Honduran police arrested some 150 people while using tear gas and water cannons to disperse a demonstration by teachers, students and others in Tegucigalpa on Aug. 27, the 23rd day of a strike by teachers over their pension fund and other issues. The protest, which blocked Central America Boulevard for three hours, was called by the Federation of Teachers Organizations of Honduras (FOMH), which includes six unions, and the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), a coalition that formed last year to oppose the June 2009 military coup against then-president José Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya Rosales.

A one-day strike by Puerto Rican teachers over budget issues and the need for additional teachers shut down about 90% of the island's 1,500 public schools on Aug. 26, according to the Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR). The walkout was the largest teachers' strike since early 2008, when the FMPR led a militant 10-day strike. Interim education secretary Jesús Rivera Chávez called the Aug. 26 strike's effect "devastating."

Private security firm Blackwater violated US arms trafficking regulations when training Colombian military personnel in 2005, a State Department report indicates. The controversial firm, renamed Xe Services LLC in 2009, is to pay $42 million for violating US law, including the unauthorized military training of Colombian soldiers—evidently for private service in Iraq and Afghanistan—in April and May 2005.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Aug. 28 promised to return 6 million hectares of farmland stolen by paramilitary groups after the original owners were forcibly displaced. The president said he will soon present congress with a Land Restitution Law aimed at restoring lands to the displaced, who now number more than 3 million. (Colombia Reports, Aug. 28)

Authorities in the south of Colombia on Aug. 29 found the bodies of two indigenous leaders who had been shot by unknown assassins. Ramiro Inampues and his wife, Maria Lina Galindez, were reported missing two days earlier, after Inampues failed to attend the regular session of the Guachucal Council in Nariño department, where he held a seat for the Indigenous Social Alliance (ASI). The bodies were found in a ditch in El Común, a pueblo near the border with Ecuador.

Four people were detained Aug. 25 for a deadly attack on Chinese military police last week in the far western region of Xinjiang, state media reported. In the Aug. 19 attack, a member of the Uighur minority apparently rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into a checkpoint at a highway intersection near the city of Aksu, some 400 miles west of the provincial capital Urumqi and 37 miles from China's border with Kyrgyzstan. Six police were killed and 15 injured in the first major terrorist attack in China since 2008. (Reuters, Aug. 25; CSM, People's Daily, Aug. 19)

In a New York Times op-ed Aug. 26, "China's Discreet Hold on Pakistan's Northern Borderlands," Selig S. Harrison of the Center for International Policy writes that Islamabad has effectively handed over de facto control of the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Beijing. Although the region is largely closed to the outside world, Harrison cites reports indicating a "simmering rebellion against Pakistani rule and the influx of an estimated 7,000 to 11,000 soldiers of China's People's Liberation Army." He describes the development as "a quiet geopolitical crisis" in the Himalayan borderlands of contested Kashmir.

All of a sudden everybody's talking about this. On Aug. 12 the Jerusalem Post noted a story by Jeffrey Goldberg in the current issue of The Atlantic, "The Point of No Return," predicting an Israeli attack on Iran by the end of the year. After speaking with 40 Israeli, Arab and US officials (past and present), Goldberg writes that "based on my conversations with Israeli decision-makers, this period of forbearance, in which Netanyahu waits to see if the West's nonmilitary methods can stop Iran, will come to an end this December." He asserts that the Pentagon has issued a directive not to shoot down Israeli planes in Iraqi airspace.