The City Council of Berkeley, Calif., is to vote Feb. 15 on a resolution to invite Guantánamo Bay detainees who have been cleared of wrongdoing to resettle in the town. Of the 38 detainees that have now been cleared, Berkeley would invite two: a Russian ballet dancer and an Algerian who was once a top-rated Italian chef in Austria. "Our hearts are with all those people who were never tried, held for years and in some cases tortured," said Wendy Kenin, chair of the city's Peace and Justice Commission. "As a municipality, this is one thing we can do to right some wrongs of our federal government."

Don Samuel Ruíz García, bishop emeritus of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in the Chiapas highlands, died in Mexico City on Jan. 24 at the age of 86. Known to his flock as Don Samuel or Tatic—"father" in the Maya tongue—Bishop Ruíz was long an advocate for the poor in marginalized Chiapas state, and came to national prominence when he brokered peace talks with the Zapatista rebels in 1994. The day after his passing, thousands of indigenous campesinos from throughout Chiapas filed past the coffin at a memorial mass in the San Cristóbal cathedral that also commemorated the 51st anniversary of his ordination there. Bishop Raúl Vera López of Saltillo, who served as Bishop Ruíz's coadjutor in Chiapas from 1995 to 1999, presided over a memorial mass in Mexico City. The Vatican issued a message hailing him as the "bishop of the poor." Even President Felipe Calderón—on the opposite side of political battles with Bishop Ruíz in life—said his death "constitutes a great loss for Mexico." (Upside Down World, Feb. 9; NYT, El Universal, Jan. 26; Catholic News Service, Jan. 25)

Speaking at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics on Feb. 7, US Army Undersecretary Joseph Westphal—the army's second highest ranking civilian official—invoked an "insurgency" mounting in Mexico. His talk focused on the Middle East and South Asia, but in response to a student's question about strategic blind spots in US foreign policy, Westphal said: "One of them in particular for me is Latin America and in particular Mexico. As all of you know, there is a form of insurgency in Mexico with the drug cartels that’s right on our border."

In recent days, Facebook groups numbering several hundred members have been calling for "day of rage" protests in Libya on Feb. 17. An initiator of the call, Jamal al-Hajji, who has joint Libyan and Danish citizenship and has spent time in prison in the past for his criticism of the Moamar Qadaffi regime, was detained on Feb. 1 for an alleged hit-and-run accident, which he denies. International human rights observers say he has been targeted for his activism.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators flooded Cairo's iconic Tahrir Square and towns across Egypt Feb. 8, in the biggest show of defiance to President Hosni Mubarak since the protests began. The immense crowd hailed as a hero Google executive Wael Ghonim whose Facebook site helped launch the protest movement on Jan. 25, and who was released the previous day after having been detained and held blindfolded for 12 days. Many protesters carried the symbols of the Internet social networks Facebook and Twitter, which have been vital mobilizing tools for the opposition. While larger crowds gather daily to protest, several thousand occupy Tahrir Square around the clock, sleeping under plastic sheets or under army tanks. (AFP, BBC News, Feb. 8)

Thousands of unionists and campesinos marched in Mexico City on Jan. 31 in what has become a traditional annual protest against the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the federal government's neoliberal economic policies. This year about 40,000 people participated, according to the organizers; the Mexico City police estimated 22, 000. Martín Esparza, general secretary of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), called for driving President Felipe Calderón out of office, even though his term ends in less than two years. "This government only has a few months left," Esparza told the marchers, "but we should overthrow it, the way they did in Tunisia and the way it's being done in Egypt. We need to raise up a civil and peaceful insurgency throughout the country." (La Jornada, Feb. 1)

There were at least eight killings last year in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León "that evidence indicates were the result of unlawful use of lethal force by army and navy officers," according to a Feb. 3 press release from the New York-based nonprofit Human Rights Watch (HRW). A recent fact-finding mission by the group to Nuevo León also "documented more than a dozen enforced disappearances in which the evidence points to the involvement of the army, navy, and police," HRW said.

Students protesting an $800 tuition surcharge imposed this year at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) marked the beginning of the spring semester on Feb. 7 with a two-hour march and rally at the school's Río Piedras campus in San Juan. Adriana Mulero, a spokesperson for the protesters' Student Representative Committee (CRE), called the demonstration a success, since "they didn't use brute force," referring to the large police presence at the campus.