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With the national youth conference, a planned coup revealed, students going back to uni yesterday, and the campaign to discuss the laws as well as for the elections heating up, it has been quite a week. 

Tuesday – My friend texted me that her

The first house we visited was really fancy- the kind with furniture

I had to go to the ‘sala situacional’ – kinda like a logistics centre, which has lists of all the branches, spokespeople, circumscriptions (group of 10 branches) etc. That was a bus trip away and I couldn’t work out which bus to get.

He is a student who moved here from Falcon state, where his family is. He’s one of five siblings and he told me how his dad had 2 siblings to a previous girlfriend, left his mother when he was 10 and has another 5 kids by a new wife, but does nothing to support the other kids

What only a few days ago seemed like a remote prospect has suddenly become a real possibility. The Colombian military's brutal massacre of 21 (at last count) guerrillas with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - Peoples Army (FARC-EP), including Raul Reyes, the FARC's chief negotiator and spokesperson, in Ecuador on March 1 marks a dramatic leap in the United States' plan to potentially trigger off an armed confrontation between Colombia and Venezuela.

“In order that December 2 never happens again” Chavez argued on Saturday that it was necessary to go on the offensive with the “United Socialist Party of Venezuela as the spearhead and vanguard” of the revolution. “Enough with betraying the people. We have arrived here to make a real revolution or die trying”.

Chavez uttered these words as he opened the founding congress of the provisionally named United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). This speech was the latest in a series of reflections, following the defeat of his proposed constitutional reform last December 2.

During last year’s "state of the nation" address, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez outlined his plan to speed up the revolution over 2007. Central to this was the "5 motors" that were to drive the revolution forward, along with reiterating his call to form a united socialist party of the revolution.

With the defeat of the referendum on constitutional reform - one of the motors - the false start of the motor on new geometry of power which was tied to the reform, a poor showing on the other 3, and the new party still non-existent, Chavez end 2007 in a difficult position.

Since then much has been made about the direction the revolution will take partly Chavez's talk of "putting the brakes" on the revolution and his cabinet reshuffle. An article in the New Statesman even went as far as to say that Chavez was doing a U-turn on his socialist project.

However his speech for the "state of the nation" address today to the National Assembly gave a bit of an insight into what we can expect this year.

Can you imagine: the Bushes and Clintons in the White House for fifty-two years; or, a janitor at a local university voting for whom the next university president will be; or, the U.S. invading Spain to bring democracy to the country? As the Four Jacks and a Jill sang in the late 60s, “It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack.”