CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela will set up a formal inquiry into claims that deceased President Hugo Chavez’s cancer was the result of poisoning by his enemies abroad, the government said. Foes of the government view the accusation as a typical Chavez-style conspiracy theory intended to feed fears of “imperialist” threats to Venezuela’s socialist system and distract people from daily problems. Acting President Nicolas Maduro vowed to open an investigation into the claims, first raised by Chavez after he was diagnosed with the disease in 2011. “We will seek the truth,” Maduro told regional TV network Telesur. “We have the intuition that our commander Chavez was poisoned by dark forces that wanted him out of the way.” Foreign scientists will be invited to join a state committee to probe the accusation, he said. Maduro, 50, is Chavez’s handpicked successor and is running as the government’s candidate in a snap presidential election on April 14 that was triggered by the president’s death last week.
Category: Russia
If you go and ask the “average” Australian on a Melbourne or Sydney street who owns the banks and large public companies in Australia, most will answer “Australians through superannuation and mutual funds”. This belief gives Australians a sense of pride in “Australian private enterprise”, and may even assist Australians grudgingly accept high bank charges and interest rates; “after all we own the banks”. However if one examines the annual reports of most of the large Australian public companies, names like HSBC, JP Morgan, Citibank, and BNP are very prominent in the tops 20 shareholders lists. There has been a major shift in the Australian corporate ownership-scape over the last decade. And a silent one at that.
After the European Commission has finally realized that major investors (RWE) and transit countries (Hungary) are leaving Nabucco, bureaucrats in Brussels are now trying to revitalize a distressed project – the so-called Trans-Caspian…
Three years ago this month, I wrote a piece entitled “Who’s to Blame for the Iraq War?” to mark the seventh anniversary of the US invasion. My sole purpose in compiling a by-no-means-exhaustive list of 20…
Whenever there is a protest in Portugal you are almost certain to hear the haunting song “Grandola, Vila Morena” (“Grandola, sunburnt town”), with its line “who most rules within you, O city, is the people”….
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) recent convention in Washington produced the usual Doomsday talk concerning Iran’s imminent possession of nuclear weapons and with calls to bomb that country before they nuked…
A thrilling scene took place recently with the United States Senate, playing host as its backdrop. Reichsmarchall Brennan Barack Obama’s kill-list aficionado, had to overcome a Mr. Smith-style filibuster. He had to do…
There is little doubt that civilians on both sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) are weighed down with anxiety as both countries carry out provocative large-scale military drills amid threats of nuclear war. North…
Responsibility to Protect And The Myth of Large Numbers The United States often uses exaggerated civilian casualty numbers to make a case for military intervention in strife-torn regions Since the 1990s, the West has justified…
FAILING to agree on ways to reduce the deficit, the US president was forced earlier this month to enact the Budget Control Act (BCA) into law. The debt ceiling compromise was originally agreed to between…