Iraq's Oil Ministry said on Aug. 29 the agreement Germany's RWE public utility signed with the Kurdistan Regional Government, which included possible future gas supply for the Nabucco pipeline project, is illegal. RWE announced two days earlier that it had signed a gas cooperation agreement with Iraq's autonomous Kurdish government.

Our August issue featured the story BP: The Case for Public Ownership by Billy Wharton, a reprint from In These Times. Our multiple-choice Exit Poll was: "Should BP be nationalzied?" We received 16 votes. The results follow:

In the largest protest to date by Haitians left homeless by the massive Jan. 12 earthquake, hundreds of people marched in Port-au-Prince on Aug. 26 to demand that the authorities take immediate measures to provide decent housing. The protesters threatened not to take part in presidential and legislative elections scheduled for Nov. 28. "There can be no elections with 1.5 million people living in tents," demonstration organizers said.

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.