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The opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been sentenced to further 18 months home imprisonment which would prevent her from participating in Myanmar’s elections in May 2010. Ms Suu Ky won the Peace Nobel Price in 1991. In 1990 she had won the right to be Prime Minister when her coalition won 59% of the votes but a military junta prevented her from assuming office.

In the first poll in 20 years, though Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s continues in office, an important overhaul of Fatah’s Central Committee changed 14 of the 18 members with younger representatives. Fatah’s position has rejected violence and proclaims “two states for two people”. Their main condition is the removal of all Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The Copenhaguen conference calls for Arctic nuclear-weapon-free zone to be demilitarized as Antarctica. It was attended by parliamentarians, academics, scientists, indigenous representatives and activists from Arctic countries and from established nuclear-weapon-free zones. Participants are flying to Thule military base, Greenland – site of B52 nuclear bomber crash in 1968.

On February, 2008, an official apology to aboriginal people was issued by the government of Australia, for their past mistreatments, for the stolen generations, for breaking their communities, their families. Today they represent a 2% of the population. An equal opportunity society is the basis of a possible future for everyone.

Honduras’s de facto rulers said Sunday they had resolved a disagreement with the Organization of American States over a visit to the Central American country to discuss its political crisis. The government running Honduras since a coup in June had told OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza to stay away but now has changed its mind, and allows him to come with a delegation.

United States President Barack Obama will hold a press conference with the leaders of Mexico and Canada at 1730 UTC. President Obama arrived in Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara, on Sunday evening for a day and a half of talks with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. In the agenda: Flu, drugs, NAFTA and the Honduras’s crisis.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is on a seven-country tour of Africa, has urged the Democratic Republic of Congo to address the root causes of the conflict in the east of the country. The war is the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II, killing 5.4 million people. She called on Congo’s government to put an end to the rape of women as “weapons of war”.

Latin American countries have agreed to hold a summit next month to discuss a deal giving US troops access to Colombian army bases. The agreement was reached at a meeting of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in the Ecuadorian capital Quito where 8 of the 11 members participated. Alvaro Uribe and Alan Garcia from Colombia and Peru were not present.

The Times of London was at it again this week. “Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead”, the paper said, “and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb”.
A great deal of information, but which is the provenance of all these ‘facts’?

On August 9, at a widely attended annual commemoration ceremony held to honor the victims of the atomic bombings of 1945, the Mayor of Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue, issued an invitation urging leaders of all countries currently possessing or developing nuclear weapons to visit Nagasaki, a city which has suffered nuclear destruction.