www.signonsandiego.com By Chris Jenkins UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER March 16, 2003

TEMPE, Ariz. – He got the welcome-home of a conquering hero. The kind of fanfare that could get you killed.

Although merely 20 last fall, Francisco Rodriguez was not so young as to think his life wouldn't change after the incomprehensible postseason he had with the Anaheim Angels, who claimed a World Series championship with a rookie relief pitcher who won five postseason games and earned the nickname "K-Rod" for all his strikeouts.

Rodriguez returned a national celebrity to his native Venezuela, a country that loves its baseball with a religious fervor, but also a country being torn apart by political unrest and uncontrolled lawlessness. If some of his countrymen saw Rodriguez as a source of inspiration in desperate times, others saw him as a target, so much so that Rodriguez grew leery of anybody approaching him in his hometown of Caracas.

"Way different," said Rodriguez when asked if people in Venezuela responded to him him differently than Americans. "Over here, people see you on the street, they say can you sign this? Over there, when they come up to you, you don't know if they want to be good to you or if they want to rob you."

Actually, Rodriguez said, it happened twice over the offseason to family members who were held up at gunpoint.

"If they think you have money," Rodriguez said, "they want it."

The environment was so terrifying that after awhile, Rodriguez stopped leaving his house; he stayed indoors to work out and stay in shape. Venezuela's winter leagues were shut down by the violence and, for the first time, Rodriguez didn't throw for months.

"That part was good," he said. "I needed the rest."

That his offseason was so short was largely Rodriguez's fault. Many things went right last year for the Angels, whose previous history was based mostly on their complete inability to reach the World Series.

A September call-up, Rodriguez threw only 51/3 innings in the regular season, but 13 of the 16 outs he recorded were by strikeout, the majority with a slider at least as nasty as Randy Johnson's. Anaheim already had baseball's best bullpen, but it became other-wordly with Rodriguez, who pitched in 11 postseason games and won just under half of them while striking out 28 in 182/3 innings.

"It wasn't a case of lightning in a bottle," said general manager Bill Stoneman. "The lightning was in Frankie's arm."

Frankly, too, the Angels were not surprised at what they saw. Rodriguez has been in their organization since he was 16. He was with the Lake Elsinore Storm – now the Padres' Class A affiliate – when Stoneman first saw him in a simulated game.

"I went 'Holy Smokes!' " said Stoneman. "He had this incredible life on his fastball. He cuts the ball and it goes this way, then it goes that way. His slider can be unhittable."

Perhaps any other major league team would have had him in its uniform on Opening Day, but with the luxury of having a well-stocked bullpen in Anaheim, the organization started Rodriguez in Class AA and had him work on his command.

In retrospect, you'd swear the Angels were sandbagging, saving him for the perfect moment.

"Obviously, he pitched exceedingly well in the postseason," said pitching coach Bud Black. Amused by his own understatement, Black added, "OK, what he did is crazy."

Crazier yet was the cool and calm that Rodriguez showed after each of his amazing relief appearances. As the media crowds multiplied in front of his locker, he seemed no more flustered by the attention than he had been by the Yankees, Twins and Giants hitters.

Most of those batters will get other cracks at Rodriguez, who's technically still a rookie. Because postseason stats don't count on your official résumé, he's got an 0-0 career record in the majors.

"Hitters may figure out some things about Frankie, like which pitches he likes to throw and when he likes to throw them," said left-hander Jarrod Washburn, the ace of Anaheim's starting rotation. "But they'll still have to deal with his filthy stuff."

More of it, too. Rodriguez said his primary goal in camp is to get better overall, but especially to develop his change-up, which would almost be unfair.

"I threw it a lot last year, but it wasn't that good," he said. "The movement was totally straight on it."

Rodriguez has come to one conclusion, a concession of sorts. Again, other teams might immediately try to make a starter of Rodriguez to maximize his talent, but the Angels know better. He was mediocre at best as a starter in the minors, much owing to the fact that he puts such intensity into his pitches, his arm won't stand the strain of seven or six or even five innings.

"It causes tendinitis," he said. "I have three ways to pitch – over-the-top, three-quarter, sidearm – and I throw all three. If I do that as a starter and throw so many pitches, it bothers me a lot. But it doesn't bother me for one or two innings. So, definitely I'll be a reliever. I have no problems with that."

A setup reliever, for the time being, too. Troy Percival, one of the game's top closers and a longtime leader of the Angels, is not going anywhere soon. Anaheim does intend to cut back on Percival's appearances to save his arm, and in most cases, the ninth-inning call then would go to Rodriguez.

This time, nobody will go "Who?"

"People watched TV and see me in the World Series," said Rodriguez. "People know me now."

For better and worse.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, March 16, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Metropolitan Mayor’s wife, Martha de Peña has announced that she will shortly be opening her center for teenage mothers.

• The center will cater for 30 teenage mothers taking in and caring for their children, while they work, study or learn a profession.

Project coordinator Anabella Acosta says she has managed to group together an excellent team that will help the teenage mothers gain the right to a normal and social life.

Mrs. Peña insists that the girls will learn about birth control, health and childcare and responsible parenthood.  “Last year of the 23,247 births at the Concepcion Palacios Maternity Hospital, 156 of the mothers were between the ages of 10-14 and 5,551 between 15-17.”

Sociologist Ivonne Marrero has high expectations because she says it’s a pioneer project, which gives the girls emotional and psychological support to face the new challenge of bringing a baby into the world.  The Caracas Lottery has donated the center’s building in San Bernardino.

www.grandforks.com Posted on Sun, Mar. 16, 2003 Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Nearly 700 wildfires fueled by dry conditions and high winds burned out of control in Brazil's Amazon jungle Sunday despite stepped-up efforts to battle the blazes.

The number of fires burning across the state of Roraima, which borders Venezuela and Guyana, more than doubled to 686 on Sunday, according to satellite monitoring by Brazil's environmental protection agency Ibama.

"Our fight against the fires is intensifying each day, but it's very dry and very windy up here," Ibama spokeswoman Monica Gil told The Associated Press from Roraima.

Ibama said it could not give an accurate estimate of the damaged or destroyed areas until the fires are extinguished. But early last week, when only 86 fires were recorded, 25,600 acres of forest and scrub land had burned.

The fires were sparked by farmers clearing agricultural land, and quickly got out of control because of extremely dry conditions caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon, an unusual warming of parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

About 330 firefighters and Ibama officials were fighting the blazes, along with three helicopters and army transport vehicles, Gil said. Another 92 firefighters were expected Monday.

The fires raged at the entrance of the Yanomami Indian reservation, home to the world's largest Stone Age tribe. On Friday, fires crossed about 2 miles into the reservation, Environment Minister Marina Silva said.

About 26,000 Yanomami live on a 25 million-acre reservation straddling the border of Brazil and Venezuela.

Meteorologists say rain is not likely for another week.

In 1998, severe dryness from El Nino led to wildfires in Roraima that burned 736,000 acres of forest and scrub. The fires eventually were extinguished by rain.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, March 16, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Playing cat and mouse game, Venezuelan Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) president Carlos Ortega’s lawyer, Omar Estacio has declared that his client has not asked for territorial asylum.

Splitting words, Estacio admits that Ortega has asked for and received diplomatic asylum but is currently assessing his options.

This morning the lawyer visited the Costa Rican Embassy where Ortega is holed up and afterwards threw out a suggestion that the Inter American system offers a series of alternatives and Ortega is weighing them up before making a final decision.

Among the alternatives under discussion is for Ortega to hand himself over to the authorities creating a potential security problem for the government.

Observers say the government will not offer Ortega house arrest but preventive arrest until his trial comes up.

Ortega is said to be angry about reactions to his asylum among the opposition and inside the CTV itself. It has been learned that lawyers have been putting out feelers to people connected to the Inter American Human Rights Court about the viability of obtaining a legal restraining order against the government for alleged human rights against the trade union leader.

Sunday www.barbadosadvocate.com Mar 16 2003 Web Posted - Sun Mar 16 2003

No, I don’t think that America actually tried to conquer her empire. She (empires are female) was only given, or over-ran, or poxed or measled, huge and fertile and ore-laden acres inhabited only by those (so-called red) Indians, who were luckily so susceptible to ordinary European diseases that they could be conquered by an unwashed blanket. Maybe muskets played a part too.

Then the British colonials in America heard about that great event at Oistins when our own Bajan ancestors proclaimed the immortal words “No taxation without representation” and the Americans later used that powerful idea (without attribution) inthe irritable American colonies, eventually clobbering those short, feeble, poor marksmen in the British troops. There was also some story about throwing tea very naughtily into the sea.

Anyway, the Americans finally won the match, achieving independence from the British Empire, and, very gradually, turning into the richest nation in the world, and perhaps one with the greatest religiosity.

Naturally, they became pious Christian democrats or even republicans, suspicious of their ancestral origins, hostile to the sensible European practice of balancing power against power, and addicted to grandiloquent, semi-religious ideas about turning the whole world into a law-abiding community of democratic nations, closely resembling their saintly selves.

It certainly was a pity that their own God (who made the world) deposited most of the valuable oil under distant places they didn’t know much about, instead of much more sensibly under their own churches and chapels and synagogues. The Americans generously forgave him.

Unlike the British, which the historian, J.R. Seeley, said, acquired their empire “in a fit of absence of mind”, the Americans got theirs by pompous notions proclaimed from the top of a mountain of gold. Not quite a proper empire either, just a nursery of naughty nations, in which America is the rich nanny of the world.

I think that living under an empire is the normal situation of our species. Look back at the Persian empire, the Roman, Spanish, British, Aztec, French, Mughal, Chinese and Russian empires. Empires turned up everywhere. Empires are normal, but never everlasting.

My preference, naturally, is for the British one, and after that for the American, followed by the Roman. You are allowed to have different preferences, even without apology. Very few wise people will vote for the Russian.

One of the present problems is whether every country should be allowed its own armoury of weapons, nuclear, biological, chemical etc. or whether (and why) there should be some system of licences so that Barbados can have one tiny warhead I suppose those towel-headed beards in Islamic Iran will have to be allowed a slightly bigger one. Will Venezuela’s Chavez have to get two?

What about Iraq, and the Palestinian Republic? Will Haiti get a blackish warhead named Field Marshal Henri Christophe? Or should the nuclear non-proliferation agreement be continued and enforced? Enforced by whom? And why? And how? I suppose the consent of the UN will be required, so no enforcement will actually ever occur. Anybody who’s got the pennies can join the game!

(Sir Aubrey “Jack” Leacock is a long- standing surgeon at the Barbados general Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth hospital.)