Chanting "We are students, not criminals," nearly 600 students and their supporters marched on Jan. 8 toward the University of Phoenix stadium in Glendale, Arizona, to protest a recently passed state law denying in-state tuition to out-of-status immigrants. Arizona voters approved the Proposition 300 ballot initiative last November; it requires students who cannot prove their legal immigration status to pay out-of-state tuition at state colleges and universities.

From the New York Times, Jan. 13, emphasis added:

ATHENS, Jan. 12 — An antitank grenade was fired into the heavily fortified American Embassy here on Friday just before dawn. The building was empty, but the attack nonetheless underscored deep anti-American sentiment here and revived fears of a new round of homegrown terror.

Ethiopian and US forces are still in pursuit of three supposed al-Qaida militants originally said to have been killed in the US airstrike of Jan. 8, with an anonymous "senior US official" in Kenya telling AP that they all survived the raid. The official confirmed the US "special operations forces" were in Somalia, but said they were focused only on tracking down the suspected terrorists and not members of the Somali Islamist militia. "The three high-value targets are still of intense interest to us," the official said. "What we're doing is still ongoing, we're still in pursuit, us and the Ethiopians."

Leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), meeting in the Philippine city of Cebu, are working on a regional anti-terror pact the day after a series of bombs exploded in nearby towns on the southern Mindanao island. At least eight were killed and over 30 injured in the attacks in Cotabato City, General Santos City and Kidapawan City.

The wives of eight campesinos from Ayacucho, Peru, who were arrested for involvement in a December ambush on a police patrol have began a hunger strike to demand the their release. Peru's Interior Minister Pilar Mazzetti admitted in a press conference Jan. 9 that National Police investigators have not find any relation between the arrested men and the Shining Path guerilla movement.

Cindy Sheehan, mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq, was among several US citizens who arrived in Cuba on Jan. 6 in preparation for a series of actions Jan. 9-13 to protest the US military's use of its Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba to detain Muslim men captured as alleged "enemy combatants" in the "war on terror." The rest of the delegation is scheduled to arrive on Jan. 9 for a press conference that day in Havana, followed by a Jan. 10 conference in the Cuban city of Guantanamo on prison conditions and international law.

On Dec. 29 Chilean judge Haroldo Brito sentenced 13 former security agents to prison terms ranging from five to 18 years for four revenge murders carried out after a September 1986 attempt to kill Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. Alvaro Corbalan Castilla, the former operations chief of the National Information Center (CNI), received the heaviest sentence, 18 years; he is already serving a 15-year sentence in the 1987 "Operation Albania" murder case. The defendants are expected to appeal the sentences.

Paraguayan general Alejandro Fretes Davalos, who led the imprisonment and torture of hundreds of people under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), died on Dec. 29 following a lengthy illness. Fretes had graduated from Chile's Military School, where he served under Augusto Pinochet before Pinochet seized power. Fretes also trained at the US Army School of the Americas in Panama in 1956 while still a major, taking the "Field Grade Officer" course.