Canadian mining company Pacific Rim, acting through a US-based subsidiary, announced this week that it will sue the Salvadoran government over its refusal to issue mining permits for the El Dorado silver and gold mine in the department of Cabañas. The case will be heard by a special international arbitration court established by the 2006 US-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

In Latin America, as in much of the world, the traditional International Workers Day marches this May 1 focused on the global economic crisis and especially on increases in the unemployment rate, which is approaching 10% in many areas.

Millionaire supermarket magnate Ricardo Martinelli of the conservative Democratic Change (CD) party easily won Panama's presidential election on May 3. With 80% of the ballots counted at around 10 PM, Martinelli had 60.62% of the votes, against 36.97% for Balbina Herrera of the governing center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). Under current president Martín Torrijos, Panama has had economic growth rates approaching double digits, but growth has slowed with the global crisis. Media analysts note that Martinelli's victory goes against the recent trend in Latin America for voters to replace conservative governments with left or center-left governments. The PRD had been losing support from the left; at Panama's May Day celebrations, labor and activist organizations urged the thousands of participants to abstain from the voting or leave their ballots blank. Herrera was also hurt by her ties to former dictator Manual Noriega. (Reuters, May 3; La Opinión, May 2 from AP)

On April 18, an eight-member Romani family living in the small Moravian village of Vitkov was attacked in their home with Molotov cocktails, which completely destroyed the house. Someone reportedly turned off the water to the building before setting it on fire. The parents of a two-year-old girl and the girl herself were severely injured; while the girl remains in hospital, her parents have since been released. On May 3 they both attended a local demonstration by the Roma community against rising neo-Nazism in the Czech Republic. Demonstrations took place in 11 other locations nationwide and were attended by 3 000 people. Such a unified gathering of the Roma community has not taken place since 1989.

Google appears to have eliminated the foreign country news page links from the bottom of the Google News page. World War 4 Report depends on these links intimately for our work. How are we supposed to access those pages now? How are we supposed to do a search for Mexican, Colombian, Pakistani, etc. news sources? Who's brilliant idea was this? Why can't anyone just leave well enough alone? Haven't they ever heard "If ain't broke, don't fix it"? Or is it some conspiracy to limit bloggers and researchers to the dumbed-down American media?

A Yemeni man was killed and four others injured when a bomb exploded May 3 among protesters in the south. Authorities said the bomb appeared to have been carried by a protester and it exploded accidentally during the clashes in the southern town of Dali. A day earlier, five soldiers and two civilians were killed in the southern town of Radfan after local tribesmen clashed with soldiers attempting to set up checkpoints in the area. The US Embassy urgently appealed for dialogue as regional protests shake the nation. (AP, May 4)

To prevent Earth's average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, several teams of researchers say that cumulative carbon emissions must be limited to no more than 1 trillion metric tons. The findings, released April 30 in the journal Nature, are daunting because human activity has already exhausted more than half that allotment since the Industrial Revolution began. Human activity will likely emit the rest of that budget in just a few decades, even if emissions are held at the current rate. The two-degree limit comes from the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a target to reduce the impacts of climate change.

Iran launched a cross-border air attack on Kurdish rebel positions in Iraq May 2—the first time Tehran has used aircraft against Kurdish guerillas. Kurdish border guards claim that Iranian helicopters began shelling three Kurdish villages—Kani Saif, Jomarasi and Kara Sozi—in the remote Panjwin district of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region at 1:30 AM local time. The attacks continued for over an hour. The aircraft reportedly did not enter Iraq and there were no reports of casualties.