On Nov. 16 Rosemond Pradel, general secretary of Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), announced that presidential, legislative and local elections, already postponed twice, are being rescheduled to Dec. 27. Runoffs, if required, will be held on Jan. 31. Haiti's Constitution requires the new government to take office on Feb. 7. Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue confirmed the new dates in a telephone interview on Nov. 17. "The decision is firm and final," he said. But Patrick Fequiere, head of operations for the CEP, told reporters he was "completely in the dark about this business."

Two small explosions caused minor damage on the morning of Nov. 18 in branches of the BBVA Bancomer bank in Tlalnepantla and Atizapan de Zaragoza, cities in Mexico state just northwest of Mexico City. According to the Mexico state attorney general's office, several people threw a "firecracker" into the Atizapan branch at 3 AM, damaging furniture and files and shattering windows in the bank and in two nearby houses. The state authorities said a homemade device found in the Tlalnepantla branch later in the morning probably failed to explode properly, though it did cause some damage. Bank personnel didn't notice the device until 11:30 am, after it had already partially exploded. BBVA Bancomer is owned by the Spanish bank BBVA.

On Nov. 16, Brazilian landless workers Vanderlei Macena Cruz and Mauro Gomes Duarte, residents of Accampamento Renascer (Rebirth Encampment), were assassinated while riding a motorcycle to work near Gleba Gama, in the Nova Guarita region of Brazil's Mato Grosso state. According to information released by the Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), the two men were found dead on a road that divides the properties falsely claimed by local landowners Silmar Kessler and Sebastiao Neves de Almeida known by the nickname Chapeu Preto (Black Hat). Another rural worker heard the shots and quickly gathered other residents to find the bodies on the road; the Military Police did not arrive at the scene until late in the evening.

On Nov. 19 and 20, some 19,000 people gathered outside the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia to demand a dramatic shift in US foreign policy and the closure of the US Defense Department's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly called the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), a combat- training school for Latin American soldiers. The protest, organized by SOA Watch, is held each November at Fort Benning to commemorate the 1989 murders in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter; some of the killers were SOA graduates. Last year 16,000 people attended. Organizers cited reports of torture by US soldiers and the ongoing war on Iraq as motivating factors for this year's record turnout.

All of a sudden, the right-wing blogs and pseudo-news sources (MichNews, PostChronicle) are rallying around bogus claims that WMD really were found in Iraq. One who has actually written a book arguing this transparently ridiculous case is Richard Miniter:

From the UK Guardian, Nov. 19:

The right to rule ourselves
Faced with US torture, killing and collective punishment of civilians, support for the Iraqi resistance is growing

by Haifa Zangana

The photograph of an elderly Iraqi carrying the burned body of a child at Falluja, widely shown during the chemical weapons controversy of recent days, is almost a copy of an earlier one that Iraqis remember - from Halabja in March 1988. Both children were victims of chemical weapons: the first killed by a dictator who had no respect for democracy and human rights, the second by US troops, assisted by the British, carrying the colourful banner of those principles while sprinkling Iraqis with white phosphorus and depleted uranium.

Perhaps it is a sign of the turning of the tide, evidenced by Congressional demands for a timetable on troop withdrawals this week. Or maybe it was just the magnitude of the death toll. But after weeks of burying the near-daily ethno-religious carnage in Iraq deep in the paper, the New York Times finally put the latest outrage in the front page Nov. 19.

From the LA Times, Nov. 19:

Jewish Group Demands an Exit Strategy
From Newsday

NEW YORK — The largest grass-roots Jewish organization in the United States voted overwhelmingly Friday to demand the Bush administration develop a "clear exit strategy" from the war in Iraq.

The Union for Reform Judaism, representing more than 1.5 million American Jews out of an estimated 5 million, is the first major Jewish organization to oppose the war. The group has a long history of antiwar activism.