Bellicose noises emit from the White House, as President Trump appoints Elliot Abrams special envoy to Venezuela – a US foreign policy hawk involved in the Iran Contra scandal. Alongside the US, significant regional players including the governments of Colombia, Brazil and Argentina have recognised Juan Guaido’s legitimacy.  In Europe, the mood is similar. Our own shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, refuses to ‘strike a pose’ and acknowledge Juan Guaido as president, denouncing ‘outside interference’ in Venezuelan affairs as unproductive for the Venezuelan people.

Join a panel of reporters, broadcasters and experts who’ve been covering the crisis for an in-depth look at the unfolding events. The challenges of reporting in a divided country that faces growing instability and turmoil – for Venezuelan and foreign journalists alike – are huge. Our panel will also be discussing the threats to press freedom and the media workers covering the news in Venezuela in the current crisis.

Chair:

Lindsey Hilsum  is Channel 4 News International Editor, and has covered many of the conflicts of recent years including in Syria, Ukraine and the Arab Spring. She was in Baghdad for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and in Belgrade for the 1999 NATO bombing. In 1994, she was the only English-speaking correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide began. She has won awards from the Royal Television Society and BAFTA amongst others. Hilsum has just returned from Venezuela where she has been reporting for Channel 4 News.

Speakers:

Vladimir Hernandez is a BBC journalist with more than ten years of experience covering Latin American affairs. He’s made documentaries on the Mexico Drug War, reported on the legalisation of cannabis in Uruguay, and worked as a correspondent in Argentina for 2 years. Since 2014 he’s regularly been travelling back home to Venezuela to show the country’s slide into humanitarian crisis and the severe deterioration of human rights by security forces – especially during the 2017 anti-government protests. His documentary for Our World Going Hungry in Venezuela remains one of the most watched videos for BBC Mundo on YouTube and his latest reports for the BBC’s Ten o’Clock News still remain widely shared on YouTube, including a piece from a market where the poor buy rotten meat to eat which has had almost 3 million views. Vladimir was born in France but is a Venezuelan / British citizen.

Ana Vanessa Herrero is the New York Times correspondent in Venezuela who also contributes reporting from across the region. She will be joining the discussion via live link-up from Caracas.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is Professor of Political Philosophy and Human Rights, Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of the award-winning “What If Latin America Ruled the World? (2010)” and “Story of a Death Foretold, The Coup Against Allende” (2013) – selected as a non-fiction Book of the Year by The Observer. He’s a member of the Royal Society for the Advancement of the Arts (RSA).

  Watch the video stream of Venezuela in Crisis

Join us for a screening of The Ransom followed by a Q&A with film director Rémi Lainé in conversation with former chief foreign correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph Colin Freeman.

The Ransom dives into the secret system of Kidnap & Ransom, designed by major insurance companies in response to the 30,000 kidnappings committed every year around the world. International insurance companies have created kidnap & ransom, ultra-confidential contracts that are experiencing an unprecedented boom. Following a pending case in Venezuela, The Ransom, filmed in Africa, Europe and the USA, features insurers, negotiators and ex-hostages who speak out for the first time.

With exclusive access to leading hostage recovery agents, The Ransom reveals the cat and mouse games employed to bring a hostage out alive.

By following a few central characters in this interconnected world – often expressing themselves for the first time – The Ransom questions the price of one man’s life and reveals the impact of this vast global organisation on countries with a heightened risk of kidnapping such as Venezuela or Somalia. By emphasising prevention and increasing protection devices, aren’t we just increasing the vulnerability of those who don’t have the means to protect themselves?

“and the price of a man’s life has been determined by the price of things” (Saint-Just)

A compelling Frontline Club event on Wednesday 25 June showcased film and photographic work from across the globe that revealed both the depth of suffering and the strength of human spirit in some of the world’s most devastating internal conflicts.

Featured at the event was a series of photographs from Tim Freccia in South Sudan, Alvaro Ybarra Zavala in Venezuela, Eman Mohammed in Gaza and Daniel Berehulak in Afghanistan, curated by multimedia photojournalist and filmmaker John D McHugh.

The event culminated in a screening of Ground Zero Syria, a dramatic film by Robert King featuring unprecedented footage of the brutal conflict in Syria, and an impassioned interview with King by The Times journalist Anthony Loyd that offered some chilling conclusions about the future of the conflict.

Robert King and Anthony Loyd at the Frontline Club.

All of the showcased work shared a common theme: that of the determination of each journalist to bring to light the plight of people facing oppression or armed struggle in their home countries, and to reveal the characters of those individuals caught up in some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts.

Among Freccia’s work was a set of portraits of soldiers from the White Army, a ruthless militia group fighting alongside former Vice President Riek Machar in his campaign against the government of South Sudan.

In Freccia’s unique portraits, presented against a white background, he aimed to show through the expressions and postures of his subjects the “humanity present in these characters, for good or bad, which is often neglected”.

Zavala’s photographs were captured in Caracas and San Cristobal in February and March this year as the protests against Venezuela’s government escalated.

A picture of a woman slumped over the coffin of a lost loved one revealed the sacrifices made by the protestors, while another featured a combatant in plastic protective glasses making Molotov cocktails to take into the fray.

Mohammed took up photojournalism at the age of 19. In a narration of her photographs, she explained how she had to overcome cultural barriers to a woman pursuing such a career.

“I thought I had what it took to be a career photographer,” she said. “I was wrong. To gain acceptance in a male dominated field was next to impossible.”

Covering the war in Gaza in 2008-09 and under fire from aerial bomb attacks, the ground “shaking like a swing beneath us”, Mohammed was abandoned by the two male journalists with whom she was travelling. “Terrified, humiliated and feeling sorry for myself”, she learned a valuable lesson.

Mohammed‘s career has been characterised by a constant tension between capturing her own agony and that of others:

“You can freeze, but your camera cannot. If you don’t document history, it never happened.”

Her work included touching portraits of Mohamed Hodr, who along with 22 members of his family lived for several years beneath the rubble of what was once his home.

The only surviving remnant of what was to be a retirement retreat was a jacuzzi, which he hauled up to the roof of his shattered home so that each morning he could give his children a bubble bath.

Berehulak’s work focused on the terrible impact that the rapidly rising use of heroin in Afghanistan is having on the local population. One in 10 urban households in the country has at least one drug user, and in rural areas heroin use is as high as 30 per cent.

A set of photographs of one hospital ward that was admitting 200 children a month for severe malnutrition featured pictures of young children so wrinkled with starvation that they looked more like the elderly than the newly born. At a year-and-a-half, Mohammed weighed just 10 pounds.

“Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here,” said Berehulak in his narration. “Women are kept away from everyone except those in their immediate family.

“Farmers can’t grow crops because of mines, and doctors can’t get to children until the situation is already severe. Women can’t nourish their own children [because of the heroin use].”

At the country’s premier children’s hospital in Kabul, a five-year-old boy weighing just 20 pounds was being treated on a bench because the infusion line wouldn’t reach to a bed. The drug problem, said the director of demand reduction at the ministry of health, is a tsunami for his country.

Ground Zero Syria

Screened in the second half of the event, King’s film gave a unique insight into the fighters of the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) in their efforts to survive the brutal attacks of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“For six to seven months we didn’t even think about picking up weapons,” said one.

“We started out with olive branches, but [in the end] the only option was to take up arms and put him [Assad] out of office.”

At a field hospital in Al-Qusayr, southwest of Homs near the border with Lebanon, a young boy looked forlornly up at the camera with a single streak of blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. Across the ward, another child’s guts were bursting through his sundered stomach.

“If I die when I help people it is good for me,” said a doctor at the hospital. “I’m a doctor, I must help people.”

At the Dar al-Shifa field hospital in Aleppo, Dr Osman, a physician at the hospital, explained how he had nightmares about amputating children’s limbs, but each day resisted the urge to return to normal life because there was no one else to help these people.

According to Osman, about 80 per cent of the patients at Dar al-Shifa are civilians. At the time of the interview, the hospital had already been bombed five times, with another 15 bombings nearby.

“The Syrian regime considers medical staff as a perfect target, as a military target,” he said.  “When you kill one doctor it is better than killing a thousand fighters.”

In November 2012, King was there when the hospital was hit yet again, but still hope was not vanquished.

“Dar al-Shifa is not a building, it’s not a machine; it’s people, it’s doctors, nurses,” said Osman, speaking amidst the rubble.

“We will continue. We will build this hospital again and we will work again.”

In one striking scene, Dr Abaman, a former veterinarian working as an assistant physician at the hospital, appealed directly to the camera, emotion cracking his voice:

“We have enough shown TV. Do something. Do something. We are suffering here alone.”

The film also featured the tragic burning of Aleppo’s market, a world heritage site and one of the world’s best-preserved souks.

King asked Ahmed Alhaji, who had witnessed the fire, to explain what he had seen.

“I saw a lot of things that make me cry,” he said. “I saw Assad destroy our history. My heart is broken, I was crying blood.”

Towards the end of the film, King asked an FSA fighter what he thought of the West’s Syria policy. The West’s inaction before – and even after – evidence came to light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, he said, was a sign to Assad that:

“Whatever you want to do, go ahead and do it. You want to kill 100,000 people that’s okay; you want to drop 100,000 tonnes of bombs that’s fine. Chemical weapons? Just keep 20–30 per cent of them.”

Most of the characters featured in the film, said King, are now dead.

Beyond the obvious perils of filming during an almost constant artillery bombardment, King faced his own challenges in shooting the film, not least the very lack of engagement from the West and its media that was alluded to by the film’s characters.

“I had to reassess why I was risking my life to cover slaughter,” said King in the Q&A with Loyd.

“I’d been there for four months and had photographed 5,000 dead bodies and nobody cared. No one would buy my photographs, so I started shooting video.”

The politics within Syria were also a source of frustration for King. He saw a shipment of powdered milk he had helped facilitate first held up in customs and then less than welcomed by those who had been benefiting from the black market in the product.

Those people who had helped him gain access to the country started to try to influence his material and, when he refused, banned him from going back.

“In the first year I figured that their politics were holding up the medical needs of the community,” said King. “Then they wanted to control the message.”

Asked by members of the audience whether his work could be used to try the perpetrators of the violence, King expressed his frustration with the absence of a more effective international legal system:

“If there was an international court of law that could hold people accountable for their war crimes . . . but why give my stuff to some organisation that fantasises that it can prosecute people?”

Loyd and King agreed that the future for the country is bleak and the potential fallout dire.

“The war launched against Al Qaeda was one thing,” said Loyd, wearing a cast around his leg after sustaining gunshot injuries in the latest of many reporting trips to Syria.

“Now something far worse [Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS)] has taken up a huge block of the Middle East running almost to the Mediterranean, and the West is aghast as to how to deal with the situation.

“Syria has raised a huge question mark and nobody knows what to do.”

King is convinced that chemical weapons have been smuggled out of Syria and have already reached Western European capitals. Asked whether he was planning to go back to Syria, he said:

“I don’t have to go to Syria. It’s done. It’s here. It’s over. I’m going to sit and wait.”

Monday 8 April

US Secretary of State John Kerry continues his visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories on Monday (and Tuesday) where he is holding talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, meanwhile, will meet on Monday with his Spanish counterpart Mariano Rajoy in Madrid.

In Chile, a team of investigators will exhume the body of Pablo Neruda to verify whether the poet did, in fact, die from cancer in 1973, or whether he was assassinated, as some claim.

Finally, US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew will be in Brussels for talks with key EU officials, at which the crisis in Cyprus and its potential impact on economic stability of Europe is likely to be discussed.

Tuesday 9 April

On Tuesday, Jacob Lew is scheduled to continue his travel in Europe, with stops in Berlin and Paris for talks with his counterparts Wolfgang Schauble and Pierre Moscovici.

In New York, the UN Security Council is scheduled to discuss the situation in the Central African Republic after the Seleka rebels took the capital Bangui, deposing President Francois Bozize.

Iran will celebrate its National Day of Nuclear Technology.

Wednesday 10 April

Meanwhile, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague will host his G8 counterparts for a two-day meeting in London.

Finally, back in New York, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde is scheduled to deliver a major address in New York City.

Thursday 11 April

Capital controls imposed in Cyprus in the wake of the bailout agreement and designed to prevent a catastrophic bank run are scheduled to be lifted on Thursday, after they were extended by a week. Most analysts expect them to be extended again.

Italy, meanwhile, is scheduled to hold a sovereign debt auction, which will provide an opportunity to see whether the continuing political gridlock inside Italy and developments outside are rattling markets’ confidence in Europe’s fourth largest economy.

Separately, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey are testifying at Senate hearing on Thursday.

Friday 12 April

On Friday, the nine South African police officers charged in connection with the death of a Mozambican taxi driver who was filmed being dragged behind a police van are due back in court.

John Kerry will be in Seoul for talks with counterparts as he begins the Asian-leg of his seven-nation trip. Once again, North Korea will dominate.

Lastly, in Dublin, Eurogroup finance ministers are due to meet, with Cyprus and the Memorandum of Understanding on the bailout agreement top of the agenda. Finance Ministers from all 27 EU member-states will meet that afternoon and on Saturday.

Saturday 13 April

North Korea will again be on the agenda when John Kerry pays his first visit to Beijing since taking over from Hillary Clinton.

Sunday 14 April

Venezuelans will on Sunday return to the polls to elect their President in the wake of Hugo Chavez’s passing on March 5. His appointed successor, former bus driver Nicolas Maduro is expected to defeat opposition candidate Henrique Capriles.

John Kerry will wrap up his Asia visit with a stop in Tokyo where he meets his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida

In Cameroon, for the first time there will be an election for 70 members of the country’s 100-member Senate, with the remainder selected by President Paul Biya.

On Sunday, Canada’s opposition Liberal Party is scheduled to appoint its new leader. There has been much excitement about the candidacy of Justin Trudeau.

“He’s this wonderful presence [in person],” remarked Rory Carroll, who spent from 2006 t0 2012 in Caracas as The Guardian‘s chief correspondent for South America, and whose latest book Commandante profiles Chavez in depth.

Western media, Carroll said, often offered a “polarised simplistic version, like Chavez is the demon, he’s blood thirsty, some kind of semi-Stalinist character, which was ridiculous, or he’s this messianic character who is delivering the poor from hell and he’s building a shining city on a hill, which was equally as ridiculous.”

“He is amiable,” The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson agreed, “and quite a fun interlocutor.”

But Anderson and Carroll, along with Diego Moya-Ocampos, a political analyst who used to practice law in Venezuela and event host Richard Lapper, the Financial Times‘ Latin America editor from 1998 to 2008, were dismayed by the promises Chavez made to fix Venezuela.

After 14 years, inequality has reached a gothic degree in today’s Venezuela, noted Anderson; hospitals are Dickensian, Carroll said – “people are selling bandages, sheets . . . there’s no bulbs . . . you’re crunching over broken glass, there’s malandros [thugs] in the corridors, maybe with guns”; the prisons are awash with automatic weapons, and have largely been overtaken by their prisoners.

Anderson commented: “The revolution made common cause with a kind of thug culture, that I don’t know how they’re going to undo at this point . . . violence is off the charts.”

Chavez championed the masses, but Moya-Ocampos saw democracy in tatters:

“[Chavez] has systematically undermined democratic institutions. . . . What we have in the end is just one institution in place: the armed forces – the only institution in Venezuela with the capacity . . . to obtain certain outcomes. . . .

Everyone wants to believe: ‘Chavez! It’s a revolution going on in Venezuela! . . . We’re really tackling inequalities, we’re really beating poverty issues!’ . . . No. It’s not true.”

Carroll agreed: “He was an extraordinary illusionist.”

“Is the Revolution one of Chavez’s illusions?” Lapper asked.

For the most part it was, the panel seemed to agree.

Carroll and Anderson still found value in Chavez’s defiance, however – be it to America’s domination of global decisions, or to haughtiness and racism suffered by Venezuela’s lower classes.

Anderson reflected: “There’s no doubt that, whatever else you say, . . . Chavez has had an extraordinary presence on the regional stage, and that he will have meant something.”

Carroll added:

“To some extent, [the revolution] is real. . . . A lot of ordinary Venezuelans feel there’s been a revolution, feel empowered by this government, and therefore in that sense, it’s real. Because for them, it’s written on their hearts, and that has value. I could [give] lots of anecdotes about people who just feel that now they finally have dignity, and the issue of poverty is [finally] center-stage, and that they don’t need to feel apologetic for being quite dark, or not speaking great Spanish. . . . In the longterm effect, how can you quantify that? No idea. But that certainly has value.”

Watch the discussion here:

Provoking adoration and revulsion in equal measure, Hugo Chavez is a leader like no other. In October last year his loyal supporters came out to vote him back into office for his fourth presidential term.

In his new book, Comandante, acclaimed journalist Rory Carroll sheds light on the inside story of Chavez’s life and his political court in Caracas. He will join the The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson and others to ask, after more than 13 years in power, what Chavez’s legacy will be.

With his inauguration indefinitely postponed and the severity of his medical condition unclear, we will be looking back at Chavez’s rule, examining his time in power and what the future holds for Venezuela.

Chaired by Richard Lapper, the director of Brazil Confidential, the FT‘s research service on Brazil.  He was Latin America Editor at the FT newspaper between 1998 and 2008, during which time he visited and reported from Venezuela regularly.

The panel:

Rory Carroll is the Guardian‘s US West Coast Correspondent based in Los Angeles and author of Comandante: Inside Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. For the past five years, throughout the writing of his book, Carroll has been stationed in Caracas as the Guardian‘s chief correspondent in South America.

Jon Lee Anderson is foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, and is the author of many books including The Fall of Baghdad and Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World.

Diego Moya-Ocampos is a senior political risk analyst for Venezuela for IHS Global Insight and IHS Jane’s. He previously worked as a lawyer for a private firm in Venezuela advising government agencies and private businesses on constitutional, regulatory and environmental issues, and as Chief Secretary at the Venezuelan Attorney-General’s Office.

A round up of world news in the week ahead from journalist resource ForesightNews.

By Jasper Wenban-Smith, international editor of ForesightNews.

Monday 10 December

A bombastic week of international news kicks off Monday with the opening of the window for North Korea’s latest satellite launch attempt. The launch will have important implications, both domestic and international. Domestically, a successful launch would boost the credibility of Kim Jong-un; conversely, a second consecutive failure might have important implications in a country where power is so concentrated among a military elite. Whether successful or not, the launch will add to regional tensions and may even influence the outcome of South Korea’s presidential elections, due on 19th December.

The seemingly endless conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo will be the subject of consultations on Monday when the African Union’s Peace and Security Council meet to discuss the M23 rebel movement at the AU HQ in Addis Ababa.

Meanwhile, in New York, the UN’s Security Council holds what is expected to be one of the highlights of the Moroccan presidency of the SC. The country’s foreign minister Saad-Eddine al Othmani will chair a high-level meeting on security in the Sahel, likely to focus on Islamist militancy in the region, notably in Mali.

In the United States, as the fiscal cliff deadline draws ever closer, President Barack Obama – who has focused almost exclusively on this issue since his re-election in November – is due to travel on Monday to the Detroit area to deliver a speech pressing the case for an agreement to avert the crisis.

Lastly on Monday, key EU figures travel to Oslo to pick up their Nobel Peace Prize.

Tuesday 11 December

Tuesday is a bit quieter, former President of Cote D’Ivoire Laurent Gbagbo is due back in the International Criminal Court for a status hearing; Canada’s Central Bank Governor Mark Carney, who will head up the Bank of England from next July, delivers a speech in Toronto; and Russia and Georgia return to the negotiating table in Geneva for the latest round of UN-mediated talks.

Wednesday 12 December

On Wednesday, Morocco hosts a Friends of Syria meeting in Marrakech. Hillary Clinton has confirmed her attendance, making it likely a slew of other foreign ministers including Foreign Secretary William Hague and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will attend too.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin will deliver his first State of the Union address since returning to the Presidency. There will be significant interest in how the former KGB man chooses to address the increased civil unrest in Russia.

IAEA officials are due in Tehran for their latest round of talks with Iranian officials on ‘outstanding issues’ related to the country’s nuclear programme. The visit follows an announcement by Robert Wood, US Ambassador to the UN nuclear watchdog, of a March 2013 ‘deadline’ for Iran to alter its approach to negotiations or face action at the UN Security Council.

In European affairs, following their failure to reach an agreement on a long-term budget, EU leaders reconvene in Brussels on Wednesday for a two-day summit. Eurogroup finance ministers are due to meet on the sidelines to make a final determination on whether to release funds to Greece. One potential spanner in the works is that the IMF has insisted that Greece complete its debt buyback operation before funds are released. However, the schedule for the buyback operation, announced by Greece’s debt management agency on 3 December, does not foresee completion until 17 December.

Thursday 13 December

On Thursday, Tunisia’s main union the UGTT plans to hold a general strike. It coincides with a visit by Hillary Clinton to attend the final day of the Forum for the Future taking place in the country’s capital. All of this comes ahead of the second anniversary on Monday 17 December of Mohamed Bouaziz’s self-immolation.

Friday 14 December

Clinton travels on to Abu Dhabi, which on Friday hosts the third ministerial meeting of the Global Counterterrorism Forum.

Saturday 15 December

On Saturday, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has vowed to press ahead with controversial plans to hold a constitutional referendum, which is likely to result in further unrest.

A three-day conference on nuclear safety kicks off in Fukushima prefecture in Japan. Ministers are due to attend the opening day.

Sunday 16 December

Japan holds parliamentary elections on Sunday, in which Shinzo Abe and his right-leaning LDP are all but certain to regain control of the Shugiin, or lower house. They already control the upper house.

Following presidential elections earlier in the year, Venezuela holds gubernatorial elections on Sunday, with attention focused on whether defeated opposition candidate Henrique Capriles secures re-election as governor of Miranda province.

Finally, on Sunday, South Africa’s ANC opens its five-yearly policy conference. At which, despite widespread labour unrest following the Marikana mine massacre and a very public challenge from former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, Jacob Zuma is expected to be re-elected the party’s leader.

Some images courtesy of fotostory / Shutterstock.com.

Once a year, the world’s leaders descend on New York for the UN’s blue ribbon event, the cumbersomely-titled UN General Assembly’s General Debate.

This year, the build-up has been dominated by the Palestinian Authority’s planned bid to become the 194th member of the UN, following South Sudan’s incorporation earlier in the year.

Notwithstanding any last minute deals, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will personally submit the application to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday, September 23, after Abbas has delivered his speech to assembled leaders.

Indeed, Friday’s session is set to be a cracker, since it also features Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s speech, in which he must surely address the issue. And yet while the Palestinian membership-issue is grabbing all the headlines, there’s plenty of other highlights.

Ahead of the formal UNGA opening today, there was a high-level meeting on Libya yesterday, the first since the UN formally recognised the Transitional National Council as the official representative of Libya last Friday. 

US President Barack Obama met privately for the first time with TNC Chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil, and held separate summits with President Hamid Karzai before he returned to Aghanistan to join the mourning of the assassinated leader Burhanuddin Rabbani.

Tuesday also saw French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe host a ministerial-level meeting of the so-called Deauville Partnership, a G20-offshoot dedicated to supporting fledgling Arab democracies.

The Debate kicks off today with an address by the Brazilian President, the first for Dilma Rousseff since she took office in January and no doubt a welcome relief from domestic troubles.

A notable absence, though, is Russian leader Dmitry Mevedev, who has chosen to delegate responsibilities this year to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

In the afternoon South Africa’s Jacob Zuma will be speaking. On Thursday morning, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gives his traditionally polemical speech (who can forget last year, when he alluded to the 9/11 attacks being a conspiracy). British Prime Minister David Cameron also speaks that session.

Highlights from the afternoon session on Thursday include an inaugural address by newly-elected Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, an address from ageing despot Robert Mugabe, and also remarks from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose star is in the ascendancy amid Turkey’s role in the Arab Spring.

On the sidelines that day, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is hosting a UN High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Safety and Security, likely to focus significantly on lessons to be learned from the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant back in March. Friday, as we’ve seen, is all about the Palestinian-membership issue.

But in the morning there is also a first-time address from new Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda , who is expected to put in appearance also at the nuclear safety meeting. That afternoon South Sudanese President Salva Kiir – who meets one on one with President Obama earlier in the week – will give his country’s address for the first time since it became member number 193 last July

Sadly, one of the traditionally more entertaining speakers – Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez – is not expected to make the journey to New York this time, as he is recovering from a fourth round of chemotherapy for cancer discovered earlier in the year.

“Enough is enough”, the former paratrooper warned during his regular Sunday television broadcast (in Spanish). “They’ve gone to far.”

Chavéz, who recently won a referendum eliminating limited presidential terms, issued a veiled warning to audiovisual media that their licences could be revoked.
 
“They [the public airwaves] are not yours, and they are subject to making responsible use of them”, he warned.

The threats come after a week which saw Venezuela’s self-proclaimed ‘21st Century Socialist’ nationalise private oil service companies.

It is by no means the first time that Chavez has had a run-in with Venezuela’s anti-government media. In 2007, the licence of the popular television network RCTV was not renewed after accusations that it aided a coup attempt five years previously.

Everyday Venezuelans lamented the loss of their favourite soap operas. Advocates of media freedom took a more serious view of the case, accusing Chávez’s administration of blatant censorship. Venezuela, it should be added, has been on the International Press Institute’s Watch List since 2000.

Chávez’s political style has always been confrontational. The press represents an obvious target. The opposition media only serves to stoke the fire, doing little to hide its loathing for the country’s elected premier. 

However, suggesting the media are involved in a militaristic attempt to unsettle his administration (Chávez blamed them for “promoting war” and “instigating the military to make pronouncements, saying that the President must die”) has a ring of paranoia to it.
 
So far, Chávez has only threatened the initiation of “investigations” into alleged coup-mongering by the press. But don’t be surprised if more radio stations and TV channels are ordered off the air in the near future.

Every year, the 34 presidents of the America’s get together for a high level chinwag. Speeches are made. Dinners scoffed. And, back in good old GW’s day, protests would be held.

But the arrival of Obama in the White House has thrown more than one Latin American leader into a spin. For more years than the average voter cares to remember, the mighty USA has played the role of imperialist poster child for the region’s populist leaders.

If you’re poor, it’s because the Yanquis exploited your natural resources. If you’re worried about global terror, it’s because of “Mr. Danger” (as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez liked to call Obama;’s predecessor) and his neo-cons in the White House. If your wages are lousy, it’s the fault of NAFTA, CAFTA or the bilateral trade agreement of the day. If short, anything and everything is the fault of the bullying big brother up North.

The Obama era makes that argument harder to sustain. Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the man who owes more to nemeses in Washington DC than anyone, went as far as to argue that the US electorate would never elect a black man. They did. Now he says that Obama might have “good intentions” but the "Empire is much stronger than him".

A cross-party Congressional delegation is currently in Havana looking to smooth the cracks of nearly half-a-century of bilateral acrimony. 

Likewise, Chávez has had to rethink his strategy. A cooling towards the USA seems to be taking place in Caracas. The Venezuelan premier went as far as to say that he’s willing to press the “reset” button on US-Venezuelan relations. This is the man who claims the FBI is obsessed with masterminding his assassination.

The situation in Bolivia remains less clear. Evo Morales threw out the US ambassador last year, accusing him of spying. That’s the diplomatic version of telling a country to ‘Go F*** Itself’. Not an easy one to come back from, even with a change of officeholder.

As for the rest of the region, presidents are toppling over themselves for a photo op with Obama. Brazil’s Lula da Silva got there first, all smiles for the camera during a recent visit to Washington.

Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner meanwhile was (I’m reliably informed by a first-hand witness) hopping round the room like a schoolgirl when Obama phoned her soon after his election. They discussed Borges. And Kirchner told him he reminded her of General Perón. From a self-styled Evita, that’s flattery personified.

The presidents of Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and most of Central America (notably minus Nicaragua) are long-standing chums of the US, whoever’s in power. They too will be in the queue for a private audience at next week’s Summit of the America.

For all the attention that he’s generating here in Latin America, Obama has remained fairly silent so far on Latin American affairs. Expect Venezuela and Cuba to dominate the media’s attention. But the significance of the Trinidad meeting will all be about building bridges in the corridors. As well as the photos ops, of course.