Hundreds of Dominican activists have reportedly held a series of demonstrations recently to protest the presence of 800 US soldiers in Barahona, capital of the southwestern province of Barahona. In one protest, apparently on Feb. 14, demonstrators gathered in the city's central park and then marched to the encampment where the US soldiers are staying. Dominican soldiers guarding the site pointed their rifles at the protesters, who later burned an effigy of Uncle Sam. The protest was organized by a coalition, the Bolivarian Continental Coordinating Committee.

During the week of Jan. 30, US federal judge G. Mallon Faircloth in Columbus, Georgia, sentenced 31 activists to prison terms of as much as six months for peacefully entering the US Army's Fort Benning on Nov. 20 as part of an annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA). Judge Faircloth also imposed fines of as much as $1,000. He sentenced one additional protester to a year of probation. Some 19,000 people took part in the demonstration in 2005, the largest since the demonstrations began in 1990. The school trains Latin American soldiers, and many of its graduates are among the region's most notorious human rights violators. Some 180 people have served prison sentences for civil disobedience at the base over the years. (SOA Watch Action Alert, Feb. 2)

On Feb. 6 police arrested six leftist activists in the community of Antebi Cue, town of Sgto. Jose Felix Lopez (also known as Puentesinho), in San Carlos municipality in the northeastern Paraguayan department of Concepcion, near the border with Brazil. The six were in a Toyota SUV owned by the Campesino Organization of the North (OCN); police say they were carrying food, medicines, ammunition and explosives. Police confiscated the vehicle.

From Haartez, Feb. 19:

Jewish group: Try Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide
The European Jewish Congress (EJC) is set to file a complaint in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide, EJC president Pierre Besnainou told Haaretz.

From Mexico's El Universal, Feb. 16, via the Miami Herald:

Fox calls for probe in Lydia Cacho case
The governor of Puebla is under fire after he is allegedly heard discussing the jailing of a journalist on a tape released to the media
The federal government on Wednesday condemned an alleged plot by a state governor and a prominent businessman to jail a journalist for libel after she wrote a book about networks of pedophiles and child pornographers.

From the Times of India, Feb. 19:

ISLAMABAD: Security forces put a cordon around the Pakistani capital and made hundreds of arrests, before using tear gas and gunfire to quash a banned protest Sunday against cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, witnesses and officials said.

The anti-cartoon protests in Pakistan seem to be mounting towards a national revolutionary movement. The government has banned the latest march in Islamabad, arrested some 200 followeres of the organization that called it, and placed its leader under house arrest. But the organizers pledge defiance, even as army troops have been called to the streets. Note that even the government spokesman feels obliged to diss the protests as part of a Jewish conspiracy to defame Islam. From Pakistan's Dawn, Feb. 19:

On Feb. 14, some 1,500 immigrants and supporters rallied at Philadelphia's Independence Mall to protest HR 4437, a harsh anti-immigrant bill passed by the House of Representatives last Dec. 16 and due to be considered by the Senate in March. (News Journal, Wilmington, DE, Feb. 15) The Philadelphia Spanish-language weekly newspaper El Dia described the rally as the largest immigrant rights mobilization in the city's history. The action was part of "A Day Without an Immigrant," a regional Valentine's Day labor strike by immigrant workers.