If you're like me, you're thrilled by the awesome power now available to us humans to get immediate, up-to-the-minute reporting from hotspots around the world. From Iraq to Israel/Palestine to Venezuela to Haiti to East Timor, the internet is providing us with a decentralized and multifaceted media lens unlike anything we've had before. It's really exciting.

Venezuela

Today is the day of the Chavez recall vote! As I mentioned before, Justin Podur is blogging live from Venezuela. Yesterday he wrote an interesting piece on the probabilities of opposition strategies.

Short of some kind of violent provocation {and there have been warnings of that as well} to try to discredit the whole electoral process, the opposition has signalled repeatedly that it plans to announce the results at 2pm. Then, when the real results are announced after the polls close at 6pm, the opposition will say {assuming that the opposition loses the referendum, which it will if there is not fraud} that its results disagree with the official results and argue that a fraud has occurred. . . .

If the SI forces claims are then discredited, as they should be, they and the US will just keep the “fraud” card in their hand, waiting for the correlation of forces to change. Then, at some point down the road, if Chavez loses a substantial chunk of support, or the army, or the oil company, they will bring out the claim that the referendum was “fraudulent” when they try to bring him down.

For a while, I wondered what the acronym SI stood for -- solidaridad internacional? seguridad interna? -- before I realized it just meant "si," the Spanish word for "yes", as in "yes, we want to recall Chavez." That's my brilliant linguistic mind at work.

Fortunately for those of us who advocate truth and democracy at all times, the Carter Center -- in Venezuela to monitor voting conditions -- has declared that the conditions in Venezuela will produce results "that will be much more satisfactory than those of 2000 in Florida." Wow!

Carter also went on to say:

There are free elections in Venezuela... There is transparency in the process... There is freedom of the press in Venezuela... For these reasons and more I believe there is respect for human rights in Venezuela.

Groovy. This report comes to us courtesy of The Narcosphere, an oddly-named blog that is also filing dispatches live from Venezuela.


Israel and Palestine

What's this? Palestinians protesting with nature murals? Palestinian prisoners using a nonviolent hunger strike? I thought the only way Palestinians expressed themselves was by detonating suicide bombs. Cognitive dissonance rising.. Does not compute.

The hunger strike is having a powerful impact on Israeli security forces, who being forced to recognize the common humanity of the people they have imprisoned. From the BBC:

Israel's security minister said they would not bow to pressure and the prisoners could "starve to death".

Elsewhere, right-wing Israeli teenagers are undergoing military-style training to prepare for physical resistance to government plans to evict them from their illegal settlements in Gaza. It's so refreshing to see the peace process being pursued faithfully by both sides in the conflict.

Meantime, Israeli troops recently held a BBC reporter -- along with an elderly woman and the doctor she had summoned -- at gunpoint for three and a half hours.

As the minutes stretched into hours, [the doctor] asked how long we would be kept there.

"You'll be here until we kill someone," a soldier replied, in perfect English.

"We're being held illegally," I said.

The soldiers nodded in agreement, but still refused to let us go.

But the most heartbreaking quote in the story comes from the old woman, Rana Malhas. As the soldiers stormed her house and pointed guns at everyone inside,

Rana leaned forward to speak. Her immediate concern was for us. "I'm so sorry this has happened to you in my house," she said, "and that I can't get you some coffee."

It's strange -- Control Room featured some shockingly gruesome footage from the war, including chilling shots of American POWs and grisly images of children's legs torn apart by shrapnel. I didn't even flinch; I feel totally numb to that sort of thing. But the kind of devastating grace shown by this Palestinian woman reduces me to tears.


HalliBush Wars, Inc.

The BBC also had an interesting article today about Republicans in the US who won't be voting for Bush.

Almost everyone I've spoken to here in over two weeks mentions Iraq as the number one election issue, and the most frequent question I've heard is: What has Iraq to do with the 11 September 2001 attacks? . . .

People are asking more and more: was [the war] worth it? The question is about economics and about the human cost.

The article focuses in on Fayetteville, North Carolina -- home to Fort Bragg, "the largest military base on this continent." Fayetteville is also home to a movie theater called the Cameo, run by Chris and Nazim Kuenzel; Nazim is an Iranian-American who came here when she was 12 years old.

They braved some expected local wrath recently and put on Michael Moore's anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war polemic, Fahrenheit 9/11.

There was hardly any wrath. The film was so popular, they had to put on extra shows every night at midnight.

All the shows were sold out and, at 14 out of 15 performances during the first week, there were standing ovations at the end, from audiences that were 80% soldiers and their partners. (my emphasis)

I won't quote the whole article, but you should check out some of those quotes from military personnel and their families. Suffice to say they understand best the human costs on the US side of this war.

TimeWaster™

If Ben Terrall ever read this site, he'd get a big kick out of the Ramones Name Generator. Hopefully others will like it too.

Today I'm listening to: Rising High: Futurescape!