Our April Exit Poll was: "Is the new healthcare bill a small step for social justice, or big one towards corporate totalitarianism?" We received the following two rather diametrically opposed responses:

Police clashed in Athens May 1 with thousands of protesters marching against new austerity measures the Greek government is to adopt under pressure from the EU and IMF. The plan, calling for wage cuts and tax hikes, has prompted plans for a nationwide general strike on May 5, led by the civil servants' union ADEDY and the General Confederation of Greek Labor (GSEE), togethering representing some 2.5 million workers, or half the Greek workforce. The walkout will be their third joint strike against the austerity plans since the start of the year. (Press TV, May 1; CNN, April 28)

Bird conservationists fear the spreading Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will affect not only local birdlife but migratory bird populations as far north as Alaska, and as far south as South America. The spill, now 100 miles long by 48 miles wide, is being pushed onshore by the prevailing southeast winds and is expected to hit the Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands imminently.

Two people are dead and at least five missing after a paramilitary group ambushed a human rights caravan April 27 in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Beatriz Cariño Trujillo, a coordinator of the Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining (REMA) and a member of the Center for Community Support Working Together (CACTUS), and Tyri Antero Jaakkola, a Finnish human rights observer, were killed when gunmen believed to be linked to the Union for the Social Wellbeing of the Triqui Region (UBISORT) attacked the caravan, which was traveling towards the municipality of San Juan Copala.

As the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) opened April 19 at Tiquipaya, outside the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, a controversy has emerged over an "eighteenth table" being demanded by Aymara indigenous leaders. While the CMPCC officially has 17 "tables" or working groups, dealing with issues such as indigenous rights and forestry, dissident Aymara leaders say they will hold a "Table 18" on social conflicts related to these questions. Bolivian Environmental Vice-minister Juan Pablo Ramos dismissed the demand. "In reality, there is no Table 18," he said, asserting that since it proposes discussion of Bolivia's "internal problems," it is therefore not appropriate to an international forum.

The conservative opposition government in Bolivia's eastern lowland department of Santa Cruz, which jealously guards its autonomy from President Evo Morales' government in La Paz, is refusing to recognize the election of two indigenous lawmakers to the departmental assembly, claiming they were voted in by a process not delineated in the national electoral code. The two men, members of the Yuracaré–Mojeño and Guarayo ethnicities, were elected in the April 4 vote through a process of "usos y costumbres," or traditional indigenous community decision-making. This process is recognized as legitimate by the autonomy provisions of Bolivia's new constitution, which also instated departmental assemblies for the first time.

World War 4 Report editor Bill Weinberg is currently in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to cover the alternative conference on climate change that President Evo Morales has called. The conference opens tomorrow, and we hope to be posting daily on-the-scene reports. Watch this spot, and please make a small donation to help facilitate this work.

Some 4,000 residents of Islay, in southern Peru, blocked the Panamerican Highway on April 17, cutting off traffic with the Chilean and Bolivian borders, to protest the proposed Tía María copper project, overseen by the Mexican-owned Southern Perú Copper Corporation (SPCC), which they charge places local water sources and the agricultural economy at risk. The protesters suspended the action the following day when Peru's Defensora del Pueblo (rights ombudsperson) Beatriz Merino traveled to the region to pledge further dialogue on the environmental impacts of the project. President Alan Garcia said the roadblock was the work of a "small minority who practice terrorism." (EFE, AP, April 18)