In a move apparently aimed at appeasing US Congressional opposition to the free trade agreement, Bogotá has ordered nine palm oil companies to return thousands of acres to displaced Afro-Colombian peasants in Chocó department. The Prosecutor General's office is investigating the firms' operators on accusations of homicide, land theft and forced displacement.

Venezuela's military has taken control of key airports and seaports under the terms of a move approved by the National Assembly a week ago. President Hugo Chávez called the move an effort at "reunifying the motherland, which was in pieces." Critics call it a power grab aimed at undercutting state and local leaders who oppose Chávez's rule.

The two biggest right wing political parties in Italy are to merge, leaders announced March 22. The National Alliance, led by Gianfranco Fini, will merge with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party to become the People of Freedom party, and take over the government. In last year's elections, the two parties won a combined 38% of the votes.

In Belgium, police arrested around 100 at a protest outside NATO's headquarters in the capital Brussels March 21. The police intervened when the protesters tried to force their way into the headquarters building. Anti-NATO protests also took place in the Netherlands, where police arrested 35 people outside the air force base at Nieuw Milligen. Some were detained while attempting to climb over the base's fence.

In the first major Tibetan protests since last year's Lhasa uprising, hundreds of local residents in Ragya township, Golog "Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture," Qinghai province, attacked a police station March 22, leading to the arrest of nearly 100 monks from the Ragya Monastery. Some 2,000 ethnic Tibetans took to the streets of Ragya after word spread that a monk had taken his own life after being arrested for possession of "separatist" literature. Authorities said several police were "slightly injured" in the clash.

The US Justice Department filed lawsuits against Union Pacific Railroad Co. March 18 seeking $37 million in damages for allegedly failing to prevent its rail cars from being used to smuggle drugs into the country. US customs inspectors on at least 38 occasions between 2001 and 2006 discovered a total of two tons of marijuana and 100 kilograms of cocaine in Union Pacific rail cars at the border crossings of Brownsville and Calexico, according to the two complaints.

Mexican soldiers March 21 captured high-level Gulf Cartel boss Sigifredo Najera in the northern city of Saltillo. Najera is accused of attacking a US consulate and a TV station of the national network Televisa, as well as killing nine soldiers. "He is directly responsible for the torture and killing of the soldiers, the attacks on the US consulate and Televisa in Monterrey," President Felipe Calderón said in a speech in the Mexican capital.

Lev L. Dassin, acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and John P. Gilbride, special agent-in-charge of the New York Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), announced the arrests March 19 of José Joaquin Montes-Ovalles and Maria Lilian Castellanos-Poveda, accused cocaine brokers for the 10th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), on charges of conspiring to import ton-quantities of cocaine into the US.