Street protests erupted after Venezuela's elections council said the opposition lacked enough signatures to force a recall referendum against President Hugo Chavez. Rioting over council delays had spread from Caracas to other cities before the decision and intensified immediately afterward.
Chavez opponents say they submitted more than 3.4 million signatures. Some 2.4 million are needed for a recall election.
But council president Francisco Carrasquero announced on Tuesday that just 1.83 million signatures were valid. Another 876,016 signatures may be valid -- if citizens confirm that they indeed signed the petition, Carrasquero said.
The decision triggered demonstrations by citizens banging pots and pans and exploding fireworks throughout the capital, Caracas.
Even before the announcement, protests surged as the opposition anticipated the result. National guard troops in armored personnel carriers rolled through several cities as demonstrators burned tires and hurled rocks and gasoline bombs at soldiers. Sporadic gunfire was heard for a second straight night in Caracas.
Protests were reported in at least seven other cities, including Merida, Puerto La Cruz, Maracay, San Felipe, the industrial centers of Valencia and Barquisimeto and the western oil city of Maracaibo.
Globovision television broadcast footage of several vehicles burning in a parking lot in Caracas' Los Ruices district, where troops fired rubber bullets at protesters who fought back with Molotov cocktails and threw rocks.
In the eastern city of Puerto La Cruz, troops fired rubber bullets at protesters who were chanting "He's leaving, he's Leaving!" in reference to Chavez, Globovision reported.
The violent demonstrations and clashes began to subside as night fell in most of Caracas, where thousands had taken to the streets earlier in the day. Local TV and radio reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, had protested in other cities.
Many opposition leaders had said they would not accept a decision requiring voters to confirm their signatures. The measure was allegedly not included in rules established for the verification process, they said.
The council said that voters would have between March 18 and March 22 to report to voting centers to confirm that they indeed had signed the petition.
Venezuela's opposition claims that such a monumental task, involving hundreds of thousands of citizens, would postpone the referendum or derail it entirely.
Protests have forced private banks to shut 20 branch offices, prevented garbage collection, caused traffic jams and hampered transit by emergency vehicles. For a second day, thousands were unable to get to work.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS