Venezuela's electoral council was set yesterday to rule on a drive to recall President Hugo Chavez amid violent protests by the president's supporters and a threat to use oil as a weapon if Washington tried to intervene.
"In the interests of preserving and maintaining peace in the country, we have decided to give the results of the decisions for the presidential recall referendum tomorrow," electoral council executive Jorge Rodriguez said Sunday.
Rodriguez said the council had postponed announcing preliminary results because it was checking petition signatures collected by Chavez opponents calling for a referendum.
PHOTO: AFP
Pro-Chavez demonstrators meanwhile set up roadblocks in poor neighborhoods, where the left-populist president has much of his support. Two people were shot to death at the barricades, state-run VTV television reported.
A motorcyclist was also shot in the head in a neighborhood opposed to Chavez's rule near the Caracas freeway where National Guard troops were positioned to stop opposition demonstrators from blocking the road, television reports said. Later in the day, two journalists were shot at during an anti-Chavez demonstration.
A photographer received a superficial injury to the chest, saved by a bulletproof vest, after a youth targeted him with a 9 mm weapon.
A Univision cameraman was shot in the exclusive Chacao district as opposition demonstrators attempting to set up a roadblock clashed with highway police. Another opposition protester was shot, as was a highway police officer, the Caracas fire chief said.
Opposition leaders say they collected 3.4 million signatures seeking the recall referendum. The constitution requires a minimum of 2.4 million valid signatures.
The government says that fraud was widespread in collecting the petitions.
But former US president Jimmy Carter, an electoral observer, said the electoral council guaranteed monitors access to the signature verification.
Carter and the Organization of American States brokered a deal last year between Chavez and the opposition to end attempts to oust Chavez through mass demonstrations and instead to use the constitutional provision allowing the president to be recalled at any time after the halfway point of the term.
Venezuela's constitution calls for a vote on a new president within 30 days if Chavez is ousted in a referendum. Chavez, whose term ends in 2006, has agreed to abide by the results of the vote.
At a rally, the president told some 60,000 cheering supporters that he would block US access to Venezuela's vast oil resources if Washington decides to move against his government.
In a three-hour anti-American diatribe that singled out US President George W. Bush as an illegitimate leader, Chavez said "if Mr. Bush is possessed with the madness of trying to blockade Venezuela, or worse for them, to invade Venezuela in response to the desperate song of his lackeys ... sadly not a drop of petroleum will come to them from Venezuela."
Chavez has long accused Washington of backing the opposition, which has tried to oust Chavez twice -- once in a nationwide strike that ended last year and in an aborted 2002 coup.
The US is keenly interested in stability in Venezuela, its fourth-largest oil supplier and and the only Latin American member of the Organization of Oil Producing Countries.
US interest in Caribbean stability peaked this week as an armed rebellion led to the resignation Sunday of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the Pentagon on Monday said that some North Korean troops have been killed during combat against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk border region. Those are the first reported casualties since the US and Ukraine announced that North Korea had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in the almost three-year war. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said that about 30 North Korean troops were killed or wounded during a battle with the Ukrainian army at the weekend. The casualties occurred around three villages in Kursk, where Russia has for four months been trying to quash a
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
ROYAL TARGET: After Prince Andrew lost much of his income due to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, he became vulnerable to foreign agents, an author said British lawmakers failed to act on advice to tighten security laws that could have prevented an alleged Chinese spy from targeting Britain’s Prince Andrew, a former attorney general has said. Dominic Grieve, a former lawmaker who chaired the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) until 2019, said ministers were advised five years ago to introduce laws to criminalize foreign agents, but failed to do so. Similar laws exist in the US and Australia. “We remain without an important weapon in our armory,” Grieve said. “We asked for [this law] in the context of the Russia inquiry report” — which accused the government
TRUDEAU IN TROUBLE: US president-elect Donald Trump reacted to Chrystia Freeland’s departure, saying: ‘Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland on Monday quit in a surprise move after disagreeing with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over US president-elect Donald Trump’s tariff threats. The resignation of Freeland, 56, who also stepped down as finance minister, marked the first open dissent against Trudeau from within his Cabinet, and could threaten his hold on power. Liberal leader Trudeau lags 20 points in polls behind his main rival, Conservative Pierre Poilievre, who has tried three times since September to topple the government and force a snap election. “It’s not been an easy day,” Trudeau said at a fundraiser Monday evening, but
RSS