Honduras 2 - This one in French

Quelques infos fraîches pour compléter mon poste précédent:

En fait, il ne faut plus parler d'un coup d'état mais d'un retour à la démocratie compte tenu des actes répétitifs illégaux commis par l'ex Pdt Manuel Zelaya qui avait decidé d'effectuer un réferendum (organisé en sa faveur et soutenu par Chavez) entre les deux tours des élections dont la dernière étape sera en Novembre 2009, puisque les internes ont déja eu lieu et le peuple Hondurien a choisi ses leaders pour chaque parti.

Ayant imposé, par tous les moyens son référendum EN DÉPIT de l'illégalité qui lui avait été signifiée par tous les organes institutionnels protégant la constitution nationale (Congrès national, Cour suprême, Tribunal suprême d'élection), jusqu'à destituer de ses fonctions le chef des armées qui refusait d'exécuter un ordre illégal contre la constitution en refusant d'accompagner et de protéger un référendum rejeté par le peuple.

Le Général a été instantanément restitué a l'unanimité par la totalité des députés du Congrès national et declaré héros national par le peuple et les médias. Mr Zelaya a continué dans un aveuglement sans limite à vouloir organiser son référendum pour le dimanche 28 Juin ... toujours en parfaite illégalité par rapport à la constitution nationale, d'ou son arrestation et expulsion du pays dimanche matin a 1h00 am.

Instantanément la constitution transmet les pouvoirs au Vice Président, lequel a déja démissionné il y a plusieurs mois pour se présenter a la candidature pour justement les prochaines élections de Novembre, donc en l'absence de Vice Président, la constitution transmet les pouvoirs au President du Congrès national (Robereto Micheletti) qui a lui aussi beneficié instantanément de l'unanimité des votes des députés, tous partis confondus.

Ici à part quelques actions sporadiques, pneus brulés et lancers de pierres par quelques mutins (d'ailleurs toujours spectaculaires pour la presse internationale) la journée s'est d'ailleurs passée normalement dans les rues, tous les commerces ouverts, je suis allé travailler normalement, fais mes courses au supermarché normalement et récupéré une des filles qui était partie célébrer l'anniversaire chez un ami ..... Bien sur l'armée et la police protègent tous les sites stratégiques.

Le danger vient de l'extérieur, Chavez formule des menaces afin de remettre son émule au pouvoir, ce matin le Chancellier Hondurien annonçait offciellement que des mouvements de troupes avaient été déclarés présents à la frontière avec le Nicaragua (autre compère du Sr Chavez, qui a récemment rejoint l'ALBA, alliance revolutionnaire Bolivarienne, orchestrée par le Pdt du Venezuela) ainsi que plus de 900 individus de nationalité vénezuelienne, cubaine et nicaraguayenne ont investi le pays en possession de passeports honduriens. Certains de ces éléments sont connus pour être des professionnels de la mutinerie et ont déja été interpellés en possession de grenades a mains. Pour ramener le calme, un couvre-feu est proclamé le soir entre 21 h pm et 6h am.

A letter from Honduras

2 very good friends of mine are currently in Honduras. One of them is born there, the other one has lived a good part of his life there. Whenever a major event arises (and unless you've been too busy with MJ you have to know there's been a coup in Honduras), it's always interesting to compare what the people in the country have to say with what the media have to say.

Needless to say I have very good reasons to trust what my friends are telling me about the true reasons behind this coup and the misrepresentation that's being made of the situation in our news media.

Surprisingly, some of them are starting to relay the real thing. A few minutes ago I received this article from Mary Anastasia O'Grady from the Wall Street Journal. My friends asked me to relay it because it finally sheds some light on what's really going on there.

And yes, it's more complicated than the good president being overthrown by the evil army.

For the records, let's just say that I was told the majority of the facts below 2 days before the coup took place, including the part of the article which discusses Mr Zelaya ability to run the country.

Honduras Defends Its Democracy
Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object.

* By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Hugo Chávez's coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation's constitution. It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya's abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya's next move will be. It's not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating "the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter" and said it "should be condemned by all." Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders. It also said that when Mr. Zelaya realized that he was going to be prosecuted for his illegal behavior, he agreed to an offer to resign in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Mr. Zelaya denies it.

Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya's foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. "We won't go backwards," one sign said. "We want to live in peace, freedom and development."

Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.

For Hondurans who still remember military dictatorship, Mr. Zelaya also has another strike against him: He keeps rotten company. Earlier this month he hosted an OAS general assembly and led the effort, along side OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, to bring Cuba back into the supposedly democratic organization.

The OAS response is no surprise. Former Argentine Ambassador to the U.N. Emilio Cárdenas told me on Saturday that he was concerned that "the OAS under Insulza has not taken seriously the so-called 'democratic charter.' It seems to believe that only military 'coups' can challenge democracy. The truth is that democracy can be challenged from within, as the experiences of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and now Honduras, prove." A less-kind interpretation of Mr. Insulza's judgment is that he doesn't mind the Chávez-style coup.

The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators. This crisis clearly delineates the problem. In failing to come to the aid of checks and balances, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Insulza expose their true colors.

7 ways to help you think your presentations through

One often overlooked but critical step in preparing for a presentation is the thinking stage.

All of us who have ever had to do public presentations have probably shared a similar experience: someone comes up in your cubicle/office/life (circle correct answer based on your hierarchical/emotional relation with said person) and asks you to prepare a 30mn or so presentation for the end of the week.

Before you know it, you've launched PowerPoint, Keynote or Impress and you've already written ten slides using the default template (you know, the one with those dreaded bullets - did I mention I hate those?). By the time you've spent the first 15-30 mn working on this, you've created a monster, a hybrid, half-scratchpad half-presentation: ideas are not organized, there's a good chance you've overlooked a good half of your topic, your slides are uninspiring and you're pretty much guaranteed to put the audience to sleep in less than a minute.

So put this mouse down, close the presentation software and start thinking it through. Everyone need to take some time to put their thoughts together, organize their ideas, do some research, decide how they are going to tell the story and map out a plan of their presentation.

Putting the effort will be highly rewarding and I guarantee it will dramatically enhance the quality of your presentation, even if you are short of time and think you know your subject.

So here are 7 ways to help you during that stage:

1 - Close the computer: take a notepad and start throwing out ideas. I know it sounds lame but if you have nothing at your disposal (not even a connection to the Internet) that's still the best way I know. In fact, you should incorporate that in every "thinking" phase, regardless of what other method you use.

2 - Map your ideas: one disadvantage of the notepad is that once an idea is on the page, it can't be edited easily. You need to add some spatial dimension to your ideas and be able to move them around to better organize them. You can use post-it on a whiteboard or a mind mapping software such as mindjet mindmanager for instance. First throw as many things as you can think of, second, organize ideas in logical group, three, further explore some ramifications, four, before you now it you have a plan.

3 - Google it: type some search terms that relate to your topic or a specific aspect of it, and look for information sources. Look at the "Images" results to help you do some free association and find new ideas. Append "filetype:ppt" or "filetype:pdf" to your search string to restrict the results to a certain type of files (you'd be surprised how many powerpoint presentations are accessible directly from Google). Use Google Trends to measure and compare the popularity of search terms.

4 - Slideshare: if you're not familiar with it, slideshare is a web site on which people put their presentations for everyone to see, and sometimes download. It's a great source of inspiration when you want to see how other people have tackled the same topic you need to. Careful though, ripping is not inspiration. It's perfectly OK to use ideas that you'd not have thought about in the first place, but re-using slides as it is not a good idea and will make your pres look like an unfinished patchwork.

5 - TED: another great inspiration source is TED, a conference which has gathered some of the most brilliant people on the planet for quite some years in an effort to get them to share their thoughts and experience. The best part about TED: there are several hundreds of video available online (and some of them feature the very best presenters and presentations in the world) and the choice of subject is very large: culture, tech, economy, history, psychology, ecology, biology, physics, education ...

6 - Take it from the pros: no matter what you're talking about take some presentation lessons from the pros of this world to help you achieve new ways to frame your subject. I recommend looking at presentations from Garr Reynolds from Presentation Zen, Seth Godin (youTube is your friend), Edward Tufte and the work from Duarte Design (I recommend their book: slide:ology). You can also venture in the world of design to help you express some of your ideas with great visuals.

7 - Talk: OK, so you're in the middle of the jungle, you have no power, no Internet and you just broke a nail. There's still one thing you can do to help yourself prepare: talk. Try to pitch the core of your presentation to the first available human being you can find (who is not hostile and seems remotely interested in your subject). 2 things will come out of it: while pitching it, you will probably realize how mature or not your story is. Great presentations don't need slide. A 5 mn pitch in front of someone is certainly a good way to see how ready you are. Secondly, you will get feedback, something that no other tool can give you. It'll be like knowing the results of a race before it takes place. You'll be able to see what's working and what's not and you will have time to make the necessary adjustments before you do the real thing.

So next time you have a presentation to do, set aside some time and think things through. After all, you would not write an essay without preparing right ? Oh, you would ? OK, we'll talk about that later then.

It's the content stupid !

Why do some people on Twitter and other social media platforms spend their time talking about the platform itself and justifying why they decided to go social ?

Don't get me wrong, it's not the majority, but I still find it a somewhat widespread trend. As if looking in the mirror and describing the mirror could help you understand what you're seeing in it in the first place.

It's the content stupid! No matter what platform you're on, what's going to make you interesting or not (if that's what you're looking for on these things) is what you have to say. Your ideas. Your message. Not how you say it or which platforms you've chosen and why.

Look, I know it can be tempting to spend a fair amount of your posts being introspective and all that, but at the end of the day, readers don't really care about that. They probably have their own introspection sessions, and they certainly haven't chosen you to discuss all day long about why Twitter.

Unless of course you don't care about you're readers, which beg the question why did you choose social networking to express yourself?

When you write e-mails (yeah, I know, so web 1.0), it would never occurred to you to discuss why you choose e-mail to communicate with your correspondent. Well, it's the same for social networks. Especially since social networks allow you to reach a much broader audience than e-mail would ever allow to (except if you're in the spam business).

So whatever you do on social networks, keep one thing in mind: it's the content stupid! If you want to blog or tweet, put some thoughts into what you want to say to the world, not how you're going to say it.

Do you have a message ?