newsobserver.com Saturday, May 3, 2003 12:00AM EDT By JOHN ZEBROWSKI, Staff Writer

ZEBULON -- The voice of Ismael Quintana, better known as Pico de Oro to the listeners of La Super Mexicana radio, comes at a furious pace, an excited stream of words touching on everything from pop singers to sports to the rising temperature outside. He speaks in Spanish, but even someone with no understanding of the language can pick up on certain phrases: enfermedades transmitida sexualmente, prevencion de abuso infantil, sifilis.

Then, there's this: Wake County Human Services.

It's 2 p.m. and this week's topic is about how mothers deal with unruly children. Quintana introduces his guest, a petite woman originally from Venezuela named Niosoty Baptista Paparella, a county especialista de salud mental (or mental health specialist). He asks her how parents should discipline their children.

"It isn't just about punishing children," Paparella said. "Some people think that discipline is to beat the children. We need to understand that children aren't property."

The show goes on for nearly 45 minutes, as mothers call in and Paparella gives advice and plugs the services offered by Wake County for the growing Latino population. Each Wednesday, a different expert on women's health sits in the cramped studio of WETC, a 15,000-watt AM station that can be heard throughout central North Carolina and southern Virginia.

Future up in air

The half-hour program runs through September, when its future becomes uncertain. The March of Dimes, which has provided the $10,000 budget the past three years, is looking for other sponsors to help fund the show.

For Wake County, the show is part of a push to better reach the Latino population, which is often kept by language and cultural barriers from using county services.

Over the past decade, the number of Latinos in Wake grew more than five-fold to nearly 35,000, outstripping the county's ability to provide the necessary help. To catch up, Human Services has hired interpreters and printed health materials in Spanish. Each year brings greater focus on Latino health issues.

But it still isn't enough, said Maria Robayo, a county public health educator who produces "En el Aire" ("On the Air"), as the program is called. Robayo was raised in Colombia and has lived in North Carolina for four years. She assigns the topics -- diabetes, hypertension, child immunization, depression -- for each week, books the guests and tries to direct them to the one-story cinderblock studio, which sits underneath four huge radio antennas in a clearing about a half-mile down a narrow dirt track from Riley Hill Road.

Robayo is also a presenter, doing two shows on sexually transmitted diseases. After her first program in March, which focused on gonorrhea and chlamydia she said about 60 people called her office seeking advice. "The response was wonderful, but it shows that people are looking for help and don't know where to go," Robayo said.

Radio a connection

For many Latinos spread around the Triangle, life is an isolated rural existence without the community support English-speaking residents take for granted. Even something as basic as watching television is complicated by the fact Spanish-language channels are available only through satellite or cable systems.

Wake Human Services works with local print media such as the Spanish-language newspaper La Conexion. But, said Martha Olaya-Crowley, Human Services' director of project management and development, the fact many area Latinos are poorly educated makes radio the best way to reach people. She said it is no coincidence that a popular English-language FM station in Raleigh recently converted to Spanish.

"People really rely on Spanish radio to stay informed," she said. "They can call in and ask a question and get an immediate response. You can hear how much they appreciate this."

On this afternoon, the caller is Maria, a mother of two whose husband abandoned her. When Maria was young, she said her own parents used to beat her. Now, she treats her own daughters roughly.

"I realize listening to you that how I'm acting is wrong," she told Paparella. "I don't want my children to be afraid of me. How can I be a more loving mother to my children?"

Robayo smiled as Paparella responded by congratulating Maria for wanting to change her behavior and telling the young mother about the classes on parenting she teaches. Each week Robayo said a similar scene is repeated over the airwaves, with women who have felt alone in a new and frightening place making contact with people who understand them.

With Univision, the national Spanish-language cable network, announcing it will soon broadcast a statewide local channel from Charlotte, Robayo is working with other counties' public health officials to see if they can pool resources to create a similar program for the television.

"We do that," she said as the phone in the studio rang with another question, "and we can help even more people."

Staff writer John Zebrowski can be reached at 829-4841 or jzebrows@newsobserver.com.

By Connie Cass Associated Press

ARLINGTON, Va. -- The names of 31 journalists who died covering the news around the world last year were added to a rainbow-hued glass memorial Friday.

The father of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the Birmingham High School graduate who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, said the lost reporters represent "the ultimate strength of open society as well as its ultimate vulnerability."

Judea Pearl of Encino said his son was killed "not for what he wrote or planned to write but for what he represented."

"To his killers," Pearl said, "he represented the ideas that every person in every civilized society aspires to uphold: modernity, openness, pluralism, freedom of inquiry, truth and respect for all people."

Joe Urschel, executive director of the Newseum, said 17 of the 31 journalists were targeted because of their profession.

"In many cases, they knew that their efforts to get close to the story placed them in danger," Urschel said during an annual ceremony to rededicate the memorial, which has a sweeping view of Washington across the Potomac River.

Last year's deaths brings to 1,475 the toll of reporters, photographers, broadcasters and other journalists who died as a result of injury or illness while covering the news, from 1812 to 2002.

Alongside Pearl, Americans on this year's list included Larry Greene, 50, a photographer with KCBS-TV (Channel 2) in Los Angeles, who was killed in a Navy helicopter crash in the North Arabian Gulf.

As the sun painted a rainbow of colors across the spiraling glass memorial Friday morning, journalists and family members read each name aloud.

Already, names are mounting for next year's service.

At least a dozen journalists died while covering the war in Iraq, and two more are missing, said Susan Bennett, director of international exhibits for the Freedom Forum's Newseum. The foundation, dedicated to free speech and free press, maintains the journalist memorial, adding the previous year's names each May.

Names of the war dead, including NBC News reporter David Bloom, Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large Michael Kelly and Associated Press Television News cameraman Nazeh Darwazeh, will be embedded between glass panes in 2004.

Journalists killed in 2002 included a newspaper editor and a broadcaster who were shot in separate incidents in Colombia; both had received death threats. In Russia, attacks on two editors and a reporter were linked to their investigative reporting. Journalists in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Nepal and the Philippines also appear to have been killed because of their work, the foundation said.

Two journalists died in gunfire while covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One was struck by a U.S. tank during military exercises in Kuwait. Others died in Papua New Guinea, Uganda and Venezuela.

Photographer David Gerdrum, 48, and reporter Jennifer Hawkins Hinderliter, 22, were killed in a traffic accident on assignment for KRTV in Great Falls, Mont.

Freelance reporter Robert I. Friedman, 51, died of heart complications resulting from a rare disease contracted while reporting in Bombay, India.

Philippe Wamba, 31, editor in chief of the Web site Africana.com, died in a car crash while doing research in Kenya.

<a href=www.thestar.com>The Toronto Star May. 3, 2003. 09:30 AM DAVID OLIVE

TOP OF THE CEO CLASS: Clive Beddoe is one of a select number of corporate leaders who have made a real difference to their companies' performance.

The "great man theory of history" took a beating in the epic collapse of financial markets two years ago.

It turns out many CEOs who claimed to be reinventing their industries — or creating new ones from scratch — didn't have the staying power to survive the first economic downturn they faced.

Ditto those who equated themselves with Michael Jordan in justifying their superstar compensation, and vied with J-Lo for ubiquity on magazine covers.

Yet while celebrity CEOs are now out, the theory about how much one leader can accomplish has not been thoroughly undermined after all.

Two of the top 10 companies highlighted in the Star's first annual report card on Canada's top-performing CEOs would not exist but for the persistence of their founder-CEOs — Clive Beddoe's Westjet Airlines Ltd., one of just three consistently profitable airlines in North America; and John Forzani's Forzani Group Ltd., one of the continent's leading sporting goods retailers.

At each of the 10 firms, risky turnaround, expansion and globalization strategies have been driven by CEOs who have put their personal stamp on both the organization and their industry.

For the past decade, Dofasco Inc.'s John Mayberry has been perhaps the most credible spokesperson for a North American steel industry that has seen about a dozen U.S. steel makers seek refuge in bankruptcy protection in the past two years.

And by risking billions of dollars on efforts to upgrade the efficiency of his oil-sands operation at Suncor Energy Inc., Rick George is incidentally making a case for Canada's immense oil-sands reserves as an alternative to the Mideast, Venezuela, Nigeria and other politically volatile oil-producing regions.

Yet these CEOs do differ from the over-hyped leaders of the pre-boom days. Forsaking big-picture talk about "vision" and "convergence," they're deeply immersed in the unglamorous details of their businesses — picking a high-traffic location for their next store, or an out-of-the-way airport with cheaper landing fees for each new city that Westjet serves, or experimenting with winning playlists at Astral Media Inc.'s growing network of radio stations in Quebec.

These are not attention-seeking leaders. "I'm only famous for my big machines," says Rick George, who's happy to surrender the limelight to Suncor's three-storey bitumen extracting trucks at Fort McMurray, Alta.

The only household name on our list is Westjet's Beddoe, who saves money by not advertising his product on television. So his marketing staff is thrilled at Beddoe's repeated TV news appearances in which his comments are sought on the chronic woes at arch-rival Air Canada. They correctly see this as the best, most credible type of advertising.

But Beddoe's annoyance with overdog Air Canada is sincere. And the chip on this Westerner's shoulder is real. "So this is the centre of the universe," was the Calgary-based Beddoe's first comment at a meeting with the Star's editorial board.

Strategies for confronting adversity are the common bond among this year's outstanding CEOs.

Dofasco's Mayberry, who retired yesterday after almost 11 years as CEO, took a series of low-key steps to weather tough times in global steel making. He locked up long-term supply contracts with auto and appliance makers and other key clients to limit Dofasco's exposure to swings in the spot market.

Mayberry also spent some $2 billion on technology upgrades over the past decade to offer clients higher-quality steel. And he gained access to the fast-growing market for mini-mill products by taking a 50 per cent stake in a mini-mill startup in Kentucky.

That slow-and-steady approach has paid off for Dofasco, which reported a first-quarter profit of $47.1 million in April in contrast to a $44 million loss at cross-town rival Stelco Inc. After experimenting disastrously with a short-lived takeover of Algoma Steel Inc. in the late 1980s, Dofasco under its new CEO Mayberry swore off the acquisitions that have since proved difficult for industry consolidators in the United States and Europe.

"We haven't seen too many people turning (mergers) into gold," Mayberry told analysts recently. "We still have this funny, old-fashioned belief that you should earn your cost of capital if you're going to make an investment."

Westjet's Beddoe is equally cautious. He is an irrepressible mascot for Westjet's latest route additions in Halifax, Windsor and Montreal. But Westjet, founded in 1996, was 3 years old before its fleet numbered eight aircraft — a benchmark that upstart Jetsgo Corp. has reached in its first few months of operation.

Each new Westjet destination is expected to be profitable in its own right, not merely as a feeder of traffic to the larger network. If new routes aren't paying for themselves within a year, flight frequency and pricing are fiddled with until the formula is right.

And for all its ambitions to rival, and perhaps overtake, Air Canada on domestic routes, Westjet still hedges its bets by renting aircraft to tour operators flying to Las Vegas and sunspots in Mexico and the Caribbean. Maximizing the use of costly aircraft is one reason why Westjet has logged more than two dozen consecutive profitable quarters.

Westjet's latest quarterly results, released last week, gave ample reason for a cautious approach. Wartime fuel-price increases and a drop in traffic, along with costs in expanding the aircraft fleet, caused profits to plunge 89 per cent.

Global expansion is one way to reduce dependence on a maturing domestic market

George's setback with an ill-fated shale oil project in Australia strengthened his conviction that Suncor needed to bolster its basic business, extracting crude from the Athabasca tar sands. The payoff from that decision has been enormous.

Beginning in the late 1990s, George invested a staggering $3.4 billion in Suncor's existing oil-sands facility at Fort McMurray, source of some 90 per cent of total profits.

The completed Millennium Project enabled Suncor to nearly double its profits last year, to $761 million. It will also help Suncor double its output by 2010. But George's focus now is on further reductions in production costs to become still more competitive with the $4 to $6 (U.S.) per barrel production costs in the Mideast.

So soon after Millennium, one of the biggest construction projects in Alberta history, George is embarking on the $3 billion Voyageur project at Fort McMurray with the goal of further efficiency improvements that will cut his production costs from $13 to $10 per barrel. Ultimately, George wants Suncor to emerge as the world's fifth- or sixth-largest producer, drawing still more attention to the fact that the Athabasca region accounts for one-third of the world's oil reserves.

Sporting-goods merchant John Forzani coped with adversity by learning how to manage the growth unleashed by his too-rapid acquisitions of competing chains, most notoriously of the large but unprofitable Quebec-based Sports Experts in the early 1990s. That deal created a national chain, but was marred by a culture clash between Forzani's entrepreneurial, English-speaking executives at Calgary head office and the more bureaucratic francophones at the new acquisition.

Retreat was in order, but Forzani and capable lieutenants he recruited soon imposed cost and inventory controls for the first time on their newly enlarged empire. They dumped money-losing locations, and took a Loblaw Cos. Ltd. approach to tracking sales of every item on a daily basis to learn exactly what was selling, where and at what price.

Today, as Forzani hands over the reins to one of those lieutenants, Bob Sartor, his company is posting its sixth consecutive year of record profits.

Through painstaking experimentation, the company has learned how to "de-seasonalize" the sporting goods business by offering an astonishingly wide variety of goods, from fashionable ski wear to golf togs, and from snowboards to in-line skates. The eclectic product mix helped Forzani subdue big-box interlopers from the United States.

Other top-performing CEOs have responded to tough conditions by expanding globally in a risky bid to reduce dependence on a maturing market.

At a struggling Cott Corp. in the late 1990s, turnaround CEO Frank Weise wasted no time after refinancing the firm and shedding such distractions as a pet-food subsidiary in staking the company's future on international expansion.

Under its late founder, Gerry Pencer, Cott became a stock-market darling by growing rapidly, a strategy that brought the firm to near ruin and which the new CEO was expected to abandon.

Instead, after implementing a rigorous cost-control regime, Weise has rekindled Cott's old reputation as a growth play with five soundly financed acquisitions in the past three years. These have strengthened Cott's position in the United States, where it now has 7 per cent of its market niche, and in Mexico, whose 100 million people have the world's second-highest per capita consumption of soft drinks, trailing only the United States.

But that is not a pell-mell growth strategy. Like Magna International Inc., which builds its new auto-parts factories alongside the assembly plants of its auto-maker clients, Cott now grows safely in tandem with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other key customers for its private-label beverages, letting those bigger firms take the brunt of the risk in developing new markets.

For Loblaw, meanwhile, Wal-Mart is an adversary, not a partner. Loblaw is the dominant Canadian grocer, but treats Wal-Mart as a serious threat given the latter's hugely successful move into food retailing in the United States.

Before Wal-Mart strikes at Canadian grocers, Loblaw CEO John Lederer is seeking to blunt the threat by challenging Wal-Mart on its own turf of non-food retailing.

A complacent Lederer could easily continue to thrive from Loblaw's unassailable hold on the industry's best real estate, which enables it to plunk No Frills, Zehrs and Fortinos stores in the neighbourhoods of its choice.

Instead, Lederer is pushing his real estate advantage by introducing such grocery store novelties as costume jewellery and Ralph Lauren jeans in his emporia. An increasing number of Loblaw parking lots now boast a gas bar, and Lederer is even experimenting with "dollar stores" within some of his larger outlets, along with expanded pharmacies.

At times, Lederer seems intent on duelling anyone who challenges him for a piece of the consumer dollar. "Why couldn't we sell you a coffee maker, toaster or frying pan?" he asks, when not musing about full-service Loblaw auto-repair centres.

How much of this is pure bluff is not the question. Confronting the world's largest retailer on his own ground, Lederer has gone on the offensive not only against Wal-Mart but Shoppers Drug Mart, Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd. and the growing Everything For A Dollar chain.

It might seem folly to take on all comers. Actually, Lederer is wisely putting rivals on the defensive. And it's not as if Loblaw is straying from its core strength in food in order to slay new dragons.

"Doing food right gives us the ticket" to expand into new niches, Lederer has told Bay Street analysts who might wonder if Loblaw, faced with the Wal-Mart spectre, has begun to forget what business it is in.

"The only obstacle is our ability to execute," he says. "We could do anything we want if we feel it is worthwhile."

An audacious pronouncement, to be sure. But it's torn from the playbook of the late Sam Walton.

Additional articles by David Olive

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, May 3 (<a href=ipsnews.net>Inter Press Service News Agency-Tierramérica) - Any overview about birds in Latin America conveys a sense of the great wealth of species, serving as a reminder of the region's almost lavish biological diversity and of the aggressions against the environment, which not only threaten the habitat of one kind of bird or another, but of all living things.

Of the 9,700 known bird species in the world, 4,339 (45 percent) are found in the Americas. Of that total, 649 are in danger of becoming extinct before 2020, according to the environmental coalition BirdLife International, based in Britain.

In Brazil and Colombia, the world leaders for biodiversity, the threat of extinction hovers over 114 and 77 bird species, respectively.

Worldwide, 1,200 bird species -- approximately one out of eight -- are in danger of disappearing forever within the first two decades of this century.

The impacts of human activity on the environment are the cause behind bird species endangerment in 99 percent of the cases, according to the Washington-based non-governmental Worldwatch Institute.

Howard Youth, author of ”Winged Messengers: The Decline of Birds”, says we are witnessing the worst wave of species extinction since the dinosaurs disappeared from Earth 65 million years ago.

In the past 500 years, since the Europeans arrived in the Americas, at least 128 bird species have disappeared from the hemisphere, with more than 100 of that total becoming extinct in the just the last two centuries.

Birds serve as valuable environmental markers, says Youth. Clemencia Rodner, president of the Audubon Foundation of Venezuela, explained this concept to Tierramérica: ”Due to their visibility, birds are the best indicator, an early warning sign, when something is going wrong in an ecosystem. They flee or their numbers diminish.”

The loss of habitat is the leading threat to bird populations, if it does not cause their extinction outright. Each year, the world loses more than 50,000 square km of forests, an area the size of Costa Rica.

That was the case of the 'poc', inhabitant of Guatemala's Atitlán Lake until a generation ago. Known in English as the giant pied-billed grebe, it became extinct as the result of the diminishing coverage of the shoreline bush it nested in, the 'tul'.

A contributing factor to the demise of the poc was the 1976 earthquake, which caused the lake level to fall several meters, killing off the tul, but another was the introduction -- by humans -- of the black 'lobaina', which fed on the eggs of the poc, also known as the Atitlán grebe.

”It was a very special bird, unique to Guatemala and the colour of dark coffee. It didn't fly, it was a diver,” Diego Esquina, mayor of Santiago Atitlán, told Tierramérica.

A fast swimmer, the poc is remembered by older residents of the area for its ability to escape the gaze of the curious, diving under the lake surface, and not reappearing until it was 20 to 25 meters farther away.

In the mid-1980s, the ”save the poc” campaign was launched, but it only proved able to prolong the lives of the handful of remaining birds for a few more years.

Unfortunately, a similar story may be told of the harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja), ”a monumental bird”, says Rodner, and the strongest bird of prey in the world. It can weigh up to nine kilos, bit it needs an extensive -- and also protected -- habitat.

This type of eagle was historically found from southern Mexico to northern Argentina. Today, the area along the Venezuela-Brazil border is one of its best-preserved populations, but ”they feed almost exclusively on monkeys and sloths, and need to eat at least one every two days,” explained the activist.

”Where can populations develop in order to make the species viable, with several dozen birds? In Venezuela, only on the Yanomami indigenous reserves in the extreme south. But what happens if the jungles begin to disappear, and with them the sloths and the monkeys?” asks Rodner.

The onslaught against birds in general has several fronts: an airport planned for construction on the site that was Texcoco lake in Mexico could affect 70 species; pesticide use contaminates land and water and is fatal for millions of birds worldwide each year; trapping parrots to turn them into pets is a threat to one out of three parrots around the globe.

But to fight these threats, there are programmes to protect birds and their habitats in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela -- seven of the 12 countries with greatest biodiversity, alongside China, India, Indonesia, Kenya and South Africa.

Many birds fly great distances -- even across oceans -- and their protection must be coordinated by several countries if it is to be effective.

One example of a bi-national initiative with public and private funding is aimed at conserving some 5,000 swallow-tailed kites (Elanoides forficatus), which migrate between southeastern United States and Brazil.

The dickcissel (Spiza americana) lives and reproduces in the northern hemisphere summer on the U.S. plains, and in the winter heads to central-western Venezuela, where the species is known to ruin rice and sorghum crops.

The Venezuelan Audubon Foundation is promoting an alliance with local farmers to convince them not to kill the birds but to scare them off using a repellent in their fields.

The protected areas of Venezuela cover a combined total of 14 million hectares, or 16 percent of the national territory, in 43 national parks, 17 natural monuments and seven wildlife refuges. But Rodner complains that the country has not developed management plans for these areas to ensure appropriate habitat for the species meant to be protected.

Luis Cova, of the governmental Wildlife Institute, told Tierramérica ”there are many cases of success. For example, the refuges created along Venezuela's Caribbean coast have pushed up the number of flamingos from 18,000 to 44,000 in just over 10 years.” (Humberto Márquez is an IPS correspondent. Jorge Alberto Grochembake/Guatemala contributed to this report.)

• Originally published Apr. 26 in Spanish by the Latin American network of Tierramérica newspapers. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme: www.tierramerica.net (END/2003)

NewsStand - Friday, May 02, 2003 <a href=www.menafn.com>MENAFN-The Dallas Morning News Exxon Mobil Corp. Sudeep Reddy

Exxon Mobil Corp. reported a record quarterly profit of $7.04 billion Thursday, more than triple its earnings from a year earlier, but analysts said a recent drop in crude oil prices should restrain profits for the rest of the year.

"Earnings were strong but really weaker than they appear," said Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Fahnestock & Co. who attributes some of the gains to lower-than-expected tax rates and other factors out of the company's control. "When you dig into them, they are a lot softer."

Crude oil prices rose more than 50 percent in the first quarter due to the war in Iraq and production disruptions in Venezuela and Nigeria. Natural gas prices more than doubled due to cold weather and fears of a supply shortage.

Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil, the largest publicly traded oil company, said first-quarter earnings were $1.05 per share, compared with 30 cents a year ago, when profit was $2.09 billion. Quarterly revenue grew from $63.8 billion from $43.4 billion.

Without an accounting change, discontinued operations, merger effects and a special item, first-quarter earnings were $4.79 billion, or 71 cents a share, a penny above Wall Street's consensus estimate, according to Thomson First Call.

Despite record earnings across the sector, oil company shares have stalled as investors bet on lower profits now that commodity prices have fallen. Exxon Mobil shares closed Thursday at $35.48, up 28 cents. The stock has lost 14 percent over the last year.

But the company's shares have done better than the overall market in the last three years. They've declined 33 percent, while the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index has fallen 40 percent.

Commodity prices are still higher than historical levels, which are under $20 per barrel for crude oil and around $2 per million British thermal units for natural gas.

Crude oil for June delivery closed Thursday at $26.03 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Natural gas closed at $5.27 per million BTUs.

That should support returns across the sector and attract new investment, said Tina Vital, an equity analyst at Standard & Poor's.

"When the market realizes that, you won't see the disconnect between the oil and gas fundamentals and the stock market," Vital said.

(c) 2003, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.