About 50 demonstrators gathered outside the Mexican consulate in New York City on Aug. 18 in an attempt to prevent Oaxaca governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz from participating in a press conference and a meeting with local Mexican community leaders. Ruiz has been the target of militant protests by Oaxacan unionists, social activists and indigenous groups for more than a year. Many of the New York protesters were friends and colleagues of New York-based journalist Brad Will, who was killed in Oaxaca in October 2006 while covering the protests. Gov. Ruiz was scheduled to visit New York as part of tour to US cities by the migration committee of the National Governors' Conference (Conago).

Mineworker Reynaldo Hernandez Gonzalez was killed and several workers were injured on Aug. 13 in a violent confrontation between rival groups of miners at Grupo Mexico's La Caridad mine in Nacozari, in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora. There were 15 arrests, and about 20 workers reportedly disappeared. The violence broke out when a group of fired workers who were loyal to the main mineworkers union, the National Union of Mine and Metal Workers of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMRM), returned to the mine to demand that they be rehired. Apparently they fought with supporters of a company union.

An Aug. 13 statement from the National Lawyers Guild calling for repeal of the "Protect America Act" signed into law by George Bush Aug. 6:

Congress put its stamp of approval on the unconstitutional wiretapping of Americans by amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the "Protect America Act of 2007."

The Iranian military has shelled territory in Iraqi Kurdistan intermittently over the past three days, wounding two women and forcing the evacuation of 200 families, local officials reported Aug. 18. Hussein Ahmed, the mayor of Qal'at Dizah, a town close to the Iranian line, said several thousand Iranian soldiers could also be seen near the border. There was no immediate comment from Tehran or Baghdad on the reports. Jabar Yaour, undersecretary at the Ministry for Peshmerga Affairs in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, said the shelling took place across a range of about 50 kilometers (30 miles). "Damage has occurred in Kurdish villages on the Iraqi side and resulted in the evacuation of more than 200 families from these villages," Yaour told Reuters.

Colombia's Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos confirmed that Israeli military advisors are helping his government fight guerillas, the Bogota newsweekly Semana reports. According to Semana, "A group of former Israeli military officials is counseling the military's top brass on intelligence issues." The weekly said the Israelis were hired by the Colombian Defense Ministry to improve the army's intelligence capabilities and the command-and-control structure.

After deliberating for less than four hours, on July 26 a 10-member jury in US District Court in Birmingham, Alabama, found the locally based Drummond Co. Inc. coal company not liable in the 2001 murders of three unionists at its La Loma mine in northern Colombia. The unionists' families and their union, Sintramienergetica, had charged that Drummond supplied fuel, vehicles and shelter to the rightwing paramilitary group that murdered Valmore Locarno and Victor Orcasita in March 2001 and Gustavo Soler seven months later. The International Labor Rights Fund and the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers (USW) filed the federal civil suit in March 2002 under the 1789 Alien Tort Statute. Terry Collingsworth, executive director of the International Labor Rights Fund, said the plaintiffs "will be swiftly appealing."

As of Aug. 11, some 13 union leaders from the US and Canada had arrived in Cananea, in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, to show support for striking miners there. According to Sergio Tolano Lizarraga, general secretary of Section 65 of the National Union of Mine and Metal Workers of the Mexican Republic (SNTMMRM), the US delegation was headed by Manny Armenta, a United Steelworkers (USW) leader in Arizona, with unionists from New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Ohio. The strikers say they also have support from workers from nearby states and from both the conservative Congress of Labor (CT) and the more independent National Workers Union (UNT).

With 98.83% of the ballot boxes counted, Mexico's centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the allied Green Ecological Party of Mexico (PVEM) had won all 25 districts in Aug. 5 legislative elections in the southern state of Oaxaca. The Alliance That Builds [Alianza Que Construye], the PRI-PVEM coalition, got 412,798 votes to 238,292 for the center-left For the Good of All coalition [Por el Bien de Todos], which is made up of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Workers Party (PT) and the Convergence party. The center-right National Action Party (PAN) of Mexican president Felipe Calderon Hinojosa came in third with 113,646 votes. Just 36.42% of the state's 2.4 million voters turned out for the election.