On April 18, some 30 police agents accompanied by armed civilians detained and beat up five campesinos in the Paraguayan community of Paraguai Pyahu, in Guajayvi district of San Pedro department. Led by Menelio Orue, chief of the local police station, the agents also tied 11-year-old Blas Argana to a tree, slapped him and beat him on the soles of his feet to try to get him to reveal the location of his father, who was being sought by police. The agents kept Argana tied to the tree for a half hour. When they released him, they gave him 2,000 guaranies and demanded he keep quiet about the incident.

Afghan and Pakistani presidents Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf met in Ankara [April 30] to publicly bury the hatchet under the supervision of Turkish president Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Karzai and Musharraf have engaged in a war of words in recent months, with Karzai accusing Islamabad of allowing the infiltration of Taliban militants into Afghanistan over its porous border, and with Musharraf suggesting that Kabul was "soft" on terror. [Reuters, April 28] Meanwhile, US officials claimed to have killed hundreds of Taliban fighters [in clashes and airstrikes] in western Afghanistan. [AP, April 30] Thousands of Afghans marched in Herat [April 30] to protest against the killing of civilians by US and NATO forces. The demonstration followed similar protests over the weekend in Jalalabad. [Reuters, April 30] And a suicide bomber struck a political rally in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar [April 28] killing 28 people and narrowly missing Pakistan's interior minister. [NYT, April 29].

Unknown assailants tossed a hand grenade and fired 17 rounds with a semi-automatic weapon into a police station in Athens April 30, damaging police cars and civilian vehicles but causing no casualties. A police official said: "It appears to be part of the anarchist attacks we have witnessed over the past few days, but we rule out nothing." (AlJazeera, April 30).

A memorandum issued over the weekend by the Turkish military has prompted words of caution and outrage inside Turkey. The memorandum, which threatened army intervention in defence of Turkish secularism, comes at a time of high tension in Turkey over the possibility of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a moderate Islamist, becoming the next president. [BBC, April 28] Turkish critics have lashed out against the "Jacobinism" of the hard-line secularists, stressed that "laicism" cannot be maintained at the expense of the rule of law, and lambasted the military for threatening a coup.

On April 23 in Arizona, Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer filed a felony complaint against US Border Patrol agent Nicholas Corbett, charging him with four counts of homicide: first- and second-degree murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide. On Jan. 12, Corbett shot to death Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera from the southern Mexican state of Puebla, about 150 yards north of the border between Bisbee and Douglas. The shooting occurred while Corbett was trying to apprehend Dominguez and three others who had entered the country without permission.

On April 24, some 60 federal agents armed with rifles and dressed in bulletproof vests raided the Little Village Discount Mall on Chicago's southwest side. The agents closed off exits, locked down the mall and stopped about 150 shoppers and workers. Witnesses said as many as 16 people were taken away. Baltazar Enriquez, a construction worker who was at the mall buying shoes when the raid took place, said the agents were carrying pictures of suspects and lined people up against a wall to compare them to the photos. "It was everybody who looked Latino," he said. Marisol Iniguez, an employee at the mall, said agents kicked open bathroom doors with guns drawn. "They treated us like criminals," she said.

On April 20, ICE agents arrested 13 Mexican immigrant workers employed at the Eagle Bag Corporation factory in East Oakland, California. Twelve of the workers were arrested at the factory; one was picked up at a residence. The workers were taken to the ICE office in San Francisco to be interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted; they are being held on administrative immigration violations while ICE continues its investigation to determine whether any will face federal prosecution for aggravated identity theft. (ICE news release, April 20; Insidebayarea.com, April 24)

On April 4, ICE agents searched apartments and stopped people on the street in the mid-Hudson community of Valatie, New York, arresting eight out-of-status immigrants. In nearby Chatham, ICE arrested two men on the street. ICE spokesperson Mike Gilhooly verified that there were 42 arrests in the Capital District of New York over the week of April 2 as part of "Operation Return to Sender," a nationwide program targeting immigrants who have failed to comply with deportation orders. However, only 18 of the 42 people arrested had already been ordered removed by an immigration judge; the other 24 were just picked up on suspicion of being out of status. Six of those arrested reportedly had criminal records. ICE received support from the Columbia County Sheriff's Office, and state police were also on the scene.