On July 28 Haitians protested in Port-au-Prince, Hinche, St-Marc and other cities to mark the 95th anniversary of the start of the 1915-1934 US military occupation of their country. Dozens of supporters of the Lavalas Family (FL) party of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996 and 2001-2004) held a sit-in in front of the US embassy in the northeastern Port-au-Prince suburb of Tabarre to demand Aristide's return from South Africa, the firing of election officials and the withdrawal of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), a 9,000-member military and police occupation force. Embassy officials met with a delegation of FL leaders, including Maryse Narcisse, who demanded that the US not finance the scheduled Nov. 28 general elections as long as the FL continued to be excluded from the ballot.

Thousands of people marched in front of the Puerto Rican police headquarters on Franklin D. Roosevelt Avenue in San Juan's Hato Rey neighborhood on July 18 to demand the removal of police chief José Figueroa Sancha and his second-in-command, José Rosa Carrasquillo, and the disbanding of the Tactical Operations Unit. The marchers started at three different points in the city, including a campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR); students from the UPR's 11 campuses defeated a proposed austerity plan with a two-month strike this spring. Some organizers said more than 5,000 people participated in the march, while police sources put the number at 3,000.

On July 12, exactly six months after an earthquake devastated much of southern Haiti, a storm caused serious damage in a camp authorities had set up for quake survivors in Corail-Cesselesse, a deserted area about 24 km north of Port-au-Prince. Some 1,700 of the camp's 7,000 residents were left without shelter when the storm ripped up or otherwise damaged 344 ShelterBox tents, which are supposedly designed for resistance to storms. About six people were injured by debris, and a woman and her baby were hit by lightning; the woman was badly burned, and local radio reported that the baby died.

On June 30 Haitian president René Préval rejected changes US senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the leading minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed for presidential and legislative elections that are now scheduled for Nov. 28. In a report earlier in the month, Lugar called for international "partners" to help restructure the eight-member Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) and for candidates from the Lavalas Family (FL) party of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996 and 2001-2004) to be allowed to run. The legislative elections were scheduled for Feb. 28 but had to be postponed because of a massive earthquake on Jan. 12. The elections are expected to cost $29.6 million, with the Haitian government providing $7 million and international donors supplying the rest.

Dozens of demonstrators were injured at Puerto Rico's Capitol building June 30 when riot police used batons and tear gas to keep hundreds of students and their supporters from entering a session of the Legislature that was to vote on unpopular budget cuts and a measure to end student assemblies. Senate president Thomas Rivera Schatz had apparently closed the public galleries before the vote, and the next day a police agent reportedly testified that the police violence had been planned in advance.

Hundreds of Puerto Ricans marched on June 6 in the island's 20th Pride event, held in San Juan's beachfront El Condado neighborhood. Olga Orraca, coordinator of the Rainbow Pride Coalition, which organized the march, said that that this year's event was intended not only to reaffirm the community's visibility but also to denounce hate crimes against LGBT people. Orraca and Human and Constitucional Rights Commission president Osvaldo Burgos criticized the inaction of the police in dealing with hate crimes eight years after a hate crimes law went into effect. (SentidoG, June 6 from El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico)

After a new four-day round of talks with a court-appointed mediator, students and the Board of Trustees at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) reached an agreement on the night of June 16-17 to end a two-month strike that had closed 10 of the public university's 11 campuses. The trustees agreed to drop plans for cutbacks in the budget and for reductions in scholarships and tuition exemptions, and they postponed until next January a plan to impose a special tuition surcharge of about $1,100 for each of the next three years. They also agreed not to penalize the strike leaders. The strikers' National Negotiating Committee (CNN) said the shutdown would end if students ratified the agreement in a national assembly on June 21.

In meetings with striking students on June 2 and June 4, officials of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) announced that the public university was $200 million in debt and that they intended to cover the debt with $200 million in tuition surcharges over the next three years—about $1,000 for each student. There will also be an "enormous reduction" in the pay to university employees, Board of Trustees president Ygrí Rivera said; this would be done through lower salaries and other cutbacks, not layoffs. Finally, UPR officials plan cuts in the budgets for books, professional services, scholarships and other aid to students, and the purchase of equipment.