I just received word that Shafik Handal, head of the revolutionary current in El Salvador died of a heart attack upon his return to El Salvador after attending Evo Morales' inauguration in Bolivia. Shafik was a central player in the left in El Salvador, he was the son of Palestinian immigrant parents, he died at 75. He will not be forgotten.

It’s now fully 3 days since Katrina passed New Orleans, the city is now in a shambles, and now mainstream news, including BBC, presents the tired "it bleeds, it leads" philosophy in yellow journalism as they pretend to care about the tragedy facing the mostly poor, mostly black population of New Orleans. In the reporting, images are repeated of desperate black citizens taking necessities from stores and being castigated by the media as looters, while white citizens doing the same thing are represented as "just doing what they need to survive". Meanwhile, the latest tragedy of the Iraq quagmire goes unnoticed and unreported in all but the most raking of muckraking media (see counterpunch, 8/31). Meanwhile, capitalism presents itself in all its glory, as reports of retailers charging as much as 6 dollars a gallon pour in from all over the region, and the Bush Administration removes pollution requirements from gasoline producers (catalytic converters be damned!). But to get a real picture of the surreal nature of the current predicament, it's important to step back a bit, to the 1950's, and the US government's assassination of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, at the behest of the United Fruit Company.

Wait for it... Ahh, yes, American Experience presents an excellent pre-invasion documentary smearing, once again, the administration of Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Fresh from Sources as Diverse as El Nacional and VTV, the war of words between Colombia and Venezuela has heated up.