Five participants in an open-ended hunger strike by dozens of laid-off Mexican electrical workers were taken to the hospital on May 21 and 22 as the protest reached the four-week mark. About 68 hunger strikers remained camped out in Mexico City's main plaza, the Zócalo, in the workers' latest protest against President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's sudden liquidation of the government-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC) the night of Oct. 10. More than 17,000 of the 44,000 laid-off LFC workers, represented by the 95-year-old Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), have rejected the government's severance package, choosing to fight the closing with protests and lawsuits.

Running battles between police and gunmen of the Shower Posse gang turned part of Jamaica's capital Kingston into a warzone on May 24, with reports of explosions and civilian casualties. Two police were killed the previous day as police moved in to arrest accused kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke for extradition to the US. The confirmed death toll has now reached three, as a soldier was killed breaking through street barricades in the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood. National Security Minister Dwight Nelson said on national television that he had received reports of several civilian deaths and desperate pleas from residents pinned inside buildings by gunfire. Police and soldiers have begun house-to-house searches for Dudus Coke.

A state of emergency has been declared in southern Kyrgyztsan following what authorities are portraying as ethnic violence. On May 19, several thousand ethnic Kyrgyz tried to storm a private university in Jalal-Abad that serves as a center of the minority Uzbek community, sparking a clash that left at least two people dead and more than 70 wounded. Witnesses said gunfire broke out as crowds approached the building encircled by a cordon of special security forces. It was not clear who opened fire, but health officials said most of the injured appeared to be from the crowd. Many see an effort to restore ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev behind the outburst.

The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) announced May 22 that it has launched an investigation into the shootings of dozens of prisoners during a jail riot in Les Cayes, the country's third city, following the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake. Haitian police had blamed fighting among inmates for the deaths. Thousands of prisoners escaped from jails in Haiti in the chaos after the quake that killed more than 200,000.

Even as the disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico, lawyers for BP and federal regulators are working to settle a civil suit the government brought in connection with the 2006 pipeline spills in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oilfield. In papers BP and government lawyers jointly filed in US District Court in Anchorage recently, the two sides said they had "conducted extensive settlement discussions including...exchanging several drafts of various settlement constructs." Judge John Sedwick granted a motion to extend deadlines related to expert witness disclosure and discovery until near the end of the year.

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The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled May 21 in al-Maqaleh v. Gates that detainees held at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan cannot bring habeas corpus challenges in US courts. The circuit court reversed the district court's ruling, which allowed habeas challenges by three Bagram detainees pursuant to the Supreme Court's test in Boumediene v. Bush. Chief Judge David B. Sentelle, delivering the opinion of the three-judge panel, stated that the district court underestimated the significance of Bagram being located in an area of armed conflict, which differentiates the defendants' jurisdictional status from those detained at Guantánamo Bay. The court held that the current case is more comparable to 1950's Johnson v. Eisentrager, where the Supreme Court ruled that US courts had no jurisdiction over war criminals held in a US-administered German prison.

Timoteo Alejandro Ramírez, 44, leader of the Triqui indigenous "autonomous municipality" of San Juan Copala in Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca, was killed May 20 along with his wife Cleriberta Castro, 35. The attack took place in Yosoyuxi, a hamlet within municipality, where the couple lived. Witnesses said an unmarked truck stopped outside the couple's store, and an "armed commando" emerged and carried out the murders. A statement from the autonomous municipality said the commando was made up of four "non-Triqui individuals," but asserted that the Movement for Triqui Unification and Struggle (MULT) is responsible for the crime. Ramírez was leader of the rival Independent Movement for Triqui Unification and Struggle (MULTI, which established the autonomous municipality in 2007). (San Juan Copala Autonomous Municipality statement, May 22)