World

The drive to oust Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian has been put on hold as the major parties jostle to win the December 9 mayoral and city council elections for the major cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung.

In the final countdown to the November 7 mid-term congressional elections, Democrats.com has already begun celebrating. Calling for candlelight vigils outside polling stations across the nation on election night, the website says its blue-clad supporters will bear moral witness against voting fraud during the historic moment when the Democrats are expected to retake Congress (well, at least the House of Representatives), with the “Republican Revolution” finally unraveling after 12 long years.

Israeli cabinet minister Jacob Edery admitted on October 22 that Israel had used white phosphorus, a substance that burns when it comes into contact with air, during its 34-day July-August war on Lebanon.

Arab MPs demonstrated outside the Israeli parliament (Knesset) calling on other countries to impose sanctions on the Zionist state as Avigdor Lieberman, the openly racist anti-Arab leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is our home”) party, was sworn into PM Ehud Olmert’s cabinet on October 30.

“We guarantee that all Venezuelans will receive free education, to the highest level, as a promise of the revolutionary government. This [event] demonstrates the importance that the [Bolivarian] revolution gives to education”, Hugo Chavez declared on October 8. The Venezuelan president was officially re-opening the Andres Bello high school, situated in the metropolitan centre of the Caracas. The high school has been extensively renovated and upgraded to provide for a student population of 1700, the October 9 Ultimas Noticias reported.

Thousands of people flocked to the La Rinconada area, south of Caracas, on October 15, to hear socialist President Hugo Chavez inaugurate the new “Ezequiel Zamora” train line from Caracas to Cua, in the Valles del Tuy — the first new above-ground train line constructed in Venezuela for more than 70 years.

On October 16, the Mexico’s national ombudsman, Jose Luis Soberanes Fernandez, delivered the recommendations of his report into the killing of two young men and the detention of another 207 people by municipal, state and federal security forces on May 3 and 4 in the municipalities of Texcoco and San Salvador Atenco. The clashes were sparked by attempts to remove flower venders without licences from a market.

At an October 6 public meeting in Boston, US dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky gave the following remarks on the threat posed to the radical governments of Venezuela and Bolivia by Washington in response to an audience member’s question.

On October 15 Ecuador went to the polls. Having seen eight presidents in 10 years, three of whom were overthrown by a population frustrated by the corruption, ineptitude and nepotism that characterise Ecuador’s elite, the chances of any government lasting out its mandate seem pretty slim. However, the challenge could be in getting one of the pool of 13 presidential candidates even legitimately elected.

The United Nations Independent Special Commission of Inquiry released its report on October 17 into the violent conflict in April and May in East Timor. The 79-page report found that the “frailty of state institutions and the weakness of the rule of law” were to blame for the conflict that erupted following the sacking of almost 600 soldiers from the Timorese Defence Force.

The “What we think” column from the US Socialist Worker, newspaper of the US International Socialist Organization, argues that although the Republican Party stranglehold on the US Congress may end in the November 7 elections, the Democrats have an abysmal record of trying to “out-Bush” the Republicans.

In a further assault on the sovereignty of the Solomon Islands, its Australian-appointed police commissioner, Shane Castles, had Solomons immigration minister Peter Shanel arrested on October 17 over the alleged illegal entry of Fiji-born Australian lawyer Julian Moti.