The Miami Herald Posted on Wed, May. 21, 2003 BY CARA BUCKLEY cbuckley@herald.com

Developers of the Four Seasons in Caracas must pay $4.87 million in damages for hacking their way into Four Seasons' computer system, accessing proprietary information and using the hotel company's logo without permission, a U.S. District Court in Miami has ruled.

Judge K. Michael Moore's decision, made last week, ended a tense months-long court battle between the Toronto-based Four Seasons and Consorcio Barr, a company headed by two Venezuelan brothers, Carlos and Lautaro Barrera.

At the heart of the dispute is control of the lush 21-story Four Seasons Caracas, built in the tony Altamira section of Venezuela's capital. Designed by Arquitectonica, and costing the Barreras $120 million, the hotel opened in January 2001 to accolades from the travel press, its status bolstered by being Four Seasons' first hotel in South America.

Almost immediately, though, the developers and Four Seasons began to spar.

The Barreras charged Four Seasons with overspending and mismanagement. Four Seasons countered that the Barreras were not paying their suppliers and, worse, were snooping through their computer files.

The Four Seasons in Caracas is the Barreras' first hotel. They are not connected with the Four Seasons condo/hotel in Miami, which is scheduled to open by the end of this year.

Four Seasons filed suit against Consorcio Barr in Miami in November 2001 and obtained an injunction one month later barring Consorcio Barr from accessing their computers. In December 2001, Four Seasons seized control of the financial management of the hotel. A Venezuela court ruled that financial control be restored to Consorcio Barr. The Four Seasons appealed, and last June stopped taking reservations at the hotel. Some 300 employees walked out in fury, demanding pay and attracting the Venezuelan media. By July, the hotel was empty, and has remained so ever since.

The trial in Miami, which ran from Dec. 16 to Jan. 30, was pitted with tension.

''Everything was contested,'' said Albert Xiques, who represented Four Seasons in the trial along with lawyers Juan Rodriguez and John Carey. ``The parties couldn't agree on the color of the sky.''

The Barreras' Miami lawyer, Eddie Palmer, presented evidence that the Four Season's supposed computer expert witness had fabricated his credentials. Consorcio Barr also accused the hotel management giant with attempting to strong-arm it into acquiescence.

But in his ruling, first reported in the Daily Business Review, Judge Moore said Consorcio Barr had stolen Four Seasons' trade secrets, violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Electronic Communications Act, thus obtaining proprietary information, and unlawfully used Four Seasons' logo to rent hotel rooms and sell condo units, which are part of the hotel.

Along with the $4.87 million awarded in damages, Moore ruled that a magistrate judge review the accounting of Consorcio Barr's sales of condo units under Four Seasons' name. Moore also ordered Consorcio Barr to hand over all desktop and laptop computers, compact, floppy and zip disks.

The decision was devastating to the Barreras, who had hoped to line up new management for the hotel. Palmer said his clients would appeal. A spokeswoman for Four Seasons says the hotel company remains committed to managing the luxury resort.

''Our goal,'' Elizabeth Pizzinato, a spokeswoman for Four Seasons, wrote in an e-mail, ``is still that the hotel will be able to resume operation under Four Seasons management on a sound financial basis.''

Miami Herald Posted on Wed, May. 21, 2003 BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO fsantiago@herald.com

DESIGN DISTRICT EXHIBIT: Artist Sandra Ramos poses with installation 'Why do rain drops look so much like tears?' PEDRO PORTAL/EL NUEVO HERALD STAFF

Water bottles shaped like tears -- or are they rain drops, really? -- come down from the ceiling to the floor, their shadows on a white wall casting another layer of poetic deluge.

''Why do rain drops look so much like tears?'' murmurs artist Sandra Ramos, echoing the title of her installation piece, ¿Por qué se parecen tanto la lluvia y el llanto?

Like the Cuban Alice in Wonderland character Ramos created in another work, a series of engravings, the 33-year-old Havana artist stands before her poignant exhibit at the Miami Design District's Casas Riegner Gallery and marvels at the raves generated by her first solo show in the United States.

It's titled Heritage of the Fish after a soulful poem by the late exiled Cuban writer Gastón Baquero, Testamento del pez (The Fish's Last Will and Testament), in which a fish professes his devotion to the city he abandoned. In five installations using sculpture, photographic self-portraits, video and water -- lots of water -- Ramos comments on the losses fueled by exodus after exodus from the island.

''Water is a symbol of the situation in Cuba, of the sadness of separation, of the impotence we feel before things that happen and we cannot change,'' Ramos says. ``I've always used water in my work in some form, but lately, it has evolved from a secondary role to being a fundamental and symbolic element.''

Ramos' art, which has attracted attention from Mexico to Tokyo and has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is remarkable enough on its artistic merit alone. But it is even more so because she's a vanguard artist inside Cuba, part of a generation that in the past decade broke through some of the constraints of censorship and made art, music, movies and authored works reflective of the starkness of Cuban reality.

These artists, writers, musicians and cinematographers fueled a boom of Cuban culture now in jeopardy as the regime renews its repressive apparatus following the sentencing of 75 dissidents to long jail terms and the executions of three men who tried to commandeer a ferry to the United States.

''Who knows what's going to happen?'' says Ramos, who has now returned to that politically charged Havana.

Ramos' artwork -- paintings, etchings, installations -- mourn the choice of exile, the trauma of abandoning the island, the break-up of family ties, the loss of childhood, of love, of self.

In a chalcography, she creates an Alice in Wonderland-like girl from a picture of herself. The child waves to a plane taking off amid palm trees. It is titled: ''Y cuando todos se han ido, llega la soledad.'' And when all have left, comes loneliness.

In another engraving, the elegiac body of a woman is slumped grieving in the shape of the island of Cuba. A pitched-black one shows only the soft silhouette of a man and a woman on a raft.

The losses she reflects in her art are all too familiar.

In 1992, her then-husband, a set designer in Havana, decided to leave Cuba. He traveled to Italy, Venezuela and is now living in Miami.

''It was a very hard time for me,'' Ramos says. ``I had to decide whether I was going to follow him or not.''

She chose to stay in Cuba, living through the ''special period,'' the harshest economic times in recent Cuban history, infamous for food shortages that prompted people to invent unimaginable dishes.

''Can you believe grapefruit rinds marinaded and fried like steak?'' Ramos laughs.

The hardships fueled her art, she says. Without electricity in her apartment nor transportation to go back and forth, she remained in her studio from dawn to dusk pouring her grief, her sense of isolation into her work.

She broke into the international art scene in the mid-1990s after she participated in and curated several Havana biennials. International curators and art gallery owners who traveled to Cuba for the events saw her work and began showing it in their galleries and promoting her abroad.

Her pieces also have been exhibited at Art Basel, Art Miami and Art Chicago.

''She's an artist who surrenders her biography, her most intimate feelings and her own body to discuss social, political and cultural problems,'' Cuban art critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera has said of her work. ``She uses her portrait to personify the Cuban flag, the island, establishing a parallel between her personal situation and the suffering of her own country.''

Born in 1969 in Havana, Ramos lives in the once-grand neighborhood of Vedado in an old house that she and her husband restored from shambles and have furnished with antiques other Cubans have sold to them. She has a 1 ½-year-old daughter, Alexa.

The main piece in her living room used to be one of her favorite paintings, an old-fashioned crib suspended in a charcoal-gray nothingness by tiny pink wings. But a foreign visitor fell in love with the work and she sold it.

''It's very hard to sell something that has been a part of you for so long,'' she says.

Inspired by her best friend's grandmother, Gloria González, who was a painter, Ramos began her art studies at age 12 in Havana's Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas.

''I loved to go to her house and watch her paint,'' Ramos remembers.

She studied at the prestigious San Alejandro Academy and at Instituto Superior de Arte under the tutelage of the talented ''1980 generation,'' artists like José Bedia, Leandro Soto and Carlos Cárdenas -- all now exiled in the United States.

''There's an entire part of my life in Cuba up to 1994 that has all left, that is here now,'' Ramos says.

But leaving the island is not for her.

''Do you think that if you leave Cuba your art would suffer?'' someone in the art gallery audience asks her one evening during a lecture.

''Yes,'' Ramos readily answers. ``My work is too related to my life there and my life would change a lot if I left. Maybe someday I need to change, but not now.''

News You Can Use Thew Week, By Geoffrey Cowley

SARS may dominate the headlines, but it isn't the only weird disease on the World Health Organisation's radar screen. In central Africa, an outbreak of the dreaded Ebola fever has stretched into its fifth month. In Belgium and the Netherlands, a virulent new strain of avian flu wiped out entire chicken farms. Dutch farmers recently slaughtered 18 million birds in hopes of stopping the outbreak. Yet the bird flu spread to several provinces and jumped from poultry to pigs and even people, causing 83 human cases. Most of the infected people suffered only eye inflammation, but some developed respiratory illness.

N I P A H The virus is named after the location in Malaysia where it was first detected. Certain species of fruit bats, the natural hosts of the virus, passed it on to pigs, which transmitted to humans

SARS. Ebola. Avian flu. The parade of frightening new maladies continues, each one confirming that our species, for all its cleverness, still lives at the mercy of the microbe. It did not seem that way 30 years agoÑnot with smallpox largely defeated, AIDS still undreamed of and medical science evolving at an unprecedented clip. But even as optimists proclaimed victory over the germ, our mega cities, factory farms, jet planes and blood banks were opening broad new avenues for infection.

The dark side of progress is now unmistakable; many of the advances that have made our lives more comfortable have also made them more dangerous. Some 30 new diseases have cropped up since the mid-1970sÑcausing tens of millions of deathsÑand forgotten scourges have resurfaced with alarming regularity. Health experts declare that infectious diseases will continue to emerge and warn that complacency and inaction could lead to more contagion. So what is to be done? As the SARS outbreak has shown, surveillance is critical. By spotting new infections wherever they occur, and working globally to contain them, we can greatly reduce their impact. But is preparedness our ultimate weapon? Do we know enough about the genesis of new diseases to prevent them? Could we avert the next SARS? The next AIDS? What would a reasonable strategy look like?

A V I A N F L U Avian flu was thought to infect birds only until it jumped the species barrier in 1997. However, the transmission of the virus from birds to humans is a rare event.

We do not hold all the cards in this game. Most new diseases begin when a person catches something from an animalÑa transaction shaped by chance or even the weather. When healthy young adults started dying of a SARS-like syndrome in New Mexico 10 years ago, it took health experts several weeks of intensive lab work to identify the culprit. To the scientists' amazement, it wasn't a human pathogen at all. It was a novel member of the hantavirus family, a group of rodent viruses that sometimes spread through the air after rats or mice shed them in their urine. The previous outbreaks had occurred in Asia. So why were people dying in New Mexico? Scientists now believe the American mice had harboured the virus all along but had never been populous enough to scatter infectious doses in people's toolsheds and basements. What changed the equation that year was El Nino. The ocean disturbance caused an unusually warm winter in the southwest. The mouse population exploded as a result and the hantavirus got a free ride.

Until someone harnesses the jet stream, such accidents are sure to happen. But quirky weather is not the greatest threat we face. As ecologists study the causes of disease emergence, they are finding that human enterprise is a far more significant force. Almost any activity that disrupts a natural environment can enhance the mobility of disease-causing microbes. Consider what happened in the 1980s, when farmers in Venezuela's Portuguesa state cleared millions of acres of forest to create cropland. The farms drew as many rats and mice as people, and the rodents introduced a deadly new virus into the region. The so-called Guanarito virus causes fever, shock and haemorrhaging. It infected more than 100 people, leaving a third of them dead.

Malaysian pig farmers had a similar experience in 1999, after they started pushing back the forest to expand their operations. As barns replaced forestland, displaced fruit bats started living in the rafters, bombarding the pigs' drinking water with a pathogen now known as the Nipah virus. The pigs developed an explosive cough that became known as the one-mile cough because you could hear it from so far away. The virus soon spread from the pigs to their keepers, causing extreme brain inflammation and killing 40 per cent of the affected people. The outbreak ended when Malaysian authorities closed eight farms and slaughtered a million pigs.

H A N T A Hanta viruses are carried by rodents, especially the deer mouse. You can become infected by their droppings, and the first signs of sickness (fever and muscle aches) appear one to five weeks later.

The point is not that rain forests are dangerous. It is that blindly rearranging ecosystems can be hazardous to our health. That is where Lyme disease emerged, and it, too, is a product of the way we use our land. The bacterium that causes Lyme lives in the bodies of deer and white-footed mice, passing between those animals in the heads of biting ticks. People have crossed paths with all these critters for generations, yet the first known case of Lyme disease dates back only to 1975. Researchers tied the event to suburban development. In open woodlands, foxes and other predators keep a lid on the Lyme agent by hunting the mice that carry it. But the predators vanish when developers chop woodlands, and the mice and their ticks proliferate unnaturally.

The problem is particularly serious in the case of infections we get from primates and pigs. When the Ebola virus jumps from an ape into a person, it often races through a family or a hospital before burning itself out. And HIV is still spreading steadily after three decades of person-to-person transmission. It has infected some 60 million people since crossing over from chimpanzees, and its emergence was no fluke of the weather. We placed ourselves in the path of the virus, we moved it around the world, and we are well poised to do it again.

jsonline.com By JOHN SCHMID jschmid@journalsentinel.com Last Updated: May 20, 2003

From the political chaos in Saudi Arabia to terror anxieties in the United States, events are conspiring to elevate gasoline prices and add a new edge of nervousness in a stalled American economy. Economy

Photo/File An oil worker operates a valve gear at an installation near Baghdad, Iraq, in 2000. Crude oil prices fell in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, but recent terrorist bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, sent prices higher.

Graphic/Journal Sentinel Oil and the Economy's Health

Crude oil prices, which fell in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war and briefly lifted hopes that cheap fuel would drive a recovery in the U.S., have been rising again.

Benchmark crude prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange gained 45 cents, or 1.6%, settling Tuesday at $29.28 a barrel, the highest level in a month.

"This will short-circuit the decline in gasoline prices," said George Gaspar, energy analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee.

In a world that burns 75 million barrels of petroleum every day, experts agree that each spike in oil prices is the equivalent of tapping on the brakes of commercial activity.

"The world economies function a lot better at $18 a barrel than they do at the current price," said James Williams, president of Arkansas-based WTRG Economics, an energy analysis group.

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, falling crude oil prices were supposed to provide a much-needed boost to a war-weary nation. And for a brief time, it seemed they would.

World market prices for crude oil, which traded above $30 a barrel for much of the year, declined after the war to just above $25 per barrel.

But last week's terrorist bombings that rocked Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, have added new jitters to oil markets and sent prices higher. Adding to the nervous climate, Saudi and U.S. officials this week issued warnings to Americans at home and abroad to brace for more attacks. The federal government Tuesday raised the terrorism alert level to orange - meaning there is a high risk of a terrorist attack - as the U.S., Britain and Germany closed their embassies in the Saudi kingdom.

Volatility to stay

According to a rule of thumb, every $1 increase in crude prices amounts to a 2.5-cent rise in average unleaded pump prices. "So if prices just rose $5, you pay another 12 cents at the pump," Williams said.

The national price for regular unleaded fuel averages about $1.53 per gallon, Gaspar said.

Roller coaster oil prices illustrate another economic reality, as well. Oil prices, which are one of the most fundamental determinants of economic direction, have seldom been more volatile than they have been in the past two years.

And that volatility is here to stay, experts concur.

Political uncertainty extends well beyond Saudi Arabia. Of the 11 nations in the world's oil cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, four of them are in the throes of political instability: Venezuela is stricken with a political leadership crisis and strikes, Nigeria is battling civil strife, Iraq's chaos means a slower-than-expected resumption of oil exports, and Saudi Arabia now finds itself in the epicenter of the anti-terror war.

"We have to get used to the fact that we have a continuous period of unsettled political affairs around the world," said Mark Baskir, portfolio manager in New York for the energy fund at Strong Financial Corp.

"The bottom line is that the uncertainties are not going away any time soon and they are being factored into the price of oil."

Floor under prices

The advent of summer driving demand will keep a floor under gasoline prices, and so will low U.S. stocks of crude oil and gasoline, analysts said. "We have near-historic lows of supplies of oil," Baskir said.

"The point is that volatility and uncertainty will be the norm for some time to come," Williams said. Because the inventories are so low, the potential for prices to increase amid that volatility is greater than any potential decrease in prices, he and other economists said.

"Part of the optimism was that we won the war and people thought someone only needed to turn a valve and all this crude will come back on the market," Williams said, adding:

"It just doesn't work that way. It will be some time before Iraqi crude returns to the market."

In the second of our series on global institutions, we see how the Iraq conflict accelerated the crisis in the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO

Larry Elliott Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian

Last autumn, Gordon Brown and his fellow finance ministers told the International Monetary Fund to draw up a plan that would give bankruptcy protection to countries. The idea was to give states the same rights as companies if they went belly-up, avoiding the expensive bail-outs that have accompanied the big financial crises of the past decade.

The IMF was given six months to come up with a blueprint, but when it reported back last month the idea was dead in the water. Billions of dollars from the bail-outs ended up in the coffers of the big finance houses of New York and George Bush was told not to meddle with welfare for Wall Street. The message was understood: the US used its voting power at the IMF to strangle the bankruptcy code at birth.

So much, so familiar. The US has wielded clout at the IMF and its sister organisation, the World Bank, since they were created at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Add in the World Trade Organisation, seen by its critics as the epitome ofUS corporate capitalism and you have the unholy trinity of globalisation.

The reality is somewhat more complex than this caricature would suggest. There is indeed a crisis looming in the global economic institutions but the problem is less that the Bush administration is seeking to carpet bomb the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO with neo-liberal ideas - rather that the US shows signs of giving up on multilateralism in favour of cutting bilateral deals with willing (and weaker) partners.

First, some background. The Bretton Woods institutions were the economic arm of the new world order designed to ensure there was no repetition of the Great Depression. Collective action at the economic level was seen as just as important as collective action in the political sphere. But over the years, the IMF changed. Set up to combat global market failure, it saw free markets as the solution to every problem in every country, every time. The IMF (and the World Bank) reflected the economic orthodoxy, championing privatisation, liberalisation and tough anti-inflation strategies when they became fashionable in the west.

Europe has more votes than the US, but has rarely dissented from Washington's world view. To complete the picture of a rich-country stitch-up, a European was always appointed to head the IMF, while the US picked the president of the World Bank.

The WTO is a different beast. Created in 1995, it has two safeguards to protect the interests of smaller countries: a one-member, one-vote decision-making structure and an arbitration system under which countries such as Costa Rica, Venezuela and Chile have been able to force the US to change its trade practices or pay sanctions in compensation. Bill Clinton saw this as a price worth paying for opening up global trade to American companies.

If anything, US control-freakery was more in evidence under Clinton than it has been under his successor, because Bush is more of a neo-conservative. In the late 1990s, Larry Summers, Clinton's treasury secretary, was in day-to-day contact with the IMF, letting it know what the administration wanted, and arranged for Joseph Stiglitz to be ousted as the World Bank's chief economist after he criticised the US treasury and the IMF's handling of financial crises.

Bush, by contrast, has pursued much more of an overt America-first policy, using the multilateral system only when it suits the administration. US aid is being channelled into poor countries through the Millennium Challenge Account. The money comes with strings attached: to liberalise service sectors and accept US intellectual property laws. Similarly, the White House does not support the World Bank's fast-track initiative under which rich countries would guarantee the resources to help developing countries implement improvements in education.

In trade policy, the US has been following a twin-tracked strategy, putting forward ambitious proposals for liberalisation at the WTO, but also cutting bilateral deals with Singapore and Chile that provide more favourable terms for US firms than could be negotiated multilaterally.

Although many in the US strongly oppose the neo-conservative agenda, there are two problems for those seeking change. The first is that the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are largely friendless bodies. Under its president, James Wolfensohn, the Bank has gone the furthest in reaching out to its critics, but those on the free-market right who see the Bretton Woods institutions as expensive, statist bureaucracies are mirrored by those on the left who view them as agents of neo-liberal oppression. "The truth is that you can't defend what these institutions currently are", says Kevin Watkins of Oxfam, "but they were part of a Keynesian political project, and it is up to the left to make them into something better."

Something better would include an open and meritocratic system for the top jobs at the World Bank, IMF and WTO, rather than the unseemly horse-trading that currently takes place. It would include stopping the IMF and the Bank colonising the territory of other UN organisations. It would involve the Bretton Woods recognising that in a deflationary world there is a need to return to their original pro-growth mandate. And it would involve the other big shareholders - the Europeans - acting in concert to put pressure on Washington.

Alex Wilkes, who runs the Bretton Woods project, a watchdog body set up by aid agencies to monitor the IMF and the World Bank, says there are few signs of this happening. There is too much grandstanding, he says, too much of a tendency to take up symbolic positions.

Watkins of Oxfam says the one arena where the EU flexes its muscles is the WTO, but only to put European corporate demands on the global agenda. Meanwhile, he believes the US is marginalising and downgrading the Bretton Woods institutions just as it is the UN. "This is a critical juncture. Iraq is accelerating the demise of multilateralism."

larry.elliott@guardian.co.uk