Back stateside after American Airlines and their computer glitch kept me at the Caracas airport for over eight hours and which also kept me overnight at the Miami airport.

But that doesn’t mean world politics has slowed down while I’ve been covering the Venezuelan elections.

The Italian electoral college begins to choose a new president tomorrow to succeed Giorgio Napolitano, and presumably, the person who will call new elections later this summer or perhaps this autumn.  I hope to have some more thoughts on that later today.

Paraguay will likely return the Colorados to power this Sunday in both the presidential and parliamentary elections. I hope to have a lot more on that in the coming days as well.

There’s also the not insignificant Icelandic elections later this month, early May snap elections in Malaysia (occasional guest contributor Andrew Novak is currently there now and may have some on-the-ground impressions soon).

Then there’s a barrage of mid-May elections in Pakistan (Pervez Musharraf has been barred from running), in Bulgaria, in the Philippines and in British Columbia.

So it’s going to be a busy month ahead — all while we keep an eye on how the Venezuelan election fallout shapes up.  So stay tuned — and thanks as usual for reading!