A confrontation on March 3 between police agents and market vendors in Piura, capital of Peru's northwestern Piura province, resulted in the deaths of at least five civilians, according to the authorities; 95 civilians and 25 agents were injured in the incident, and 137 people were arrested. The vendors were protesting Piura mayor Mónica Zapata's plan to remove them from their current location in the Modelo Market to a new market area that they considered inadequate.

There were celebrations in Mexico City's downtown Alameda park on March 4 as 31 same-sex couples applied for marriage licenses at the Civil Registry on the nearby Arcos de Belén avenue under a new law that took effect that day in the Federal District (DF). The DF legislature passed the law on Dec. 21, making Mexico City the first city in Latin America to recognize same-sex marriages.

A US federal judge has ruled that the Research Triangle Institute (RTI), a USAID-funded organization providing local governance services in Iraq, can be sued in the United States for the deaths of two Iraqi women killed by their security guards in Baghdad in October of 2007. The judge will also allow the victims' attorneys discovery on whether the security company, Unity Resources Group, has sufficient business contacts in the United States to be sued in a US court. Whether Unity Resources Group can be sued should be decided within the next few months.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment March 8 accusing a suspect brought to the US from Nigeria, Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization—al-Shabab, the main insurgent army in Somalia. Ahmed, 35 of Eritrea, is also charged with providing that support, conspiring to receive training from a foreign terrorist organization, and receiving the training.

Hundreds were again killed over the weekend in ethnic violence around the city of Jos, in central Nigeria's Plateau State, with corpses dumped into hastily dug mass graves. Christian members of Plateau's leading ethnic group, the Beromas, were apparently by Muslim Fulani herdsmen, who swept into their villages, putting homes to the torch and attacking the residents with rifles and machetes as they fled. In a telephone interview with Britain's Channel 4 News , the Rev. Benjamin Kwashi, Anglican archbishop of Jos, said the attackers were "people who knew what to do and were trained on how to do it."

A building of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in Lahore was targeted in a suicide car bomb blast March 8, killing at least 13, including two security officials, and injuring 89 others. The targeted building is variously described as an "office" where terrorist suspects were interrogated and a "safe-house"—implying it may have been a clandestine prison. While the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility, Xinhua quoted officials including the ex-secretary of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Brigadier Mehmood Shah, saying the operation was beyond the Taliban's capability—which raises the question of who really did it. (Blackwater, the paranoid will doubtless tell us.) (Dawn, March 9; Xinhua, VOA, March 7)

Fierce clashes left some 50 fighters dead in northeast Afghanistan's Baghlan province March 7, pitting Taliban forces against their erstwhile allies in Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami militia. The fighting was be centered in Baghlan-e-Markazi district, a stronghold of Hezb-e-Islami, in a village called Qaisar Khail. Hekmatyar has reportedly offered to join forces with the government against the Taliban. (Times of India, WP, March 7)

The death toll from bomb and rocket attacks in Baghdad on March 7, reached 37 with 62 others wounded, as Iraqis voted in the country's parliamentary election. Most of the attacks were on residential buildings in densely populated neighborhoods far from the Green Zone. (Xinhua, March 7) One day earlier, a car bomb ripped through a parking lot used by Shi'ite pilgrims at the Imam Ali shrine in the holy city of Najaf, killing three—two Iranians and one Iraqi. The attack near an Iranian tour bus also wounded 54 people, 19 of them Iranians. (LAT, March 7)