ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Photo provided by the Presidency of Venezuela shows Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (C) and his daughters Rosa Virginia (R) and Maria Gabriela reading a Feb. 14, 2013 copy of Cuban Government's official newspaper "Granma" during his recovery process in Havana, capital of Cuba on Feb. 15, 2013. CARACAS, March 4 (Xinhua) -- Venezuelan Communication and Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said Monday night that President Hugo Chavez's health has deteriorated and remains delicate. Villegas announced on Venezuela's national TV broadcaster VTV that a "worsening of respiratory function" had happened to the president, which was motivated by clinical immune depression. The minister said that the president "has a new and severe respiratory infection" and stressed that the general health state of Chavez continues to be "very delicate" as he is undergoing chemotherapy with high impact and other complementary treatments. The president remain...

CAIRO, -- Both the security and governance's headquarters in Egypt's Port Said were set on fire on Monday as protesters hurdled Molotov cocktail at the buildings, state-run Ahram online reported. At least four people were killed, including two policemen, and 400 others were injured in clashes between the protesters and the security forces in Port Said governorate, which is witnessing its third week of civil disobedience. An interior ministry source on Monday told Xinhua that some unidentified people had shot randomly at the security members guarding the two buildings and injured several of them, one in critical conditions. Also on Monday, a statement of the interior ministry urged the residents of Port Said not to approach the police and the governmental institutions for their safety. The statement added some people "are seeking discord and wedge between the protesters and the security forces to escalate the situation." Violent clashes erupted on Monday when a Shura C...

Five people - including two policemen - were killed when protesters and security forces clashed in the Egyptian city of Port Said, officials say. At least 400 people were injured in the fighting overnight, officials said. Port Said has been rocked by violence since January, when 21 local football fans were sentenced to death over deadly football riots in 2012. Thousands of people joined the funeral procession on Monday for those killed in the clashes. Angry mourners shouted anti-government slogans during the procession. The latest violence comes at a time of heightened political tension in Egypt. The country has been increasingly polarised between pro-Islamists and liberal and secular forces since Islamists swept to power in parliamentary and presidential elections last year. Scores of people have died in clashes across the country this year amid protests against Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and grievances over the treatment of those convicted over the football riots. 'Bird-s...

Faced with "faster and faster" centrifuges spinning in Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Monday that Tehran's nuclear program was getting closer to crossing a crucial "red line." Speaking via satellite link from Jerusalem to an influential pro-Israel lobby group, the remarks reiterated Netanyahu's apparent impatience with the policy of leading nations to use sanctions to suppress Iran's atomic ambitions. Instead, the comments seemed to underscore Netanyahu's desire to see Tehran face a more robust military threat, in the wake of talks last week between the world's top powers and Iranian negotiators on the disputed nuclear program. "Iran enriches more and more uranium, it installs faster and faster centrifuges," Netanyahu told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States. "We have to stop its nuclear enrichment program before it's too late," he...

An Al-Qaeda source has confirmed the death of one of the leaders of the organisation's north African wing, in the most significant success yet for the French-led operation against Islamist fighters in Mali. But there were no public celebrations in Paris on Monday as relatives of hostages held in the region voiced fears the development leaves their loved ones at greater risk and called for a pause in the bombing to allow for negotiations aimed at securing their release. Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, a senior figure in Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was killed last week in a French bombing raid in the Ifoghas mountains, an AQIM militant told the private Mauritanian news agency Sahara Medias. The source insisted however that another Islamist leader, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was alive and still fighting. That contradicted claims over the weekend from Chad that its troops had killed Belmokhtar, the mastermind of the January assault on an Algerian gas plant in January that left 37 foreign ho...

THE deadly sinkhole that swallowed a man as he slept has finally been revealed. The six-metre wide sinkhole opened without warning underneath Jeff Bush's bedroom on Sunday (AEST). Jeremy Bush, 35, tried to reach his brother, 37, but he was helpless and had to be saved himself by Sheriff's Duty Deputy Douglas Duvall. The sinkhole was shown for the first time as crews razed more than half of the home in Brandon , in Tampa's Hillsborough County, Florida.   Crowds gather for sinkhole house demolition Bringing down the house in Florida Watch Close Bush and relatives prayed with a pastor as the home - where he lived with his girlfriend, Rachel Wicker; their daughter, Hannah, 2; and others - was demolished and choked with tears as they waited for firefighters to salvage anything possible from inside. "I feel like they could have tried harder to get my brother out of there," Bush said. "That was my brother. No one i...

HEAVY clashes in northern Mali have left at least 50 rebel fighters and a French soldier dead, following reports that two top Islamist militants have been killed in recent days. Heavy fighting in northern Mali has left at least 50 rebel fighters and a French soldier dead. Source: AAP The reports from Chad that its soldiers killed Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the mastermind of January's assault on an Algerian gas plant that killed 37 foreign hostages, as well as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) commander Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, have not been confirmed by other sources. But both French and Malian officials said clashes had intensified in the region in recent days, with French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian saying a French soldier had died "in some of the heaviest fighting that we have carried out on Malian territory". A Malian military source said the fighting continued on Sunday near the town of Gao in northern Mali, where Malian troops backed by French forces are hunting...

No nation should own nuclear arms – not Iran, not North Korea, and not their critics who take the moral high ground By Desmond Tutu March 04, 2013 - " The Guardian " -- We cannot intimidate others into behaving well when we ourselves are misbehaving. Yet that is precisely what nations armed with nuclear weapons hope to do by censuring North Korea for its nuclear tests and sounding alarm bells over Iran's pursuit of enriched uranium . According to their logic, a select few nations can ensure the security of all by having the capacity to destroy all. Until we overcome this double standard – until we accept that nuclear weapons are abhorrent and a grave danger no matter who possesses them, that threatening a city with radioactive incineration is intolerable no matter the nationality or religion of its inhabitants – we are unlikely to make meaningful progress in halting the spread of these monstrous devices, let alone banishing them from national arsenals. Why, for instance,...

Now, just as diplomacy is yielding results, has never been a better time to ignore the lobbying of Israel's prime minister for war By Murtaza Hussain "If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons , this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind … the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close." March 04, 2013 - " The Guardian " -- The above quote – from a speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to a joint session of the United States Congress – is notable not only for its sense of urgency and dire threat, but also for the date on which the speech was given: 10 July 1996. That was far from the first time Netanyahu had sounded the alarm for the need to take drastic action against a purportedly imminent Iranian nuclear weapon: in a 1992 address to the Israeli Knesset , he declared, "within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become auton...