<a href=www.thestar.com>Toronto Star May. 8, 2003. 07:11 AM

CALGARY—Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., the country's Number 3 oil explorer, said yesterday first-quarter profit quadrupled due to sky-high oil and gas prices that have led to stellar results across the industry.

Canadian Natural, with operations at home, in the North Sea and offshore west Africa, also said it was proceeding with engineering work on its $8.5 billion Alberta oil-sands project while pressing Ottawa for more details on the long-term impact of the Kyoto climate change accord on costs.

It earned $428 million, or $3.19 a share, in the quarter, up from year-earlier $99 million, or 81 cents a share. That handily beat the average earnings estimate of $2.35 a share among analysts polled by Thomson First Call.

Cash flow, giving a glimpse into an oil company's ability to fund development, was $906 million, or $6.76 a share, up from $359 million, or $2.95 a share.

Canadian Natural, the biggest of several companies that count Calgary financier Murray Edwards as a major investor, joined a raft of oil firms with huge first-quarter profit.

Results were driven by oil prices that jumped 55 per cent as markets fretted over supplies ahead of the Iraq war and during a protracted strike in Venezuela that crippled exports from the OPEC producer.

North American natural gas prices more than doubled due to cold winter weather and depleting inventories.

The stock fell 20 cents to $50.20 in Toronto yesterday. It has risen 25 per cent in the past year, outpacing the TSX oil group, which is up 12 per cent.

Chairman Allan Markin said his company completed its busiest-ever drilling program in the quarter with 749 wells and a 94 per cent success rate.

Canadian Natural produced 1.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, up from year-earlier 1.1 billion. Oil and gas liquids output averaged 237,560 barrels a day, up from 188,439.

Volumes increased in North America, off Ivory Coast and in the North Sea, where it acquired additional stakes in some of its projects, it said.

It said it expects production to average 1.28 billion to 1.3 billion cubic feet a day of gas in 2003, 240,000 to 260,000 barrels of oil and gas liquids a day.

Canadian Natural said it was working with the Canadian government to determine the costs of implementing Kyoto after 2012 as it moved toward a decision on the 232,000 barrel a day Horizon oil-sands development in northern Alberta.

The company said it was optimistic it would get necessary assurances before deciding on major spending in 2004.

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic news Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Francisco Rivero

Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 09:03:18 -0400 From: Francisco Rivero riverofjr@hotmail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Reply to Mr. Elio Cequea

Dear Editor: To Mr. Elio Cequea. 

Quote: <a href=www.vheadline.com>Anyway, does this sound contradictory to him "... right on the surging of urban slums and shanty towns ... wrong to disprove robust economic growth."  It does to me ... I thought economic growth reduces the other one.Unquote

Beware of your common sense!  Your mind is operating on the following track ... urban slums and shantytowns are today’s flagship of misery and depravation in Venezuela ... so anything that triggered its surging could not be a good thing...

Wrong! let me give you a different perspective ... you are living in a country with a large and poor farming population living (¿really?) in appalling agricultural dwellings ... all of a sudden such a country’s economy goes into overdrive expanding at breakneck speed over a fairly long period ... (I know this fact is emotionally unacceptable to you because it does not fit your hair-brained theory of exploitation, decline and degeneration since discovery day ... masterly exposed in your letter “In Venezuela, even the Virgin Mary plays politics” and summed up in the following line “what have brought us where we are”).

Those humble families, at the end of their wits, scraping a life, saw better opportunities for them and their children around the industrial and urban poles of development.  Plenty of work opportunities and well paid jobs awaited them.  The spectacular growth of the economy triggered a massive shift from farm to city ... those people were not fools ... they knew better ... they knew what a hopeless life they were leaving behind ... humble families in the 60s did have hopes for better lives (not so for today’s humble families, and you can speak volumes about “the future remains to be seen”).

Why were those hopes for better life were dashed on the rocks of woe and despair?

We simply stopped growing ... sometime around the late 70s our national economy tanked and went into a long and unstoppable decline ... and the compensating and beneficial effects of a growing economy were not anymore there to cope with the initial surge from farm to city and the inertial population increases caused by better perspectives and better health care ... gross economic mismanagement for sure ... its roots could certainly be found in the period of fantastic economic growth and improving well-being ... however that does not invalidate the undeniable fact that such a thing really happened in Venezuela.

Your theory notwithstanding, there was an historical period in our history that the forces you stated did not operate...

Quote <a href=www.vheadline.com>In Venezuela we have both "world class wealth and world class poverty" ... one is getting wealthier and wealthier the other one, poorer and poorer.Unquote

That is absolutely true ... and nowadays things are really speeding up ... I can foresee we will solve this problem pretty soon ... the very very few numbers of the old-rich will leave the country and the entire Venezuelan population will scrape their lives with less than a dollar a day ... of course with the sweet little exception of the very very few numbers of the new-and-revolutionary-fluent-rich...

That is what we really need to stop!

Francisco Rivero riverofjr@hotmail.com Caracas, Venezuela

<a href=www.vheadline.com>venezuela's Elecronic News Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Raymond Moyers

Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 08:58:53 -0500 From: Raymond Moyers  rmoyers@nop.org To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Our declared editorial bias is pro-democracy

Dear Editor: The left have mass murdered over 170 million people  ...  Lenin, Stalin, Mao, PolPot, Castro, Hitler's National Socialism.

The murder of millions when the Viet Cong came south ... incentive to work and produce is abolished by socialist taxation or collectivization, and is always eventually replaced by terror in the form of mass murder and slave labor at the point of a gun.

That is where you are heading, and we are watching.

The world is growing weary of death camps and leftist utopians that make excuses for mass murder, terror and bloodstained marxist oppression.

Look to the starving of North Korea to see your future, the reward of the bloodstained leftist secular religion that has, 1900-1986 mass-murdered over 4 times the total battle dead of all wars, to stand alone as the greatest cause of inhumanity to man.

Yes we are watching you, you evil bloodstained leftists, we know your history, we know what your evil holocaustic ideology delivers, and when you start abusing your people like all leftist states do, we will throw down another terror state, unearth your mass graves free those last survivors of your gulags, and add yet another chapter to the bloody history of Socialist-Communist infamy.

Raymond Moyers rmoyers@nop.org New Caney, Texas, USA

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic news Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Dawn Gable

Today's task is not to point fingers at the past, but to learn from it

Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 17:55:31 +0000 From: Dawn Gable morning_ucsc@hotmail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: In response to Mr. Moyers

Dear Editor: In response to Mr. Moyers ... good grief man, get a hold of yourself. Have you forgotten the mass murders committed by the Christians, the kings, queens and czars of yesteryears?

Do you not know of the cruel and torturous genocide of hundred of thousands of natives by colonial, capitalist invaders in what is now the USA?

...or the enslavement and murder of millions of natives by the European colonizers of the now called Latin America in a frenzy to extract the mineral riches.

What about the  capture, enslavement and barbaric treatment of Africans brought to the Americas upon whose back the capital of the USA was built.

Or more recently, the dropping of the bomb on innocent civilians in Japan; or the cruel and disgusting oppression of South African apartheid levied by our dearest friends.

Ok so, can we only ... in light of this information ... say that both systems can be distorted into a murderous policy?

Or can more be said?  Maybe, we should look at the world today a little closer.

I think it's fair to say that, today, the world economy is basically running on a capitalist model and there's rampant poverty worldwide, starvation and disease afflicts billions of people the world over.

Oh yes, the capitalist model is working just splendidly. NOT!

The point is,  that today's task is not to point fingers at the past, but to learn from it ... and move forward ... developing alternatives that may include the best of both paradigms. But, more likely, it will be found in a completely new one.

Creativity is what we need ... plowing forward on new experiments, new social structures: this is the only way to truly solve the dire problems facing our planet.

I believe that if everyone would get off Chavez' back, he could lead Latin America forward on their exploration for a just and prosperous society.

Dawn Gable morning_ucsc@hotmail.com

CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER, <a href=www.sfgate.com>Associated Press Writer Wednesday, May 7, 2003
(05-07) 22:46 PDT CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) --

After months of talks, diplomats trying to broker a peaceful end to Venezuela's political troubles have little to show for their efforts -- save for a moribund accord to end verbal insults.

The so-called Group of Friends of Venezuela made up of diplomats from six countries was created in January to help the Organization of American States broker a solution to Venezuela's crisis.

But Chavez's government embarrassed OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria by backing out of an April 11 deal for a referendum on Chavez's presidency.

It was a blow as well to the efforts of the six Friends -- Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and the United States.

Government negotiators now say that opposition delegates at the OAS talks don't represent all sectors opposing Chavez and suggest the OAS-mediated talks be replaced by debate in the Chavez-dominated National Assembly.

Lawmakers, they say, are better suited for the task because they were elected by the people, while the delegates at the OAS talks are chosen by political parties.

The six months of talks between Chavez's government and Venezuela's opposition have produced just an agreement in February to end verbal insults and political violence.

And even that pact has been forgotten.

The mudslinging reached a new low after an opposition general strike curbed Venezuelan oil production and cost the economy $6 billion but failed to oust Chavez.

When a protester was slain during an opposition May Day march, Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel blamed the opposition and said that government adversaries were obsessed with "necrophilia."

Interior Minister Gen. Lucas Rincon told cadets at a police academy graduation that opposition leaders were "brain-damaged" because of excessive expectations on fighting crime.

Carlos Ortega, a labor boss granted asylum in Costa Rica after leading the general strike, said Chavez was "not well in the head."

Chavez routinely assails what he calls a "fascist," "terrorist" and "coup-plotting" opposition.

Chavez, a former paratrooper who led a failed 1992 coup attempt, was elected president in 1998 and re-elected to a six-year term in 2000. His opponents accuse him of mismanaging the economy, dividing the country along class lines and becoming increasingly authoritarian.

The president says a reckless opposition is more interested in his unconstitutional ouster than helping govern.

World Trade Posted on: 05/07/2003 By Lara L. Sowinski

One thing's for bloody well sure--they are all absolutely symbiotic," says Lynn Fritz as he explains the highly integrated nature of the supply chain, and the striking effect that individual components can have on the entire supply chain. "What happens to one is going to have a definitive action on the others," he emphasizes.

If anyone knows supply chains, it's Lynn Fritz. He turned his family owned domestic documentation company into a global logistics conglomerate that was eventually acquired by UPS two years ago. And while he is an expert in commercial supply chains, his interest in humanitarian supply chains was piqued during his tenure as chairman and CEO of Fritz Companies.

"I remember Turkey. I remember Caracas," Fritz says, reflecting on a five-month period in late 1999 when natural disasters claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in two separate parts of the world. It started with a 7.4 magnitude earthquake in western Turkey on August 17, 1999, that killed 17,000 people. Three months later, a 7.2 magnitude aftershock killed hundreds more. Then, in the middle of December, Venezuela experienced the worst natural disaster of its history when catastrophic floods and mudslides caused the deaths of nearly 50,000 people along the country's Caribbean coast and in the suburbs of Caracas.

During his conversations with other CEOs around the world at that time, he began noticing that many didn't have a disaster preparedness plan. He also discovered that relief organizations were suffering from a lack of collaboration and coordination on the operational side.

Fritz retained two professors to conduct further research into the operations of relief organizations. "They came back and validated the fact that the people in the field were very talented, innovative, experienced, and did great things with very little tools. However, there were very few methods and little automation-operations were largely manual," he says.

Armed with a greater understanding of the relief organizations' operations and internal processes, Fritz assembled a team of professionals under the Fritz Institute to bring together business best practices, technology, and academic research to enhance the capabilities of humanitarian organizations involved in disaster relief.

Getting a hand around the human supply chain

Lynn Fritz and Fritz Institute staffers greet children on a recent visit to Lesotho.It's not an exaggeration to say that few things have had as dramatic an impact on supply chains as information technology, which has raised efficiency, communication, and visibility to new heights. But while there are core similarities, "software for relief organizations' supply chains is uniquely different from that intended for commercial supply chains," Fritz says.

That's why the Fritz Institute began working with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)--the world's largest humanitarian network--to design a customized web-based humanitarian logistics software that would track information from the origin of a donation or pledge all the way to delivery of supplies to the field warehouse.

"It took us over 3000 hours spent interviewing the IFRC," during the initial development stages of the software, says Fritz. The software will standardize the process of disaster resource mobilization; automate manual processes and reduce redundancies; and establish a means for measuring results. Indeed, being able to quantify outcomes is essential, explains Fritz. "We do solutions now. We do not engage with anybody that is not absolutely, totally agreeable to measurement and accountability." With 178 members around the world, the software promises to have a tremendous influence on the IFRC's operations.

According to Fritz, the exceptional challenges of managing a humanitarian supply chain have generated a lot of excitement from logistics experts. He tells of a professor friend who has consulted for leading multinationals, including Heineken, on their supply chains. "The guy's an algorithmic genius, and he says to me, 'I have to be involved with you. Think about it; disasters are the embodiment of randomness. You don't know when they're going to happen, where it's going to happen, and who's going to be affected. This is the ultimate execution of a sophisticated supply chain, particularly from an algorithmic planning basis. Every other supply chain is based on predictability.' That's why the things that are learned from humanitarian supply chains will be so important even to commercial supply chains."

The humanitarian logistics software, aside from being the first of its kind, will help relief organizations get a handle on another unique challenge--fluctuating budgets. "There's a lot of turnover when it comes to relief organizations because crises are cyclical, as are their budgets, especially the operational budget," says Fritz. Relief budgets are typically skewed toward providing direct relief for the victims of disasters, and not for infrastructure services. Most times there is little or no money at the end of a relief effort to record or codify best practices. As a consequence, the processes of managing commodities and tracking the information of the complex supply chain under the most dynamic of conditions remains largely manual, ad hoc, and repetitious. Meanwhile, limited institutional memory is kept over the course of successive disasters, further hampering the upgrading of methods and processes.

Another difficulty facing disaster relief management, Fritz points out, is human nature itself. "There's a profound dissonance in the human condition against preparation for tragedies and disasters, not that we don't know that they're going to happen. On the other hand, there is an extraordinarily positive response from people when they do happen. But, after the tragedy, there's total apathy again." He draws a parallel to the relief organizations' operations. "The way humanitarian aid 'works,' in this context, makes sense when you analyze human behavior."

Calling all scholars

Relief supplies in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.Along with tapping into the expertise and practical experience of the business community, the Fritz Institute sponsors curriculum that will begin teaching disaster management. The institute formed a partnership with Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration to provide specialized professional education and training to leaders in humanitarian relief, and training to improve logistical management in humanitarian disasters. Other partnerships have been formed with INSEAD University in France, Florida International University, Oxford University, and Pepperdine University.

Speaking about the importance of sponsoring education in disaster relief, Fritz remarks, "It makes it an appealing area for young people to invest their lives in." He makes another comparison to the commercial logistics environment. "The word 'logistics' wasn't even used in the industry 25 or 30 years ago, and there was no formal education available. Everything was learned on-the-job." Fritz adds, "Disaster relief management as a science has evolved just like logistics evolved to mean everything--customs brokerage, warehousing, freight forwarding, etc."

The Fritz Institute is also passionate about putting organizations together to convene. Last January, the institute helped facilitate one of the largest gatherings of relief organizations ever. In addition to sharing knowledge and experience, "convening will also generate a list of 'hot things' that need to be addressed," Fritz says, adding, "The convenings are not just for relief groups, but also for academicians."

Globalization: friend or foe?

Along with the WTO, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has received a fair amount of heat from anti-globalizationists. As co-chair of the WEF's Disaster Relief Network steering committee, Fritz could easily be found guilty by association. Nonetheless, "Nobody seems to have issues with operations," he says. "People have issues with political fund raising, where you go, why you go there. When you're there on the ground doing the work, nobody seems to mind." While he can empathize with anti-globalization critics, he defends the mission of the Fritz Institute by saying, "We're not political, we're operational."

Sidebar: IFRC's Supply Chain

Global supply chains encompass much more than transportation and logistics, as WORLD TRADE's profiles of leading manufacturers has consistently shown. Likewise, the humanitarian supply chain exercised by relief organizations such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) illustrates the various aspects that comprise a global supply chain. -- Lara L. Sowinski

Global Sourcing. For relief organizations, this depends on the location of the disaster. However, the IFRC pre-sources by region--Africa (Johannesburg); Europe (Turkey); Asia (Kuala Lumpur); Middle East (Geneva); and the Americas (Panama)--through their regional supply headquarters. They try to source locally at the disaster site for as much as feasible and to conduct international procurement for the best prices based on the best value around the world. The IFRC maintains enterprise agreements for items like blankets, tents, tarps, certain emergency rations, and WHO medical kits that are consistent across disasters.

Site Selection and Economic Development. Again, this is based on proximity to the disaster. Warehouses are determined at the country level, while national relief societies handle distribution and may have their own warehouses. In the meantime, the technology supply chain is not consistent everywhere, so quality and processes are not standardized by geography or disaster. Logistics practices and customs laws also vary by country and are not defined in countries without governments (i.e. Angola's warlords).

Transportation & Logistics. All modes of transportation are used in relief efforts--air, ocean, and road, and sometimes range from donkeys to trucks to ships and helicopters. The mode of transportation depends upon route conditions and disaster conditions, as well as the country's infrastructure. For instance, a 10-metric-ton truck cannot drive through small villages or across mountainous terrains. When commercial transportation is used, NGOs usually pay a higher price because it's project based rather than fixed volume.

IT & Software. The IFRC uses the most common computer applications, such as email and databases. The organization's collaboration with the Fritz Institute resulted in a newly designed, comprehensive humanitarian logistics software, which is the first web-based solution from origin to destination, providing total pipeline visibility to donors. The humanitarian logistics software is customized for acute disasters.

Telecommunications. In first-world countries telecom resources are modern, but oversubscribed during emergencies. In most countries there is not sufficient infrastructure, and what is available is oversubscribed during emergencies.