www.latintrade.com January, 2003

Venezuelans continue to pressure President Hugo Chávez to abandon office immediately or call early elections. Union group Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela, business chamber Fede-cámaras and other opposition leaders have given the government an ultimatum: resign or we strike!

“We are ready for the great strike!” —Union leader Carlos Ortega (El Universal)

“The people are going to defend the revolution. It won’t be guerrillas in the mountains, it will be people in the streets.” —Pro-government counter-striker Carlos González (The Houston Chronicle)

“The government is solidly united. It’s the opposition which is divided.” —Venezuelan Vice President José Vicente Rangel (Forbes)

“He who holds the most responsibility and power should yield the most.” —Episcopal Conference President Baltazar Porras (BBC Mundo)

“A strike has no chance of succeeding unless it is the final step in a process, the final break.” —Project Venezuela leader Henrique Salas Romer (The Washington Post)

“This is the time to resolve Venezuela’s difficulties peacefully, democratically and constitutionally, through an election.” —Otto Reich, former U.S. assistant secretary of state (The Miami Herald)

“I will call for elections, but in December 2006. And we will also win that election.” —Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (Clarín)

www.billingsgazette.com

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Soldiers loyal to President Hugo Chavez seized riot gear -- including submachine guns and shotguns -- from Caracas' police department Tuesday in what the opposition mayor called a deliberate effort to undermine him. Federal interference in the capital's police department is one reason Venezuela's opposition has staged a strike -- now in its 44th day -- demanding early elections. Tuesday's raids stoked already heated tensions in this polarized nation.

Greater Caracas Mayor Alfredo Pena said the weapons seizure stripped police of their ability to control street protests that have erupted almost daily since the strike began Dec. 2. Five people have died in strike-related demonstrations.

Strike leader Manuel Cova said opponents would "strengthen the struggle to topple" Chavez in response to the raids.

"This demonstrates the antidemocratic and authoritarian way in which this government acts," said Cova, leader of the Venezuelan Workers Confederation, the country's largest labor union.

Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said the seizure was part of an effort to make police answer for alleged abuses against Chavez demonstrators. The government accuses police of killing two Chavez supporters during a melee two weeks ago that involved Chavez followers, opponents and security forces.

"The metropolitan police cannot be above the law, above the executive, above citizens," Rangel told foreign reporters. "We are trying to make them answer to the law. That's why we seized their equipment and weapons."

Troops searched several police stations at dawn, confiscating submachine guns and 12-gauge shotguns used to fire rubber bullets and tear gas, said Cmdr. Freddy Torres, the department's legal consultant. Officers were allowed to keep their standard-issue .38-caliber pistols. It was not clear how long the seizure would last.

Chavez ordered troops to take control of the force in November, but the Supreme Court ordered it restored to Pena last month. Chavez is trying to break a strike that has paralyzed Venezuela's crucial oil industry and cost the government an estimated $4 billion. He has warned he might send troops to seize food production plants that are participating in the strike.

Called to press Chavez into accepting a nonbinding referendum on his rule, the strike has depleted many Caracas supermarkets of basics like milk, flour and bottled water. People spend hours in lines at service stations and at banks open only three hours a day. Many medicines are no longer are available in pharmacies. Rangel said the strike was weak outside of Caracas -- one reason the government has been able to survive.

"Is there a country on Earth that can withstand a strike for 44 days? I don't think so," the vice president said.

With hopes of helping resolve the dispute, former President Jimmy Carter plans to visit Caracas on Jan. 20 to observe the crisis, the Atlanta-based Carter Center announced.

Carter, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, will consult with Cesar Gaviria, secretary general of the Organization of American States, who has been mediating talks between the two sides, the center said.

Venezuela's oil industry provides half of government revenue and 80 percent of export revenue. With the strike, about 30,000 of 40,000 workers in the state oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., are off the job.

Venezuela is usually the world's fifth-largest exporter and a key supplier to the United States, and the U.S. Energy Department has said the crisis could cause American motorists to pay up to $1.54 per gallon of gasoline by spring.

www.kansascity.com Posted on Wed, Jan. 15, 2003 By EDWARD M. EVELD and LISA GUTIERREZ The Kansas City Star

Has somebody really cloned a human being? Or are the folks at Clonaid putting us on?

It's the hoax question. Again.

Bombarded with information, we constantly confront the puzzle of what to believe and what not to believe, from crop circles to John Edwards' "Crossing Over."

As hoaxes and big lies fall all around us -- there's no Bigfoot, no tainted Coca-Cola -- it's amazing we believe anyone about anything. But we do.

Even post-Watergate. Even post-Enron. Even though government officials, corporate executives, doctors and scientists have lost some of their aura of authority.

We like to think of ourselves as more sophisticated and more skeptical than ever. Certainly more so than those '60s rubes who fell for the cons of Frank Abagnale Jr., glorified now in the movie "Catch Me If You Can."

Yet even hoax "experts" admit to looking twice at that photo of the 80-pound monster cat on the Internet. And the president of Venezuela believed it was Fidel Castro on the phone last week, falling prey to a prank by two Miami disc jockeys.

And the women competing on TV's "Joe Millionaire" believe the good-looking bachelor is worth millions. But he's not. (Or is he?)

Thanks largely to the Internet -- that World Wide Web of deceit that warns of tainted perfume strips and offers free Gap clothes -- hoaxing is in its heyday.

"I think we're living through another golden age of hoaxes," said Alex Boese of San Diego, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes, an Internet site that chronicles history's more famous hoaxes (www.museumofhoaxes.com).

"In our culture we have very open minds about new things. So when you're very open to new possibility, you can easily get hoaxed."

Boese, 34, became fascinated with hoaxes while working on a history of science degree at the University of California-San Diego. He began collecting stories of the weird and wacky and posted them on his Web site in 1997. Museum of Hoaxes -- the book -- came out in November.

Boese's research took him back to 1726, where he found the tale of Mary Toft, a peasant woman in a small English town who gave birth to rabbits.

Made you stop, didn't it? People are especially fascinated with hoaxes concerning bodily atrocities, Boese said.

"Birth and extreme births have always been kind of a fascination with people," Boese said. In honor of Clonaid, he added birth hoaxes to his Web site.

The media have exposed hoaxes but have, in their history, done better perpetuating them. Media hijinks began in the early 1800s, Boese said, when America's penny press was hunting bigger circulations. Editors figured there wasn't enough real news to grab readers' attention. So why not make some up?

The first big scam was the Great Moon hoax. In 1835 the New York Sun ran stories claiming that British scientists had discovered life on the moon. Lunar unicorns. And beavers that stood on two feet and lived in huts.

But wait, there was more! A race of winged humans living on the moon!

Now the Internet is an engine of hoaxes, urban legends and rumors, but it also can be useful in stopping them in their tracks. Or at least trying to.

A Web site at hoaxbusters.ciac.org -- its logo is a court jester with the international slash through his tasseled headpiece -- tries to give visitors a heads-up about current e-mail hoaxes.

Rose Konopka, a cyber-security analyst for the U.S. Department of Energy in Livermore, Calif., said she and colleagues launched the site because they were bombarded by inquiries about hoaxes, to the point they couldn't focus on real computer security problems.

The Web site quickly grew popular within the Energy Department and then with the general public, she said.

When Konopka gives computer security talks, her best advice about hoaxes is simple: "Don't be afraid to hit `delete.' "

But how do you know real from scam, serious from hoax? Repetition, for one thing. By now, she said, everyone should know there's no Nigerian fellow who needs to give you his bank account number.

There are other recognizable attributes. Any message that says "send this to everyone you know" is unlikely to be legitimate. Beware of messages that drop names of famous people or corporations -- or appear to originate from such lofty offices -- and of those that use technical language.

One widely distributed hoax told e-mail recipients that "if the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity binary loop which can severely damage the processor." All made up.

Most hoax messages sound like chain letters. There's the hook, which seems plausible and plays on fear or sympathy, such as "virus alert" or "little girl is dying." Then comes the threat, the dire consequences if you delete the message. Often there's a request, either for money or for help in distributing the message.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, confronted with one health hoax after another, has devoted part of its Web site, www.cdc.gov/hoax(UNDERSCORE)rumors, to debunking bad information.

Under the heading "False Report: Poisonous Perfume Samples in the Mail," for example, the CDC states unequivocally that women are not dropping dead after inhaling free perfume samples that come in the mail.

With the anthrax scare, apparently, poisoned scents didn't seem out of the question.

Ditto for the bogus "Klingerman virus," which victims supposedly contracted by handling a sponge that arrived in a package labeled "A gift for you from the Klingerman Foundation."

Why do people try to pull off such hoaxes? They get a charge out of it. They like to see how far a published hoax can spread, Konopka said. "It's like writing viruses -- because you can," she said. "Just for kicks."

More often, hoaxsters want the attention. "Everybody wants to be a celebrity," said Boese of the hoax museum. "But not everybody has a good, compelling, truthful reason why other people would be interested in them.

"In that case, if you don't get what you want by telling the truth, you get what you want by telling a lie. And the more creative a lie you can come up with, the more attention you'll get."

Case in point: The infamous Taco Bell April Fool's joke in 1996, when the fast-food chain made a bogus announcement that it bought the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and would rename it the Taco Liberty Bell.

People got so mad that Taco Bell quickly owned up to the joke.

Maybe the company would have gotten more attention if it had cloned a baby.

Technological advances, especially in the biomedical field recently, make almost anything seem possible now. Scientists have cloned a sheep, so what's so far-fetched about a cloned human?

Falling for the far-fetched doesn't necessarily make us suckers. Not in Boese's book anyway. "I think you have to keep a sense of humor about it."

To reach Edward M. Eveld, features writer, call (816) 234-4442 or send e-mail to eeveld@kcstar.com.

To reach Lisa Gutierrez, features reporter, call (816) 234-4987 or send e-mail to lgutierrez@kcstar.com.

Laughing matters?

See more hoaxes:

• www.museum of hoaxes: A look at famous hoaxes throughout history. Test your skills at spotting hoax photos.

• www.stiller.com/hoaxa.htm: An alphabetical list of common hoaxes -- computer viruses and others.

Avoid hoaxes:

...hoaxbusters.ciac.org: Warns about current e-mail hoaxes. Run by employees of the U.S. Department of Energy in Livermore, Calif.

...www.cdc.gov: Debunks health hoaxes. Run by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

reuters.com Wed January 15, 2003 11:30 AM ET By Hugh Bronstein

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Venezuelans brought their struggle for power to New York's posh Park Avenue on Wednesday, with opposition calls for the ouster of President Hugo Chavez clashing with the shouts of his supporters.

Members of the opposition told market analysts, investors, and Venezuelan expatriates gathered at the Americas Society that if their efforts succeed, the country would become a safer place to invest.

Outside the meeting, on the streets of Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood, a dozen pro-Chavez demonstrators shouted slogans defending his presidency.

"It is a demonstration of what's going on in Venezuela, where two extremes are radicalizing their own positions," said Luis Oganes, a sovereign debt strategist at J.P. Morgan who attended the meeting.

Back home, Chavez's foes extended an ongoing strike aimed at forcing him to call early elections into its 45th day. In New York, they called on investors to ramp up pressure on Chavez to resign.

"The international community can no longer be passive," said Timoteo Zambrano, a member of the National Assembly of Venezuela. "It has to take on a greater role."

As the domestic standoff, which has crippled oil production in the world's fifth-largest petroleum exporter, intensifies, both sides in the conflict have appealed for international support. Chavez is to hold talks on Thursday with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York.

Opposition leaders argued that while Chavez was elected fairly in 1998, he has since veered off the democratic course, putting basic liberties, such as freedom of the press and property rights, in jeopardy.

"It is not only necessary for the president to be democratically elected, but also that he continue along the democratic pathway," said Carlos Fernandez, president of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry in Caracas.

The protesters' voices drifted through the meeting room's second floor window as Fernandez blasted Chavez for his poor handling of the Venezuelan economy. Fernandez said poverty has increased 25 percent during Chavez's administration and sharply criticized him for describing the opposition as coup-plotters.

But William Camarco, a 33-year old Venezuelan taxi driver who is studying journalism at Queens College, slammed the opposition: "They are guilty of economic sabotage."

Chavez, notorious on Wall Street for his fiery rhetoric and brash leadership style, was elected in 1998. He vowed to wrest control from what he branded as the country's corrupt elite and to enact reforms to help the poor. But opposition has grown amid charges the president wants to establish a Cuban-style authoritarian state.

Chavez weathered a short-lived coup last April.

ogj.pennnet.com By OGJ editors

HOUSTON, Jan. 15 -- Crude oil futures prices rose modestly Tuesday upon comments from the United Nations chief arms inspector Hans Blix that his team found evidence of weapons-related smuggling by Iraq.

But Blix said it was unclear if the goods were linked to weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, US President George W. Bush issued a stern warning to Iraq that he is running out of patience.

"I'm sick and tired of games and deception," he said. "I haven't seen any evidence that he has disarmed. Time is running out on Saddam Hussein. He must disarm," Bush said of the Iraqi president.

The market already was jittery because of a huge build of US planes and ships along with thousands of troops in the oil-rich Middle East. Traders also are keeping a close eye on the general strike in Venezuela that has drastically reduced that country's oil exports.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is slated to visit with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday.

The February contract for benchmark US light, sweet crudes rose by 11¢ to $32.37/bbl Tuesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The March position also gained 19¢ to $31.78/bbl.

Refined products closed mixed. Unleaded gasoline for February delivery slipped by 0.74¢ to 89.16¢/gal on NYMEX. Heating oil for the same month rose by 0.78¢ to 89.16¢/gal.

The February natural gas contract lost 14.4¢ to $5.11/Mcf on NYMEX.

In London, the February contract for North Sea Brent oil gained 41¢ to $30.61/bbl on the International Petroleum Exchange. The February natural gas contract also climbed, rising 15¢ to the equivalent of $3.44/Mcf on IPE.

The average price for OPEC's basket of seven benchmark crudes climbed 39¢ to $30.21 Tuesday.