Hidden mural of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa

Troops from the paramilitary People's Armed Police (PAP) and Public Security Bureau (PSB) fired on hundreds of protesters led by Buddhist monks at Kardze in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of China's Sichuan province April 3, leaving eight dead. The protest began when monks of Tongkor Monastery in Zithang township, Kardze County, marched to demand the release of two monks arrested the previous day for defying China's official "Patriotic Education" campaign, which requires monks to denounce the Dalai Lama, according to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD). Scores of Tibetans were injured and arrested, the TCHRD said. China's official Xinhua news agency reported one government official was seriously injured in what it called a riot.

Judges at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague April 3 found two former commanders of the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), Kosova's ex-prime minister Ramush Haradinaj and Idriz Balaj, not guilty on all charges. A third ex-KLA defendant, Lahi Brahimaj, was sentenced to six years imprisonment. The three were accused of murders, rapes, torture and persecution of Serbs and perceived collaborators during the KLA guerilla struggle in 1998. (VOA, Kosova Live, April 3)

Some 40 activists marched against the NATO summit in Bucharest April 3, beating on drums and chanting "Stop the war, stop NATO" and "NATO out of Bucharest." In a pre-emptive strike before the march, Romanian security forces broke into a factory that had been rented by the protesters as a Convergence Center, detaining 46 for "identity checks." Eight others were picked up off the street and brought to police precincts. (Gipfelsoli Infogruppe, Germany, April 3) The city remains occupied by some 30,000 special police, military troops and intelligence officers. A "code yellow" security alert has been declared, with all protests forbidden. (Balkan Decentralized Network, April 3) A solidarity protest demanding release of the detained was held at the Romanian embassy in Berlin (IMC Deutschland, April 3)

Tanks have been deployed in parts of southern Yemen after a fifth day of angry protests by thousands of mostly young people. Youth are blocking roads and burning tires, and up to 100 have been arrested. In al-Dalea, two police station were torched, and military vehicles burned, while riot police fired into the air and used tanks against street barricades. In response, armed protesters threw up roadblocks on the main road between the capital, Sanaa, and the port of Aden, halting traffic.

From Naftana ("Our Oil" in Arabic), an independent UK-based committee supporting democratic trade unionism in Iraq, March 28:

In a series of telephone calls from Basra over the past 48 hours, Iraqi trade union activists appeal for solidarity and describe how the so-called "Security Plan" started midnight 24 March with intense shelling and fire from all kind of weapons.

More than three years after a brutal massacre of two families in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombian prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 15 Army soldiers for participating in the killing and for terrorism. (Fiscalía press release, March 27)

Argentine farmer groups and the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner held six hours of talks on March 28 aimed at ending a 16-day-old producers' strike that had restricted food supplies in major cities. Strike supporters lifted some of the blockades they had maintained on highways throughout the country, but more radical sectors said this was only a 48-hour truce and stayed at their positions at highway entrances.

An ongoing occupation of threatened oak trees on the campus of UC Berkeley reached its 485th day March 30. Perversely, the grove of some 90 California oaks was planted in 1923 as a memorial to Californians who lost their lives in World War I, adjacent to the university's Memorial Stadium. But UC now plans to destroy most of the trees to build an athletic training facility. Activists maintain the site is also an Ohlone Indian burial ground, noting remains found there when the stadium was built in the '20s. The campaign has taken on several demands beyond preservation of the threatened grove, including: