Amidst revelations of a secret CIA program responsible for killing at least two dozen rebel leaders in Colombia, former guerrilla leader Gustavo Petro is facing a campaign for his ouster as mayor of Bogotá.
Read MoreAmong the tens of thousands set to be released are the Arctic 30, members of Greenpeace who were arrested in September after trying to stop Russian oil drilling in the Arctic. “We’re glad it happened, but we’re still wondering why we need to be amnestied for something we didn’t do,” says Peter Willcox, who was the captain of the Arctic Sunrise and has worked with Greenpeace for decades.
Read MoreVenezuelan President Nicolas Maduro traveled to Havana and met with Fidel Castro on Saturday to commemorate the first visit by Hugo Chavez to Cuba and his encounter with the Cuban leader 19 years before.
Read MoreMy expectations were not high when I accepted the invitation of an old out-of-town friend to see the Rockettes’ Christmas show. But once there, the cultural shock made my critical faculties go on overdrive as if they had been put on steroids.
Read MoreA court in Canada has ruled Ecuadorean farmers and fishermen can try to seize the assets of oil giant Chevron based on a 2011 decision in an Ecuadorean court found it liable for nearly three decades of soil and water pollution near oil wells, and said it had ruined the health and livelihoods of people living in nearby areas of the Amazon rainforest.
Read MoreThe United Nations is warning Syria has become the most dangerous crisis for global peace and security since World War II. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said that the situation in Syria has “deteriorated beyond all imagination,” while António Guterres, head of the U.N. refugee agency, has described it as “the most dangerous crisis for global peace and security since the Second World War.”
Read MoreThe movie “Heli”, a controversial love story between a young girl and a young policeman set in a background of violence and drug trafficking in Mexico, won first prize for fiction at the this year’s Havana Film Festival. “I try to film what bothers me or catches my attention,” said the director Amat Escalante. “It’s the reality around me that I see, I touch ,” he added .
Read MoreWelcome to This Week in Palestine, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for December 7 to 13, 2013.
Read MoreWe look back at the pivotal role Cuba played in ending apartheid and why Castro was one of only five world leaders invited to speak at Nelson Mandela’s memorial. Historian Piero Gleijeses argues that it was Cuba’s victory in Angola in 1988 that forced Pretoria to set Namibia free and helped break the back of apartheid South Africa.
Read MoreFew times has a US president and a Castro shaken hands, thus the greeting between Barack Obama and Raul Castro today at the Nelson Mandela funeral in Johannesburg was considered big news, despite any real indication of change in the Cold War relic relationship. Here is the CNN video of the encounter.
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