<a href=www.indianexpress.com>www.indianexpress.com Thomas H. Maugh Ii & Usha Lee Mcfarling

Toronto, April 25: In an effort to stave off economic disaster, Canadian officials launched a campaign Thursday to repudiate the World Health Organization’s warning that it is potentially dangerous to travel to Canada’s largest city because of an outbreak of SARS.

Local officials met Thursday morning to plot strategies to restore tourism in this normally bustling city, dispatching Canadian diplomats to WHO headquarters in Geneva to plead for the warning to be rescinded. ‘‘Fortress Toronto’’ and ‘‘Boo WHO’’ read banner headlines on local newspapers, as the mayor and other officials made high-profile public appearances to dispel what they considered misguided perceptions about the city, the sixth largest in North America and the financial capital of Canada.

Toronto officials argued that, despite the WHO warning, they were making major progress in controlling Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Dr Sheela Basrur, the city’s chief medical officer, said that Toronto had not had a new case for seven days.

WHO’s warning against unnecessary travel, issued Wednesday, was quickly echoed by the governments of Britain, France, Ireland, Australia, Venezuela and Jamaica.

Local hotels, convention centres and theatres were already beginning to feel the effects of cancelled reservations. The US is by far the largest source of foreign visitors to Canada, with more than 62 million border crossings each year.

Some good news came from the nearby Nova Scotia, which has issued a similar warning, then withdrew it overnight.

Toronto officials feel a strong sense of outrage. ‘‘They (WHO) have quarantined an entire city,’’ said Mayor Mel Lastman. ‘‘I demand that WHO come to Toronto and see for themselves that Toronto is safe to visit, safe to work in, and safe to play in.’’

Masks are rarely sighted on Toronto streets. Bus and subway drivers have been ordered not to wear masks, even though some reportedly would like to do so.

There have been no cases of infection on public transportation, officials said, so there is no need for the masks.

The Canadian government’s effort to rescind the WHO travel warning will probably do no good. The warning will remain in force for a full three weeks, WHO spokesman Jon Linden said Thursday. (LAT-WP)

By Ted Rall, <a href=www.alternet.org>AlterNet April 25, 2003

Iraq is going to hell. Shiites are killing Sunnis, Kurds are killing Arabs and Islamists are killing secular Baathists. Baghdad, the cradle of human civilization, has been left to looters and rapists. As in Beirut during the '70s, neighborhood zones are separated by checkpoints manned by armed tribesmen. The war has, however, managed to unite Iraqis in one respect: Everyone loathes the United States.

Some Iraqis hate us for deposing Saddam Hussein. No dictator remains in power without the tacit support of at some of his subjects. Now that we've committed the cardinal sin of conquest – getting rid of the old system without thinking up a new one – even those who chafed under Saddam blame us for their present misery.

Others resent our Pentagon-appointed pretender, 58-year-old banker/embezzler Ahmed Chalabi. The State Department points out that Iraq's new puppet autocrat has zero support among Iraqis, having lived abroad since 1958. But who knows? Maybe he was a really popular kid.

Thousands of Iraqis have been reduced to poverty, raped and murdered by rampaging goons as U.S. Marines stood around and watched. We watched the plunder of museums in Mosul and Baghdad safe at home with our tisk-tisk dismay, but Iraqis will remain outraged by the wanton devastation we wrought through war, permitted through negligence and shrugged off through arrogance. "We didn't allow it," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. "It happened."

Imagine foreign troops sitting idly, laughing as hooligans trashed the Smithsonian, stole the gold from Fort Knox and burned down the Department of the Interior. That was us in Iraq.

But let's forget this penny ante stuff. Let the real looting begin! George W. Bush's bestest buddies, corporate executives at companies which donate money in exchange for a few rounds of golf and a few million-dollar favors, are being handed the keys to Iraq's oil fields.

Bush's brazen Genghis Khan act seems carefully calculated to confirm our worst suspicions. First he appoints retired general Jay Garner, president of a GOP-connected defense contractor, SYColeman Corp., as viceroy of occupied Iraq. "The idea is we are in Iraq not as occupiers but as liberators, and here comes a guy who has attachments to companies that provided the wherewithal for the military assault on that country," marvels David Armstrong, a defense analyst at the National Security News Service. A smart and/or decent president would have picked a civilian for a civil administration post.

Then Bush slips a $680 million contract to the Bechtel Group. The deal puts the company in position to receive a big part of the $100 billion estimated total cost of Iraqi reconstruction. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel gave Republican candidates, including Bush, about $765,000 in PAC, soft money and individual campaign contributions between 1999 and 2002.

Finally, refusing to accept bids from potential competitors, Bush grants a two-year, $490 million contract for Iraqi oil field repairs to Halliburton Co., the Houston-based company where Vice President Dick Cheney worked as CEO from 1995 to 2000. "It will look a lot worse if Halliburton gets the USAID [Agency for International Development] contract, too," Bathsheba Crocker, an Iraq specialist for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned in March. "Then it really starts looking bad." Guess what! Halliburton has since scored a piece of that $600 million USAID contract.

Are we looking bad yet?

Only Bush's most intimate friends were invited to bid for these contracts. Even businesses based in Great Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair risked his political career to support Bush, have been excluded from a rigged process where only U.S.-based, Republican-led, Bush-connected companies need apply.

Two senior Democratic Congressmen, Henry Waxman and John Dingell, are asking the General Accounting Office to look into these sleazy kickback deals. "These ties between the vice president and Halliburton have raised concerns about whether the company has received favorable treatment from the administration," their letter reads. Well, duh. But don't count on appropriate action – like impeachment proceedings – from the do-nothing Dems.

Bush's right-wing Gang of Four – Cheney, Rummy, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz – saw Operation Iraqi Freedom as a chance to line their buddies' pockets, emasculate the Muslim world, place U.S. military bases in Russia's former sphere of influence and, according to the experts, lower the price of oil by busting OPEC.

"There will be a substantial increase in Iraqi oil production [under U.S. occupation], and I wouldn't be surprised if schemes emerged to weaken, if not destroy, OPEC," says Jumberto Calderón, former energy minister of Venezuela. Former OPEC secretary general Fadhil Chalabi (no relation to Ahmed) estimates that increased exploration could potentially double Iraq's proven reserves, which would raise production from 2.4 to 10 million barrels a day. Such Saudi-scale production would "bring OPEC to its knees," says Chalabi.

The cartel's member nations, ten of 11 of them predominantly Muslim, would suffer staggering increases in poverty as a result of falling oil revenues, plunging some into the political chaos that breeds Islamist fundamentalism. Meanwhile, the people of Iraq, whose self-flagellating Shias already make the evening news look like a rerun of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, would starve as foreign infidels raked in billions thanks to the oil beneath their land.

Time to dust off the duct tape.

Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism.

Reuters, 04.25.03, 5:58 PM ET  

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, April 25 (Reuters) - Brazilian state oil company Petroleo Brasileiro (Petrobras) <PETR4.SA>(nyse: PBR - news - people) said on Friday it lowered its 2005 production target due to delays in the construction of exploration platforms.

Production in 2005 should reach 1.82 million barrels of oil a day, not the previously targeted 1.9 million bpd, said Petrobras Finance Director Luis Sergio Gabrielli. He added that output should reach 2.22 million bpd in 2007.

"The events of the last years have caused us to draw a more conservative scenario," said Gabrielli, who explained that some oil exploration platforms would not be ready as soon as previously expected.

The firm's projections were based on forecasts for 3.1 percent annual economic growth and 2.8 percent yearly growth in consumption until 2007. Petrobras plans to invest $34.3 billion from 2003 to 2007, slightly higher than the $32 billion previously forecast.

Gabrielli also said Petrobras decided to construct a heavy crude refinery in northeast Brazil with a capacity of 150,000 bpd in partnership with Venezuela's PDVSA state oil company, which would supply some of the refinery's crude oil.

Rogerio Manso, director of supply for Petrobras, said the new refinery would help meet increased demand for diesel oil in the country.

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD — Special for Granma International —

Without Frontiers • Under the pretext of fighting for press freedom, Reporters Without Frontiers has been transformed into a tool of Washington and its Interests Section in Havana • In order to try and undermine the Cuban Revolution, Robert Menard, leader of this organization, is purchases the services of pseudo-reporters to fuel the fascist, annexationist and Batista-loving Miami press

PLAGIARIZING the name of credible international organizations was not that difficult for neo-reactionary Robert Menard - pseudo-journalist, fraudster and CIA agent – in order to make a space for himself in the communications world. Nor was it difficult to find funds for his projects of misinformation: the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are offering the bread and butter.

One of Robert Menard’s protégés, journalist Néstor Baguer, was president of the Association of Independent Cuban Journalists...until it became known, during the trial of those mercenaries of misinformation, that he was State Security agent Octavio. Menard also lent his support to Aleida Godínez, journalist with Lux magazine, an alleged trade union publication from the electricity industry, printed in Miami and distributed by USIS. Above, Néstor Baguer in a "journalists" meeting held in the U.S. Interests Section.

Following the arrest in Cuba of those individuals who actively collaborated with the U.S. Special Interests Section and its plans to destabilize the Cuban Revolution, Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Frontiers-RWF-), Menard’s NGO (that’s not that non-governmental) in support of "independent journalists" (who are not exactly journalists or independent), has thrown itself into an hysterical anti-Cuba campaign worthy of counterrevolutionaries in Miami.

For several years now, Menard and the RWF organization have managed to penetrate the editorial offices of several French and international media agencies, disguised as imperialist-style human rights activists, demanding the right to interfere in the internal affairs of individual nations and justifying the military interventions of their bosses.

A recent, sensationalist publicity stunt by RWF was to make a scandalous parallel of the human rights situation in Baghdad - where U.S. fascism has just carried out a massacre - with Cuba, where the Revolution exercises the right to defend itself from brazen foreign intervention.

In a press conference on April 9, Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque recalled that there is an abundance of financial sources which groups like Menard’s – obsessed with Cuba and supposedly "humanitarian" - have access to.

The balance sheet is, quite simply, indecent.

RAINING BUCKS

In 2002, the International Republican Institute in the United States received the sum of $1,674,462 USD in order to "help create bases of international support to provide material, moral and ideological aid to activists in Cuba."

On December 27, Adolfo Franco (a member of the so-called Miami Connection and one of more than 20 Cuban-Americans to have penetrated the upper echelons of the Bush administration), the USAID administrator for the Latin American and Caribbean region (get this!) openly stated before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee that the US foreign aid agency had invested $22 million USD in materials, propaganda and other items for Cuba, including 7,000 radios "to listen to Radio Martí."

It is worth mentioning that the very same Radio Martí receives $25 million USD from Voice of America funds, of which it is a simple subsidiary... In the same way every year, from the many sources created by the government in Washington to supply mercenaries, tens and tens of millions of dollars rain on those who collaborate with imperialism, as much in Paris or Havana as in Miami.

The self-same James Cason - a CIA agent and head of USIS – who was commissioned by George W. Bush’s government to intensify the subversive campaign against Cuba, announced on Miami television that he would meet at every possible opportunity with the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), an organization created, sustained and directed by the CIA, servant of the NED and USAID, and identified by terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, currently imprisoned in Panama, as his principal financial source.

Cason also acknowledged his immoral and active relationship with the paramilitary version of CANF, the Cuban Liberty Council, an organization run by terrorist couple Ninoska Lucrecia Pérez Castellon and Roberto Martí Pérez, the proven organizer and financier of multiple acts of terrorism committed against Cuba.

In his eagerness to "liberate Cuba" and "support press freedom", and with the anti-communist venom he has been unable to hide, Menard has not only hired out his organization but has transformed it into a misinformation agency and a mechanism for distributing funds to counterrevolutionaries, one that also provides false material for all the neo-fascistic and Batista-supporting media channels in South Florida: a French version of CIA-operative Frank Calson’s Freedom House, which also devotes itself to distributing payment funds.

"WE GAVE THEM $50 USD A MONTH"

Some years ago, Menard implicitly confessed to his participation in the distribution of money to an important number of "collaborators" who were carrying out work for the USIS.

"We gave around 20 journalists $50 USD per month each to survive," Menard confirmed to Hernando Calvo Ospina and Katiijn Declercq, authors of ¿Disidentes o mercenarios? (Dissidents or Mercenaries).

In fact, the way in which these funds - of "undetermined" origin – were distributed by Menard and his organization correspond with the methods used by various organizations in the United States openly connected to the NED and USAID and reveal the relationship between RWF and the CIA; like the destination of the supposed "information" circulated by the counterrevolutionary "agencies".

This material, systematically directed at undermining and damaging the Revolution’s image, is destined for publications characterized by their alignment to Washington. In such a way that RWF is not just fulfilling its mission to locate, recruit, direct and financially support a series of mercenaries, but also to fuel media channels controlled by a stew of Batista-loving personalities such as El Diario de las Américas, El Nuevo Herald, Radio Mambí and Radio Martí, each of them with clear neo-fascist, annexationist tendencies.

By behaving in this way, Menard is aligning his supposedly humanitarian organization with the vision of Cuba held by the "Pontiff" of Radio Martí, Alberto Pérez-Roura. This individual is the head of a loathsome channel that constantly expresses its support for the bloodiest terrorism, represented by Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.

A clear collaborator with the blockade in respect of information, Menard has always abstained from condemning the tremendously repressive policies of numerous "regimes" associated with the United States. Nor does he attack the empire that generates them, preferring instead to get his funds from those in the European Union and various business people suspiciously interested in the cause of information.

Significantly, Menard’s organization is one of three similar organizations provided with large budgets and saturating the global market of the defense of press freedom in its monopolistic version. Curiously enough, the other two are U.S. organizations: CPJ of New York and Miami’s Inter American Press.

Some months ago, Menard let his mask slip in Venezuela, by rushing to the aid of the putschist press, that of multimillionaire Gustavo Cisneros and others like him, whilst ignoring the fate of journalists from the community press, those in favor of the immense popular support enjoyed by President Hugo Chávez.

In the same way, he has always ignored the brutal attacks on and detentions of reporters connected to the anti-globalization campaigns (most notably those from the Indymedia network) and the large-scale protests that have taken place since 1999 against the World Trade Organization in Washington.

A self-proclaimed freedom fighter, he has embarked on his new crusade whilst George W. Bush sets off on his, with admirable simultaneity.

In the same way that George W. Bush and his regime use the issue of human rights as their defense in crushing them - either through the Patriot Act or cluster bombs - Robert Menard uses it to finish off with information. Dreaming of one America...without frontiers.

25 Apr 2003 21:08:59 GMT

CARACAS, Venezuela, April 25 (Reuters) - A man wanted in Spain for allegedly carrying out a 1979 attack for the Basque separatist group ETA has surrendered to Venezuelan authorities, the government said on Friday.

Luis Maria Olalde, one of six suspected ETA members in Venezuela whose extradition was sought by Madrid, gave himself up to local prosecutors Wednesday. Venezuela's Supreme Court must decide whether the extradition request should be granted.

Olalde, 46, went into exile in the South American nation at the end of the 1980s with other Basque separatists as part of an agreement between the Spanish and Venezuelan presidents at the time, Felipe Gonzalez and Carlos Andres Perez.

Olalde is sought by Spanish police in connection with a 1979 attack against a Civil Guard vehicle.

Following an extradition request last year from Spain to President Hugo Chavez's government, Venezuelan authorities ordered the arrest of Olalde and the five other ETA suspects.

An ETA guerrilla campaign since 1968 to press demands for an independent Basque state in Spain has killed more than 830 people.