Nicaragua

In the sweltering hub of Nicaragua's once-thriving banana industry, Juan Dominguez saw an opportunity. He arrived in Chinandega in 2002, shortly after watching a CNN report about men claiming they had become sterile from exposure to DBCP, a pesticide used on banana plantations in the 1970s. Until then, Dominguez was best known as the mustachioed personal injury lawyer pictured on the backs of Los Angeles buses and had no experience in international law.

Nicaragua's total ban on abortion is a violation of human rights and is killing a growing number of women and children, Amnesty International said Monday in launching a campaign to have the measure repealed. In a report released in Mexico City, the international human rights organization said Nicaragua's law, which went into effect in late 2006, puts the Central American country among the 3% of the world's nations that do not allow abortion under any circumstance.

A Los Angeles judge has wiped out most of a jury verdict awarding millions of dollars to Nicaraguan field hands who applied pesticides to Dole Food Co. crops and who are now sterile. Although the decision leaves four workers with $1.58 million, it will undercut claims of an estimated 6,000 others who have sued in the United States for similar injuries suffered outside of this country. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Victoria G. Chaney overturned jury verdicts in the first U.S.

Daniel Ortega was sworn in Wednesday as president of this Central American country, bringing the erstwhile rebels of the Sandinista movement back to power as professed allies of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. In a speech before more than a dozen heads of state and an estimated 300,000 supporters gathered in this capital city's John Paul II Plaza, Ortega, 61, promised to attack the grinding poverty in which 80% of Nicaraguans live.

Iran's hard-line president expanded his courtship of allies in his standoff with Washington, pledging deeper ties with Nicaragua's leftist leader through the opening of new embassies in each other's capital. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, as part of a whirlwind series of meetings with Latin America's newly inaugurated leftist leaders.

A Southern California pesticide company has agreed to settle a lawsuit alleging that one of the firm's products caused agricultural workers in Nicaragua to become sterile, plaintiffs' attorneys announced Sunday. Amvac Chemical Corp. has agreed to pay a total of $300,000 to 13 Nicaraguan workers who contended that they were sterilized while exposed to a pesticide called DBCP on banana plantations nearly three decades ago.

Thousands of Hondurans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans in Southern California and across the United States who are here under temporary protected status have been granted an 18-month extension, officials said. Hondurans and Nicaraguans who received protected status after Hurricane Mitch devastated their countries with floods and mudslides in 1998 were due to return home after July 5.

THE people crammed into the stifling basketball gym. They filled the court, lined the walls and tumbled beyond the doors onto the sun-blistered streets. They had gathered to hear a promise of justice. Many had spent their lives toiling on banana plantations that U.S. companies operated in this region some 30 years ago. By day, the workers had harvested bunches of fruit to ship to North American tables.

Hurricane Felix came ashore on Nicaragua's remote Miskito Coast early Tuesday as a Category 5 storm, damaging about 5,000 homes in the region before moving westward toward the heart of this country of 7 million people, officials said. Less than nine hours later and more than 1,600 miles away in the Pacific, a second and much weaker hurricane, Henriette, struck the resort city of San Jose del Cabo on the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico.