KHARTOUM (Reuters) –
U.S. Sudan envoy Scott Gration began crisis talks with political leaders in Khartoum on Thursday after the shock withdrawal of a presidential candidate threatened to undermine the credibility of coming elections.

Yasir Arman, the candidate for the south’s dominant Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) pulled out of the race late Wednesday, less than two weeks before voting, citing concerns over election fraud and insecurity in Darfur.

Opposition parties were due to meet later Thursday to discuss whether to unite in boycotting the vote, a move that would seriously undermine what were supposed to be Sudan’s first multi-party elections in 24 years.

The SPLM also said it would boycott voting in Darfur, the scene of a seven-year conflict, going back on an earlier threat to pull out of the whole vote in the north in solidarity with opposition parties.

The elections are central to a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil war between Sudan’s Muslim north and the South, where most follow Christianity and traditional beliefs.

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KHARTOUM (AFP) –
Key Sudanese presidential hopeful Yassir Arman has pulled out of April’s vote, leaving the way clear for a first-round win by President Omar al-Beshir unless the opposition finds a single candidate.

The move, announced by Arman’s ex-rebel group, came Wednesday after Beshir ruled out deferring the first multi-party polls in 24 years.

“I took the decision to withdraw for two reasons. Firstly, after having campaigned in Darfur, I realised that it was impossible to hold elections there due to the current state of emergency,” Arman told AFP early Thursday.

“Secondly, there are irregularities in the electoral process which is rigged.”

Stressing that his fight would continue despite his pullout from the race, Arman declared: “President Beshir is a burden for Sudan and for his own party. He’s been leading Sudan for over 20 years. That’s enough.”

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LA MADRUGA, Cuba – James DeWolf Perry VI’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather used African slaves to grow coffee on this rocky hillside outside Havana, and to him its thorny weeds and small sugar plots feel haunted.

“Do you feel the ghost of James DeWolf out here?” asks Katrina Browne, Perry’s distant cousin.

“Yes,” he replies, drawing out the word in a long, awkward breath.

Both are descendants of the DeWolfs of Bristol, Rhode Island, who became the biggest slave-trading family in U.S. history, shipping well over 11,000 Africans to the Americas between 1769 and 1820. It was a business that made the family patriarch, James DeWolf, America’s second-wealthiest man.

The cousins came to Cuba this week as part of a visit by the U.S. replica of the 19th-century slave ship Amistad — which on Wednesday wrapped up a 10-day educational mission to the island.

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MONTPELIER, Vt. – The cargo ship captain who spent five days as a hostage of Somali pirates says in a new book it was a high-seas double-cross that led to his brutal ordeal in a sweltering lifeboat.

Richard Phillips says that one of the AK-47-wielding pirates was grabbed by the crew of the Maersk Alabama last year, but the crew agreed to release him if the pirates released their captive, Phillips.

Bad idea, he says now. The crew gave up the pirate, but the other pirates reneged on the swap and kept Phillips.

“Don’t make deals with pirates,” Phillips writes in “A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS and Dangerous Days at Sea.” “We should have never made the exchange.”

Phillips calls that one of three mistakes he made in the encounter, which saw him beaten, tied up and threatened before he was rescued days later by the U.S. Navy.

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Guillermo Zuloaga isn’t exactly a paragon of responsible journalism. In 2002 he and his Venezuelan television network, Globovision, backed a military coup against democratically elected President Hugo Chavez. Since then, Globovision has been so gratuitously and vociferously anti-Chavez it makes Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Barack Obama seem even-handed.

So who could make a media martyr out of a guy like Zuloaga? Chavez may well have done it on March 25, when his left-wing government arrested Zuloaga for making comments “offensive and disrespectful” to the President. Speaking in Aruba the week before, Zuloaga had remarked that it was a shame Chavez wasn’t overthrown in the failed April 2002 coup and said the putsch happened because Chavez had ordered his forces to fire on anti-government protesters, an opposition charge that has never been proven. Zuloaga went on to argue that Venezuela lacks freedom of expression because Chavez is increasingly harassing independent media, including Globovision, a network Chavez has repeatedly threatened to shut down. “Chavez,” said Zuloaga, who denies the defamation-against-the-state charge and is now free on bail, “is setting up a disguised communism.” (Read a review of the book Chavez gifted to President Obama in April 2009.)

Provocative stuff – but in few countries would it merit the five years in prison Zuloaga could get if he’s convicted under Venezuela’s defamation laws. Another Chavez opponent, former Zulia state Governor Oswaldo Alvarez Paz, was arrested on March 24 for suggesting, on Globovision, that Venezuelan officials had aided the Basque terrorist group ETA, and that Venezuela had become a key transshipment point for drug traffickers. (He denies the charge of spreading false information but remains locked up, say prosecutors, as a flight risk.) “The end of impunity for the bourgeoisie has come,” Chavez declared. He rejected claims that the arrests were politically motivated efforts to stifle opposition to his 11-year-old revolution, as the economy falters and he faces a growing challenge in this year’s parliamentary elections. And he insisted that due process was being followed. “Who can criticize that?” he asked.

It’s not due process of law that’s being criticized in these cases. It’s the law itself that’s under international scrutiny, even in judicially challenged Latin America. “The real question is not the legality of these (criminal defamation) measures but their legitimacy,” says Mariclen Stelling of the independent Media Observatory in Caracas. Carlos Lauria, Americas coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York, agrees: “There is a growing international consensus that laws that criminalize speech are not compatible with human rights.” Last year Brazil, Argentina and Costa Rica scrapped their criminal defamation laws; Mexico and El Salvador became the first to eliminate them, at least at the federal level, in 2007. This year justices in countries including Colombia and Chile have dismissed a number of defamation convictions. (See what Chavez’s presidential win meant for Latin American democracy.)

Speech that incites the violent overthrow of a government or physical injury to people is still a criminal offense in most if not all nations. But libel and slander are being moved to civil courts, where most jurists agree they belong, and out of the criminal arena – where the threat of prison sentences is often used by governments and elites to muzzle press freedoms and dissent.

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