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Sarah Ferguson writes for the Village Voice, March 31:

Friday night's Critical Mass bike ride was played as a First Amendment "showdown" over the NYPD's new parade rule, which requires groups of 50 or more to get a permit to be on the streets.

From the Center for Constitutional Rights, March 30:

Hicks Forced to Agree to Gag Order With Plea
Guantanamo Detainee May Not Speak to Press, Criticize his Detention or Say He was Tortured
The US government required Guantánamo detainee David Hicks to agree to a series of conditions in exchange for accepting his plea before the military commission and releasing him to Australia to serve a sentence of seven years for "material support of a terrorist organization." Attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represented Hicks in the original Supreme Court case that established the right of the detainees to challenge their detention in US courts, criticized the deal.

More than 1,000 immigration detainees held a two-day hunger strike at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, according to the consul general of El Salvador in Georgia, Asdrubal Aguilar. The Atlanta Latino newspaper reported the protest in a March 22 article, but did not say when it took place. The facility is operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) under contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

On March 26, a Border Patrol shot and killed a man who allegedly threatened him with a rock in Calexico, California, on the border with Mexico. The agent fired an M-4 assault rifle at the man, who was apparently trying to evade arrest and run back to Mexico. The man was pronounced dead from one bullet wound at El Centro Regional Medical Center. Pablo Arnaud Carreno, Mexico's consul in Calexico, said the victim appeared to be a Mexican man who had entered the US without permission. His name was not released. The Mexican government has asked US authorities for a thorough investigation. "It seems unjust to shoot someone who is unarmed," Arnaud Carreno said on March 27.

On the night of March 23, four young people associated with the anarchist punk fanzine Pensares Y Sentires were arbitrarily attacked, beaten and detained by police on the outskirts of Oaxaca City. The black-clad attackers, who repeatedly fired their pistols in the air to intimidate the youths, belonged to the municipal police force of Santa Lucia del Camino, the Oaxaca district where Indymedia reporter Brad Will was killed last year. The detainees were taken to the Santa Lucia del Camino jail, and released at 1:30 AM, charged with disorderly conduct. Two days earlier, they had particiapted in the ceremony and hunger strike to demand the Brad's killers be brought to justice. The detained were also members of the local Somos Resistencia collective, part of the Anarkalactica youth culture network. (Kolectivo Todxs Somos Presxs, March 24)

Speaking to supporters and the press at the opening of the second phase of the Zapatistas' "Other Campaign" in the Chiapas highland city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Subcommander Marcos said that capitalism is provoking a "fourth world war" for control of the resource-rich lands of poor countries. He said global capitalism has entered a new phase, seeking total market control over lands, waters and even genetic resources. He cited as an example the struggle over Cerro Huitepec, a hill just outside San Cristobal where the developers of a soft-drink plant hope to mine water, with no benefit to the inhabitants of the city. He said that in the new order "national governments are mere managers, and a manager is not a director." (Notimex, March 25)

Cuban leader Fidel Castro, in his first editorial since largely disappearing from public view due to illness last year, charged US demand for biofuels directly hurts the world's poor. The article, appearing in the official Cuban newspaper Granma, was titled "Over three billion people in the world condemned to premature death due to starvation and thirst," charging that biofuel demand pushes farmers worldwide to plant fuel crops instead of food crops needed by the world's poor.