Dark oil slicks are spreading from the middle of Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo towards the shores -- the wetlands, mangroves, beaches and docks. Oil is permeating fishing nets, coating the garbage dumped into the water, killing off wildlife and driving away residents and tourists.

"My sons would set out the nets and at dawn would bring in mullet and corvina fish to sell to small restaurants in Puerto Caballo. They stopped several months ago because what they caught were blackened and damaged," Adelso Silva, an elderly fisherman from Santa Cruz de Mara, near the city of Maracaibo, capital of Zulia state.

Located in northwest Venezuela and connected by a natural channel to the Caribbean Sea, Lake Maracaibo is the largest in South America, with a surface area of 12,800 square kilometres and a volume of 245 billion cubic metres of water. The shoreline and lakebed have been the sites of intense petroleum production since the second decade of the 20th century.

Yesterday José Miguel Insulza presented to the President of the OAS Permanent Council, Maria Isabel Salvador, the 12 page report of the High Commission appointed to report on conditions in Honduras. The full report has not yet been released, but its conclusions just appeared in the Honduran press. As reported in El Tiempo, the High Commission proposed seven points that could make it possible for Honduras to return to the OAS.

Colombia - A report released by U.S. NGO the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) finds an "alarming link" between Colombian military units that received U.S. funding and cases of extrajudicial killings or "false positives" -- in which civilians were murdered and presented as guerrillas killed in combat -- committed by those units.  John Lindsay-Poland, the FOR's research and advocacy director, told Colombia Reports that the NGO undertook the two year research project on Colombia as a case to study, in order to evaluate the affects that U.S. military aid has on human rights.  To compile the report, the FOR drew on data from the Colombian prosecutor general's office, the Colombian inspector general's office and 20 human rights organizations, in order to study 3,000 cases of false positives committed by members of the Colombian armed forces since 2002. These cases were then cross-referenced with lists of more than 500 Colombian military units who received assistance from the U.S.

Six Reasons Why Argentina Legalized Gay Marriage First...  1) First, Catholics don't go to Church and Evangelicals are (still) small in number. ... 2) Second, separation of church and party.  It is not enough to have separation of church and state, as do most countries in the region. It is vital to have separation of church and party. ... 3) Third, transnational legalism.  Much has been written about how globalization helps to promote LGBT rights.  But Argentina shows that there is a type of globalization that is especially helpful, and which incidentally, is scarce in the United States--transnational legalism.  This term refers to the ease with which a country's legal system borrows from international cases to set legal precedents domestically. ... 4) Fourth, domestic legal resources. It would be incorrect to say that Argentina's pro-LGBT groups drew exclusively from abroad.  They also drew from domestic sources. ... 5) Fifth, democracy, yes; referendum democracy, no.  Perhaps the most important victory by pro-LGBT groups in Argentina was to avoid the referenda trap. ... 6) Sixth, and lastly, the president presides.  Ultimately, what made the law possible was the President's decision to take the risk of backing the bill.