Salvos of missiles fell on southern Israel Jan. 9 and Israeli aircraft hit a location in the north of Gaza Strip in response. Al-Quds Brigades, military wing of Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility for the new missile strikes, saying they were "in retaliation for US President George W. Bush's visit to the region due later today." The National Resistance Brigades, the military wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, also claimed a rocket strike on an Israeli military position in the eastern Gaza Strip. Al-Nasser Salah-Eddine, military arm of the Popular Resistance Committees in Palestine, said in a statement one of its fighters was killed in an Israeli air strike that targeted a group of its militants near Beit Lahia in the northern Strip. The Israeli Army announced it was blocking all checkpoints around the strip and the West Bank as a security precaution ahead of Bush's visit. In a statement, Hamas said Bush's visit it "would be part of international schemes against the Palestinian cause." (KUNA, Jan. 8)

On Dec. 31, Latino groups in Oregon turned in over 5,000 petition signatures to the state's Driver and Motor Vehicle Services Division in Salem, asking for a one-year delay in implementation of new rules that will require driver's license applicants to show proof of legal residence starting on Feb. 4.

In a Dec. 17 press release, Colorado's Park County announced it would pay $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought in February 2005 by Moises Carranza-Reyes, who was held in federal immigration custody at the county's Fairplay jail for seven days in 2003. According to the suit, Carranza-Reyes, now 31, was held in a filthy, freezing jail pod designed for 18 people, but holding 60.

On the morning of Jan. 3 a unit of 15 masked people armed with AK-47 rifles set fire to three backhoes belonging to the Constructora Torreblanca, a construction company building a highway in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. "No to the gas price increase!" and "Join the armed struggle!" were some of the slogans the group painted at the site, in Tixtla municipality, about 15 kilometers from Chilpancingo, the state capital. The company had the slogans removed, and news of the incident didn't become public until Jan. 5. No group took responsibility for the action, although the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI) and other rebel groups have been active in Guerrero in the past. (La Jornada, Jan. 6) [It is not clear from news sources whether the company is linked to Guerrero governor Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo.]

On Dec. 23 Italian authorities arrested former Uruguayan navy captain Nestor Jorge Fernandez Troccoli in Salerno. Fernandez Troccoli, who headed Uruguay's secret services for the 1973-1985 military dictatorship, had been ordered arrested on Dec. 17 by an Uruguayan judge investigating Operation Condor, a clandestine program of cooperation between South American militaries. The arrest led Italian authorities to renew their request for the detention of a total of 140 military officers and soldiers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in connection with crimes against more than 25 people of Italian origin.

On Jan. 4 Argentine federal judge Sandra Arroyo charged two coast guard officers, Angel Volpi and Ruben Iglesias, with homicide in connection with the death of former navy officer Hector Febres. Febres, who was 66, was found dead on Dec. 11 in the Naval Prefecture in Buenos Aires, two days before he was to be sentenced for participation in torture and other crimes, including the theft of babies from dissident women during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Febres' wife, Stella Maris Guevara, and their children, Hector and Sonia Febres, were charged with concealment.

Chilean agronomy student Matias Catrileo Quezada, an indigenous Mapuche, was shot dead early on the morning of Jan. 3 at the Fundo Santa Margarita estate, in Vilcun in the southern region of Araucania, presumably by police agents. He and other Mapuche activists were setting fire to bales of hay; the estate, which the local Mapuche community claims as part of its traditional ancestral lands, has been attacked several times in recent years. Activists told Bio-Bio radio station Catrileo was shot in the back with a machine gun.

A petition from the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), Jan. 5:

The southern cities of Iraq which are totally under the grip of Islamist parties have turned into no-woman zones. Female physical appearance is not acceptable in the streets, educational institutions, or at work places. Although veiled and passive, death awaits women around street corners, in the market, and visits them inside their homes daily in the city of Basra.