World

IPS — Nearly two months since UN troops began launching heavy attacks that they say are aimed against gang members in poor neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince, roadblocks and barbed wire remain in place and the atmosphere is grim.

An extraordinary mobilisation of Rainbow Solidarity for the Cuban Five is extending around the world.

On February 26, a US consular official in Hong Kong announced that Washington was ready to “begin taking steps” to lift financial sanctions on North Korea by resolving a dispute over Macau’s Banco Delta Asia. In September 2005, the US Treasury designated BDA a primary money-laundering concern, accusing it of being a “willing pawn” in North Korea’s alleged distribution of counterfeit US dollars and sales of illegal tobacco products.

Venezuelan foreign minister Nicolas Maduro and London Mayor Ken Livingstone signed an agreement on February 20 for Venezuela to provide discounted oil to London authorities. In return, London will assist with city management and environmental protection in Caracas.

On February 24, 60,000 anti-war protesters took to the streets of central London in a demonstration against the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and against the threat of military action now hanging over Iran. On the same day, thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Glasgow, demonstrating against the Labour Party’s plans to upgrade the Trident nuclear weapons facilities based in the Clyde estuary.

Through its Vietnam ambassador, the Bush administration announced on February 9 that it will fund 40% of a US$1 million plan to study how to clean up a former US military base in Vietnam that is contaminated by dioxin, a class-one human carcinogen. Dioxin was a key ingredient in Agent Orange, a defoliant that Washington used extensively in the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971.

Luis Britto Garcia was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1940. He is the author of a vast work that encompasses 47 titles, eight of them narrative fiction. In 1970, he won the Casa de las Americas Prize with his collection of tales Rajatabla. In 1979, he won that international distinction again with his novel Abrapalabra.

El Salvadoran President Antonio Saca’s right-wing government has proclaimed 2007 the “year of peace”, inaugurating this move with an attempt to nominate the late Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of Saca’s ARENA party, with the highest human rights award in the country.

The left-wing Acehnese Peoples Party (PRA) will be holding its founding congress in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh at the end of February. Sydney University Southeast Asian Studies lecturer Max Lane spoke to Thamrin Ananda, chairperson of the Preparatory Committee of the PRA.

The following report is by a correspondent in Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe’s political situation has suddenly become pregnant with the possibility of uprisings, as ordinary people begin to defy police brutality. Unlike in the past when people were very scared of the police, now the situation seems to be different, with events bearing testimony to the mood of resistance. Just a drive around Highfield Township on February 18 was enough to see the return of the late ’90s fighting spirit among the poor people.

“Today a new epoch begins”, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared in his victory speech on December 3, having won the presidential election with the highest vote in Venezuelan history on a platform of deepening the struggle to build socialism. “That new era is the new socialist democracy. That era is the new socialist society.”

An official European Union report issued on February 20 revealed that one in six people in the EU live below national poverty thresholds. The February 21 British Morning Star reported that according to the European Commission’s social inclusion report 10% of people in the EU — one of the wealthiest regions in the world — live in households in which no-one has a job.