Today’s news is that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is visiting Moscow, slapping the backs of Putin and LUKOil’s Vagit Alekperov, signing oil contracts, and pledging to purchase $3 billion worth of Russian weapons. Chavez also used his Kremlin stage to taunt America, calling the U.S. a “stupid giant”. Chavez basked in the welcome from the Kremlin, the friendliness of many ordinary Russians on the streets, and favorable coverage from the Russian media. Russia Blog will...

The German newspaper "Die Welt" reported last month that Venezuela is becoming a safehaven for Islamic terrorists. The close friendship between the leftist Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his Iranian colleague Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardline Muslim radical, resulted into ever closer cooperation between the two countries. Western intelligence services have reason to believe that Iran's fundamentalist regime is sending terrorists and Muslim radicals to an increasing number...

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Islam Online) - Residents of Palermo, a large middle-class district in Buenos Aires, are used to seeing their skyline change. New high-rise apartment towers, enormous shopping malls, shiny gas stations and U.S.-style fast food outlets are constantly erupting between the parks and plazas that represent an older, more leisurely city. But now a different kind of building has appeared right in the heart of this traditional neighborhood, occupying an eight-acre triangle...

THEY represent only one side of a story, and most of their claims have yet to be independently corroborated. But Interpol has now concluded that the huge cache of e-mails and other documents recovered from the computers of Raúl Reyes, a senior leader of the FARC guerrillas killed in a Colombian bombing raid on his camp in Ecuador on March 1st, are authentic and undoctored. The documents throw new light on the inner workings of the FARC. And they raise some very pointed questions about...

INTRODUCTION The general elections of April 20 will no doubt be considered as historic in modern Paraguay. This is the first time in 60 years that the President does not come fromthe ranks of the Colorado Party. Until now Paraguay was the only country of the Mercosur not to have shifted to the Left of the political spectrum. With the accession to the Presidency in August of Mr. Fernando Lugo, it will no longer figure as the exception to the rule. However, the incontestable victory of...

WASHINGTON, April 30 (UPI) -- A top official from the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs says that narco-terrorism is spreading into North America. David Johnson, assistant secretary for the INL, says that the illicit drug trade is directly linked to known terrorist groups in the Western Hemisphere and that these groups are employing terrorist tactics to traffic drugs into North America. Johnson spoke before the Attorneys General of the Americas, who were...

In a Friday sermon that aired on Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV on April 11, 2008, Yunis Al-Astal, Hamas MP and cleric, told worshipers that Rome, "the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital," would soon be conquered by Islam, just as Constantinople was. It then, he said, would become "an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, and even Eastern Europe." The following are...

On a recent crisp Friday afternoon in El Barrio, the Puerto Rican heart of East Harlem, Ramon Omar Abduraheem Ocasio, Imam of the Alianza Islamica, delivered a khutba (sermon) in Spanish, English and Arabic on fatherhood and responsibility to a motley congregation of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Panamanians, Spaniards, and African Americans. Although it might seem surprising to find a Muslim mosque thriving in such a traditionally Catholic community, organizations like Alianza Islamica represent...

MANTA, Ecuador - Military and diplomatic sources see a link between the Manta air base, operated by the United States in Ecuadorean territory, and this month’s bombing raid by Colombia on a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuador. The U.S. air force was granted a 10-year concession in 1999 to use the base, located in the port city of Manta on Ecuador’s northern Pacific coast, in its counter-drug trafficking activities in the region. A high-level Ecuadorean military officer, who...

CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chavez dared the U.S. on Friday to put Venezuela on a list of countries accused of supporting terrorism, calling it one more attempt by Washington to undermine him for political reasons. Chavez said the "threat to include us on the terrorist list" is Washington's response to his own successes in the region. U.S. lawmakers -- including Reps. Connie Mack and Ileana Ros- Lehtinen, both Florida Republicans -- have called for the State Department to...