More than three years after a brutal massacre of two families in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombian prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 15 Army soldiers for participating in the killing and for terrorism. (Fiscalía press release, March 27)

Argentine farmer groups and the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner held six hours of talks on March 28 aimed at ending a 16-day-old producers' strike that had restricted food supplies in major cities. Strike supporters lifted some of the blockades they had maintained on highways throughout the country, but more radical sectors said this was only a 48-hour truce and stayed at their positions at highway entrances.

An ongoing occupation of threatened oak trees on the campus of UC Berkeley reached its 485th day March 30. Perversely, the grove of some 90 California oaks was planted in 1923 as a memorial to Californians who lost their lives in World War I, adjacent to the university's Memorial Stadium. But UC now plans to destroy most of the trees to build an athletic training facility. Activists maintain the site is also an Ohlone Indian burial ground, noting remains found there when the stadium was built in the '20s. The campaign has taken on several demands beyond preservation of the threatened grove, including:

Turkish jets and artillery fired missiles and shells on Kurdish guerilla camps in northern Iraq March 29, killing at least 15 PKK fighters, the General Staff said in a statement on its web site. The statement said guerillas had been launching attacks on Turkish territory from the camps. Turkey withdrew as many as 10,000 troops from northern Iraq on Feb. 29 after a week-long incursion in which 237 PKK fighters and 24 soldiers were reported killed. The Turkish military has carried out at least two other air-strikes on Iraq since the withdrawal. The General Staff said it was ready to meet "every threat against Turkey." (Bloomberg, March 29)

Award-winning journalist and World War 4 Report editor Bill Weinberg will present a video and discussion at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland, CA, on the Iraq Freedom Congress, a new alliance of trade unions, women's organizations, neighborhood assemblies and student groups opposed to both the US occupation and the sectarian militias.

Our March issue featured the story "Phantom Republics: Kosovo's Independence Reverberates Across Eurasia," by Rene Wadlow, a reprint from Toward Freedom. Wrote Wadlow: "The self-proclamation of independence by Kosovo may be the last act in the division of former Yugoslavia, or it may be one step in a new chain of territorial adjustments. There are calls in Republika Srpska, the Serb unit of the Bosnia-Herzegovina federation, for its integration into Serbia... There is also the impact of the example of Kosovo on the other phantom republics born of the break up of the Soviet Union: Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Transnistria in Moldova—and, if not completely crushed, Chechenya in Russia." Our March Exit Poll was: "Do you support independence for Kosova? If your answer is 'no,' please tell us how you feel about Palestine, East Timor, Western Sahara, Northern Ireland, the Basque Country and Puerto Rico. If your answer is 'yes,' please tell us how you feel about Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria." We received the following responses:

Tibetan activists—chanting "Reject China's bloody torch," "Olympics in China, torture in Tibet" and "We will never give up"—are gathering daily at midday at San Francisco's Civic Center in what has essentially become a protest campaign to demand their right to protest. With the Olympic torch set to arrive in the city in less than two weeks, Mayor Gavin Newsom (while paying requisite lip service to the First Amendment) is considering shunting protesters away from the torch route to isolated "free speech zones"—which the Bay Guardian rightly calls "an oxymoron if there ever was one."

The latest escalation in the ongoing struggle for Basra is affecting global oil prices. As news broke that one of Iraq's main oil export pipelines from Basra exploded, cutting at least a third of the exports from the city that provides 80% of the government's revenue, oil prices jumped more than $1 a barrel, Reuters reported. Jamal Hamed al-Fraih, spokesman for the South Oil Company, said the stricken pipeline was feeding crude to one of the main refineries in the province, at Shuaiba—for internal consumption. "Oil exports are still flowing but they are less than a few days ago," he said adding that oil exports from Basra, Iraq's main outlet, had been averaging 1.5 million barrels a day before the new outbreak of fighting. Prices leveled off after his clarification.