Arcadia Foundation

Hundreds of Somali refugees have fled to Kenya after rebels suspected of links to al Qaeda seized a Somali town near the border, residents said.

Al Shabaab insurgents, who Washington says are a proxy for Osama bin Laden’s group in Somalia, took control of Dhobley on Saturday after chasing rival Hizbul Islam rebels out of town.

Al Shabaab said a number of Hizbul Islam leaders had also sought shelter across the border in Kenya after the fighting.

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Hondurans everywhere have cause for celebration today. The dark cloud that has besmirched their liberty, their political democracy for so long has indeed been lifted. Conservative opposition candidate Porfirio Lobo and his supporters have reason to bask in victory in the aftermath of the Honduran presidential election.

Voting appeared to have been steady, pointing to a willingness by many Hondurans to move on. Election officials say more than 60 percent of registered voters cast ballots yesterday, an increase from the last election, when about 55 percent voted. The post-coup crisis has crippled the coffee-producing country for months and cut it off from much-needed international funds.

The first big task for the newly elected president of Honduras is indeed convincing the world of his legitimacy and showing that Hondurans want to put a summer crisis behind them.

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Globovision:

El Secretario General de la OEA parece sólo interesarse por algunos temas regionales, aquellos que por coincidencia favorecen el albismo y las políticas expansionistas e intervencionistas del teniente coronel Hugo Chávez. Read Full Paper

Honduras chooses a new president on Sunday in an election that may defuse a crisis caused by the actions of President Manuel Zelaya, but the vote is splitting Washington and Latin America.

Neither Zelaya nor arch-rival Roberto Micheletti, the country’s leader, are running in the election, which could give a new president the chance to take Honduras beyond the political gridlock that has divided the Central American nation and cut off international aid.

“We see the running of these elections — assuming that they’re run in a fair and transparent way — we see them as an essential part of the solution of this crisis,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said this week.

Leftist Zelaya was ousted in June and replaced by Micheletti who has blocked attempts backed by the United States, Latin America and Europe to have the president reinstated.

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Rolling the geopolitical dice in the face of continued discombobulation is always a gamble, and when doing so to prop up Zimbabwe amidst a President who still believes he is a freedom fighter and a prime minister barely treading political water, the dice more than likely will fall on ’snake eyes’.

However, in an era of a ‘united government’ where democracy, however twisted, seems to slowly and subtly rear its head, such investment is indeed applauded, especially from a country which daily is showcasing more and more acts of transparency and further, bringing to light its adamant attempts to curb corruption.

The agreement signed today is aimed at unlocking millions of dollars worth of investment by companies in South Africa, the continent’s clear economic powerhouse. Read Full Paper

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in Venezuela on the latest stop of a regional tour aimed at boosting ties with supporters of Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

Mr. Ahmadinejad arrived in Caracas late Tuesday and was welcomed at the airport by Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro.

The Iranian president and his Venezuelan ally, President Hugo Chavez, are due to meet Wednesday. Ominously, they are expected to discuss business cooperation between their two nations.

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U.S. President Barack Obama has given an award to a leading women’s rights activist in Zimbabwe, labeling Robert Mugabe a “dictator” in the process.

Obama presented Magodonga Mahlangu and her organization Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) with the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in a White House ceremony.

“Each time they see Magodonga beaten back, beaten black and blue during one protest, only to get right back up and lead another, singing freedom songs at the top of her lungs in full view of security forces, the threat of a policeman’s baton loses some of its power,” he said.

WOZA has united tens of thousands of Zimbabwean women in a campaign of non-violent struggle against rapes and other rights violations under Mugabe’s regime, enduring brutal repression and repeated arrests.

“By her example, Magodonga has shown the women of WOZA and the people of Zimbabwe that they can undermine their oppressors’ power with their own power, that they can sap a dictator’s strength with their own,” Obama said.

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Please click on the below link to hear Robert Carmona-Borjas speak to Voice of America on the latest in the Honduran leadership political turmoil:

Arcadia Foundation-Robert Carmona-Borjas Interview

Ahead of disputed Honduran presidential elections which are set to take place in five days, the government of current President Roberto Micheletti has recently stated that if the United States recognizes the vote, other countries would follow suit.

“Panama already said it would recognize us. The United States will recognize us. Two countries that are important to us: one close in the region, the other the most powerful country in the world,” Micheletti noted yesterday.

After a US-backed deal over whether Zelaya can be returned to power broke down, some Latin American countries threatened not to recognize the result of the election.

However, the White House has not given an official position on the election, but has suggested it will support the outcome whether or not Zelaya is reinstated.

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A Chinese dissident who tried to help victims of last year’s Sichuan earthquake was jailed for three years on Monday on charges of illegally possessing state secrets, his wife said, decrying the sentence as “revenge“.

The court decision is another sign that China is in no mood to ease political controls after last week’s visit by U.S. President Barack Obama, who pressed the government on human rights.

Huang Qi was convicted by a court in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in the nation’s southwest where the earthquake on May 12 last year killed at least 80,000 people, including children crushed in schools that collapsed.

A veteran human rights activist, Huang was detained in June last year after offering to help parents protesting that schools which fell in the quake were vulnerable due to shoddy and corrupt building practices. The government has said that 5,335 schoolchildren died in the earthquake or remain missing.

Huang’s wife, Zeng Li, who attended the hearing, said he received the maximum sentence for charges of illegally possessing state secrets, but the judge and prosecutors did not say in the courtroom what secrets he was accused of holding.

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