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Oil prices pushed further above $US30 on Monday ahead of this week's Opec producer cartel meeting, which is expected to tighten crude supplies as fuel demand dips to the lowest point in the year.

US light crude in New York rose 26 cents to $US30.81 a barrel, the highest closing price in nearly three weeks.

Trade in Brent crude on London's International Petroleum Exchange was closed for the Easter holiday.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) will hold an emergency meeting in Vienna on Thursday - called after oil dropped about 30% in a month when Middle East oil flows escaped severe disruption from the war in Iraq.

"We expect oil prices will remain well-supported given recent statements from member countries indicating a desire to curtail physical supply," said Matthew Warburton of UBS Warburg investment bank in a research note.

Prices rebounded last week as Iran called on Opec, which controls over half of oil exports worldwide, to cut official production quotas, warning that a failure to rein in supply could trigger a price collapse.

Other Opec members have said that tighter compliance with official output limits would probably be enough to avoid a supply glut.

Opec pumped more than 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) over its self-imposed 24.5 million bpd production ceiling in March, as it raised output to counter the loss of Iraqi exports and earlier disruption from a strike in Venezuela.

<a href=asia.reuters.com>Asia Reuters Mon April 21, 2003 05:31 PM ET By Pascal Fletcher

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela on Monday dismissed renewed charges by Colombia that it was sheltering leftist guerrillas, intensifying a dispute over border security two days before a bilateral presidential summit.

President Hugo Chavez and his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, are due to meet on Wednesday in eastern Venezuela to try to defuse the controversy over the frontier and shore up ties battered by economic and political problems in both countries.

Relations between the two Andean neighbors, which share a rugged 1,400-mile border, have been strained by accusations from Colombia -- denied in Caracas -- that Chavez's government is allowing Colombian Marxist rebels to operate from Venezuelan territory.

"Venezuela gives no shelter to criminals of any nationality," Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said in an angry response to charges from Colombian Attorney-General Luis Camilo Osorio.

Osorio said over the weekend that Venezuela was becoming a "haven for Colombian delinquents" and urged Venezuela to help rid the border of rebels, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers.

Rejecting Osorio's comments as "a provocation," Rangel said in a statement: "If Colombian delinquents have come into this country, then this is more the result of negligence and complicity by the Colombian authorities, rather than by us Venezuelans."

"A SANCTUARY FOR TERRORISTS"

Reaffirming Colombia's accusations, a Colombian senator alleged on Monday that a Colombian guerrilla leader was living in Venezuela under the protection of Chavez's government.

"Andres Paris lives in Caracas, protected by President Chavez's security services. ... Venezuela is turning into a sanctuary for terrorists," legislator Jimmy Chamorro told reporters. Paris is a leading figure in the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

There was no immediate Venezuelan reply to this accusation.

In a war of words in recent weeks, Chavez's government has accused the Colombian army of backing right-wing paramilitaries and allowing them to penetrate into Venezuela.

The latest heated exchange set the tone for what could be a prickly April 23 meeting between leftist Chavez and Uribe, a lawyer who has set himself the task of trying to defeat the Marxist rebels and bring peace to his country.

Uribe, whose father was killed by FARC rebels, has appealed to neighboring governments to denounce the FARC and a smaller rebel group as "terrorists" and act firmly against them.

But populist Chavez, who was first elected in 1998 and has declared a self-styled "revolution" in favor of his country's poor, has refused to label the Colombian rebels as "terrorists." He says he wants to maintain a neutral position to be able to contribute to a negotiated peace in Colombia.

His critics accuse him of having ideological sympathies for the Colombian guerrillas.

Chavez has denied the criticism, saying his armed forces will repel any illegal incursions into Venezuelan territory, whether by rebels, paramilitaries or the Colombian army.

"Venezuela, its government and people, want to have the best relations with Colombia. ... We hope the Uribe-Chavez meeting in Puerto Ordaz will be fruitful," Rangel said.

Also on the agenda for the talks in the industrial city of Puerto Ordaz will be trade between the two neighbors, which are major commercial partners.

<a href=ipsnews.net>Inter Press Services News Agency Mario Osava*

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 21 (IPS) - Coverage of the war on Iraq in Latin America has been marked by efforts to send correspondents from the region despite the economic crisis, and by a largely successful attempt at balance, according to analysts.

Several large media outlets from the region spent special envoys to Iraq and the neighbouring countries of Jordan and Kuwait, while publications and radio and TV stations in Latin America incorporated material from the U.S. as well as European media in order to provide balanced reporting and commentaries.

A large majority of the public in Latin America has been opposed to the war from the start, according to opinion polls -- a position that is shared by most of the media in the region, which counterbalanced their traditional reliance on news, and especially broadcast images, coming out of the United States.

But Bernardo Ajzenberg, ''readers' advocate'' at the daily newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, told IPS that he believed there was ''a clear effort to maintain a certain balance, and to reduce the anti-American slant in news dispatches and in the publication of articles, analyses and interviews.''

He acknowleged, however, a few exceptions to that aim for balance, as seen in the titles of several supplements dedicated to coverage of the war, like the Folha de Sao Paulo's ''Attack by the Empire'', or ''Bush's War'' by another daily newspaper, O Globo. But he said there were also cases of bias in favour of Washington.

Meanwhile, Globo, Brazil's leading TV station, sought to remain impartial, Ajzenberg added.

But in an Internet survey carried out by the 'Observatorio da Imprensa' (Press Observatory), an independent organisation headed by Brazilian press guru Alberto Dines, 91 percent of the 4,099 people who have so far taken part agreed that in Brazil, ''opposition to the war led the media to take an anti-U.S. stance.''

Dines criticised coverage of the war in Brazil, saying there was an exaggerated use of ''indignation and of the 'politically correct','' combined with a lack of more in-depth information, while the media tended to ''simplify'' things due to side-taking or unfamiliarity with the reality on the ground.

Folha de Sao Paulo was the only Brazilian media organ to send special envoys to Baghdad, a reporter and a cameraman, who for safety reasons went to Amman for a few days when the Marines advanced into the Iraqi capital.

That provided a ''Brazilian perspective'' for the public, who otherwise would have had to depend on ''cold news reports,'' said Ajzenberg, the only ''readers advocate'' in a Brazilian print media outlet.

The Argentine daily newspapers Clarín and La Nación, Mexico's Televisa TV network and El Universal newspaper, and Chile's Televisión Nacional also had their own reporters in Iraq.

In Mexico, ''the balanced nature of TV coverage of the war was surprising,'' and the correspondent sent by El Universal provided ''a human face and colourful reporting,'' just as the paper's special envoy did in Afghanistan in 2001, Raul Trejo, founder of the news and media analysis magazine Ectcétera, told IPS.

That sense of surprise was shared by other analysts, who pointed to the rich mix of material from media outlets in the industrialised North with ''the other face'' of the war -- the human element, the position of the Iraqi government, and the harsh criticism of Washington.

Gustavo Sierra, with the Argentine paper Clarín, filed on-the-spot stories with a human face from Baghdad.

His reports, which graced the front-page of the newspaper and drew new visitors to its web site and listeners to the Mitre radio station -- which belongs to the same media group -- provided a blend of news and first-hand impressions from hospitals and shops in a war-torn city, similar to what a soldier might write home to his family.

Mexico's TV Azteca, Globo in Brazil, and even outlets in smaller Latin American countries like Costa Rica and Guatemala sent reporters to neighbouring countries like Kuwait and Jordan, many of whom went to Iraq after the fall of Baghdad.

There have never been so many Latin American journalists covering a war on another continent, and this region provided its share of the reporters who were killed, who numbered 13 in all.

Two press workers sent by Argentina's Telefe TV station, Mario Podestá, 51, and Verónica Cabrera, 28, were killed on their way from Amman to Baghdad.

On Apr. 14, the car in which they were driving rolled several times after its tires were hit by gunfire from an unknown origin, according to witnesses. Podestá was killed on the spot and Cabrera died in a hospital the next day.

The deaths of journalists in Iraq, and especially the cases of three press workers who were killed in U.S. attacks on the Palestine Hotel and the office of the Al-Jazeera Qatar-based TV network on Apr. 8 in Baghdad, triggered outcries from organisations like the International Federation of Journalists and the Brazilian and Uruguayan press associations.

But in Dines's view, accusations against Washington that the attacks were ''deliberate'' and amounted to ''murders'' and ''war crimes'' arose from a ''politicised and corporatist reaction'' by the press that was not based on real evidence.

Trejo also lamented the deaths, but dismissed allegations that the attacks were deliberate, and said they were transformed into something ''out of the ordinary'' due to the fact that journalists were involved, while in many cases the mainstream media remained silent regarding the deaths of thousands of civilians.

The challenge of providing balanced coverage of the war meant media outlets in the region had to creatively overcome a shortage of resources and the limitations faced by overworked journalists who lack the time and funds to train and prepare themselves, unlike their colleagues from rich countries, said Ajzenberg.

Such limitations especially affect international coverage. Folha de Sao Paulo, for example, had 20 correspondents posted abroad in the early 1990s, but had to cut that number by three-quarters as part of a downsizing and cost-cutting effort seen ''throughout Latin America,'' said Ajzenberg.

• Marcela Valente in Argentina, Diego Cevallos in Mexico and Humberto Marquez in Venezuela contributed to this report. (END/2003)

New Vision (Kampala) April 19, 2003 Posted to the web April 21, 2003 John Kakande Kampala

UGANDA has broken ranks with the African Group at the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR) by declining to vote against a motion to censure Sudan and Zimbabwe for human rights abuses.

Uganda on Wednesday also declined to support or oppose resolutions by UNHCR condemning alleged human rights abuses in the North Korea and Turkmenistan. The European Union sponsored the motion.

Recently, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Eritrea broke ranks with other African and non-aligned countries when they supported the Iraq war.

The UNHCR on Wednesday adopted resolutions condemning rights violations in North Korea (DPRK), Turkmenistan and Myanmar, but rejected bids to censure the abuses in Zimbabwe and the Sudan.

Uganda, Thailand and Venezuela were the only three countries that opted to abstain on the motion to censure Sudan for human rights violations, according to a statement issued by the UN.

In all, 26 countries opposed the Sudan motion. They include Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Libya, Senegal, South Africa and Zimbabwe.