www.forbes.com Reuters, 02.05.03, 6:53 PM ET

BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Colombian and Panamanian firms are studying a $160 to $200 million project to connect their national electricity grids via a cable crossing the inaccessible jungles of the Darien Gap, one of the firms said on Wednesday. Interconexion Electrica SA (ISA) <ISA.CN>, Colombia's biggest electricity transporter, said that the 300 Megawatt cable would enable the country to export 3,200 gigawatts a year to Panama. ISA, which runs cables connecting to grids in Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador, said it was working on the project together with Panamanian firm Empresa de Transmision Electrica SA (ETESA). But the company said that the project presented engineering difficulties, including the necessity to cross Colombia's River Atrato, which bursts its banks in the wet season. ISA said its studies considered the environmental impact on the area's jungle and the need to respect native Indians in the Darien. The area is relatively inaccessible and dangerous because of its importance to Colombian rebels and far-right paramilitaries, who use it for smuggling weapons and drugs. The communique did not specify when work on the cable could begin.

siliconvalley.internet.com February 5, 2003 By Michael Singer

The game of world domination for wireless standards continued this week with news of a new deal brewing in Latin America.

Portugal Telecom and Telefonica Moviles Tuesday said they are launching commercial wireless application services powered by QUALCOMM's (Quote, Company Info) Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) (define) platform. The joint venture between the three companies is expected to impact more than 16.8 million subscribers in Brazil.

Already, a battle over mobile phone standards is emerging in Central and South America -- one that pits CDMA2000 (define) against GSM (define).

Together Portugal Telecom and Telefonica Moviles have a long history of firsts in Latin America; first to commercially launch data services with WAP (define), first to launch a CDMA2000 1X network, first to conduct a trial of BREW wireless data services, and now, first to launch BREW-enabled commercial services.

"Based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our initial market trial, we are confident in the growth potential of our BREW-enabled service," said spokesman for the joint venture Luis Avelar. "The services will build stronger competitive advantages of our operations over our TDMA and GSM competitors."

Avelar said the joint venture's BREW services will take advantage of a next-generation CDMA2000 1X network, nearly doubling voice capacity and capable of supporting data transfer speeds up to 144 kbps. Customers will initially be able to select from two BREW-enabled handsets, the Motorola T720 and Audiovox/Toshiba CDM9500 with models from Samsung, LG, Kyocera and others offered at a later date. QUALCOMM said there would also be a wide array of game, entertainment, communications, productivity and business applications available to download. Some of potential applications being discussed for the joint project include WIZ Mail, Photo Album, Ringtones, Wall Paper, Via Rio, Sensual Club and games such as Navy Battle and Arkanoid.

The two wireless platforms have historically been broken down along geographic lines. Europe remains a GSM stronghold, while the United States is firmly rooted in CDMA and TDMA (define) technology. Asia has gotten a blitz of CDMA technology courtesy of QUALCOMM, but has been wavering between that and GSM.

Several more companies such as Ericsson (Quote, Company Info), Nortel (Quote, Company Info) and AT&T Wireless (Quote, Company Info) have made their presence known in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Nicaragua hoping to dominate the region and become the king of mobile telephony - commonly known as 3G.

Already AT&T Wireless, Telecom Personal (Argentina) and Telcel (Mexico) have begun working together to launch GSM networks that will work alongside their TDMA networks.

The adoption rate to launch BREW services around the globe has been a little slower. The joint venture between Portugal Telecom and Telefonica Moviles along with Verizon Wireless and ALLTEL in the United States, KTF in South Korea and KDDI in Japan have all launched commercial BREW-based services. U.S. Cellular has launched a BREW user trial and China Unicom announced its plans to launch BREW-based services in China in the first half of 2003.

In all, San Diego-based QUALCOMM reports 32 BREW- enabled handset models available to consumers. An additional 33 device manufacturers have also indicated their interest in the BREW platform.

"The success of the BREW trial in the Brazilian market demonstrates that BREW-enabled services continue to be a leading catalyst for consumer adoption of wireless applications," said QUALCOMM Wireless & Internet Group president Dr. Paul E. Jacobs. "With BREW as the foundation, the joint venture will give the Brazilian mobile community a powerful and personalized wireless experience that is unrivaled in Latin America."

According to a study by The Strategis Group, wireless Internet services are expected to grow from 1.4 million subscribers in 2000 to more than 47 million in 2007. The study, "Latin America Wireless Internet Markets," analyzes the region's six largest marketsArgentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela for many of the most common wireless Internet technologies.

Research group also IDC predicts the number of cellular subscribers in Latin America will grow to 143 million by 2004, while the number of mobile data subscribers will jump to more than 71 million users at the same time.

www.globeandmail.com By STEVEN CHASE

Wednesday, February 5, 2003 – Page A13

OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Jean Chrétien is lobbying heads of state across the Western Hemisphere to hold a special Summit of the Americas this year to bring a dozen newly elected leaders into the fold, most notably Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The next regular Summit of the Americas is not expected to take place until 2005, in Argentina. Federal officials said Mr. Chrétien, chairman of the Summit of the Americas process until June, wants an extra meeting of leaders this year to rekindle enthusiasm for hemispheric co-operation and integration.

Twelve new leaders have been elected among the 34 member countries involved in summit talks since the last official Summit of the Americas in April, 2001.

"It's an occasion for the hemisphere to regroup because a lot of things have happened," a senior Canadian official said. "When we left Quebec City, the hemisphere was in good shape, but the year 2002 was a tough year for the hemisphere."

Argentina and, to some degree, Brazil have been buffeted by financial chaos, while Venezuela's economic downturn has been worsened by the battle between President Hugo Chavez and opponents.

www.techcentralstation.com By James Pinkerton 02/04/2003

In the wake of the Columbia tragedy, the arguments of the pro-space constituency are strong, but not strong enough. If space advocates can't bring themselves to make the most powerful arguments of all—that space is vital to human freedom, even to human survival—then their cause will falter as the soaring spirit of heroism and martyrdom fades, and as the counter-arguments of the cost-benefiting, bean-counting critics gain footing.

To be sure, the weekend was a time for both paying tribute to lost astronauts and offering exhortation for future astronautics. Space, said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, is "important to us as Americans and as adventurers." Declared Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, to Fox News, "We must push back the frontiers of knowledge." And, most poignantly, first-American-to-orbit-the-earth John Glenn told CNN, "I'd go back tomorrow if I could." For the time being, those pro-space affirmations—oftentimes couched in such solemn language as, "The greatest tribute to the men and women of Columbia would be to carry on their work"—will dominate the debate.

But already, the skeptics and faultfinders are being heard. Here, for example, is a report from Sunday's Manchester Guardian: "Fears of a catastrophic shuttle accident were raised last summer with the White House by a former NASA engineer who pleaded for a presidential order to halt all further shuttle flights until safety issues had been addressed." And here's a headline atop a cutting article in the new Time magazine: "The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped: It's costly, outmoded, impractical and, as we've learned again, deadly." Soon enough, more details and anecdotes—true or not—will come dribbling out, depicting reckless errors and fatal mistakes. Indeed, one can half-expect a report from France to proclaim that the "accident" was staged by the Pentagon at the direct order of President George W. Bush.

Then will come war on Iraq, and the whole controversy—naysayer and yeasayer alike—will be swept out of the headlines for months, if not forever. And what will emerge at the other end of the investigation, after the bombs stop dropping down on Baghdad—and after the reportorial bombshells stop bursting at NASA headquarters? Most likely, a discredited and shriveled piloted space program. Why? Because the glory of the Columbia crew will have to be shared with a new cohort of battlefield heroes, and the budget for future space missions will have been reallocated to other needs, from the Pentagon to prescription drugs. Yes, space will always have its advocates. But just as during the Vietnam War, today, during the Terror/Iraq War, the immediate demand for guns abroad and butter at home will surely crowd out the more abstract claims of the spacefaring future.

To be sure, space will not be entirely neglected. The U.S. military will surely continue its exo-atmospheric expansion. And a good thing, too; much of America's dominance depends on satellite communication and surveillance. And someday, maybe sooner than we think, America will put heavy weapons into orbit. But generals and admirals can do their war-work in space without putting men and women into space.

So what's the real case for space—space for people?

It's two-fold. First, in the long run, we will need space to be free. Second, we will need space to survive as a species. Freedom and survival: that's putting the hay down where the horse can get it. And that's what needs to be said, sooner rather than later—sooner, before it's too late.

Freedom? We need space for freedom? Aren't we fighting a war for freedom right now? Aren't we sure to win against Saddam Hussein and, one way or another, Osama Bin Laden? Most likely, we will prevail, big time. But that doesn't mean that the bad guys won't get off a lucky shot—a lucky weapon-of-mass-destruction shot. And if they do, then homeland security, from national ID cards to computer snoopers, will come down upon us and our civil liberties like an iron fist. And few will protest. To be sure, the crisis mode might ease up after awhile, but the lesson of big government is that once it gets big, it stays big.

Moreover, the world itself is getting smaller, and that's not good for the don't-tread-on-me ethos. President Bush came in as the sworn enemy of Clinton-era world-government projects, such as the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto agreement, but now, two years later, there's less discontinuity and more continuity between the presidencies than many Republicans might like to admit. Confronted with the need to maintain and strengthen his anti-terror/anti-"axis of evil" alliances, the President announced last year that he would rejoin the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. And he, or at least his administration, seems committed to an emerging "Kyoto Lite" system. And of course, building and rebuilding other countries—and curing them of AIDS—is not only expensive, but inherently multilateral. In the meantime, even organizations that most TechCentralStationeers probably endorse, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, all chip away a bit at American sovereignty.

And this is a Republican president we're talking about. What will happen under a future Democratic president? In the same way that the elder and younger Bush are known as "41" and "43," what if former president Bill Clinton is someday remembered as "42," and Hillary Rodham Clinton is known as "44"? Maybe we'll be spared that particular political fate. But just as government gets bigger here at home, no matter who's in charge, so government around the world will get bigger, too. Eventually, inevitably, superstates at home and abroad will start crowding us. And yet the physical world we live in stays the same size, offering no escape. A few years ago, many libertarians thought that the Internet would be a kind of Ayn-Randian refuge, but the regulators and tax collectors are now corralling that freezone. Here's a prediction: every year for the rest of our lives, the world will be knitted together a bit more closely, by this or that international agreement. Worrisome? Sure. Preventable? Probably not. It seems self-evident that if the earth is of a fixed size and the government is equally fixed in its Parkinson's Law-like growth pattern, then freedom will be crowded out.

So what's the answer? One word: space. In the past, Europeans could find freedom by coming to America, and Americans could find freedom by heading out west. But that frontier is long closed. And from now until the end of time, the feds will be closing in, looking for more things to regulate and red-tape. Freedom-lovers will resist, but if the past is any guide, the freedom-dislikers—most politicians and all bureaucrats, environmentalists, and egalitarians—will win more fights than they lose. That doesn't mean that America is destined to become another Maoist China; most likely, America in a globalized world will drift toward the global mean—which is to say, a condition of considerably less freedom than we have now.

But if Americans could travel, physically and permanently, to space—even if just to the moon, as in Robert Heinlein's libertarian classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress—then prospects for the survival of maximum human freedom would be greatly enhanced. Those who don't mind being niggled and nitpicked by the state could stay right here, but the mere existence of an exit-option for freedom-ophiles would serve as a check on the checkers.

Historically, the only way that the slow bureaucratic creep of government is reversed is through revolution or war. And that could happen. But there's a problem: the next American revolution won't be fought with muskets. It could well be waged with proliferated wonder-weapons. That is, about the time that American yeopersons decide to resist the encroachment of the United Nations, or the European Union—or the United States government—the level of destructive power in a future conflict could remove the choice expressed by Patrick Henry in his ringing cry, "Give me liberty, or give me death." The next big war could kill everybody, free and unfree alike.

Which leads to the second argument. Spaceship earth may not be as fragile as a space shuttle, but it's still fragile. By all means, let's have homeland defense and missile defense. But let's also get real. If the weapons get bigger, and the planet stays the same size, then prospects for human survival shrink accordingly. For the time being, North Korea seems to have gotten away with breaking out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Kim Jong Il's arsenal could be eliminated in the future, of course, but in the meantime, the atomic cat is out of the nuclear bag.

Writing in the February 3 Weekly Standard, Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington D.C., offers up scenarios for the spread of nuclear weapons that are much more compelling than the scenarios for their unspreading. Countries such as Iran, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, he writes, have all flirted with the idea of building atomic weapons. And one could add to Sokolski's list other countries, such as Brazil, where the new president, Lula da Silva, seems to be forming an axis of anti-Americanism with the likes of Venezuela and Cuba.

Meanwhile, every one of those potential proliferators could be brought into line, and we'd still face the problem of "super-empowered individuals." Yup, the prospect of Moore's Law—computer power doubles every 18 months—affects cyber-geek and terror-creep alike. Such computational capacity is inherently "dual use" —the ultimate double-edged sword, hanging over all of us, to be wielded by some of us. As technofuturist Ray Kurzweil predicts, "We'll see 1,000 times more technological progress in the 21st century than we saw in the 20th." Most of that progress will be to the good, but not all. What could a hacker-terrorist alliance come up with, weapon-wise? There's only one way to find out.

Sooner or later, Moore's Law will meet Murphy's Law, and we'll realize just how vulnerable we all are, six billion souls, crowded into a narrow band of soil, stone, air and water, hugging the flimsy, filmy, easy-to-rub-off surface of the earth. Let's hope that before we have that rendezvous with deathly destiny, we've had the foresight to build an escape ladder for ourselves.

Some pro-space pragmatists will say that the American public, preoccupied with shuttle heroes, Saddam Hussein, and the stock market, is not going to be interested in long-term arguments about the future of freedom—even the future of human survival. Better, those alleged pragmatists will assert, to simply make once again the traditional arguments about the positive scientific and psychic spinoffs of space travel.

Those arguments are fine, as far as they go. But they don't go far, at least not far enough. That is, the "Tang and Teflon" argument, which lost much of its force three decades ago, is not going to recreate a strong pro-space constituency simply because it is repeated with renewed fervor. The ghosts of seven dead space-heroes may summon spaceniks back into space, but more risk-averse Americans will question the cost.

The people of this country—and of the world—need to be told the truth. And here's the truth: if we don't create an off-earth option in the relatively near future, we risk not only our liberty, but also our lives. The sooner the United States declares its independence from these 50 geographic states, proclaiming instead that our sacred honor should flourish everywhere, on and off the earth, the better for all earthlings. America may be the last best hope for mankind, but the emphasis should always be on the "best," not the "last."

www.upi.com By Bradley Brooks UPI Business Correspondent From the Business & Economics Desk Published 2/3/2003 6:54 PM

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Feb. 3 (UPI) -- Grace Souza Calvocante considers herself collateral damage of a war that hasn't yet come in Iraq.

"The first thing they raise the price of is gas," said Calvocante, a mother of three in her late 40s who makes her living cleaning apartments inhabited by tourists.

"Then they raise the price of food, then clothing, then the costs of transportation -- which also makes all the other products more expensive," she said as she perused the aisles of a grocery store on Monday.

"And if there is a war, the tourists will stay home in front of their TVs, they won't come here, and I won't have work."

So it goes for the inhabitants of a region with some of the most turbulent economies in the world.

While the countries of Latin America might not send a single soldier to the Middle East, the fighting that goes on there will nonetheless bring pain -- of the economic sort.

"What the war implies for Latin America is more or less what it implies for the United States and other industrial countries," said William Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

But for the already anemic economies of the region, that could bring a fatal blow, as opposed to the increase in economic discomfort the First World would register.

"You have investor caution during the course of a war, and that has a particularly painful effect for Latin America," Cline said. "The investment flows in bonds and bank lending to Latin America tends to dry up when there is a period of high risk aversion."

That's a scary thought for Latin American businessmen, considering that the well of foreign credit and investment in the region is already bone dry.

Investor appetite for pushing into Latin America severely diminished in a disastrous 2002 that saw Argentina founder, Brazil stumble and Venezuela threaten to fall flat.

Even Chile -- the beacon of stability and progress, with its free trade pacts with both the European Union and the United States -- would feel great pressure if war comes to Iraq: the country imports 80 percent of its oil.

Local analysts forecast that the turbulent ride for Latin America -- just beginning to ease -- will be ready to begin anew should the bombs start falling on Baghdad.

"A war would affect Brazil by preventing recovery in the flow of foreign direct investments and credit lines that we were starting to see recover after the political crisis we lived through," said Carlos Firetti, director of BBV Corretora de Valores in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

"As a consequence, this would keep the foreign exchange under pressure. In the case of Brazil, this would mean that inflation would not reduce as quickly and interest rates would be kept at a high level," he said.

Brazil -- Latin America's largest economy -- is burdened by its massive $240 billion debt, much of which is linked to the dollar or floating interest rates. This makes the debt highly susceptible to fluctuations in the exchange rate for the local currency -- the real.

That would also place the spotlight even more on new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva -- a leftist whose election spooked investors.

During his campaign, Lula promised voters the moon when it came to improving the horrific social situation in Brazil, where some 40 million people live below the poverty line.

Analysts question how the government will pay for its social programs should war severely crimp Brazil's economic situation.

This has grown as a concern for analysts after a top adviser to Lula said Monday that no cuts would be made in social spending, whether war breaks out or not.

While Lula's moves during his first month in office have eased investors' anxieties, the economic shocks that would come with a war in Iraq could trip him up, analysts say.

For instance, the domestic pricing policies of state-run oil giant Petrobras might be used by Lula to artificially improve Brazil's economic situation in a time of war.

"The main concern is that the government could hold oil prices down in order to keep inflation under control, or so they're not affected by public opinion that is clearly against increases in oil prices," Firetti noted.

What can the leaders in Latin America do to lessen the pain of external shocks that a war in Iraq will bring?

"I think there isn't much to do," Firetti said, specifically in regard to Brazil.

"In fact, the only thing they can do is follow through with a credible economic policy and give signs to the market that they will go through with reforms."

Cline agreed, saying: "The main thing they can do is to continue to show international investors a firm resolve to keep basic policies on a healthy trend," he said. "That means making sure fiscal accounts are in order and making sure the exchange rate isn't out of line."

For Calvocante -- already struggling to make ends meet in a year that saw Brazil's currency lose about 35 percent of its value against the dollar -- weathering the affects of a war has little to do with complicated economic policies.

For her, it is math of a simpler sort.

"I might pay 60 cents for a kilo of rice now. But if there is a war, the price could go up to $1.20," she said. "That is a big problem for me."