Iranian security forces turned out in large numbers on the streets of Tehran March 16 to prevent possible opposition protests during a national festival. Iranians are celebrating Chahar-Shanbe Suri, a ceremony held ahead of the Persian New Year, Nowruz. People turned out on smaller neighborhood streets to light bonfires and set off fireworks, but news agencies reported that Tehran's main thoroughfares and squares were largely deserted except for police.

The governor of Bolivia's Chonchocoro prison has been sacked after a number of violent incidents at the facility, as well as revelations that former military ruler Luis García Meza was being housed in a luxury cell. Investigators searched the facility after several prisoners were injured in a turf war between inmates that involved a grenade attack and a shooting. They found that García Meza's quarters included a gym, sauna, tennis table, dining room and barbecue grill. He is serving a 30-year term for abuses dating back to his period in power in the early 1980s. Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti said prison governor Col. Gilmar Oblitas and other police officers would face penalties. (BBC News, March 16)

The Obama administration will halt new work on the $3 billion "virtual fence" planned for the Mexican border, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced March 16, diverting $50 million in planned economic stimulus funds for the project to other purposes. "Not only do we have an obligation to secure our borders, we have a responsibility to do so in the most cost-effective way possible," Napolitano said in a statement. "The system of sensors and cameras along the Southwest border known as SBInet has been plagued with cost overruns and missed deadlines."

On March 12 hundreds of Honduran soldiers, police and agents of the National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) removed thousands of families from some 200 manzanas (about 340 acres) of land they were living on in the Montes de León, La Mesa, Santa Rosa and Loarque Sur neighborhoods in Comayagüela, Tegucigalpa's twin city. Deputy Police Commissioner Leandro Osorio said the operation was in compliance with an eviction order issued by a Tegucigalpa court. According to authorities, the land belongs to the Social Fund for Housing (FOSOVI) and was occupied illegally. After the residents were removed, bulldozers destroyed their homes, built mostly from materials like sheet metal and pieces of wood.

Some 12 Chilean social and grassroots organizations have formed a solidarity network in response to what they consider the authorities' failure to act quickly and appropriately when a 8.8 magnitude earthquake devastated much of central and southern Chile on Feb. 27. The network will work for Chileans to "reconstitute ourselves as an organized people to confront the present tragedy in an effective and dignified manner," the groups said in an undated statement posted on the website of Vía Campesina, the international peasant federation, on March 10.

According to a report in the Peruvian daily La República on March 5, Jesús Sosa Saavedra, a former agent of Peru's Army Intelligence Service (SIE), has confessed to prosecutor Alicia Chamorro Bermúdez that he participated in the 1988 "Operation Lucero," in which the SIE captured and executed alleged Ecuadorian spy Enrique Duchicela and Lt. Marco Barrantes, a Peruvian officer also accused of espionage. Sosa Saavedra said Col. Oswaldo Hanke Velasco, then the head of the SIE, ordered the operation. According to La República, this testimony may bring Hanke Velasco to trial; he had avoided prosecution in the past.

Palestinians staged angry protests in Jerusalem March 16 as part of a "day of rage" declared by Hamas, clashing with police and setting fire to tires and garbage bins. Police in riot gear fired back with rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas. Some 60 Palestinians and 14 police officers were reported injured, and at least 30 protesters were arrested.

Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, the New York Times reports in a front-page story March 15, based on interview with military officials and business figures in Afghanistan and the US. The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former CIA and Special Forces operatives. The mercenaries, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.