www.cnn.com Thursday, February 13, 2003 Posted: 8:51 PM EST (0151 GMT)

U.S. Navy Seabees train to build a bridge at Camp 93 Thursday in the northern Kuwait desert. The camp is named for Flight 93, which crashed during the terrorist hijackings of September 11, 2001.

PERSPECTIVE TIME.com's Scott MacLeod writes in an article called "Sacrifice for Saddam? Not This Time Around":

"While Arab public opinion is running strongly against a new American war on Iraq, there are few such tender embraces of Saddam these days. Protesters stress their support for Iraq's people but, conspicuously, not its leader. Al-Jazeera, the most widely watched Arab satellite TV channel, emphasizes criticism of American policy instead of flogging Saddam's line. What apologists there are for Saddam cast him as a victim rather than a hero. "Meanwhile, more Arabs are finding the courage to speak out against him. 'We want to end the terrible silence and break the false image that Arabs are all behind Saddam,' explains Lebanese democracy advocate Chibli Mallat. "The region is still bracing for a fresh wave of anti-Americanism should war come, especially given existing anger over U.S. support for Israel in its struggle with the Palestinians. However, it is a common view in Arab capitals that public resentments could be contained if the U.S. assault is surgical and swift. And if the U.S. does choose war, Washington's Arab allies -- despite a lot of preliminary balking -- are almost sure to offer support in one form or another."

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta reports the U.S. military is learning the importance of stress management, family support and even the discussion of feelings in a war zone. (February 13)

ON THE AGENDA • Friday: Weapons inspection  chiefs Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei to report to U.N. Security Council. Iraq's National Assembly convenes "extraordinary session" in Baghdad.

(CNN) -- With events moving closer to a war with Iraq, here is a look at some of the latest developments around the world:

ROAD TO WAR?

• 'EXTRAORDINARY SESSION': Iraq's National Assembly will convene in "extraordinary session" Friday, shortly before U.N. weapons inspectors report to the Security Council, Iraqi officials said. The subject of the session, scheduled for 4 p.m. in Baghdad (8 a.m. EST), is not known. The National Assembly, as Iraq's parliament is known, usually votes on important issues, but its decision can be overruled by the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, led by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

• BLAIR'S DEMAND TO E.U. LEADERS: Britain's prime minister has demanded that European Union leaders not rule out military action against Iraq when they meet in an emergency summit on Monday. "While we all of course regard military action as a last resort, we must make clear that no member state rules it out if needed to uphold the authority of the (U.N.) Security Council," Tony Blair wrote other E.U. leaders ahead of Monday's meeting. Blair told the deeply split 15-nation bloc that time was running out for a peaceful solution, according to Reuters, which said it had obtained a copy of the letter. (Full story)

• PENTAGON'S DEPLOYMENT GOAL: The U.S. military has reached its goal of 150,000 troops within striking distance of Iraq by mid-February, the Pentagon said Thursday. Troops arriving late Wednesday and early Thursday brought the number to 156,000 under the U.S. Central Command, with another 16,000 on two carrier groups in the Mediterranean Sea under the U.S. European Command, according to the Pentagon. (Full story)

• NATO CANCELS MEETING: NATO canceled a meeting scheduled for Thursday to discuss the precarious split among its members concerning a U.S.-backed initiative to put defenses in place for Turkey in case of an attack by Iraq. France, Germany and Belgium have blocked the plan, saying such a move would damage peace initiatives. The United States and its allies will be able to send surveillance aircraft and missile defenses "in a way that would not require political approval" from the NATO alliance, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday. "They think they may have that legal authority without going through the political process," Gen. Richard Myers told the Senate Armed Services Committee. (Full story)

WAR OF WORDS

• Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said "Iraq no longer has the means to attack Israel," in an interview with the French television network TF1 broadcast Thursday (Full story)

• Speaking of outlaw nations in an address to sailors at the Mayport Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, President Bush said: "These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail, terror, mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies who would use them without the least bit of hesitation. ... If force becomes necessary to secure our country and to keep the peace, America will act deliberately, America will act decisively, and America will act victoriously with the world's greatest military." (Full story)

• Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Thursday that if Iraq begins providing full cooperation, "I think we still have a chance if we continue with our work, if Iraq provides full cooperation, we still should be able to avoid the war."

IMPACT

• U.S. stocks amassed further declines Thursday amid threats of terrorism against Americans and more talk of war, completely disregarding some slightly better-than-expected economic news. "There are so many clouds over the market. I don't see any short-term way out of this mess," said Jack Baker, head of equities at Putnam Lovell Securities. "Some people are calling for not only a test of the October lows, but for possibly falling below the October lows once we start shooting." (Full story)

• In anticipation of a possible war in Iraq, United Airlines told its employees Thursday that it is preparing for another travel industry downturn by reallocating some of its assets for military use and drawing up plans for more cutbacks. Among those plans: the nation's second-largest carrier has contracted out four 747's and one 777 to the Department of Defense. In the event of a war and a sharp drop in commercial travel, United is also prepared to cut capacity and costs, it said. American, Continental, Delta and US Airways are also making war plans.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Thursday, February 13, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Accion Democratica (AD) general secretary Rafael Marin has thrown down the gauntlet and says he will not resign, despite a letter from 22 of 25 regional secretaries. Instead, Marin has asked them to resign for “acting like Chavists.”

Marin has lashed out at his colleagues during a press conference, challenging them to hold internal elections to see who is the real leader. “I’m sure that if we held a signature campaign in the party, I would win … I was elected by party grassroots.” His opponents, Marin claims, are nothing but party gravediggers, promoting his political assassination.

It has been learned that AD executive committee (CEN) has postponed a meeting to decide the future of Marin, who has ignored the party line of seeking a political solution to the crisis. Marin says he prefers fighting the government on the streets with AD “shock troops,” which he is said to have commanded for several years.

• The national executive must obtain two-thirds majority to shed Marin of his post.

Marin says he intends to restore AD to its former glory and rescue its image internationally … "we cannot and should not sit down for talks with anyone from this government." Criticizing party president Henry Ramos Allup, Marin says he would never have met Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s envoy like Ramos Allup did.

abcnews.go.com The Associated Press RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil Feb. 13 —

Soaring fuel prices pushed inflation to 2.25 percent in January, the biggest jump for the month since 1995, the government said Thursday.

January's rise in consumer prices was higher than the 2.1 percent jump in December and above the 0.52 percent increase in January 2002, the IBGE statistics institute said.

In the past 12 months, prices measured by the key IPCA inflation index have risen 14.47 percent, compared to 12.53 percent in 2002, the institute said.

Fuel prices were the main culprit, rising 8.82 percent in January, while bus fares climbed 5 percent, the IBGE said. Food prices rose just 2.15 percent, compared to 3.91 percent in December.

The prospect of higher fuel and transport costs in the event of a U.S.-led war against Iraq could force the government to raise interest rates to keep inflation in check. The government hopes to limit inflation to 8.5 percent this year.

Many economists expect the central bank to raise its prime lending rate when its monetary policy committee meets next week. The rate now stands at 25.5 percent.

Higher interest rates would slow an already sluggish economy and could hamper the government's plans to create jobs, a top priority of leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The government hopes the economy will grow 2.8 percent this year, up from an estimated 1.45 percent in 2002.

www.everyweek.com Vol.   14     No.   7 Issue Date 2/13/2003

By Ari LeVaux

Our man abroad reports from the World Social Forum

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil—For over 20 years, the owners of the world have been meeting yearly in Davos, Switzerland, at an event called the World Economic Forum. Davos is where the theory of world domination by capital begins manifesting into practice.

For several years, small-scale “anti-Davos” meetings have been held around Europe. Three years ago, a group of activists had the idea of coalescing growing anti-Davos (as well as general anti-corporate-globalization) sentiment into a singular, world-scale forum, to be held at the same time as the World Economic Forum. Thus, the World Social Forum (WSF) was born.

The intention of the WSF is to bring together citizens from around the globe who are actively working for a better world, in arenas such as peace, environment, social work, culture, politics, agriculture, economics, etc. The idea is to create a space for networking, strategizing, sharing of stories, morale-boosting, and general collective searching for alternatives to the dominant, capital-centric paradigm.

I was among the 100,000 attendees from 156 countries at the WSF, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Although over 4,000 journalists were in attendance, pitifully few were from the U.S. I wrote this dispatch from Brazil in an attempt to include North Americans in the discussion, since we were excluded by our own corporate media. In light of the overwhelming disgust at U.S. policies evident in Porto Alegre, this exclusion is all the more unfortunate. The people of the U.S. need to know how the world is reacting to our policies.

Yet, despite the flag burning and anti-U.S. rhetoric, attendees did not confuse U.S. policy with the will of most Americans, especially those who made the trip to Porto Alegre. People know that Bush stole a very close election, and the few Americans who showed up at the WSF were eagerly embraced. And many Americans made presentations, including Noam Chomsky, who drew an audience of 15,000.

Other “left-wing rock stars” in attendance were Nelson Mandela, Vandana Shiva, Danny Glover, Aleida Guevara (daughter of Che), Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, and Deepak Chopra. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, made a surprise appearance, and announced that his embattled regime was part of the movement, affirming his resolve to fight the U.S. empire’s attempts to oust him from his majority-elected position.

While Chavez cast himself as a revolutionary, Brazil’s wildly popular new president-elect, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, aka “Lula,” made a speech in which he presented himself as a peacemaker, determined to end hunger and inequity in Brazil—without destabilizing the Brazilian economy. Lula also announced his imminent trip to Davos, and his intent to keep the discussion at the World Economic Forum focused on ways in which capital might serve people—not the other way around.

The speeches were inspiring, educational, and altogether valuable, but the real engines of the WSF are the workshops and activities organized by the various groups in attendance. These were a sort of civil laboratory, mixing up ideas, strategies, stories, processes, and discoveries from around the world of ideals.

The workshops were held at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica, the major university of Porto Alegre. It was pretty much the ideal college utopian scene. Imagine going to a school with course offerings like “The global water grab,” “Encounters with the truth,” “A feminist challenge to the market: the gift economy,” “Community food security in North America: building alternatives to the global food system in the belly of the beast,” “The transformational power of hip-hop,” “Prostitution and Globalization,” and “Medicinal plants of the Guarini Indians.”

Imagine a campus crowded with students from 156 countries, the symphony of languages filling the halls and stairwells, poking heads into different rooms, with hundreds of options to choose from at any given time. You can check out a class and if it doesn’t stoke you, get up and go to another one. If you arrive late, it’s probably because you got stuck behind a samba parade, or were entranced by a dance of neon-feather-decorated Indians from deep in the Amazon.

I attended a series of workshops on “Individualization, globalization, and civil society.” The workshops were spearheaded by the sustainable development organization GlobeNet 3 of Stuttgart, Germany, with contributions from Merkur of Sweden, and the New York Open Center. I was impressed by their process for running workshops, integrating their own material with comments and ideas from the group, always moving forward while integrating. When asked if Germans had a certain knack for this, one speaker explained:

“From Germany, we can look to the East and see the loss of freedom in the name of solidarity; we can look to the West and see the loss of solidarity in the name of freedom. This motivates us to search for a middle path. Also, we have this lingering national wound of the Holocaust, and a tremendous collective desire to become a nation that promotes peace and unity, to be a leader in international problem-solving.”

These folks definitely had a knack for finding middle ground. Middle ground between the individual and the collective; middle ground between politics, economics, and culture; middle ground between conflicting viewpoints arising in the workshops that were, upon closer inspection, not necessarily in conflict at all.

For me, the most spine-tingling moment of the whole event was when a group of people held hands in the middle of the packed Gigantinho soccer stadium. One read the following statement:

“We, Israeli and Palestinian pacifists, are determined to find peace, justice, and sovereignty for our people, and an end to the Israeli occupation of the occupied territories of 1967; a creation of an independent Palestinian state, side by side with Israel; Jerusalem as an open city, with independent capitals for both states. We call on the international community, in particular the UN, to intervene and arrange an end to this tragic situation and an end to the violence on both sides, by guiding the peace negotiations. Porto Alegre, January 27, 2003.”

Following this declaration, the pacifists on stage began passionately embracing each other, while the crowd roared and the band played John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The stadium rang with voices from all over the world singing along. I get chills, still, just writing about it.

The event was not without criticism from within. Canadian writer Naomi Klein diminished the WSF as a watered-down and mediocre “old paradigm” version of what it was supposed to be, asking: “How on earth did a gathering that was supposed to be a showcase for new grassroots movements become a celebration of men with a penchant for three-hour speeches about smashing the oligarchy?…For some, the hijacking of the forum is proof that the movements against corporate globalization are finally maturing and ‘getting serious.’ But is it really so mature, amidst the graveyard of failed, left political projects, to believe that change will come by casting your ballot for the latest charismatic leader, then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? Get serious.”

I found Klein’s criticism, while grounded in some important truth, to be more of a downer than necessary. Her conclusion that “the theme of the WSF was big” is only true if you focus on the big events, rather than the 1,000-plus small and intimate workshops. And while she dismissed Chomsky as “another big man,” she failed to mention the small woman, Arundhati Roy (a writer, like Klein) who spoke after Chomsky, batting clean-up for the event. Her short, sweet, and powerful speech ended with these words:

“…No doubt Saddam is a ruthless dictator, and the people of Iraq would be better off without him. But then, the whole world would be better off without a certain George Bush. It’s clear that Bush is determined to go to war against Iraq, regardless of the facts and of public opinion. In its recruitment drive to build allies, the U.S. is prepared to invent facts. The charade of weapons inspectors is the U.S. government’s insulting, offensive obsession to some twisted form of international etiquette…like leaving the doggie door open for last minute allies, or maybe the UN, to crawl through. But for all intents and purposes, the new war against Iraq has begun.

“So what can we do? We can call on our mem-ory. We can learn from history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the U.S. government and its excesses. We can expose Bush, Blair, and their allies as the cowardly baby killers, water polluters, and long distance bombers that they are. We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways; a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass. When Bush says ‘You are either with us or with the terrorists,’ we can say ‘No thank you.’ We can let him know that the people of the world don’t have to choose between a malevolent Mickey Mouse and a mad mullah.

“Our strategy should not only be to confront empire, but to lay siege to it, to deprive it of oxygen, to shame it, to rock it with our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance and our ability to tell our own stories, stories that are different from the ones we are being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling.

“Remember this: We be many, and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. And if you listen carefully, you can hear her breathing.”

While criticism like Klein’s is important for keeping the “movement” on task and moving forward, and preventing it from falling into “old paradigm” patterns, I tend to agree with the assessment of “big men” like Lula, Chomsky, and Kofi Annan—as well as that of many big and small women—that the WSF is one of the most important events in contemporary history. Personally, it moved me from the fence, and made me a firm believer in the power and importance of activism.

abcnews.go.com — By Axel Bugge

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Saying he had inherited a country in an "extremely serious situation," Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled on Thursday a key pillar to his center-left government's ambitious reforms and social agenda.

Lula, who took office in January, installed an advisory council of 82 leading business, labor and social leaders, promising that it could become the "most important element of my four-year mandate" in its proposals on reforming the debt-ridden pension and cumbersome tax systems.

Those reforms could become pivotal to secure the economic health of Latin America's largest economy and the success of its first elected leftist government as high debts, rising inflation and low growth undermine Lula's ambitions to help Brazil's millions of poor.

"As everybody knows we received the government of a country in a very serious situation, I would say extremely serious," Lula said. "It is enough to say that on the map of distribution income, Brazil is one of the worst on the planet and it simply didn't change over the last 30 years."

"But we have a common objective: to contribute to making Brazil pass the necessary reforms, overcome the current crisis and return to a path of sustained economic growth and true social justice," he told the councilors.

Lula said the council, whose only function will be to advise the administration, is part of the Workers' Party government's plans "to be in constant dialogue with society."

Former union leader Lula said the economy faced "extreme vulnerability," which had forced his government to take tough measures -- such as cutting spending sharply and hiking rates.

"But these (measures) are crucial so that the economic and financial situation of the country do not get out of control," Lula said. "The council is an instrument for the construction of solutions."

IRRELEVANT TALKING SHOP?

The Council has faced criticism from opposition politicians and some analysts that it is a ploy by the government to by-pass Brazil's sometimes painstakingly slow Congress, or that it risks becoming an irrelevant talking shop.

Analysts say Brazil could be hard hit by the fallout of a war on Iraq due to its dependence on imported oil and foreign financing. As Lula talked, the real currency fell sharply on Thursday as world markets fretted about a possible war.

Business leaders forming part of the Council said reform of the public pension system -- which bleeds $15 billion from public coffers every year -- was especially urgent.

"This is a key element of reestablishing savings for the country," said Jorge Gerdau Johanpetter, one of Brazil's leading industrialists. "We are already late. Every day that passes is important."

Pension reform -- which analysts agree could change the long-term fiscal outlook of Brazil's debt-ridden economy at a single stroke -- has been talked about off and on in Congress since the early 1990s.

Lula said the council would in no way substitute Congress but that the "search for consensus in society can be very useful for the legislature and executive."

With Lula becoming Brazil's most elected president in history but his party holding no clear majority in Congress, the government is hoping to take advantage of every bit of popular support to push its agenda.

Congress reopens next week after the summer recess, when the government is expected to aggressively mobilize its allies to get reforms moving.