Dozens of schoolgirls in Afghanistan were hospitalized May 11 after two apparent poisonous gas attacks on schools, officials said, the latest in a spate of similar incidents. Thirty schoolgirls in the northern city of Kunduz and six in Kabul are hospitalized, with health officials reporting more coming in. One of the girls taken ill in Kunduz said she saw a man in black clothes and face mask throw a bottle near the school, which released a foul-smelling fume. Three suspected poison gas attacks on girls' schools have taken place in Kunduz over the past few weeks; last week 22 schoolgirls and three teachers fell ill when their school was struck. The Taliban have denied responsibility. (Reuters, May 11)

Hundreds of Iraqis were injured and 85 killed in a series of bomb attacks across the country May 10, marking the bloodiest day since the beginning of this year. The capital alone was hit by more than a dozen attacks, carried out by roadside bombs, rigged cars and automatic weapons fired from cars against police and security forces at checkpoints. In Basra 13 were killed and 64 injured in an attack apparently aimed against a police patrol. Nonetheless it turned out that almost all of the victims were civilians, mostly hit in crowded places.

Two Colombian soldiers, Sgt. Pablo Emilio Moncayo and Pvt. Josué Daniel Calvo, returned to their hometowns on April 15 following their release by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and more than two weeks of rest and medical tests in Bogotá. Calvo, who was freed by the FARC on March 28 after 11 months in captivity, was greeted by family, friends and the departmental governor in Popayán, capital of southwestern Cauca department, while Moncayo, released on March 30, arrived at Sandoná in the southwestern department of Nariño accompanied by his parents and other family members.

Civil Pact for Life, Liberty and the Rights of Women of Mexico, an association of 90 groups, held a rally in Mexico City on May 5 to call for a boycott of the seaside resort city of Cancún in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo as a protest against the state government's anti-choice policies. Like more than half of Mexico's 31 states, Quintana Roo recently passed a strict anti-abortion law. The protesters charged that the state, governed by the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), acts "as if it was a church." "Get your rosaries out of our ovaries," they chanted.

On April 29 the Vietnamese telecommunications company Viettel formally acquired 60% of the shares in Haiti's state-owned phone company, Télécommunications d'Haiti (Haiti Téléco). Central Bank president Charles Castel said the company, which escaped the privatization process that led to the sell-off of several state enterprises in the 1990s, was constantly in the red and required monthly subsidies from the government. According to Téléco director Michel Presumé, the company had "more than 5,000 employees who weren't doing anything." "A lot of them spent more time in the radio stations than in their places of employment," he added, presumably referring to workers giving interviews about their opposition to the company's privatization.

On the night of April 15-16 the Haitian Senate approved an 18-month extension of the state of emergency that President René Préval decreed after a Jan. 12 earthquake killed some 230,000 people and devastated the capital area. The "emergency law," which had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies one week earlier, would take effect once Préval had it published in the official government gazette, Le Moniteur.

Mario Ernesto Villanueva Madrid, ex-governor of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, was extradited to the US on May 10 to face charges of accepting some $20 million in bribes from the notorious Juárez Cartel in exchange for allowing in the transport of over 200 tons of cocaine through his state towards North American markets. US prosecutors say the money was laundered through accounts at Lehman Brothers in New York. Appearing in federal court in New York the day of his extradition, Villanueva pleaded not guilty to all charges. (AHN, AOL News, May 10)

Mexico's prosecutor general of Military Justice, José Luis Chávez, announced May 1 that following a joint investigation with civilian prosecutors, it was determined that drug cartel gunmen, not soldiers, were responsible for the deaths of two children during a confrontation in the northern state of Tamaulipas. The incident took place April 3 on the Reynosa-Nuevo Laredo highway near Ciudad Mier, where a family of 13 traveling in an SUV was apparently caught in a crossfire between army troops and cartel gunmen. Bryan and Martin Almanza Salazar, ages 5 and 9, were killed and seven other family members wounded. The survivors said that the troops opened fire without provocation.