The Nov. 21 New York Times includes a profile of Venezuela's recently retired army commander-in-chief Gen. Raul Isaias Baduel, a longtime confidant of Hugo Chavez who led the paratrooper raid that restored him to power following the abortive 2002 coup d'etat, but has now publicly broken with the president and spoken out against his proposed constitutional reform. Apart from chavista calls to send Baduel to the "paredón" (execution wall), some of the rhetorical reaction against the general will recall the firestorm sparked on this blog last year over accusations of anti-Semitism in Bolivarian Venezuela:

Some 800 students from Mexican teachers colleges occupied the state legislature building in Chilpancingo, capital of the southern state of Guerrero, at about 3 PM on Nov. 14. The students—largely young women from 16 teachers colleges, chiefly those in Saucillo, Chihuahua, and Tamazulapan, Oaxaca—held the sit-in to support demands by students and alumni of Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Guerrero for 75 teaching positions for alumni and for retention of the degree in primary education, which the state government has decided to abolish. The students said they had tried for months to arrange a meeting with Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo, of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), to discuss their demands. The president of the legislature's governing committee, Carlos Reyes Torres, also of the PRD, called for the police to remove the protesters. At about 5 PM some 500 agents of the State Preventive Police (PPE), with air support from a helicopter, marched into the building and tried to remove the protesters. The confrontation lasted about two hours, with police hurling tear gas canisters and clubbing students, while the students hurled firecrackers at the agents.

Tens of thousands of protesters occupied the Gen. San Martin bridge, which links the Argentine province of Entre Rios to Uruguay, on Nov. 11 to protest Uruguayan president Tabare Vazquez's decision to let the Finnish company Botnia start operating a paper mill it has built in Fray Bentos, across the Uruguay River from Gualeguaychu, Entre Rios. Argentine environmental activists have been protesting plans for the mill for four years and have blocked traffic between the two countries at the San Martin bridge, at Concordia and at Colon.

On Nov. 13 Puerto Rican environmental activist Alberto de Jesus ("Tito Kayak") ended a week-long protest at a small island near San Juan with a spectacular escape from a police operation that included four launches, motorboats and a helicopter. De Jesus had occupied the top of a 200-foot-high crane; he and the environmental organization Friends of the Sea were attempting to block completion of the Paseo Caribe tourist complex on what they said was public land with historic value. The sit-in was opposed by a builders association and construction unions. There was at least one demonstration by Paseo Caribe supporters, and at least seven shots were fired at De Jesus during the week.

From the International Herald Tribune, Nov. 15, links and emphasis added:

Unorthodox sects face prosecution in Indonesia
JAKARTA — Indonesian human rights lawyers are again questioning the country's commitment to religious freedom after the recent arrests of several unorthodox Islamic leaders and the banning of their organizations.

An open letter to the world human rights community and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, from PetitionOnline:

Delaram Ali is a woman’s activist who has been given a custodial sentence for 28 months with 10 lashes for taking part in a protest meeting in June 2006 in Iran. In an interview with the official newspapers she expressed her anger at the fact that the security guards were not penalized for beating and maltreating her. Delaram’s imprisonment has led to a mass protest action in Iran. Despite all the protests and the efforts of her solicitor, Mrs Shirin Ebadi, the Islamic regime condemned her to jail sentence.

Oil prices rose Nov. 19 after suggestions from the Riyadh OPEC summit that member nations are considering ditching the dollar. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the dollar a "worthless piece of paper." Venezuela's Hugo Chavez added: "The dollar is in free fall, everyone should be worried about it. The fall of the dollar is not the fall of the dollar — it’s the fall of the American empire." That led to a reaction from Saudi Arabia. "OPEC shouldn’t be used as a political organization," Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at the event's closing press conference. "Oil should be a tool for development and not a tool for conflicts." (London Times, NYT, Nov. 19)

Pakistan's atomic weapons are secure, Muhammad Khurshid Khan, deputy director of Islamabad's Strategic Plans Division, told a meeting of nuclear counter-terrorism specialists in Edinburgh Nov. 20. "There's nothing to worry about the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons," Khan told the meeting sponsored by the IAEA, emphasizing that the people guarding the weapons "are not the fundamentalists." (Bloomberg, Nov. 20)