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The Associated Press Jan. 25 —

BOGOTA, Colombia The Red Cross failed Saturday to make contact with rebels who kidnapped an American photojournalist and a British reporter early last week.

Photographer Scott Dalton and reporter Ruth Morris were captured on Tuesday in the eastern province of Arauca. The two were on assignment for the Los Angeles Times.

Fighters from the National Liberation Army, or ELN, announced two-days later they were holding the journalists, but didn't say when they would be released. The journalists' hired driver, who has been detained, said the rebels promised to turn the foreigners over to the Red Cross along with a message for the international community.

A Red Cross delegate in Arauca, where Dalton, 34, and Morris, 35, were abducted, made unsuccessful attempts Saturday to contact the rebels, Red Cross spokesman Carlos Rios told The Associated Press.

Police officials in the province said they had nothing new to report on the fate of the hostages.

The ELN and a larger rebel group are fighting right-wing paramilitaries and the government for control of oil-rich Arauca.

The United States, which has given Colombia nearly $2 billion in mostly military aid, recently deployed approximately 70 Green Berets to Arauca to train Colombian troops. The rebels see their presence as an act of aggression.

Dalton worked for The Associated Press for about nine years in Panama, Guatemala and Colombia. Last year, he left the AP to pursue video projects while freelancing for major newspapers.

Morris has previously written as a freelancer for the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, and other publications.

Meanwhile, suspected rebels armed with machetes killed four Colombian men who had apparently denounced them for stealing cattle, authorities said Saturday.

The men were hacked to death on Friday in Sahagun, 310 miles northeast of the capital. Police blamed the slayings on a small band of rebel fighters known as the Popular Revolutionary Army.

ASSOCIATED PRESS Jan. 25 — Traffic on the many parts of the Internet slowed dramatically for hours early Saturday, the apparent effects of a quick-spreading, virus-like infection that overwhelmed the world’s digital pipelines and interfered with Web browsing and delivery of e-mail.

The virus-like attack sought out vulnerable computers on the Internet to infect using a known flaw in popular database software from Microsoft Corp., called ‘SQL Server 2000.’

SITES MONITORING the health of the Internet reported significant slowdowns globally. Experts said the electronic attack bore remarkable similarities to the “Code Red” virus during the summer of 2001 which also ground traffic to a halt on much of the Internet.

It’s not debilitating,” said Howard Schmidt, President Bush’s No. 2 cyber-security adviser. “Everybody seems to be getting it under control.” Schmidt said the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center and private experts at the CERT Coordination Center were monitoring the attacks.

The virus-like attack, which began about 12:30 a.m. ET, sought out vulnerable computers on the Internet to infect using a known flaw in popular database software from Microsoft Corp., called “SQL Server 2000.” But the attacking software code was scanning for victim computers so randomly and so aggressively — sending out thousands of probes each second — that it overwhelmed many Internet data pipelines.

‘LIKE CODE RED ALL OVER AGAIN’ This is like Code Red all over again,” said Marc Maiffret, an executive with eEye Digital Security, whose engineers were among the earliest to study samples of the attack software. “The sheer number of attacks is eating up so much bandwidth that normal operations can’t take place.”

The impact of this worm was huge,” agreed Ben Koshy of W3 International Media Ltd., which operates thousands of Web sites from its computers in Vancouver. “It’s a very significant attack.”

Koshy added that, about six hours after the attack, commercial Web sites that had been overwhelmed were starting to come back online as engineers began effectively blocking the malicious data traffic.

People are recovering from it,” Koshy said.

22,000 SYSTEMS AFFECTED Symantec Corp., an antivirus vendor, estimated that at least 22,000 systems were affected worldwide.

Traffic itself seems to have leveled off a little bit, so likely only so many systems are exposed out there,” said Oliver Friedrichs, senior manager with Symantec Security Response. The attacking software, technically known as a worm, was overwhelming Internet traffic-directing devices known as routers.

The Internet is still usable, but we’re definitely receiving reports from some of our customers who have had it affect their routers specifically,” Friedrichs said.

The attack sought to take advantage of a software flaw discovered by researchers in July 2002 that permits hackers to seize control of corporate database servers. Microsoft deemed the problem “critical” and offered a free repairing patch, but it was impossible to know how many computer administrators applied the fix.

People need to do a better job about fixing vulnerabilities,” Schmidt said.

The latest attack was likely to revive debate within the technology industry about the need for an Internet-wide monitoring center, which the Bush administration has proposed. Some Internet industry executives and lawyers said they would raise serious civil liberties concerns if the U.S. government, not an industry consortium, operated such a powerful monitoring center.

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www.alertnet.org NEWSDESK   25 Jan 2003 18:39

By Patrick Markey

CARACAS, Venezuela, Jan 25 (Reuters) - Thousands of foes of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez took to the streets of Caracas on Saturday to back a 55-day strike aimed at triggering elections in the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.

Waving national flags and banners, the demonstrators flocked in a festive mix of politics and partying to a major highway in the east of the capital, where they clamored for the leftist leader to quit.

"He has to go. After more than 50 days we can wait a few more until he is out," said Flores Diaz, 26, a lawyer cloaked in a red, yellow and blue Venezuelan flag.

The strike, led by rebel managers at state oil firm PDVSA, has slashed Venezuela's vital petroleum output, driving up world crude prices and drawing the international community into the nation's tense political deadlock.

Protests, severe fuel shortages and aggressive political rhetoric from both sides have stoked tensions. At least seven people have been killed and dozens wounded in clashes and shootings since the shutdown began on Dec. 2.

Hundreds of thousands of Chavez supporters packed the streets of central Caracas on Thursday in a show of strength for the former paratrooper, whose populist promises to ease poverty handed him a landslide election victory in 1998.

The pugnacious Venezuelan leader, whose fiery speeches are peppered with references to class warfare, refuses to yield to foes he brands as rich elites trying to topple him by destroying the oil sector.

But the alliance of opposition political parties, unions and businesses counter that Chavez has ruled like a corrupt, inept dictator. They say the stoppage will go on until he agrees to elections.

"Chavez is not interested in going to the polls," said union boss Alfredo Ramos before Saturday's march. "All the government has done is make fun of the Venezuelan people and avoid an electoral solution."

GLOBAL HELP AMID ECONOMIC CRUNCH Nearly eight weeks into the grueling shutdown, Chavez and his foes appear set on standing their ground even as the strike drives Venezuela's fragile economy deeper into recession. Oil exports account for half of the government's revenues.

The Finance Ministry and the Central Bank on Wednesday shut down foreign currency exchange markets to stave off capital flight and halt the deep slide in the local bolivar currency as investors seek the safety of the U.S. dollar.

The international community on Friday stepped up efforts to break the stalemate. After meeting in Washington, six regional governments led by the United States and Brazil said they would send a team to Caracas next week to back negotiations brokered by the Organization of American States.

"The mission is going to discuss concrete measures like, for example, how to diminish the risk of violence," Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said in Washington.

The peace talks, which started more than two months ago, are stalled as government and opposition negotiators haggle over the timing of possible elections.

Former U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter has proposed two solutions: a constitutional amendment that will shorten the president's term in office or a binding referendum on his rule on August 19. Both sides say they are analyzing the options.

The president's popularity has fallen sharply. But he still retains strong support among poor voters who believe his reforms will give them access to the nation's huge oil wealth.

Fighting back against the strikers, Chavez has ordered troops and replacement workers to take over oil installations. Crude production and exports have crept back up, but the industry is still operating far below its usually levels of about 3.1 million barrels per day.

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Protesters of the Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil wave a Venezuelan flag as they demonstrate against US policies for Venezuela and Iraq at the Third World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil Saturday, Jan. 25, 2003. The forum is an annual protest against the World Economic Forum held simultaneously in Davos, Switzerland.

By STAN LEHMAN Associated Press Writer

President Bush wants to establish a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Argentina, but if participants at the World Social Forum have their way, he'll never pull it off.

A collection of activists ranging from poor Bolivian farmers and Ecuadorean Indians to the poverty relief group Oxfam International said Saturday that the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, would translate into a U.S. annexation of Latin American economies.

Bush wants to form the 34-nation bloc by 2005, eliminating tariffs to create the world's largest free trade zone. Cuba would be excluded, because membership is limited to countries with democratically elected governments.

Activists at the six-day social forum, a counter-conference to the simultaneous World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, say the FTAA would mainly benefit large multinational corporations and hurt Latin American farmers who can't compete with agricultural giants based in the United States.

The Brazil forum has drawn about 100,000 participants, offering 1,700 sessions and workshops on topics ranging from corporate misdeeds to Third World debt.

One participant is Zacarias Calatayud, a Bolivian farmer in his 40s, who used to grow rice, sugarcane and potatoes on 20 acres in the country's tropical north. He was put out of business when cheap imported farm products started flooding into Boliva from Brazil and Argentina.

Those imports started in the late 1990s, when Bolivia joined the South American Mercosur trading bloc as an associated member. Now Calatayud farms just one acre, to feed his family.

"With Mercosur we're already living with a smaller FTAA," Calatayud said. "With the FTAA, we'll end up in the streets of the cities, abandoning our plots and building shacks."

Oxfam released a report Saturday criticizing the agreement, saying it favors investors but would increase Latin American poverty.

For comparison, Oxfam cited Mexico's 3 million corn farmers, who have seen the price of their product drop 50 percent since the NAFTA trade agreement with the United States and Canada went into effect.

"The poorest people of Latin America live in rural areas and they are the people who depend on agriculture," said Simon Ticehurst, Oxfam's Mexico campaign coordinator.

The trade agreement would probably be phased in over five to 10 years, meaning that Latin American farmers who never learned other skills would be displaced without jobs, said Mark Weisbrot, an economist who co-directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

"The United States went from 1870 to 1970 from having 56 percent of our population in agriculture to 4.6 percent," he said. "Imagine compressing this into a five or 10-year period: It's a recipe for social explosion."

Manuel Masaquiza of Ecuador's National Indian Conference called the FTAA "the birth of a monster that will devour the poor and marginalized of Latin America."

Ecuador's Indians, already the country's poorest citizens, doubt they can compete with an anticipated flood of American products if the trade agreement goes through, Masaquiza said.

Latin America will simply turn into a cheap source of labor and a huge consumer market for U.S. goods, said Doris Trujillo, an Ecuadorean Kichwas Indian dressed in a black felt fedora-style hat and a red-and-black poncho.

"The FTAA will bankrupt farmers and small businessmen who will not be able to compete with the United States," she said.

Even an association of small U.S. farmers sent a representative to Brazil to protest the agreement.

It "is a very tangible boogeyman out to get Latin America and spread the power of capitalism and multinationals in the region," said Dena Hoff, of the Washington-based National Family Farm Coalition.

Last modified: January 25. 2003 1:27PM

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CARACAS Jan 25 - Venezuela's opposition said Friday it would end a 54-day-old strike if agreement on early elections is reached, effectively accepting a suggestion presented to international mediators in Washington.

``We are perfectly willing to lift the strike if the international community, together with pressure from social mobilization in Venezuela, gets the government to accept an electoral solution,'' said Jesus Torrealba, a spokesman for the Democratic Coordinator (CD) group of opposition parties.

Torrealba also told AFP a referendum the opposition planned to hold on February 2, but which the Supreme Court halted, would now be conducted as a symbolic poll on the mandate of President Hugo Chavez, scheduled to end in 2006.

The statements, which came amid signs the strike was weakening, suggested that the opposition alliance - made up by the CD as well as business and labor groups - has warmed to proposals presented by former US president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter.

The proposals entail either holding a recall referendum on August 19 or amending the constitution to shorten the presidential term and holding early elections.

The deal would also require agreement by the opposition to lift the strike aimed at forcing Chavez from office.

The proposals were presented to diplomats attending a closed-door meeting of the Group of Friends of Venezuela, which was set up to boost a so far unsuccessful mediation mission by the Organisation of American States.

The Washington gathering at OAS headquarters was attended by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and diplomats from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Portugal and Spain.

Powell urged Chavez and the opposition to accept one of the two proposals by Carter aimed at defusing the crisis.

Powell said in remarks at OAS headquarters that the Carter proposals were the best available options for the Venezuelan people.

The countries seeking to help Venezuela emerge from its tense political standoff also agreed to meet again January 30 to try to move forward steps aimed at ending the crisis and preventing further violence, Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said.

Chavez has said he was open to the compromise plan, which the United States endorsed as an ``excellent basis'' for a resolution of the deep crisis in the South American country which, while oil-rich, remains plagued by poverty.

The embattled president put up a huge show of force on the eve of the Washington talks, addressing hundreds of thousands of supporters who marched through Caracas to converge at a downtown rally.

The opposition, in turn, announced a 24-hour gathering on a stretch of highway in eastern Caracas, already dubbing it ``the biggest protest in history.''

The rally was called to protest ``against the theft of the referendum,'' a reference to the Supreme Court's decision to halt the February balloting.

But it was mainly seen as a bid to demonstrate popular rejection of the leftist-populist president at a time when the strike is losing steam.

While major businesses remained closed, most stores have reopened in recent weeks, and even the vital oil sector, the worst affected, was showing signs of recovery.

The opposition has conceded that crude output, which the strike initially slashed to a trickle, rose significantly in recent weeks, putting production at more than 800,000 barrels per day. The government said daily oil production exceeded one million barrels, or a third of pre-strike output.

``People are still watching the news regarding Venezuela, where there appear to be a few little signs that maybe the strike is coming to an end,'' Prudential Bache broker Tony Machacek said in London.

Insecurity triggered by the strike has also hit the bolivar, prompting the government to announce it would implement currency controls starting Wednesday, when currency trading resumes after a five-business-day suspension.

Venezuela's currency has depreciated more than 30 percent since the strike started on December 2. - AFP