Venezuela Aug. 31 rejected US requests to resume Drug War cooperation, saying Washington should focus on slashing demand for drugs at home rather than blaming setbacks on other nations' supposed lack of cooperation. "The anti-drug fight in Venezuela has shown significant progress during recent years, especially since the government ended official cooperation programs with the DEA," Venezuela's foreign ministry said in a statement. President Hugo Chávez responded angrily to recent comment by US Drug Czar John Walters, calling him "stupid" for suggesting that drug smuggling through Venezuela has increased. (AP, Sept. 1)

A car bomb exploded early Sept. 1 near the Palace of Justice in Cali, Colombia, killing four and wounding up to 20. The dead were identified as one police officer and three street vendors. Authorities said they suspect the blast was the work of the FARC guerillas' "Columna Manuel Cepeda Vargas". The Palace of Justice was damaged in the blast, along with dozens of shops and homes. (LatinoMadrid, Sept. 6; CCTV, Sept. 2; NYT, Sept. 1)

Venezuelan National Guard troops in Maracaibo Sept. 4 captured fugitive former Colombian senator, César department governor and national agriculture minister Alvaro Araujo Noguera, 75. Araujo Noguera, who had been wanted for a year and a half, is expected to be extradited shortly. He is accused of collaborating with paramilitary warlord "Jorge 40" in the kidnapping of a rival, businessman Víctor Ochoa Daza. The scandal has embroiled Araujo Noguera's family and prompted his daughter María Consuelo Araujo to step down as foreign minister. His son, ex-senator Alvaro Araujo Castro, was imprisoned last year on charges related to the case. (AP; El Tiempo, Bogotá; El Espectador, Bogotá, Sept. 5)

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced his government will formally recognize the independence of the breakaway Georgian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia—becoming the first country other than Russia to do so. The Nicaraguan decree was read in a Sept. 5 press conference at the Foreign Ministry. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has expressed support for recognizing the breakaway enclaves, but has not yet taken formal action. (AP, Sept. 5)

Iranian-born, neocon-friendly pundit and "journalist" Amir Taheri has been implicated in fabricated news reports—so take his sneering analysis of Barack Obama's recently released foreign policy positions as a propagandistic exercise. What he is aghast at we can perhaps take heart at. Will Barack Obama be the post-GWOT president? From the United Arab Emirates' Gulf News, emphasis added:

The Democratic Party website ExxonMcCain, delineating the Big Oil connections of several advisors to the GOP candidate, includes the dish on Randy Scheunemann—recently identified by Robert Scheer as a lobbyist for the Georgian government to grease NATO entry, and a veteran of the Project for a New American Century:

It looks like someone spoke too soon, accusing GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin of having been a member of the Alaska Independence Party. Now it turns out that she only attended the party's 1994 convention, and that her husband joined. So the Republicans get to proclaim "false alarm!" Was the overstatement a strategically-leaked strawman in the first place—a spin-control inoculation by Palin's own allies? Because the truth of the Palins' links to the separatist movement would have been newsworthy without the overshoot. Now, we don't have a problem with Alaskan independence per se—although we fear it could just be a scam by the oil and resource industries to weasel out of federal environmental laws. But more to the point—can you imagine the outcry if Michelle Obama had been a member of the Republic of New Afrika?

In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County prosecutors have formally charged eight alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with "conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism." Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald, and Max Spector, face up to seven and a half years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty.