Two groups that regularly protest the US ban on most travel to Cuba by making unauthorized trips to the island returned to the US without incident on Aug. 3 after their latest visits, the first since US president Barack Obama took office. About 140 members of the Venceremos Brigade walked from Canada into the US at Buffalo wearing orange T-shirts and chanting for an end to US sanctions, while some 130 members of the US/Cuba Friendshipment Caravan returned to the US at the Hidalgo International Bridge from Reynosa, Mexico. US Customs and Border Protection agents gave the travelers no trouble even though they said they had been in Cuba.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez announced Aug. 8 he is sending his ambassador back to Bogotá—while not formally re-establishing relations or backing down from opposing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's plan to open the country's military bases to a bigger US presence. "The decision to freeze relations with Uribe's government remains," Chávez told reporters. "We have plenty of reasons to be highly concerned." Chávez told Ambassador Gustavo Marquez to return 11 days after he was ordered home. (AP, Aug. 10) However, the next day, Chávez accused Colombian soldiers of crossing into his country. "We are not talking about a patrol with a few soldiers that strayed over a border," Chávez said on his weekly television show Aug. 9. "These troops crossed the Orinoco River in a boat and carried out an incursion into Venezuelan territory... When our troops got there [the Colombian troops] had already gone away." (AlJazeera, Aug. 10)

The five generals who lead the Honduran armed forces made a rare appearance on national television Aug. 4 to explain their role in the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya. They repeated that they did not act to take sides in the political fight that has polarized the country, but out of obedience to the law, and that history would judge them as patriots. They denied that they acted in the interests of an "oligarchy." They said that Zelaya was acting on behalf of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and had become a threat to democracy throughout the hemisphere. Said Gen. Miguel Ángel Garcia Padget: "Central America was not the objective of this communism disguised as democracy. This socialism, communism, chávismo, we could call it, was headed to the heart of the United States."

From the Washington Blade, July 31:

A fundraising event to benefit an LGBT community center in Lebanon last week took a surprise turn when stunned audience members were shown graphic photographs of beheaded corpses and images purportedly depicting U.S. soldiers preparing to execute gay Iraqis.

On July 27, Stavros Vitalis, representing the Panhellenic Macedonian Front, filed a libel suit against Greek journalist Takis Michas, author of Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia. Michas' book and work in the daily Eleftherotypia accuse Greek mercenaries in Bosnia of participating in the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre. In a media statement, Vitalis said that the Greek volunteers who fought in Bosnia under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic were there to help the Serbs, "who were being slaughtered by international gangs that were also stealing their houses, their country and their dignity."

Mauritania registered its first suicide bombing Aug. 8 when an attacker blew himself up outside the French Embassy in the capital Nouakchott, injuring two security guards. The official Agence Nouakchott d'Information reported that the bomber was a Mauritanian. The country has seen growing attacks by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in recent months. Three Mauritanians were charged last week with murder in the presumed AQIM slaying of US national Christopher Legget. One was wearing an explosives belt that did not detonate when he was arrested in July. (NYT, Aug. 8)

After meeting in La Paz with his Colombian counterpart Álvaro Uribe Aug. 5, Bolivian President Evo Morales announced he will request the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) reject the opening of foreign military bases on the continent. "We will take the UNASUR meeting a draft resolution to not accept the presence of any foreign armed soldier in the region," Morales said. The UNASUR summit is to open Aug. 10 in Quito, Ecuador. (Prensa Latina, Aug. 5)

The Mexican Catholic bishops' conference issued a statement criticizing federal police for bursting into a Mass to apprehend an alleged cartel lieutenant Aug. 3. "We make an energetic protest against the lack of respect and the violence exercised on the part of the forces responsible for guaranteeing the security of all persons in our nation...by interrupting a religious act...at the moment in which holy Mass is celebrated," the bishops said in a statement signed by Auxiliary Bishop Jose Gonzalez Gonzalez of Guadalajara, conference secretary-general. "Nothing explains this kind of action inside a religious place and much less in these moments where Mexico is noted internationally as an insecure and violent country." (Catholic News Service, Aug. 4)