Police in Diyarbakir, Turkey, used water cannons, tear gas and batons against Kurdish protesters Nov. 25. The protesters hurled stones and burned tires after being blocked from marching through the city's center. Protesters chanted slogans in support of the Democratic Society Party, which prosecutors want closed down, and in favor of Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned leader of the PKK guerillas. Police detained dozens during the clashes.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former US commander in Iraq, gave the Democratic Party's weekly Saturday radio address Nov. 24, calling Bush's Iraq adventure a failure—while emphasizing he was not representing the party. Said Sanchez: "That failure continues today. At its base is the mistaken belief, despite years of evidence to the contrary, that victory can be achieved through the application of military power alone." The former commander is backing congressional Democrats who want $50 billion in additional war funding linked to the goal of US withdrawal by the end of next year. That legislation was blocked by Senate Republicans who want $70 billion for the war without conditions. Democrats voted down that measure, and no additional funds were approved before Congress left for its Thanksgiving break. (VOA, Nov. 24)

On Nov. 16, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Wilfredo Vazquez was arrested by federal agents in Tampa, FL, and charged with three counts of knowingly causing a detainee under his supervision to engage in a sexual act. According to the accusation, Vazquez was driving a Jamaican woman, identified in an ICE press release only with the initials "M.C.," from ICE's Krome Service and Processing Center in Miami-Dade to the Broward Transition Center in Pompano Beach on the afternoon of Sept. 21 when he took a detour to his home in Tamarac and raped her there.

On Nov. 13, in its second day of deliberations, a federal jury in Newark, NJ, awarded former asylum seeker Hawa Abdi Jama of Somalia $100,000 in damages after finding the private company that ran an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth negligent in its hiring and training. The jury rejected a claim that Jama's international human rights were violated during her 11-month detention at Elizabeth in 1994-95.

Over 20,000 people gathered outside the gates of Fort Benning, GA, on Nov. 18 to demand the closing of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), a US Army training school for Latin American military and security personnel formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA). Eleven protesters were arrested as they crossed into the grounds of the fort.

Meeting in a heavily guarded military academy on the outskirts of Sucre, Bolivia's Constituent Assembly approved a new Constitution late on Nov. 24 with the support of 136 of the 255 delegates. Two delegates abstained, and the majority of the opposition, led by the Democratic and Social Power (PODEMOS) party, boycotted the session. Most of the votes for the new Constitution came from the leftist Movement to Socialism (MAS) of President Evo Morales, but some opposition delegates backed it, including three from PODEMOS. The Constituent Assembly, which has been meeting for 15 months, approved the document "as a whole" but left some details to be worked out.

Mario Zavala Navarrete, a leader of alumni of the Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, reported that he was assaulted by armed, masked assailants the night of Nov. 22. He said they followed him in a white van as he was heading home to Tixtia on a public bus after leaving the college. They caught him when he left the bus and beat him unconscious.

Several Haitian nongovernmental organizations--including the Haitian Platform for Alternative Development (PAPDA), Haitian Women's Solidarity (SOFA), Tet Kole Ti Peyizan ("Union of Small Farmers") and the National Coordinating Committee for Women's Rights (CONAP)—have written the Haitian government demanding an investigation of reports of sexual against Haitian women and minors by soldiers in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).