According to a July 1 press release from the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), an independent Mexican labor group, one of its affiliates has won a settlement in a two-month struggle with the Central de Abasto, Mexico City's huge wholesale food market. The Union of Workers of Commercial Buildings, Offices and Stores, and the Like and Related (STRACC), which represents about 40 workers who clean bathrooms in the facility's flowers and vegetables area, signed an agreement in which management recognized the union and its contract and confirmed the rights and working conditions the workers had before the conflict started on April 29. STRACC also won full payment of wages lost due to the conflict, along with better working conditions and schedules. The employees returned to work on July 1.

Some 100 members of the 19th US-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan, an annual shipment of humanitarian aid organized by the New York-based group Pastors for Peace, arrived in Havana on July 5. Reverend Lucius Walker led the delegation, which was met at the José Martí International Airport by Communist Party and religious leaders. Pastors for Peace has been collecting and shipping aid to Cuba since 1992. To challenge the 46-year-old US trade embargo against Cuba, the group refuses to request a license from the US Treasury Department for the shipment.

Latin American leftists expressed satisfaction at the release of 15 people held captive by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)—including French-Colombian ex-presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US military contractors—in a Colombian military operation July 2. "Out of a basically humanist sentiment, we rejoiced at the news," former Cuban president Fidel Castro Ruz wrote in an article dated on July 3. "The civilians should have never been kidnapped, neither should the soldiers have been kept prisoner in the conditions of the jungle. These were objectively cruel actions. No revolutionary purpose could justify it." ("Reflections by Comrade Fidel," July 3)

On June 26, Palestinian professor Sami Al-Arian was charged in US District Court in Alexandria, Va., with two counts of criminal contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury which is investigating whether Islamic charities in northern Virginia were financing terrorists. Al-Arian has already been jailed for a year on civil contempt charges for refusing to testify. If convicted of the new charge he could face additional jail time; there is no maximum or minimum penalty for criminal contempt. Al-Arian has been jailed by the federal government since Feb. 20, 2003, and in ICE custody since April 11 of this year; he suspended a 52-day hunger strike on April 23 in the hopes of being deported soon.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested or helped arrest 489 people in "Operation Community Shield" raids announced between June 2 and July 2, targeting foreign-born alleged gang members in Kansas, Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Georgia and Texas.

On July 3, ICE arrested supervisors Juan Carlos Guerrero Espinoza and Martin De la Rosa Loera at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant owned by Aaron Rubashkin in Postville, Iowa. Federal prosecutors said they had also issued an arrest warrant for Hosam Amara, described by workers as a plant manager.

Heavily-policed demonstrations were held in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo July 5 as world leaders began arriving on the island of Hokkaido for the G8 summit that opens Monday at Toyako mountain resort. A march of some 5,000 was lined with, and sometimes boxed in by, several thousand police in full riot gear. At least four people—including Reuters reporter Masahiro Koike—were arrested. Police shattered the window of a sound truck and dragged out the driver. AFP said the van failed to stop at a traffic stop. Japan Economic Newswire reported that a South Korean labor union official arriving for the protests was arrested at Sapporo's airport July 4 "on suspicion of obstructing an immigration officer."

Speaking to the Caracas-based Union Radio, Archbishop Roberto Luckert Leon of Coro, vice president of the Venezuelan bishops' conference, charged that the newly established Reform Catholic Venezuelan Church is a ploy by the government of President Hugo Chávez to divide the Catholic Church, and warned that liturgies celebrated by the new church had no religious validity. He said the new church's bishops "are going to dress like priests and carry out baptisms and confirmations, all paid for by the government which has tried to finish off the Catholic Church but failed."