the face of the peace process." Defending the decision, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said: "We've said all along that there won't be a complete freeze in construction in the large settlement blocks. We've been very consistent and upfront."

With a boycott of the March 9 election called by parties barred from participation because of their presumed links to the armed separatist group ETA, abstentionism in Spain's Basque Country was at 35%—ten points higher than the national average. Elections in the three provinces that make up the semi-autonomous Basque region (Álava, Biscay and Guipúzcoa), the Socialist Party for the first time won power, ousting the long-ruling Basque Nationalist Party (PNV)—a "moderate" party which was not among those barred. The March 7 slaying of Isaias Carrasco, a former Socialist town councilor in Mondragón (known in Basque as Arrasate) was widely attributed to ETA.

At a massive assembly in the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan on March 5, some 10,000 members of the Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR) almost unanimously backed the union leadership's recommendation to suspend a strike that started on Feb. 21 over wages, classroom size and health issues. FMPR president Rafael Feliciano recommended that the union start a process of reflection and analysis on the strengths and weaknesses of the strike, although without acceding to Law 45's ban on strikes by public employees. The assembly also strongly rejected the reported interference of the US-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its vice president, Dennis Rivera, in the situation.

Colombian trade, industry and tourism minister Luis Guillermo Plata was in New York on March 8 to push the Free Trade Agreement (FTA, or TLC in Spanish). Accompanied by Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY) and other officials, Plata participated in a roundtable in Queens to defend President Alvaro Uribe's human rights policies. "At this time, the government of Colombia has more than 1,900 unionists under its protection," he said, claiming that the number of murders of unionists had fallen to 26 in 2007 from 196 in 2006. Outside the restaurant where the meeting was held, a group of youths from a local group, the People's Referendum on Free Trade, chanted slogans against the FTA. (El Diario-La Prensa, March 7)

At a Feb. 29 press conference in Mexico City, researchers from the Economic Investigations Institute (IIEC) of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) gave a generally negative assessment of the economic impact of the 14-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Mexico. According to the institute's Emilio Romero, Mexico has lost 2 million agricultural jobs during the period, while 400,000 Mexicans now migrate to the US each year. Jose Luis Calva said that since NAFTA took effect in 1994, Mexico's growth rate has averaged 3% a year, as opposed to a rate of 6.1% a year from the end of the 1910 revolution until 1982. Agricultural production has increased, he said, but productivity increased much more slowly than in the US; Mexico's rate grew from 1.7 to two tons per hectare while the US rate grew from seven to 8.9 tons.

Jacobo Silva Nogales (Comandante Antonio) and Gloria Arenas Agís (Coronela Aurora), convicted as leaders of the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI), had their sentences reduced from 46 years and three months to 14 years and two months. Andrés Nájera Hernández, director of the Eureka Committee, which advocates for Mexico's political prisoners, called the decision a great advance in the struggle for a "general amnesty for all political prisoners in the country." Nogales and Arenas were arrested in October 1999. (La Jornada, March 5)