It is a looming nightmare for Washington, but Mexico may be the next to join the fast-growing loose alliance of left-populist governments in Latin America, if Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the left-opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) becomes president next year, joining Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Lula da Silva of Brazil, Nestor Kirchner of Argentina and Tabare Vazquez of Uruguay. Not surprisingly, the power structure around President Vicente Fox's ruling right-wing National Action Party (PAN) has moved to block Lopez Obrador's candidacy through legalistic prestidigitation. But the PAN regime now appears to be backing down in the face of sustained and determined protest. From Reuters:

This year's North American winner of the Goldman Prize, awarded annually to the most courageous environmental activists on five contients, is Isidro Baldenegro of Chihuahua, Mexico, a Tarahumara Indian who has long defended the forests of the Sierra Tarahumara against the chain-saws of the timber mafia. As reported in WW4 Report 90, Baldenegro was imprisoned in 2003 on trumped-up terrorism charges, and released following an international campaign.

Taxi driver, pregnant passenger, pedestrian in critical condition

April 26, 2005, 12:31 PM EDT

NEW YORK -- A taxi driver whose out-of-control cab set off a chain reaction of crashes at Times Square remained in critical condition on Tuesday, as did his pregnant passenger and a pedestrian.

The driver, Syed M. Zia, 54, of Corona, Queens, was driving along 42nd Street near the Port Authority Bus Terminal at around 10:30 a.m. Monday when he collided at the intersection of Eighth Avenue with a station wagon, which then hit a pedestrian, authorities said.

The cab then went around the station wagon, striking the pedestrian a second time, then sped off, and hit a minibus, then a Chevrolet Impala, and finally hit a row of taxicabs, the last of which stopped near Ninth Avenue, police said.

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah met with George Bush in his ranch in Crawford, TX, April 25, where unprecedentedly escalating oil prices obviously dominated the agenda. The reactionary NY Post ran a front-cover story "THE HIGH PRICE OF OIL," with prominent photos of Bush walking hand-in-hand with the prince and exchanging an "air-kiss" (as the caption put it) with him. This was, of course, portrayed as unmanly and a national humiliation, prompting predictably outraged letters from lug-headed Post readers ("No, the prince should not have gotten a kiss on the cheek. He should have gotten a kick in the rear.")

A group of prominent businessmen in Turkey have issued a call for Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies to be banned from Turkish TV after the California governor endorsed a call by Armenian-Americans (a sizeable constituency in his state) for April 24 to be declared "Day of Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide."

Joseph Mussomeli, charge d'affairs at the U.S. embassy in Manila, was quoted April 11 as saying that the southern island of Mindanao, where U.S. and Philippine forces are battling Muslim rebels, could be the next Afghanistan. According to a report from the Pakistan Tribune:

The recent moves towards peace between India and Pakistan, symbolized by the historic establishment of bus service across the line of control in divided Kashmir, are a welcome development. But the April 6 arson attack on a Srinagar compound where trans-border bus passengers were being housed is testament to the potential for further armed resistance. This report from the Pakistan Daily Times of April 25 delineates some of the little-noted reasons that Jammat-e-Islami, the biggest Kashmir resistance group, is not laying down arms (a position supported by the group's legal arm, Muthidda Majlis-e-Aamal):

Largely gone from the headlines and overshadowed by the horrorshow in Iraq, violence continues in Afghanistan, especially in the Taliban-sympathetic zone along that Pakistan border. We recently reported on an especially grisly incident involving U.S. troops. Now comes a similarly grisly report from Pakistan's Daily Times, April 25: