On Monday, former state governor and opposition presidential candidate Oswaldo Álvarez Paz was charged with spreading false information after he said that Venezuela has become a haven for drug traffickers, an accusation long made by U.S. and Colombian officials.

Read more here.

The world is upside-down.  No doubt Israel will be condemned… for defending themselves at their borders.

AP, Jerusalem - Israel withdrew its troops from the Gaza Strip Saturday after some of the fiercest gunbattles with Palestinian militants in the Hamas-run territory since last year’s military offensive.

Israeli troops used bulldozers to “flatten infrastructure used by terrorists to attack soldiers” before the early morning withdrawal, a military spokeswoman said.

The violence began Friday when soldiers patrolling the border crossed into Gaza after spotting Palestinians planting explosives near the fence with Israel.

Two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinian militants were killed in the gunbattle, the military said. Palestinian medics said one civilian was killed and seven were wounded in the fighting. Militants reported one wounded and one missing.

Read more here.

Now nuclear-armed, could we be seeing an emboldened North Korea?  Perhaps.  What’s the South going to do now, against a rival who believes that he is, not just a God, but God Himself.

Look to North Korea’s behavior as a micro-model of a nuclear-armed Iran.  In the world of nuclear weapons, there is no such thing as fairness and equity.

The South is, of course, denying the North Korea had anything to do with it… that’s exactly what they should do.

South Korean Rescue Vessel at Site of Sinking

Wall Street Journal, March 27th 2010, by Evan Ramstad, SEOUL – South Korean rescuers in ships and helicopters on Saturday searched for survivors of an explosion that sank a naval patrol boat near the maritime border with North Korea but officials made no reports of progress by mid-afternoon.

In the hours after the explosion late Friday, rescuers pulled 58 sailors from the water near Baengnyeong Island, the country’s western-most land in the Yellow Sea. Another 46 were missing.

The incident may surpass a 1967 sinking as the most deadly naval episode for South Korea since the Korean War of the 1950s. In the 1967 incident, North Korea shot and sank a South Korean vessel, killing 39 of 79 crew members.

By mid-Saturday, South Korean officials had made no comments about whether North Korea played a role in the sinking of the latest ship, which patrols a maritime border that has long been contested by Pyongyang.

The broader relationship between North and South has been fractious since the Korean War. The two countries traded naval fire as recently as November in the area near where the patrol boat sank Friday.

Read more here.

While I have been very skeptical of Iraq’s long-term prospects for peace, I find the process and results of the country’s recent national elections encouraging and, dare I say, uplifting.  I suspect with strong U.S. and U.N. support (not backing but “support”… there’s a difference!), the results will stand.  Most encouraging is that a coalition that truly cuts across religious and sectarian lines has won, its Shi’a leader and Sunni Deputy already reaching out to Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurdish leaders across the country to form a coalition.

Bears watching, and closely… Iran on one side and al-Qaeda on the other and their surrogates in-between will remain determined that no one calling themselves a “secularist” or a “nationalist” will place themselves above the apocalyptic goals of the two competing militant teams.

I wish the al-Iraqiyya Party the best.  If the Middle East is to be transformed, it will alas be through Iraq, but it is going to be a very long and tough road.

Ayyad Alawi - Iraq's Newly Elected Prime Minister

(BBC News, March 27th, Baghdad) The leader of the secular alliance that narrowly won Iraq’s parliamentary election has offered to work with all parties to form a coalition government.

Iyad Allawi said his Iraqiya bloc would start by talking with the rival State of Law alliance of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, which it beat by two seats.

Mr Maliki has refused to accept the result and said he would challenge the count through the courts.

Both the UN and US envoys to Iraq have said the 7 March poll was credible.

Read more here.

"I'm not as dumb as I look."

Oh,  boy.  The administration continues to give Iran the single ingredient it needs to complete its construction of a nuclear weapon… TIME.  Bold “Need to Know!” prediction: Ahmadinejad or some Iranian regime luminary will indicate in the next couple of weeks or so, that they may be willing to hold discussions with the IAEA or our European proxies and everyone in the media will report (AGAIN!):

“A ray of hope opens as Iran indicates a willingness to halt its nuclear weapons program.”

Then, the world will spend another week or two analyzing and attempting to interpret the meaning of the hopeful statement.  Diplomats will talk among themselves as they calculate their next move in this game of nuclear Soduku, where the Iranians hold the answer key and get all the prizes.  And to further skew the message, Iranian leaders from President Mahmud “Monkey Boy” Ahmadinejad and various Friday Substitute Prayer Leaders like the Zealot purveyor of Twelver-Shi’a apocolyptic, Mesbah Yazdi, will intersperse antagonism into the cryptic message of “hope.”

And while we direct our energies toward trying to figure it all out (again), the Iranians will continue pouring their energy and labor into completing a nuclear weapon having been granted, from the West, their final missing ingredient: Time.

(CNN) — President Obama reiterated his offer of dialogue with Tehran in a message on Saturday to mark the beginning of the Iranian new year.

The online video, subtitled in Farsi, was timed to coincide with Nooroz, a festival celebrating the Persian new year. It pledged the administration’s commitment to a more hopeful future for Iran.

“I want the Iranian people to know what my country stands for,” Obama said in the message. “The United States believes in the dignity of every human being, and an international order that bends the arc of history in the direction of justice — a future where Iranians can exercise their rights, to participate fully in the global economy, and enrich the world through educational and cultural exchanges beyond Iran’s borders.”

Obama said though Iran has “chosen to isolate itself, ” he is open to dialogue.

“That is why, even as we continue to have differences with the Iranian government, we will sustain our commitment to a more hopeful future for the Iranian people,” he said.

Part of the help will include more opportunities for young Iranians to take part in study programs, Obama said. He also said the United States would work to ensure Iranians had Internet access without fear of censorship.

Read the rest here.