The World
No Surprise: Hugo Ch´vez Wins
With his landslide re-election, President Hugo Ch´vez of Venezuela has a green light to ramp up what some call his "petropopulism" and to continue his thumb-in-the-eye approach toward the United States. Ch´vez received nearly 63 percent of the vote, reflecting what polls showed is support for his populist economic policies favoring the poor, even if not for his authoritarian tendencies.
While the old radical war horse of Latin America, Cuba's Fidel Castro, is out of the picture in failing health, Ch´vez's leftist policies and oil-funded influence are being felt throughout a region where 1 in 4 people lives on less than $2 a day. Echoing his "El Diablo" remarks directed at President Bush at the United Nations in September, Ch´vez, 52, called his re-election to a six-year term "another defeat for the devil."
Nothing but Bad News From Darfur
The long-running crisis in Sudan took a turn for the worse as the United Nations evacuated aid workers from El Fasher, the Darfur provincial capital, after at least eight Sudanese were killed in a Janjaweed militia attack on the local market. Clashes between the government-backed Arab militia and the Sudan Liberation Army threaten relief assistance to more than 1.3 million people across northern Darfur. The fighting throws into doubt the fragile, partial peace accord between the SLA and the Sudanese government.
Psst. Guess Who Has Nukes? Read On
It may be one of the world's worst-kept secrets- Israel has nuclear weapons-but it's been subject to an official "don't ask, don't tell" policy going back decades. And that served everyone well: Israel had its deterrent, Arab leaders could evade pressure to go nuclear themselves, and the United States could avoid being compelled to impose sanctions on its Mideast ally. So incoming Defense Secretary (and former CIA chief) Robert Gates was being either frank or indiscreet during his confirmation hearings when he speculated about why the Iranians are so determined to build a nuclear arsenal. "They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons-Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west, and us in the Persian Gulf." He did please Israelis-and other Iran critics-with his firm "Yes, sir" response to Sen. Lindsey Graham's question about whether he believes Iran's president is lying when he denies seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
A Historic Warm Spell in the Alps
If you happen to own a ski chalet in the Alps, now might be a good time to sell. The weather in the Alps is the warmest in at least 1,300 years, though climatologists point out that the mountains went through a warmish patch back in the 10th and 12th centuries. With global climate change, "it will undoubtedly get warmer in the future," says Reinhard Boehm, a climatologist in Austria who reconstructed the temperature history for the Alps. Mild temperatures in November and early December have forced some Alpine ski resorts to delay opening their slopes.
'Access.Is Not Authorized'
Iran's fiery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has his official blog (at www.ahmadinejad.ir), but don't get the idea that Tehran authorities are fully embracing the Web. As millions of Iranians have turned to the Internet to exchange information and to circumvent media censorship, authorities have responded by throttling back Internet access speed to 128 kilobytes per second-painfully slow for audio and video-and using filtering to restrict access. In recent days, reports Amnesty International, popular sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube have been blocked, permanently or temporarily, as part of a growing trend of restriction of sites that are deemed "immoral or against the principles of Islam."
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