The suit, filed to Germany's federal prosecutor Monika Harms at her offices in the western German city of Karlsruhe, is a second attempt to prosecute Rumsfeld in Germany after a similar case was rejected two years ago.

"We failed two years ago because there was an ongoing investigation in the United States, but it is now clear that there is no chance of prosecuting high-ranking officials in the U.S.," the German lawyer representing the detainees, Wolfgang Kaleck told a press conference in Berlin.

"We are not expecting that Rumsfeld will appear in a court, but we are hoping investigators will begin looking into the case," he said. "We want to show that there will be no safe haven anywhere in the world for him," he added.

The civil rights activists, accusing Rumsfeld of approving special "tactics" including sleep deprivation and a ban on praying, called for an investigation and, ultimately, a criminal prosecution that will look into the responsibility of high-ranking U.S. officials for allegedly authorizing war crimes in the context of the war on terror.

Rumsfeld resigned last week after Republicans lost control of the U.S. Congress to the opposition Democrats in midterm elections largely due to the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq.

In court papers, Cheney's lawyers said Wilson did not have any grounds to bring the suit. Even if she did, the vice president was shielded from civil suits, they said.

The suit focused on conversations between Cheney and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, about Plame's job at the CIA.

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald had been investigating the leak case since October 2003.

No one had been charged for the leak, but Libby was charged with lying to investigators about his own conversations with reporters regarding Plame. Libby, who faces trial in January next year on perjury and obstruction, has asked that the lawsuit be dismissed.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has admitted that he was the source of the leak of information about Wilson's identify to newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak in the summer of 2003.

The forum presented on Tuesday a new synthetic product with anti-tumoral properties patented by a team of Cuban scientists from the Havana-based Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB).

According to Granma daily, the first phase of the clinical test in 31 uterine-cancer patients has already been completed, and it was further evidenced that secondary reactions are minor when compared to conventional therapies.

The new medicine, presented with the CIGB-300 code, is a compound that inhibits and kills the CK2 enzyme, which is found at high levels in malignant tumors.

Venezuela and Argentina each sold $500 million worth of the bond and plan to offer more later this week. A press statement from the Venezuelan finance ministry said that the demand both in terms of the number of buy requests and the number of different financial institutions involved represented a historical high.

According to the ministry, the market's support for the sale of these bonds showed support "for the financial development of the economies of the region."

The Venezuelan bonds were sold in Bolivars, the local currency, which essentially allowed investors to exchange Bolivars for Dollar-denominated bonds, giving them access to dollars at the official exchange rate. Venezuela currently has currency exchange controls in place, which makes it difficult for investors to access dollars at the official exchange rate. The black market exchange rate is about 30% higher than the official exchange rate.

According to many analysts, the high demand for these bonds showed that there is a tremendous amount of liquidity in the economy. The cash in the Venezuelan economy, according Bloomberg, has increased by 50% since March of this year.

Draining some of the liquidity through the sale of bonds will lower pressures on inflation, which was 15.5% last month.

Latin America is traditionally seen as a continent set apart from colonial projects elsewhere, the outcome of its long experience of settlement since the 16th century. Yet it truly belongs in the history of the global expansion of white-settler populations from Europe in the more recent period. Today's elites are largely the product of the immigrant European culture that has developed during the two centuries since independence.
The characteristics of the European empires' white-settler states in the 19th and 20th centuries are well known. The settlers expropriated the land and evicted or exterminated the existing population; they exploited the surviving indigenous labour force on the land; they secured for themselves a European standard of living; and they treated the surviving indigenous peoples with extreme prejudice, drafting laws to ensure they remained largely without rights, as second- or third-class citizens.

Latin America shares these characteristics of "settler colonialism", an evocative term used in discussions about the British empire. Together with the Caribbean and the US, it has a further characteristic not shared by Europe's colonies elsewhere: the legacy of a non-indigenous slave class. Although slavery had been abolished in much of the world by the 1830s, the practice continued in Latin America (and the US) for several decades. The white settlers were unique in oppressing two different groups, seizing the land of the indigenous peoples and appropriating the labour of their imported slaves.

A feature of all "settler colonialist" societies has been the ingrained racist fear and hatred of the settlers, who are permanently alarmed by the presence of an expropriated underclass. Yet the race hatred of Latin America's settlers has only had a minor part in our customary understanding of the continent's history and society. Even politicians and historians on the left have preferred to discuss class rather than race.

In Venezuela, elections in December will produce another win for Hugo Chávez, a man of black and Indian origin. Much of the virulent dislike shown towards him by the opposition has been clearly motivated by race hatred, and similar hatred was aroused the 1970s towards Salvador Allende in Chile and Juan Perón in Argentina. Allende's unforgivable crime, in the eyes of the white-settler elite, was to mobilise the rotos, the "broken ones" - the patronising and derisory name given to the vast Chilean underclass. The indigenous origins of the rotos were obvious at Allende's political demonstrations. Dressed in Indian clothes, their affinity with their indigenous neighbours would have been apparent. The same could be said of the cabezas negras - "black heads" - who came out to support Perón.

This unexplored parallel has become more apparent as indigenous organisations have come to the fore, arousing the whites' ancient fears. A settler spokesman, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian-now-Spanish novelist, has accused the indigenous movements of generating "social and political disorder", echoing the cry of 19th-century racist intellectuals such as Colonel Domingo Sarmiento of Argentina, who warned of a choice between "civilisation and barbarism".

Latin America's settler elites after independence were obsessed with all things European. They travelled to Europe in search of political models, ignoring their own countries beyond the capital cities, and excluding the majority from their nation-building project. Along with their imported liberal ideology came the racialist ideas common among settlers elsewhere in Europe's colonial world. This racist outlook led to the downgrading and non-recognition of the black population, and, in many countries, to the physical extermination of indigenous peoples. In their place came millions of fresh settlers from Europe.

Yet for a brief moment during the anti-colonial revolts of the 19th century, radical voices took up the Indian cause. A revolutionary junta in Buenos Aires in 1810 declared that Indians and Spaniards were equal. The Indian past was celebrated as the common heritage of all Americans, and children dressed as Indians sang at popular festivals. Guns cast in the city were christened in honour of Tupac Amaru and Mangoré, famous leaders of Indian resistance. In Cuba, early independence movements recalled the name of Hatuey, the 16th-century cacique, and devised a flag with an Indian woman entwined with a tobacco leaf. Independence supporters in Chile evoked the Araucanian rebels of earlier centuries and used Arauco symbols on their flags. Independence in Brazil in 1822 brought similar displays, with the white elite rejoicing in its Indian ancestry and suggesting that Tupi, spoken by many Indians, might replace Portuguese as the official language.

The radicals' inclusive agenda sought to incorporate the Indian majority into settler society. Yet almost immediately this strain of progressive thought disappears from the record. Political leaders who sought to be friendly with the indigenous peoples were replaced by those anxious to participate in the global campaign to exterminate indigenous peoples. The British had already embarked on that task in Australia and South Africa, and the French took part after 1830 when they invaded Algeria.

Latin America soon joined in. The purposeful extermination of indigenous peoples in the 19th century may well have been on a larger scale than anything attempted by the Spanish and the Portuguese in the earlier colonial period. Millions of Indians died because of a lack of immunity to European diseases, yet the early colonists needed the Indians to grow food and to provide labourers. They did not have the same economic necessity to make the land free from Indians that would provoke the extermination campaigns on other continents in the same era. The true Latin American holocaust occurred in the 19th century.

The slaughter of Indians made more land available for settlement, and between 1870 and 1914 five million Europeans migrated to Brazil and Argentina. In many countries the immigration campaigns continued well into the 20th century, sustaining the hegemonic white-settler culture that has lasted to this day.

Yet change is at last on the agenda. Recent election results have been described, with some truth, as a move to the left, since several new governments have revived progressive themes from the 1960s. Yet from a longer perspective these developments look more like a repudiation of Latin America's white-settler culture, and a revival of that radical tradition of inclusion attempted two centuries ago. The outline of a fresh struggle, with a final settling of accounts, can now be discerned.

- This article is based on the third annual SLAS lecture, given to the Society for Latin American Studies in October. Richard Gott is the author of Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press)

"I never said anything of the kind. And I find it disgraceful that people can use this kind of argument. Feminism is a noble cause, but you don't grow up by making remarks like that," he said.

Asked if Royal was a liar, he said: "That or she is ill-informed. If candidates are tired, let them rest. I am not tired, and I could not ignore what was said by acquiescently staying silent," he said.

After a speech on Monday Royal, 53, drew hoots and laughter when she quoted Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister, as saying after a debate on international affairs that "she would have done better to stay at home instead of reading from her recipe-cards."

Royal also resurrected a quote attributed to the third candidate in the socialist race, left-wing former prime minister Laurent Fabius, 60, who allegedly said on hearing of her presidential ambitions: "Who's going to look after the children?"

Royal has four children with her partner, Socialist Party (PS) leader Francois Hollande.

Fabius repeated his denial of the quotation Tuesday. "Those who know me know that I am not a chauvinist," he said.

Some 220,000 card-carrying members of PS vote on Thursday to choose which of the three will be their candidate in April's election against the likely right-wing contender Nicolas Sarkozy, 51.

Royal has a clear lead in opinion polls, but Strauss-Kahn and Fabius hope to force a second round of voting in a week by together forming a blocking majority. The run-off would be between the two leading candidates.

With tensions running high on the last day of campaigning, Strauss-Kahn launched an outspoken offensive against the front-runner -- accusing Royal of producing a series of incoherent and authoritarian policies.

"She has spent the campaign correcting and modifying. In five weeks of campaign there have been five major corrections ... I note that there are 25 weeks till the presidential election," he said.

"To beat Nicolas Sarkozy we need to set out a course which is different from the one he is proposing. If we don't set out a course, if we fall back on 'order', yesterday, the past, if there is no forward looking dynamic, we will lose," he said.

Royal has been accused of producing a series of crowd-pleasing measures which go against PS orthodoxy, such as boot-camps for young delinquents and "popular juries" to monitor elected politicians.

The presidential election takes place over two rounds on April 22 and May 6. Results of the socialist ballot will be known early Friday.

The three candidates were to address their last meetings of supporters Wednesday evening, Royal in Nantes, Fabius in Rouen and Strauss-Kahn in Narbonne in the south.

Leading political commentator Alain Duhamel said in Liberation newspaper that the month of campaigning had brought out unexpected qualities in Royal: "audacity, a determination of steel, a sense of timing, a feel for the questions which people care about."

But it also revealed "major deficiencies in her understanding of issues -- notably international -- and a regrettable propensity for demagogy. For the occasion, she has invented what one could call 'lightweight populism'," he said.