Besides indulging in the occasional odd blog I also podcast. In fact it was through podcasting that I came upon Polizeros Bob in cyberspace — ie: yours and mein host — in the first instance. Now I got myself an LA franchise.

Among my podcastables is VenSol: the Venezuela Solidarity podcast. VenSol carries reports from Caracas and audio generated by VenezuelaAnalysis

But the podcast also offers a great networking tool and my fellow podcastor Warwick Fry — who works out of NimFM Community Radio here in Australia — runs LatinRadical . In the latest edition, Warwick showcases his new song on Bono — the man from the band U2 — who is sponsoring a game which offers a Venezuelan invasion scenario. Since Bono is touring Australia next month the local solidarity community was keen to mark his visit with protests. What better way than with a song?

Latin American solidarity activism has been big time here since the early seventies when Chileans arrived in exile. Even the current president of Chile — Michelle Bachelet — spent part of her exile here.

So while we may be a world away, like so many world wide, Australians are looking to Latin America for lessons and inspiration. So we get to know a lot here about Yankee imperialismo too.

I was also helping out a new blog that one of the leading activists here has instigated: Bolivia Rising. So if you are keen on “the axis of Evo” maybe you’ll appreciate the translations archived there from the original Spanish.

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And blogging about The Lancet report.

She lives in Baghdad and hadn’t blogged for over two months, saying she feels hopelessness.

There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.

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A drunk driver, Martin Heidgen, has been found guilty of murder in New York. He drove the wrong way on a freeway for nearly three miles, was three times over the legal blood alcohol limit of 0.08, and ran into a limo, killing the driver and a 7 year old girl.

I’ve been sober quite a few years now - and drove drunk many times before that. Stories like this give me chills, both for what I could have done and thankfully never did, and for families and friends of those killed by drunk drivers.

As for the drunk driver, rehabilitation is possible. Once you quit drinking, change can occur. I know more than a few men who committed violent crimes drunk, went to prison, and now that they been sober a long time, you’d never even remotely guess what their pasts were like. They ain’t that guy any more.

Would the driver have gotten the same conviction if, say, he’d gotten drunk, started shooting up the house, and a bullet went through the walls and killed someone next door? Would that be murder too? Or would it be manslaughter, which would still put you in prison for several years, but not as long as murder would.

That depends on how you define “depraved indifference,” the state of mind he was judged to be in while driving. Often people that who are that drunk don’t remember what happened, they were in a blackout, with their mental functions just as impaired as their physical functions. I’m not sure you can be ‘depraved’ when you’re nearly comatose.

The jury may have thought he was depraved because he passed other cars while going the wrong way on the freeway and thus his hitting the limo had to be purposeful. Um, he may have been so drunk that he was swearing at the other cars for driving crazy, honking at him, and swerving - and had no concept what was really happening. He tested out at 0.28, which is knee-walking drunk.

Heidgen could get 25 to life (whereas manslaughter would be 10-12 years.) Some experts say the verdict may well be overturned on appeal because the court “will make it crystal clear to prosecutors throughout the state that the murder statute is not designed for alcohol-related driving activity.”

The mother of the 7 year old girl held her daughters’s decapitated head in her lap until paramedics had to physically separate her from it. That family, and the family of the limo driver, will never recover from this hideous tragedy, one that would have never happened had one alcoholic decided to stop drinking that night instead.

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Right here.

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