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.

Colombia's Supreme Court approved a request by the Fiscalía (attorney general's office) to reopen the investigation of former army general Rito Alejo del Rio, who is suspected of having collaborated with illegal paramilitaries. The Fiscalía asked for the reopening after testimony by several demobilized paramilitaries linked the retired general to the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Hebert Velosa, Salvatore Mancuso, Jorge Ivan Laverde and Elkin Casarrubia are among those who testified on del Rio's ties to the AUC.

In a landmark ruling, Brazil's Supreme Court March 19 found that the Raposa-Serra do Sol indigenous reserve in northern Roraima state should be maintained as a contiguous territory. The 10-1 decision upholds the demarcation of the territory, home to some 18,000 members of the Makuxi and other tribes, as designated in a 2005 presidential decree. The decision requires the removal of rice growers within the reserve, who brought the legal challenge to the demarcation.