Former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, ousted by a coup d'etat nearly two years ago, met May 22 with the Central American republic's current sitting president, Porfirio Lobo, and signed a pact that will allow him to return to the country. The accord also opens the way for Honduras to re-join the Organization of American States (OAS), from which it was suspended after the coup. The meeting took place in Cartagena, Colombia, and the pact was brokered by the governments of Colombia and Venezuela. "This agreement is great news to Latin Americans because it normalizes the situation in the inter-American system," Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said in a statement after the signing. (BBC News, CNN, May 22)

A long-standing maritime border dispute between Chile and Peru that is currently before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague took a new turn last week when a third country, Ecuador, moved to formally demarcate its sea boundaries with the government in Lima. The deal reaffirms the Peru-Ecuador sea border as a straight line that runs west parallel to the equator from the land boundary. But it also contains a clause in which Ecuador confirms that Peru's 1950s accords with Chile were fishing agreements—not a three-way border agreement. Peru's government is now hoping to use the agreement with Ecuador as a legal argument to finally settle its dispute with Chile. Lima's Foreign Affairs Minister Jose Antonio García Belaunde said the signing of the agreement with Quito "is important because it ratifies the premise that Peru has always held up that the agreements of 1954 and 1952 are fishing [accords], and that will strengthen our position at The Hague."

Following a regional summit in Bamako, the leaders of Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger agreed May 20 to form a 75,000-man security force to police the Sahel and Sahara regions against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and trans-border organised crime networks linked to terrorism. A new body based in Algiers, the Joint Military Staff Committee of the Sahel Region (CEMOC), will co-ordinate the military force. The participating nations also agreed to hold regular ministerial meetings every six months, with the next gathering set for Nouakchott, and a summit external partner states is to be held in Algiers. "Our partners from outside the region, such as the European Union and the United States, will be invited to this meeting that will be probably held during the last quarter of this year," said Abdelkader Messahel, Algerian Minister for Maghreb and African Affairs. "Our countries have started to take action. Today, it is about enhancing the path that was kicked off to confront the terrorist threat and its branches."

Tens of thousands of protesters have filled the main squares of Spain's cities for the past week to protest government austerity measures—in defiance of a government ban imposed ahead of municipal and regional elections. Madrid's central square has been occupied for days by some 30,000 protesters, who have been dubbed "los indignados" (the indignant). Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero admitted he may not enforce the ban. "I have a great respect for the people protesting, which they are doing in a peaceful manner, and I understand it is driven by economic crisis and young people's hopes for employment," Zapatero said during a radio interview. (BBC News, May 21; Reuters, May 20)

Thousands took to the streets in towns and cities across Syria for Friday protests May 20, and security forces again responded with tear gas and live ammunition, leaving at least 32 people dead. The killings were reported in the southern region of Deraa, the Damascus suburb of Daraya, the seaport of Latakia, the central city of Homs, and a village near the north-central town of Idlib (see map). Among the dead in Homs were two boys, aged 16 and 11. Protesters in many places shouted "azadi," which means freedom in Kurdish. Organizers had dubbed the 20th as Azadi Day, in solidarity with Kurdish protesters and to reflect the failure of policies aimed at getting Kurdish Syrians on the government's side with promises of recognizing their civil rights. (DPA, AlJazeera, May 20)

Extreme weather events—such as the heavy rains that have flooded towns along the Mississippi River and the tornadoes that ripped through an unprecendented 300-mile swath in Alabama—are extremely likely to occur more frequently in the future, according to climatologists. Urban planners and the insurance industry are among those that took part in a telephone press conference held May 19 by the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Climate change is about more than warming. What we're really seeing is global ‘weirding,'" said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. "It is altering the character and conditions of the places we know and love. For many places around the world, what we are likely to see could be feast or famine—more frequency of weather at the extremes, from intense storms to prolonged droughts. We can't attribute any one event to climate change, but we do know that every event that happens is already superimposed on very different background conditions than we had 50 years ago."

Ethiopia's Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) rebels issued a statement May 19 charging that the army has opened an offensive that is targetting civilians in the ethnically Somali region in the country's east (see map). ONLF spokesman Abdirahman Mahdi accused Ethiopian security forces of attacking villages near oil exploration sites in the Ogaden, which borders Somalia and has been the scene of a low-level insurgency since the early 1990s. "It is a random killing aimed at terrorizing the public," Mahdi said from his office in London. "This is the first time security forces turned up in villages, rounded up villagers and killed them in brutal manners." The statement called the attacks, centered around the towns of Nogob (Fik, by its official Ethiopian designation) and Jarar (Degahbur), a "pogrom," with at least 100 dead in recent days, and demanded an immediate UN investigation. Mohamed Gure, information minister for the Somali state government, called the claims "baseless propaganda." (AP, Ogaden Online, May 19)

Moammar Qaddafi's forces are carrying an offensive into Libya's western Nafusah Mountains that is not only targetting rebel training camps and supply routes that have been established there, but villages of the indigenous Amazigh (Berber) population. Local hospitals are reportedly overwhelmed, with casualties having to be loaded onto donkeys and smuggled past government blockades to get treatment elsewhere. Since the uprising began in February, some 50,000 Libyans have fled through the mountains to Tunisia, where a refugee camp has been established near the Dehiba border crossing. Berber refugees interviewed there by Human Rights Watch report that their homes in the villages of Nalut and Takut were shelled and livestock destroyed by Qaddafi's forces. Said one refugee from Nalut: "They were killing everything, the troops. They kept some [sheep] to eat, and they killed the rest. They shot them.... I saw the dead sheep." Grad missiles have targetted homes, mosques, water facilities, a school, and hospital compounds, refugees said. (AP, May 19; HRW, May 18)