The grandson of the late African-American human rights activist Malcolm X has been killed in Mexico, a report says. - The Amsterdamnews.com reported that Muslim civil activist Malcolm Shabazz was killed early Thursday due to injuries, but the exact circumstances of his death are still unconfirmed. Reports say that he suffered the fatal wounds after he was thrown off a building or shot as he was being robbed in the city of Tijuana. Terrie M. Williams, a close friend of the Shabazz family, stated in a message posted on Twitter, “I’m confirming, per US Embassy, on behalf of family, the tragic death of Malcolm Shabazz, grandson of Malcolm X. Statement from family to come.”

AWIP: FBI arrests Malcolm X grandson en route to Iran [02/04/13]

Indigenous groups claim they have not consented to oil projects, as politicians visit Beijing to publicise bidding process.

Ecuador plans to auction off more than three million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, angering indigenous groups and underlining the global environmental toll of China's insatiable thirst for energy. On Monday morning a group of Ecuadorean politicians pitched bidding contracts to representatives of Chinese oil companies at a Hilton hotel in central Beijing, on the fourth leg of a roadshow to publicise the bidding process. Previous meetings in Ecuador's capital, Quito, and in Houston and Paris were each confronted with protests by indigenous groups. Attending the roadshow were black-suited representatives from oil companies including China Petrochemical and China National Offshore Oil. "Ecuador is willing to establish a relationship of mutual benefit – a win-win relationship," said Ecuador's ambassador to China in opening remarks. According to the California-based NGO Amazon Watch, seven indigenous groups who inhabit the land claim that they have not consented to oil projects, which would devastate the area's environment and threaten their traditional way of life.

Venezuela's Supreme Court has ruled out a recount of the country's disputed presidential vote, saying there is no legal basis for the opposition's push for a vote-by-vote recount. - The head of the country's Supreme Court, Chief Justice Luisa Morales, said on Wednesday that manual vote counting was not possible, citing the country's 1999 constitution that "eliminated the manual electoral process." "In Venezuela the electoral system is completely automated. Therefore, a manual count does not exist. Anyone who thought that could really happen has been deceived," she said. "The majority of those who are asking for a manual count know it and are clear about it. Elections are not audited ballot by ballot but through the system," she added.

Stephen Lendman: Destabilizing Venezuela - On April 14, Venezuelans elected Nicolas Maduro president. He won fair and square. It's official. A nationally televised Monday ceremony announced it. Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles cried foul. He called Maduro "illegitimate." He refuses to recognize election results. He demands a recount. He wants "every vote" counted. National Electoral Council (CNE) president Tibisay Lucena responded. A manual recount of all votes isn't needed to confirm accuracy, she said. Proper auditing checks were implemented. It's routine. They're done before, during and post-elections. Over half the Sunday vote total was checked. She called doing so "a statistical proportion that in any part of the world (would be) considered excessive." Fourteen audits were conducted. They assure a free, open and fair process.

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales says the United States is planning to stage a coup in Venezuela, condemning Washington’s questioning of the Venezuelan presidential election results as interference. - In a press conference on Tuesday, the Bolivian president said that the US is getting ready for a coup d’état in Venezuela. He also rejected the White House’s moral authority to question electoral results worldwide, after Washington demanded Caracas to hold a full vote recount.

PressTV: President-elect Nicolas Maduro: US Embassy is behind unrest over vote in Venezuela
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Stephen Lendman: Destabilizing Venezuela
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Le Monde: Manifestations au Venezuela : au moins 7 morts et 61 blessés

Among the cables, a series of diplomatic communications exposes the relationships between the Vatican and a number of dictatorial regimes, from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla to Spain’s Francisco Franco. On September 11, 1973, a CIA-backed coup led by general Pinochet overthrew the elected government of Socialist Party President Salvador Allende. In Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, thousands of left-wing activists, students, trade unionists and anyone suspected of opposing Chilean and international capital were killed or disappeared by the regime. Hundreds of thousands were jailed and tortured, or sent into exile.

Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles said he will not accept Chavista candidate Nicolas Maduro’s victory until a full audit of the election results is carried out. Capriles has slammed the ruling party with allegations of election fraud. - With the vote split almost equally acting President Nicolas Maduro has won Venezuelan presidential election to replace Hugo Chavez. Venezuelan election authorities have announced that with 99.12% of votes counted Maduro is leading with 50.66 per cent of the votes cast. Capriles is dragging behind with 49.07 per cent. Around 77 per cent of the eligible voters cast their ballots, officials said.

The victory is a long time coming. - The decree banning GMO foods was drafted in 2008. It not only bans GMO crops like Monsanto’s BT-Corn, but also expands on a prior law that required all foods on supermarket shelves that contain GMOs to be labeled. Those GMO containing foods will now be completely banned. After being subjected to public discussion, being amended, and finally passed in the Peruvian congress in April of 2011, the ban is finally going into effect this week. A study done in April of 2011 by the Peruvian Association of Consumers and Users (ASPEC) tested 13 products purchased in major supermarkets and shops in Lima, Peru. Unsurprisingly, 10 out of 13 tested positive for containing GMOs.

Venezuela is the top target for US media, not to mention the State Department, legendary director Oliver Stone said at a special screening of his film on Hugo Chavez. Sunday's vote is a choice between two very different futures for Venezuela, he said. - American filmmaker Oliver Stone, whose 2009 film “South of the Border” attempted to help Chavez’s image in the US, bemoaned the western media’s portrayal of Chavez as a clownish thorn-in-the-side of democracy. When asked about the perception that US President Barack Obama betrayed the country, Stone reminded the audience that the people of Venezuela will ultimately be responsible for their own success on the global stage.

Banana Giant Fears National Security Archive “Media Campaign”. - [NSA] Chiquita Brands International last week filed a “reverse” Freedom of Information lawsuit to block the release of records to the National Security Archive on the company’s illegal payments to Colombian terrorist groups, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court. At issue are thousands of documents the company turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 1998-2004 as part of an investigation of the company’s illegal transactions with leftist insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Two years ago, the Archive published “The Chiquita Papers,” a declassified collection of more than 5,000 pages of internal Chiquita documents turned over to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of a criminal investigation of more than $1.7 million in payments to the AUC over six years, and for nearly three years after the group was formally designated as a terrorist organization. That case resulted in a 2007 sentencing agreement in which Chiquita admitted to more than ten years of payments to a variety of Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary groups.

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa says Britain is not in a position to preach about its decision to offer asylum to Julian Assange when it failed to extradite former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. Correa has infuriated British officials by offering protection at the Ecuador embassy in London to the Wikileaks founder who is wanted for sex assault and rape allegations in Sweden. 'Pinochet was not extradited for humanitarian reasons, when there were dozens of Europeans and thousands of Latin Americans who were murdered, and tens of thousands of people were tortured during the Pinochet dictatorship,' he told reporters in the country's capital Quito. Pinochet was arrested by British police at a hospital in London in 1998 after Spain demanded his extradition for alleged torture and murder, including of Spanish citizens, during his 1973-1990 rule. The British government decided in 2000 that the frail Pinochet was unfit to stand trial and free to fly home. He died six years later in Santiago, Chile, aged 91.

In a secret US cable published online by WikiLeaks, former ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, outlines a comprehensive plan to infiltrate and destabilize former President Hugo Chavez' government. - Dispatched in November of 2006 by Brownfield -- now an Assistant Secretary of State -- the document outlined his embassy’s five core objectives in Venezuela since 2004, which included: “penetrating Chavez’ political base,” “dividing Chavismo,” “protecting vital US business” and “isolating Chavez internationally.” The memo, which appears to be totally un-redacted, is plain in its language of involvement in these core objectives by the US embassy, as well as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), two of the most prestigious agencies working abroad on behalf of the US.

WikiLeaks Central presents an exclusive interview with Chilean journalist Patricio Mery, who claims the CIA has been actively plotting to destabilise or even assassinate Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, after US anger over decisions such as the granting of political asylum to Julian Assange and the termination of the US lease on a military base in Manta. Mery claims the CIA is running an Iran-Contra style drug operation in Chile, trafficking “about 200 kilos of cocaine per month” from Bolivia in order to fund anti-Correa operations. Early last year, Italian police discovered 40 kilos of cocaine in Ecuador’s diplomatic mail. Mery alleges senior Chilean officials were involved, and he has a dossier of proof for the Ecuadorian government.

Press Core/SOTT: CIA Targeted Assassinations by Induced Heart Attack and Cancer

Ecuador plans to auction off more than three million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, angering indigenous groups and underlining the global environmental toll of China's insatiable thirst for energy. On Monday morning a group of Ecuadorean politicians pitched bidding contracts to representatives of Chinese oil companies at a Hilton hotel in central Beijing, on the fourth leg of a roadshow to publicise the bidding process. Previous meetings in Ecuador's capital, Quito, and in Houston and Paris were each confronted with protests by indigenous groups. Attending the roadshow were black-suited representatives from oil companies including China Petrochemical and China National Offshore Oil. "Ecuador is willing to establish a relationship of mutual benefit – a win-win relationship," said Ecuador's ambassador to China in opening remarks.

The biggest emerging markets are uniting to tackle under-development and currency volatility with plans to set up institutions that encroach on the roles of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The leaders of the so-called BRICS nations -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- are set to approve the establishment of a new development bank during an annual summit that began today in the eastern South African city of Durban, officials from all five nations say. They will also discuss pooling foreign-currency reserves to ward off balance of payments or currency crises.

The War on Democracy is a 2007 documentary film directed by Christopher Martin and John Pilger. Focusing on the political state of Latin America, the film is intended as a rebuke of both the United States' intervention in foreign countries' domestic politics, and its "War on Terrorism". [The film] explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.

Using archive footage sourced by Michael Moore's archivist Carl Deal, the film shows how serial US intervention, overt and covert, has toppled a series of legitimate governments in the Latin American region since the 1950s. The democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by the United States. John Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries in the region. He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet's torture squads were trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina. The film unearths the real story behind the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and how the people of the barrios of Caracas rose up to force his return to power.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires who was elected Pope by the papal conclave on Wednesday, was intimately involved in Operation Condor’s “Dirty War” in South America. - Bergoglio headed up the Catholic church during the successful effort by the globalists to dismantle Argentina’s economy. The country’s military dictatorship was supported by Wall Street bankers and David Rockefeller. “One of the key appointments of the military junta (on the instructions of Wall Street) was the Minister of Economy, Jose Alfredo Martinez de Hoz, a member of Argentina’s business establishment and a close friend of David Rockefeller,” writes Michel Chossudovsky. “The neoliberal macro-economic policy package adopted under Martinez de Hoz was a ‘carbon copy’ of that imposed in October 1973 in Chile by the Pinochet dictatorship under advice from the ‘Chicago Boys’, following the September 11, 1973 coup d’Etat and the assassination of president Salvador Allende.”

Bill Van Auken: The “Dirty War” Pope - [Some] of Bergoglio’s harshest critics come from within the Catholic Church itself, including priests and lay workers who say he handed them over to the torturers as part of a collaborative effort to “cleanse” the Church of “leftists.” One of them, a Jesuit priest, Orlando Yorio, was abducted along with another priest after ignoring a warning from Bergoglio, then head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, to stop their work in a Buenos Aires slum district.

The Pope has been accused of failing to stand up to the brutal military junta that slaughtered tens of thousands of Argentines in its so-called Dirty War. - Critics say Jorge Mario Bergoglio did little to help those who disappeared when the country was under right-wing military rule – and too much to criticise the left-wing opponents of the generals. He has even been accused of turning a blind eye to the rounding up and torturing of his own Jesuit priests, something he strongly denies. The baggage of Argentine history also means potential diplomatic difficulties for Britain over the Falkland Islands.

Daily Mail: Argentinian pontiff Francis I labelled British 'usurpers' in the Falklands one year ago

Venezuela's acting president, Nicolas Maduro, said the country would open a scientific investigation to see whether late leader Hugo Chavez was poisoned "by dark forces that wanted him out of the way," Reuters reports. Maduro, who barely avoided explicitly saying the United States had poisoned Chavez, talked about "scientific laboratories [that were] testing how to cause cancer" in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s and asked whether that technology might have progressed since then, CNN adds. This isn't the first time Maduro has claimed Chavez's death was orchestrated. On March 5, hours before the president's death was announced, Maduro said there was "no doubt" that Chavez's illness was caused by an "attack" by foreign enemies.

William Blum: The Anti-Empire Report: Hugo Chávez
William Blum: U.S. Government Assassination Plots
Wayne Madsen: Scientific Assassinations Are Part of the CIA’s Record

En 1999, poco antes de que Hugo Chávez Frías asumiera como presidente de Venezuela, Gabriel García Márquez lo entrevistó en un avión durante un viaje de La Habana a Caracas. A medida que charlaban, el Nóbel colombiano fue descubriendo una personalidad que no se correspondía con la imagen de déspota que tenía formada a través de los medios. Existían dos Chávez. ¿Cuál era el real? Un perfil del presidente que se hizo militar para jugar al beisbol, que recitaba de memoria poemas de Neruda o Walt Whitman y murió de cáncer a los 58 años. Iconoclasistas ilustró especialmente para Anfibia.

Carlos Andrés Pérez descendió al atardecer del avión que lo llevó de Davos, Suiza, y se sorprendió de ver en la plataforma al general Fernando Ochoa Antich, su ministro de Defensa. "¿Qué pasa?", le preguntó intrigado. El ministro lo tranquilizó, con razones tan confiables, que el Presidente no fue al Palacio de Miraflores sino a la residencia presidencial de La Casona. Empezaba a dormirse cuando el mismo ministro de Defensa lo despertó por teléfono para informarle de un levantamientio militar en Maracay. Había entrado apenas en Miraflores cuando estallaron las primeras cargas de artillería.

An American writer says he believes the United States murdered Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez by infecting him with cancer causing elements just as Israelis had poisoned Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to death.

The comment comes as on Tuesday, Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro announced that President Hugo Chavez passed away after a two-year battle with cancer. Hours later, Maduro announced the expulsion of two U.S. embassy officials while implicitly accusing Washington of having infected Chavez with the cancer virus. In a tacit reference to the U.S., Maduro said, “We have no doubt” that Chavez’s cancer was induced by “the historical enemies of our homeland.” Press TV has conducted an interview with American writer, radio host and columnist at Veterans Today, Stephen Lendman. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Stephen Lendman: Chávez: A Personal Tribute
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