Monday, February 24, 2014

Demonstrations sweep across Venezuela


Scenes of political turmoil have played out for the last couple of weeks across Venezuela as citizens protest against unemployment, a rise in violent crime and surging inflation




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Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán: US to seek cartel leader's extradition from Mexico

World's most wanted drugs trafficker spent his final days of freedom scrambling through tunnels and drains


Washington will seek the extradition of Mexico's most-wanted man, the US attorney's office announced Sunday, as reports emerged that Joaquín Guzmán Loera spent his final days of freedom scrambling through tunnels and drains before ending up pinned to a bed in a beachside condominium unable to reach a Kalashnikov rifle lying on the floor.

The arrest of Guzmán (known as El Chapo, or Shorty) in the Pacific resort city of Mazatlán just before dawn on Saturday punctured the myth of untouchability that had enveloped the capo since his escape from a high-security jail in January 2001 and his rise to the status of world's most wanted trafficker.

News of Guzmán's capture has been triumphantly received in the US, where he is blamed for up to 80% of the drugs trade in cities such as Chicago, with the official response emphasising the successful collaboration of the US with the Mexican authorities.


"[The] apprehension of Joaquin 'Chapo' Guzmán Loera, by Mexican authorities is a landmark achievement, and a victory for the citizens of both Mexico and the United States," said the US attorney general, Eric Holder. "We are pleased that we were able to work effectively with Mexico through the co-operative relationship that US law-enforcement agencies have with their Mexican counterparts."

The secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, called it a "milestone in our common interest of combating drug trafficking, violence and illicit activity along our shared border".

Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for the US attorney's office in Brooklyn, said later that his office planned to seek Guzmán's extradition to face a variety of charges, although the Mexican ambassador to the US, Eduardo Medina Mora, hadearlier rejected calls for an American trial, saying it was important Guzmán was tried in Mexico.

Over the years there were numerous reported sightings of the highest profile leader of the Sinaloa cartel – named after Guzmán's native state – which already had a long trafficking tradition as far afield as Argentina. Guzmán was believed to spend most of his time, however, in the mountainous regions where he grew up in poverty.

A former high-level official of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, who was briefed about the arrest operation that involved American agencies, said Guzmán had tired of living without the luxuries he could so easily afford. "He became complacent and started coming to the city," Michael Vigil told the Associated Press. "That was a fatal error."

The Mexican attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, told reporters that the authorities began closing in on the 56-year-old drugs kingpin this month once they had located a network of safe houses, one of them owned by one of his former wives.

But by time the team on his trail had got through a reinforced steel door to at least one of those houses, the capo had slipped away via a tunnel leading to the city's drainage system.

A video of one of the houses shows the entrance to the tunnel under a bath, which tipped up to reveal a metal staircase below. The 5ft 6in (160cm) Chapo already had a reputation as a pioneer in the use of tunnels under the border to move drugs north and money south.

The manhunt in nearby Culiacán was accompanied by the arrest of a number of second-tier figures in the Sinaloa cartel, along with dozens of weapons, which may have helped the authorities follow his trail to a 10-floor holiday apartment block called the Miramar, on the coastal road through the city of Mazatlán, Sinaloa's main seaside resort.

Witnesses told local media that the capo had moved into the flat two days before his capture and kept a low profile. Few were willing to give many details about the much-feared drug lord.

According to a report in the Milenio newspaper, dozens of navy operatives isolated the block a little before 4am on Saturday, and quickly dominated a single lookout on the ground floor.

It was a far cry from the multiple security perimeters that had protected Guzmán in the Sierra, with the help of tip-offs from corrupt authorities. These had ensured he could woo a teenage beauty queen, who would later become his wife, with a two-day party in 2007 without being bothered.

When the authorities reached a laboratory in the same mountain range, reputedly capable of producing 100kg of crystal meth a day in 2009, the only sign of El Chapo's possible presence was a large quantity of designer suits for a very short man, as well as a catalogue of Colombian models.

But in the Mazatlán apartment block was bereft of even door reinforcements. According to the Milenio report, the marines easily broke the lock on the door to flat 401 and immobilised Guzmán on his bed before he had time to reach for his AK-47 rifle.

A video of the apartment suggests Guzmán was living in comfort, though not in a style befitting a frequent inclusion on Forbes' rich lists. The video shows a pink suitcase on a bed as well as a travel cot, although there are no reports suggesting there was anybody else inside the flat at the time of the arrest.

On Sunday, the facade of the Miramar was crowded with passers-by and motorists taking photographs of the cream-coloured Miramar condominium block with its white balconies.

By then Guzmán was locked up again in the Altiplano high-security jail, though not the same one he had left behind so embarrassingly for the authorities 13 years ago, inevitably alluded to in a rash of ballads, or corridos, that immediately turned up on YouTube. One has the lines: "With the capture of El Chapo things are not going to change / Let's see if he doesn't surprise them and escape again."

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Is San Francisco losing its soul?

The big pay cheques of the tech boom are changing the City by the Bay as Twitter and Google millionaires take over its bohemian haunts. Could this be the end of the city as we know it? 

Poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti came to San Francisco in 1951 because he heard it was a great place to be a bohemian. He settled in the Italian working-class neighbourhood of North Beach with its cheap rents and European ambience. And before long he put the city on the world's counter-cultural map by publishing the work of Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But despite his status as world and local literary legend, the 94-year-old co-owner of the renowned City Lights bookshop and publishing house doesn't feel so at home in the City by the Bay anymore. 

He complains of a "soulless group of people", a "new breed" of men and women too busy with iPhones to "be here" in the moment, and shiny new Mercedes-Benzs on his street. The major art galley in central San Francisco that has shown Ferlinghetti's work for two decades is closing because it can't afford the new rent. It, along with several other galleries, will make way for a cloud computing startup called MuleSoft said to have offered to triple the rent. "It is totally shocking to see Silicon Valley take over the city," says Ferlinghetti, who still rents in North Beach. "San Francisco is radically changing and we don't know where it is going to end up."

Until recently, San Francisco, California – a small city of around 825,000 poised on the tip of a peninsular on America's western edge that sprang up during the 1840s gold rush – wasn't thought of as a centre for business. Rather, it was famed as an artistic, bohemian place with a history of flowering counter-cultures that spilled over and changed America and the world, from the beats in North Beach to the hippies in the hilly region of Haight- Ashbury to the gay rights movement in the Castro neighbourhood. Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner called it "49 square miles surrounded by reality".

But times have changed in Ferlinghetti's city. San Francisco has become the hype- and capital-fuelled epicentre of America's technology industry, which has traditionally centred on the string of suburban cities known as Silicon Valley 40 miles to the south. In 2011, Mayor Ed Lee introduced tax breaks for Twitter and several other tech companies to encourage them to settle in and revitalise the downtown San Francisco neighbourhood South of Market, or Soma, and help the city climb out of the recession. Soma has become home to some of the most important companies in the new economy, such as Twitter and Dropbox, and many small startups hoping to challenge them. AngelList, a networking site for investors, now lists 5,249 tech startups in San Francisco, each worth $4.6m (£2.8m) on average and offering an average salary of $105,000 (£64,000).

At the same time, San Francisco has become a bedroom city for people who work in Silicon Valley and prefer vibrant urban neighbourhoods to sleepy suburban towns. Facebook, Google, Apple and other companies lay on shiny luxury buses to ferry their employees on the approximately 90-minute trip. San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Authority estimates about 35,000 ride the air-conditioned, Wi-Fi-provisioned buses each day.

In one sense, San Francisco is thriving. The unemployment rate is just 4.8%, compared to 8.3% for California as a whole. In 2013 job growth in San Francisco County led all others in the nation. But the influx of so many young, rich tech workers has caused significant tensions. Starting in mid-2011, rents and house prices began to soar. Eviction rates soon followed as property speculators sought to cash in by flipping rent-controlled apartment buildings into flats to sell. Evicted residents have found themselves unable to afford to live in their city anymore and many businesses and non-profits have been squeezed. "There is only a handful of cities in the world that have such an extreme problem of gentrification," says Richard Walker, an urban geographer at the University of California, Berkeley. 

The facts are stark. The median household income of the San Francisco Bay Area is now higher than anywhere else in America, and San Francisco has twice as many billionaires per capita as London (financial analysts PrivCo estimated that Twitter's stock market launch in November 2013 created more than 1,600 new millionaires in a single day, mostly employees). The median monthly rent is already the highest in the country and is still increasing at a rate three times the national average. Based on official figures from the San Francisco Rent Board, the San Francisco Tenants Union estimates that no-fault evictions displaced nearly 1,400 renters in 2013. About a third of those evictions were under California's Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict tenants and sell their apartments. A City study from October 2013 says Ellis Act evictions increased by 170% from 2010 to 2013. There are also untold numbers who have left the area after accepting buyouts.

It isn't as if San Francisco hasn't seen a tech boom before. Silicon Valley's dotcom boom of 1998 to 2001 also led to significant displacement in San Francisco. But this latest one is focused on the city and visibly changing it faster. Many long-time San Francisco residents worry not only about being forced out of the city they love, but also that their city is being changed for the worse. Critics say that San Francisco's communities of alternative culture, ethnic or otherwise – the soil of its creative mojo and legendary social movements – are being turned into playgrounds for rich people. If San Francisco's soul is its social and economic diversity and status as a refuge for those outside the mainstream, then it is being lost. 

Emerging in its place is the mostly white, male-dominated, monied monoculture of the tech industry and there appears no end in sight. "It is not like it is over, but the tide is going out on San Francisco," says Chris Carlsson, a resident since 1992 and co-founder of the Critical Mass bicycle activism movement, whose offshoots regularly take over the streets of London and other cities worldwide. Writer Rebecca Solnit, whose book Hollow City documented the effect of the first dotcom boom, fears the world is about to lose one of its most radical outposts. "I am not arguing for a city frozen in amber," she says, "but this particular iteration of change is eliminating a lot of what the city's identity has been for the past 150 years." 

Artist Zeph Fishlyn, aged 47, came to San Francisco in 1988 and settled in the working-class Hispanic Mission District, drawn by the large lesbian community there. In late 2012 she and 16 other artists who were part of the Million Fishes Art Collective were kicked out of the studio space they had lived and worked in for almost a decade. Rents have soared in the Mission, which is conveniently located for the freeways to Silicon Valley and has become a fashionable place to live. A new landlord had bought the building and, citing non-compliance with zoning laws, kicked them out.

Unable to afford to stay in San Francisco, Fishlyn moved east across the bay to Oakland, where the burgeoning art and activism scene is buoyed by a steady flow of economic refugees. "Anybody spending their time doing something that doesn't come with a big pay cheque is having to move," says Fishlyn, "and that includes the creative sector and any kind of social justice work." So many creative types have relocated to Oakland that Oakland's mayor, Jean Quan, recently likened the city to Brooklyn (San Francisco was Manhattan); San Francisco-based street artist Eclair Bandersnatch, whose stencil portrait of Edward Snowden recently featured in the Guardian, says so many of her friends have moved away that she feels like an anomaly. The irony, she notes, is that "with money you get people who are more into the arts".

The Mission and Ferlinghetti's North Beach are "ground zero" for gentrification, says Ted Gullickson, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Others have already been subsumed including, he says, the Castro district, the world famous "gayborhood" synonymous with progressive hero Harvey Milk. The area was hit badly by evictions in the first dotcom boom, he says, and has been finished off by the latest tech surge. "It is more homeowner and much straighter, much whiter and much more conservative." In late 2012, the elected representative of the Castro introduced a measure to ban public nudity outside of festivals in San Francisco despite, or perhaps because of, male nudity being commonplace in the Castro for decades.

Gullickson believes the future of the city's character now rests on the Mission, North Beach and the wider Haight-Ashbury, iconic neighbourhoods which people associate with San Francisco. "I think ultimately if they become gentrified, we are talking about San Francisco as a whole." 

There are others who see what is happening in San Francisco in a different light. Fred Turner, an American cultural history professor at Stanford University, argues that gentrification driven by white, middle-class newcomers to the city is nothing new, and has even underpinned its famous counter-culture movements. The arrival of the bohemians in North Beach began the displacement of the working-class Italians; the arrival of the hippies in Haight-Ashbury displaced some of the long-standing working-class residents; and the Castro had a large working-class Irish population before it became a gay mecca. The latest incarnation digital workers displacing working-class Latinos and artists from the Mission District who themselves were already gentrifying it is not radically different. "Nearly everything that is said about them the taking of public resources, the pushing out of poor folks and different ethnic minorities was said about the hippies of the 1960's and not without good reason," says Turner. 

In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, he even argues that today's tech culture is a direct descendant of the hippy movement. The techies are far richer and aren't a counter-culture, but like some hippies they have the same sense of social mission to transform the world for the better with technology. Likewise the way that tech culture mixes work and play and emphasises personal growth has echoes of hippy life. "The same logic that was driving the counter-culture and that continues to drive much of San Francisco today is the very logic that drives Google," says Turner. "In a limited sense, the 1960's are turning around to bite San Francisco."


Stewart Brand, who personified the link between San Francisco's 60's flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley, lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. He is watching with pleasure as the tech boom enfolds San Francisco. Now 75, Brand came to the Bay Area in 1956 and became famous for publishing the counter-cultural bible the Whole Earth Catalog which recommended the tools, technology and attitudes hippies would need to advance themselves and society as a whole.

As Brand sees it, history is being made again in the city. There is the suburban version of Bay Area cyber-business and there is a new urban version being created in San Francisco. "Market Street has been this sleepy dead street for a long time," says Brand, referring to the thoroughfare that bounds Soma. "Well, it is lively and exciting again now, thanks to the tech guys… A creative form is a creative form." Brand is convinced that the injection of so many young people with technical skills, money to play with and no family ties will spawn new ideas in San Francisco, a well-heeled, much needed creative renaissance. 

He has little sympathy for those displaced along the way. San Francisco is a small corner of the Bay Area, he points out, and the rest still has significant economic diversity. Even if San Francisco becomes a Manhattan-like redoubt of the rich, the area as a whole will see benefits. "One side effect of this may well be that Oakland, which is pretty damn interesting, becomes even more interesting."

Curiosity drew Zeph Fishlyn back to Million Fishes's old building last year. She found it occupied by a startup called Bloodhound that had moved in mid-2013 and was paying two and a half times the old rent. The company designs apps to make exchanging contact details with people easier in work situations. Its founder and CEO is Anthony Krumeich, a 27-year-old dropout from Stanford University's Symbolic Systems course, which has produced senior executives for companies such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. On Twitter, he describes himself as: "Inventor, dog owner, free and present thinker, entrepreneur, drop-out, sailor." 

Originally from suburban New York, Krumeich has curly hair, thick-rimmed glasses and wears a plaid shirt – standard urban hipster uniform. He arrived in San Francisco in late 2010, after a couple of years trying to get Bloodhound going in Silicon Valley. The company now has 15 employees and nearly $5m in investment funding including from Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook. Bloodhound has revenues but not profits and Krumeich moved his company to the Mission from Soma in search of lower rents and some soul. The office's aesthetic is white space, wood and large Apple computers. It overflows with signs of a start-up culture there are also soft furnishings, a table-tennis table and a copy of the tech entrepreneurs' bible The Lean Start-up. Employees who commit to not driving get a custom-made bike from a local bike shop and three days a week a chef cooks the office a wheat- and dairy-free lunch.

Krumeich and I walk the one block to Lower 24th Street, San Francisco's most vibrant centre of Hispanic culture and commerce. It has the highest concentration of Latino businesses in the city, an eclectic mixture of speciality stores, Mexican bakeries, grocers and butchers. But 24th Street is in transition. High-end coffee shops and restaurants are poking in, along with a fashionable Jewish deli selling $13 sandwiches. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who has a second home in the Mission, has been spotted there. 

Krumeich is busy with the kind of project that Brand claims will define San Francisco's future. Inspired by the housing crisis, he and his companion a Boxer dog have just moved into what he calls an "alternative living situation", a shipping container on a flatbed truck. Krumeich is converting it into an off-grid, mobile living space that he says will be self-sustaining in its finished form. Solar panels provide electricity and a system of plants is to be used to recycle grey water. He thinks more mobile living might be the future.

But unlike Brand, Krumeich believes new San Francisco doesn't have to eradicate the old. The big ground-floor windows of his office are currently exhibiting canvases painted by an Oakland-based artist. A couple of weeks ago he held his first "artists' showcase", where he opened the doors to passers-by and had various local artists show their work and he is thinking about a new kind of app to connect artists with potential buyers. 

All this was inspired by finding out that Million Fishes had been in the space before, courtesy of Fishlyn. "They had an interesting place," he says, and while he is determined not to suffer from "tech guilt" he is thinking about the role he can play in his community. "I don't have a lot of preconceived notions about how this should work, but I am just going to start from: I care about other people; I am trying to do interesting and good things; I would like my presence here to be a contribution." 

That kind of tech-led mission might be possible, but perhaps first an endangered species needs to be saved from extinction. Since late 2013, neighborhood marches and blockades against Google's commuter buses have captured local, national and international attention. Tenant and neighborhood organisations are working on proposals to be taken to San Francisco voters in November suggestions include a moratorium on no-fault evictions. In January, the mayor responded to the growing pressure, urging people to stop demonizing tech workers while announcing a seven-point housing plan which includes a target of 30,000 new homes by 2020, at least a third of which will be affordable. More immediately, he plans to try to reform the state's Ellis Act. 

The San Francisco peninsular is where the world's new dominant industry information technology is most concentrated. Its tensions between highly paid tech workers and the communities that came before them may be a preview for other places. "What happens here may well happen in similar ways elsewhere, such as the emerging tech zones in London and Berlin," says Turner. "San Francisco is a canary in a coal mine." What reinvented San Francisco will look like when the dust settles is difficult to predict. But the nature of urbanity is that people packed in together do encounter each other and discover history and traditions. "Cities are more resilient than you might think," says Richard Walker. It's unlikely to be all doom for old San Francisco.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for one, is still convinced that the San Francisco he knows ultimately can't be engulfed by Silicon Valley, seeing too strong a connection to its geography, with water on three sides. "It still has an island mentality," he says. "At nearly 95, all I can say is good luck!"

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Venezuelan opposition leader, Leopoldo López, tells his allies to keep fighting

Message from jail adds to leadership credentials of politician who was little known to outside world until a week ago.


Venezuela's jailed protest leader, Leopoldo López, has urged his supporters to continue their struggle as army tanks, helicopters and paratrooper regiments attempted to restore order after more than a week of clashes that have led to at least eight deaths and 137 wounded.

In a note passed to his wife during a prison visit and then rapidly spread across social networks, the opposition figure said the demonstrations should go on."I'm fine, I ask you not to give up, I won't," López wrote from a Caracas prison. "To the youth, to the protesters, I ask you to stay firm against violence, and to stay organised and disciplined. This is everyone's struggle."


The message is likely to give impetus to a movement described by the government as a US-backed coup attempt to seize power in the oil-rich nation. It will also add to the leadership credentials of a politician who, until a week ago, was little known in the wider world. The 42-year-old is a political blue-blood from one of the most powerful families in Venezuela. Several ancestors have held cabinet posts, including a great, great grandfather who was a former president.

In character, if not in politics or background, López has been compared to the late president Hugo Chávez, who could also be uncompromising to the point of recklessness – much to the frustration of his ostensible allies.

"For opposition parties, López draws ire second only to Chavez … the only difference between the two is that López is a lot better looking," Mary Ponte – a prominent figure in the Primero Justicia Party – was cited as saying in a 2009 US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks.

The US embassy described López as necessary, but troublesome. Under the heading "The López Problem", diplomats acknowledged that many in the opposition did not trust his motives, even though they need his support to reach out to the public. "He is often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry – but party officials also concede his popularity, charisma and talent as an organiser," it says.

López attended one of Caracas's elite schools, Los Arcos for a couple years and later studied at the Kennedy school of government in Harvard University.

A college friend, Rob Gluck said López established an activist group called Active Students Helping the Earth Survive. According to Gluck, he was anything but the rightwing figure that he is often portrayed as by the Venezuelan government. "Calling Leo rightwing is like calling Maya Angelou a racist. It is bizarre. It is the ultimate Orwellian exercise in doublespeak."

Friends say his patriotism is evidenced by the tattoo of Venezuela on his ankle. But they also described López who has often taken to Twitter to taunt President Nicolás Maduro at one stage asking him "don't you have the guts to arrest me?" As extremely competitive."Leopoldo was always very competitive. Going out at night with him was always quite hard because he was always very popular with girls", said Alberto Wallis, who has known him since his teens.

At the age of 29, López was elected mayor of the Chacao municipality, the richest in Latin America. He initially won plaudits for revamping the public health system and building new public spaces, but was later charged with embezzlement and stripped of the right to run for office an accusation that López denies as politically motivated.

López is now married to Lilian Tintori, who used to host a TV program about extreme sports. The couple are sometimes mocked as Barbie and Ken for their perfect looks, but their tearful public parting before López handed himself over to the national guard has proved a powerful image on social networks.

He has long had a rivalry as well as a friendship with the ostensible head of the opposition, Henrique Capriles, who was mayor of a neighbouring district in Caracas. During the failed 2002 coup that saw Chávez ousted for three days, they jointly arrested the minister of interior affairs, earning them the nickname "Batman and Robin".

López has now proved himself the more dynamic of the duo. While Capriles accepted last December's municipal election loss with a handshake with Maduro, López launched a radical movement named "La Salida" (The Exit) which aims to unseat the president through protests. It was his call for street demonstrations that began the current cycle of unrest.

López's detention has made him a figurehead of the opposition movement, but whether that will lead them to power or more futile unrest as in 2002 is debated. Critics say his radical stance has simply polarised society, which will be to the advantage of the Chavista government, which has a numerical advantage as well as control of the military, the courts, parliament and community militias.

Others, however, say that his confrontational strategy has more chance of success than conciliation in a country that has often been ruled by caudillo strongmen. Hugo Chávez was a little-known army colonel until he led an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992 that resulted in more than 140 deaths. He was thrown in jail, but seven years later he was president.

A similar outcome is far from certain. Beaten in election after election, the opposition has tried and failed before to use street protest to grab power, but the attempts in 2002 led to injuries and deaths but no long-term change in administration.

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Venezuelans on streets again as protest leader awaits trial

Opposing marches on Saturday come after president Nicolás Maduro played down protest movement on Friday.


Venezuelans have taken to the streets for the second time in ten days in opposing marches for and against the Maduro administration. The government has asked women to rally around the presidential palace, while the opposition has called on supporters to protest against the country's mounting street crime and to demand the disarmament of violent pro-government groups.

What began two weeks ago in the western state of Táchira as a student-led street movement demanding that the government address safety concerns on a university campus following the assault of a student soon spread to other cities. In the capital, Caracas, the street marches were spearheaded by opposition leader Leopoldo López, who called for protests to continue until the president, Nicolás Maduro stepped down from power. López currently awaits trial in a military jail.

Since the protests began, 10 people have died, 137 have been injured and 104 arrested, according to government figures.

In a press conference with foreign media on Friday, Maduro said the protests – the worst since his razor-thin election victory against Henrique Capriles last April – are only occurring in 18 of the country's 335 municipalities, all of which, he contends, are under opposition rule.

Maduro reiterated that the events of the last two weeks are a coup-in-the-making backed by the US and financed by Colombia's ex-president Álvaro Uribe, whom Maduro accuses López of working closely with. The proof of his allegations, he says, "will soon come to light".

But as Venezuelans take to the streets again it is hard to predict whether the march will be the last, or if it will serve to inject new energy into an opposition that has been dispersed over the last couple of nights by National Guard troops firing rubber bullets and teargas and tearing down the camps students set up on street corners.

In San Cristóbal, the state-capital of Táchira, where military action was felt the strongest, troops and tanks took to the streets on Wednesday to disperse crowds and to clear debris that was blocking the city's main roads. According to locals, the internet remained down until Friday.

In another effort to neutralise mounting tensions, the minister of energy, Rafael Ramirez, has banned fuel distribution to areas he considers "under-siege".

Human Rights Watch has issued a statement condemning the systematic violation of personal freedom and the unlawful imprisonment of civilians.

Adding to the uncertainty reigning in the streets of Venezuela is the complete media blackout. Private and public TV stations in the country have given little coverage to the street protests, or even to the incarceration of López, who now awaits trial in a military prison on the outskirts of Caracas on charges of sedition.

In the most flagrant demonstration of state censorship yet, several members of a CNN team had their journalist accreditation revoked and left the country amid accusations of "contributing with their coverage to psychological warfare".

But despite accusing the US of meddling in the country's internal affairs and expelling three US diplomat, Maduro has invited Obama to "a sincere dialogue between equals".

"Accept the challenge and we will start a high-level dialogue and put the truth on the table," Maduro said in a nationwide TV address.

Michael Shifter, head of the US thinktank Inter-American Dialogue, says that despite the government's severe weaknesses, it does not appear to be on the verge of collapse.

"Given the gravity of the current situation, it is not surprising that more and more Venezuelans are prepared to take to the streets to express their profound discontent with the government's ineptitude and the country's rapid descent," he said.

"It is not clear what can be accomplished through this approach.  It depends very much on what the government does now – both in dealing with sustained protests and Venezuela's deepening economic distress. If there is no relief on the economic front, it is likely that the protests will only intensify… Any reconciliation or even meaningful dialogue between the government and opposition forces seems like a long way off."

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Western nations scramble to contain fallout of Ukraine crisis

EU leaders worry about country fracturing into pro and anti-Russian factions in aftermath of Viktor Yanukovych's ousting
Anti government protest in Ukraine
A portrait of Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko is seen during a rally on Independence Square in Kiev on Sunday. Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA
Ian Traynor in Brussels and Shaun Walker in Kiev

Western governments are scrambling to contain the fallout from Ukraine's weekend revolution, pledging money, support and possible EU membership, while anxiously eyeing the response of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, whose protégé has effectively been ousted.

As the big international loser of the three-month drama's denouement, the Kremlin has the potential to create the most mischief because of Ukraine's closeness, its pro-Russian affinities in the east and south, and the country's dependence on Russian energy supplies.

With the whereabouts of President Viktor Yanukovych still uncertain, the Ukrainian parliament on Sunday went about legalizing his downfall, giving interim presidential powers to an ally of Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister who was released from jail on Saturday. Oleksandr Turchinov said the parliament should work to elect a government of national unity by Tuesday, ahead of elections that are planned for 25 May.

Yanukovych appeared on television from an undisclosed location on Saturday night, claiming he was still president and comparing the protesters to Nazis, but he continued to haemorrhage support on Sunday; even the leader of his parliamentary faction said he had "betrayed" Ukraine, and given "criminal orders".

A woman pays her respects at a memorial to anti-government protesters in Kiev, Ukraine
 A woman pays her respects at a memorial to killed anti-government protesters in Kiev.

Western leaders, while welcoming the unexpected turn of events in Kiev, are worried about the country fracturing into a pro-Russian and pro-western conflict. They are certain to push for a new government that is as inclusive as possible to replace the collapsed and discredited administration of Yanukovych, who vanished within hours of signing EU-mediated settlement terms with opposition leaders on Friday.

Maintaining the fragile country's territorial integrity swiftly emerged as the paramount concern in the west. "France, together with its European partners, calls for the preservation of the country's unity and integrity and for people to refrain from violence," said Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, echoing the key western worry that Kiev and western Ukraine could be pitted against the Russophone east and south.

Putin, busy at the closing ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, has not yet commented publicly on the violence of the last week and Yanukovych's flight from the capital. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany phoned him on Sunday to press for assurances on Russia's reaction. Susan Rice, national security adviser to the US president, Barack Obama, warned that Moscow would be making a "grave mistake" if it sent military aid to Ukraine.

"There are many dangers," said William Hague, the UK foreign secretary. "We don't know, of course, what Russia's next reaction will be. Any external duress on Ukraine, any more than we've seen in recent weeks … it really would not be in the interests of Russia to do any such thing."

Whether such nightmares are realized will hinge largely on the Kremlin's position and policies. Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, has called the protesters on Independence Square "pogromists", but it appears that Moscow is grudgingly coming to terms with the new reality. In a phone call with the US secretary of state John Kerry on Sunday, he accused the opposition of seizing power and failing to abide by the peace deal thrashed out on Friday.

People and protesters roam the garden in front of the mansion of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych
 Protesters roam the garden in front of the mansion of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's home in Mezhygirya, near Kiev.
Analysts say Yanukovych, disgraced as he is, no longer holds any use for the Kremlin, but how the Russians will react on the ground is still an open question. This also partly depends on how the new Ukrainian government behaves. One of the first issues the parliament tackled this weekend was that of the language, annulling a bill that provided for Russian to be used as a second official language in regions with large Russian-speaking populations. If the new government also looks to end the lease of a Black Sea naval base by the Russian military, the response from Moscow could be more aggressive.

"It will definitely depend on how the new government behaves," said Vladimir Zharikin, a Moscow-based analyst. "If they continue with these revolutionary excesses then certainly, that could push other parts of the country towards separatist feelings. Let's hope that doesn't happen."

In Kiev, the barricades around Independence Square remained in place, though the lines of riot police facing off against them had long evaporated. Thousands of people of all ages came to the barricades to pay their respects to the 77 people who died last week, in the bloody clashes that eventually led to Yanukovych fleeing.

As the third of three official days of mourning came to an end, priests continued to sing laments from the stage in the square. Between the soot-black pavements and the slate-grey sky, there were splashes of bright colour as thousands brought bunches of flowers to lay at makeshift memorials to the dead.

At Yanukovych's residence outside Kiev, a team of investigative journalists went to work on a trove of documents fished from the water; the president's minders had apparently tried unsuccessfully to destroy them before fleeing. Thousands of people again came to see the vast, luxurious compound with their own eyes.

Tymoshenko, who has her eyes on the presidency, met the US and EU ambassadors in Kiev. She was released from prison on Saturday and went straight to Independence Square, where she promised to fight for a free Ukraine. Nonetheless, there was ambivalence about the former prime minister among the protesters, with many feeling that she represents the divisive and corrupt politics of the past.

There was no clear central authority in Kiev on Sunday, with the city patrolled by a self-proclaimed "defence force", comprised of groups of men wearing helmets and carrying baseball bats. Nevertheless, the mood is orderly and peaceful, and the protest representatives have been meeting with the police and security services in an attempt to restore a feeling of normality to the capital.

With the country about to turn a new leaf in its history, for the first time since the crisis erupted in November, senior EU officials spoke of the possibility of Ukraine joining the European Union which, if serious, would represent a major policy shift.

"We are at a historical juncture and Europe needs to live up to its historical moment and be able to provide Ukraine with an accession perspective in the medium-to-long term – if Ukraine can meet the conditions of accession," said the economics commissioner, Olli Rehn, at a G-20 meeting in Australia.

Until now, Brussels' policy towards Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, known as the eastern partnership, has been expressly intended as a substitute for rather than a step towards EU membership. It was the EU deal, Yanukovych's rejection of political and trade pacts with the bloc in favor of cheap loans and energy from Russia, that sparked the conflict and crisis in November.

With the likelihood of Russia's $15bn (£9bn) lifeline also dissolving, the EU was under pressure to come up with funding to shore up an economy on the brink of bankruptcy. "We are ready to engage in substantial financial assistance for Ukraine once a political solution, based on democratic principles, is finalized and once there is a new government which is genuinely and seriously engaged in institutional and economic reforms," said Rehn.

The EU said its foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, would travel to Ukraine on Monday. "In Kiev she is expected to meet key stakeholders and discuss the support of the European Union for a lasting solution to the political crisis and measures to stabilize the economic situation," an EU statement said.

The likelihood was of an International Monetary Fund programme, supported by the US and the EU, although EU officials partly blame the IMF for the November fiasco by attaching strict terms to loans and prodding Yanukovych towards Moscow.

"We will be ready to engage, ready to help," said Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief who is also being tipped as a contender for a job at the top of the EU this year. But the IMF will insist on major reforms and steps to arrest the routine plunder of the country by Ukraine's oligarchs in cahoots with the politicians.

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