www.alertnet.org Jan 2003 13:41

By Andrea Friedli

ZURICH, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Switzerland is mounting its biggest security operation for the world's business and political elite who gather this week at the Davos ski resort, with any plane straying overhead risking being shot down.

Hundreds of police and around 300 soldiers will be deployed in and around the chic mountain city for the January 23-28 World Economic Forum (WEF). Troops in neighbouring Germany are on standby in case of need, police sources said.

The aim is not only to protect international figures such as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Brazil's new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from extremist attack, the resort is also bracing for anti-globalisation or anti-war protests.

Unlike in 2001 -- last year the event switched to New York as a mark of respect after the September 2001 suicide plane hijackings -- demonstrations will be allowed in Davos, Europe's highest city at 1,500 metres.

The WEF meeting comes amid mounting international tension over Iraq, with United Nations weapon inspectors due to report to the Security Council on January 27 on their search for Baghdad's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Washington, which has threatened war if Iraq does not come clean over its alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, says the report could be crucial.

Last Sunday, police in Davos found a small explosive device containing a firecracker and an automatic fuse near the Davos Congress Centre where the WEF meeting will be held.

WEF organisers, police and the Swiss government played down the threat from violent political extremists bent on striking a high-profile blow.

"The fact that personalities like the U.S. Attorney General and others are participating should show you that this question has been taken care of," WEF founder Klaus Schwab told journalists.

GUANTLET OF CHECKPOINTS

The security measures will cost the Swiss authorities some $10 million, around $5,000 for each of the 2,000 leaders of finance, business and politics due to attend.

The resort is not on the route of commercial airlines and any light plane seeking to overfly it could be shot down by Swiss fighters if it ignores orders to change course, Swiss government officials said.

The several thousand protesters expected in Davos for Saturday's main demonstration will have to run a gauntlet of police checks.

"We are expecting large difficulties (in getting to Davos). At the moment we have permission to demonstrate, but no permission to allow demonstrators to get to Davos," Walter Angst from the Oltner Buendnis protest movement told Reuters.

Police are setting up checkpoints in the narrow valley that leads to Davos and travellers will be searched for weapons or potentially dangerous objects.

At the main checkpoint midway up the valley, train and bus passengers must disembark and enter a fenced area where they will be searched before being allowed to board a train to Davos.

The government came in for heavy criticism from both civil rights groups and the media for banning protests in Davos in 2001 when riots erupted in other Swiss cities, particularly Zurich.

www.nytimes.com January 19, 2003 By JUAN FORERO

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Jan. 18 — Latin America's four most visible left-leaning heads of state came together for the first time this week at the inauguration of one of them as president of Ecuador.

Ecuador's new leader, Lucio Gutierrez, is a former army colonel and coup plotter who has promised to fight the "corrupt oligarchy" in his country. The others are Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former union leader elected to the Brazilian presidency in October; Fidel Castro of Cuba, the grand old man of the Latin American left; and Venezuela's embattled president, Hugo Chávez.

The four basked in applause at Ecuador's cavernous Congress on Wednesday and held meetings to discuss the future of a troubled region.

To some in Washington, particularly conservatives on Capitol Hill, the convergence of leftist leaders — all of whom, at some point, have used antagonistic words in criticizing United States policy — has raised concerns about a new pan-Latin American movement with socialist overtones.

Indeed, Representative Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois and the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, warned late last year that Brazil's new president might join Mr. Chávez and Mr. Castro in a Latin "axis of evil." Mr. Hyde also characterized Mr. da Silva as a dangerous "pro-Castro radical who for electoral purposes had posed as a moderate."

It is true that all four leaders share similarities: opposition to the unfettered market reforms that have failed so far to bring prosperity to Latin America, concern about the burdensome foreign debts that stagger many nations in the region and wariness about the United States meddling in their affairs.

Invigorated by Mr. da Silva's victory in Brazil — the first election of a leftist president in the largest Latin American country — the four leaders see an opportunity to shape events in the region, rather than leave it to the United States to set the agenda.

Brazil has already exerted its influence, with Mr. da Silva becoming the driving force behind a "group of friendly nations," including the United States, that is offering to help Venezuela negotiate an end to a seven-week-old national strike aimed at forcing Mr. Chávez from power. The Venezuelan leader has welcomed the initiative, flying on Friday to meet in Brazil with Mr. da Silva to discuss ways to resolve the crisis.

"There's no question that these four nations are going to form an axis of populism, or an axis of popular rhetoric," said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington-based policy analysis group.

But Mr. Birns and other analysts who track political trends in Latin America said that while the four leaders might, on the surface, show a united front, they were four very different men who would pursue different agendas with markedly different approaches.

Mr. da Silva, 57, who grew up in poverty, became a factory worker and helped found the Workers Party, won a loyal following as a leftist firebrand who railed against everything from international lending policies to the incompetence and corruption of Brazil's elite class.

But after losing three presidential elections, he moderated his tone, promising that Brazil would pay its foreign debt while still trying to enact social policies to alleviate poverty and hunger.

While still raising concerns about such important issues as the hemisphere-wide trade zone proposed by Washington, Mr. da Silva has worked to build ties with the Bush administration. "I can count on President Bush as an ally," he has said.

Miguel Diaz, director of the South America Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said of Mr. da Silva, "He wants the U.S. to be a part of the solution, and doesn't see the U.S. as part of the problem."

That is not to say that Mr. da Silva plans to abandon his campaign against poverty and hunger. His Workers Party, an amalgam of divergent leftist movements, expects Mr. da Silva to address seriously Brazil's grinding inequality. Mr. da Silva has promised to improve the lives of his countrymen, pledging that all Brazilians would receive three meals a day.

But the pursuit of his social agenda will be difficult in a country saddled with a huge foreign debt and international commitments to foreign lenders. It is a challenge both he and Mr. Gutierrez face: carrying out the far-reaching social programs they promised on the campaign trail last year while dealing with serious financial constraints in difficult economic times.

Mr. da Silva appears acutely aware of how important it is for him to provide successful guidance for Brazil, a country of 175 million that has one of the world's largest economies and is a budding power broker.

Mr. Gutierrez, 45, a former colonel and son of a riverboat captain, shares many of Mr. da Silva's qualities, according to international analysts who have met the new Ecuadorian leader.

Though his background is dissimilar — he helped lead a coup that toppled President Jamil Mahuad three years ago — he is seen as a pragmatist who has already sharply shifted on earlier positions like scrapping the country's dollar currency and not paying the foreign debt.

Mr. Chávez and Mr. Castro, leader of the hemisphere's only Communist country, have taken more defiant stances.

Mr. Chávez, 48, a former coup plotter, was elected to office in 1998 after promising to upend the old social order and to improve the lives of the poor. But his incendiary speeches have divided the country and alienated business leaders, labor groups and others who now seek to force him from office.

The Venezuelan leader has harshly criticized Washington's policy in the Americas, built a strong friendship with Mr. Castro and has promised a peaceful revolution to remake his country. While analysts do not view his policies as particularly radical, his government is seen as inept, with the country's economy suffering the consequences and slowly disintegrating over the last two years.

Mr. Castro, 76 and the leader of Cuba for 44 years, is clearly delighted about Latin America's shift to the left, though he is now more a symbol than a protagonist with influence.

Mr. Chávez may believe he has new close friends to help extricate him from the turmoil roiling his country. But Mr. da Silva and Mr. Gutierrez are expected to steer clear of forming strong alliances with the Cuban and Venezuelan leaders, though Mr. da Silva is strongly committed to finding a negotiated resolution to Venezuela's problems.

The Bush administration has, at least publicly, offered support for the new leaders, with the American ambassador in Brazil praising Mr. da Silva and the State Department wholeheartedly supporting the group of friends of Venezuela despite initial misgivings.

Michael Shifter, who has closely followed the political changes for the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy group, said the United States must now show flexibility to give the leaders "more room to maneuver and undertake new social and economic policies."

"The worst scenario would be if the United States begins to lump all of these leaders together, in other words sees Lula and Gutierrez the same way they see Chávez, and talks of an axis of evil," Mr. Shifter said. "Then the risk is it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."

sg.biz.yahoo.com Thursday January 16, 8:58 AM From The Wall Street Journal Bye-Bye, Steve

When AOL Time Warner Inc. Chairman Steve Case announced his resignation Sunday night, the media seized on the story of his fall from grace. Even America Online, the company that Mr. Case co-founded in 1985, couldn't resist playing it up.

On Monday morning, the news was highlighted on America Online's "Welcome Screen," which is the first page that its 35 million subscribers see they log onto the online service. Top billing went to a story that hit readers in their wallets: "Getting Hosed at the Pump: Venezuela Strike Boosts Price More Than 5 Cents in 3 Weeks."

But the corporate intrigue could not be ignored. Below the oil news was a smaller headline: "Steve Case to Step Down." Clicking on the headline's link produced a Reuters article that didn't pull any punches. An analyst was quoted in the third paragraph saying, "Case was clearly ineffective."

An America Online spokesman says: "We thought it was news our members would want to get."

Pirate's Revenge?

Someone with a nasty sense of humor and a vile disposition apparently doesn't like the Business Software Alliance. The BSA is a Washington trade group of software companies that is best known for its world-wide campaign to combat software piracy. The BSA encourages disgruntled employees to identify companies that use illegally copied software and joins with law-enforcement agencies to raid software duplicators.

Recently a number of unfortunate computer users saw on their screens the following message: "Illegal Microsoft Windows license detected . . . Your unauthorized license has been revoked. For more information [see] . . . our Web site at: www.bsa.org."

The message is the final act of the malignant Opaserv-K virus, which destroys all data on a hard drive, according to Symantec Corp., maker of a virus-busting software.

But it isn't from the BSA, which calls the virus's final message "a malicious act that tricks victims." The BSA, which says its mission is "promoting a safe and legal online world," now has a pop-up message on its Web site denying responsibility.

Laurie Head, director of marketing for the BSA, says it received a number of calls about the virus, but she doesn't know how many computers have been infected. "I don't think anyone really believes we'd sponsor such a virus," she adds.

Download This

The band Wilco, shut out of this month's Grammy awards, this week walked away with one of Wired magazine's Rave awards. But the magazine's judges liked the band's position on intellectual-property rights at least as much as its alt-country sound.

Wilco made waves in 2001 when the band streamed its latest album from its Web site, giving fans free access after its old record label refused to release the CD. Thousands of listeners captured the downloads and the songs were widely available on Internet file-sharing services such as Kazaa.com. Record companies have argued that such services are killing sales, but the album, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," made its debut at No. 13 on the Billboard chart when it was finally released under a new label last year.

At the Wired party, Wilco played to a packed house. The downloading strategy has given the band an anticorporate image -- one of the best kinds these days -- and band leader Jeff Tweedy says the episode shows that free music can be a marketing boon.

"They defied the conventional business wisdom," says Blaise Zerega, Wired's managing editor. "It's less about sticking a thumb in the eye of the record industry than about trying to coax the industry to embrace the potential that Internet technologies offer."

Dead Letter

On Dec. 12, an Intel Corp. manager wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to propose changes in the review process for some wireless-networking technology. The letter ostensibly was on behalf of a group called the Industry Consortium for Module Approval, listing 11 members that include Hewlett-Packard Co., International Business Machines Corp., Nokia Corp. and Agere Systems Inc. One week later, a different Intel executive wrote back to withdraw the letter.

The problem? Some of the companies listed weren't on board -- or, as the second letter put it, there was "confusion" as to which members of the consortium wished to join the letter.

At issue is how the FCC, which must certify specialized communication chips and cards, will handle a trend to integrate wireless functions into other chips on a computer's main circuit board. An Agere executive said it disagreed with the consortium on one issue -- requiring consensus among component suppliers before elements of a system can be recertified by the FCC -- which could restrict the company's ability to reuse existing chips and reduce the cost of them. A Nokia spokesman says it "simply did not have the opportunity to review the proposal. . . . Therefore, we felt that it was premature to include our name on a list of companies involved."

An Intel spokesman acknowledges that, because of the rush to get business done before the Christmas holiday, not all companies that were part of the group got a chance to see the latest version of the letter. He says the group plans to get the necessary approvals and resubmit the letter this month.

Digits was compiled by Ann Grimes with contributions from Julia Angwin, David Bank, William M. Bulkeley and Don Clark.

www.thescotsman.co.uk

VIC ROBERTSON AND FORDYCE MAXWELL THE economic woes of arable farming have forced the industry’s marketing, research and development body, the Home Grown Cereals Authority, to ditch plans for increased spending - and plans for a levy increase.

At its board meeting yesterday, the authority accepted the need to cap spending at its current level and scrap a proposed 3p per tonne increase in growers’ levy which would have taken cereals to 43p and oilseeds to 68p.

The decision came after extensive consultation throughout the industry and outright rejection of any funding increase by farmers’ unions on both sides of the Border.

It is expected that research and development projects will be the major casualty with an anticipated budget cut of about £1 million, 16 per cent, in the coming year. Total projected spend for 2003-04 was £11.2 million.

The HGCA said that recommendations for a levy increase - the first since 1996 - stem from the disastrous harvest of 2001 which had resulted in a 25 per cent cut in levy income and a serious dip into reserves.

The board will now have to draw up new budget proposals for the coming financial year, which starts at the beginning of July.

"The expected cut backs will mean no new research and development projects in cereals for the next 12 months," said HGCA chairman Tony Pike. "This is regrettable, but was explained to all stake holders during the consultation period.

"If we are to satisfying consistently the industry’s needs, then a regular income stream is required because substantial variations in income would make it very difficult for us to support long-term research and development projects."

A spokesman for NFU Scotland, confirming the union’s "No" to an increase announced earlier this week said that a reduction in HGCA activity was an unfortunate legacy of depressed combineable crop incomes for the past five years.

A cargo of 6,000 tonnes of groats - oats with the husks removed - will leave Dundee this week for Venezuela where the product will be rolled into porridge oats or manufactured into cereal bars.

The final shipment in a 20,000 tonne contract signals, according to Ian Harper, logistics manager with Quaker Oats in Cupar, a major opportunity for Scottish cereal growers.

He said: "This is business we have been trying to get for years. There is a potential market for Scottish oats in Latin America of at least 40,000 tonnes each year. Currently most of the oats for this market are from the US and Canada, but we can compete on both cost and quality."

The Quaker plant in Cupar handles 80,000 tonnes of oats each year and throughput has been growing recently at 20 per cent year on year. The Scottish harvest usually yields about 100,000 tonnes of oats but Harper is keen to see an increase to end "imports" from England to meet orders.

www.thescotsman.co.uk

VIC ROBERTSON AND FORDYCE MAXWELL THE economic woes of arable farming have forced the industry’s marketing, research and development body, the Home Grown Cereals Authority, to ditch plans for increased spending - and plans for a levy increase.

At its board meeting yesterday, the authority accepted the need to cap spending at its current level and scrap a proposed 3p per tonne increase in growers’ levy which would have taken cereals to 43p and oilseeds to 68p.

The decision came after extensive consultation throughout the industry and outright rejection of any funding increase by farmers’ unions on both sides of the Border.

It is expected that research and development projects will be the major casualty with an anticipated budget cut of about £1 million, 16 per cent, in the coming year. Total projected spend for 2003-04 was £11.2 million.

The HGCA said that recommendations for a levy increase - the first since 1996 - stem from the disastrous harvest of 2001 which had resulted in a 25 per cent cut in levy income and a serious dip into reserves.

The board will now have to draw up new budget proposals for the coming financial year, which starts at the beginning of July.

"The expected cut backs will mean no new research and development projects in cereals for the next 12 months," said HGCA chairman Tony Pike. "This is regrettable, but was explained to all stake holders during the consultation period.

"If we are to satisfying consistently the industry’s needs, then a regular income stream is required because substantial variations in income would make it very difficult for us to support long-term research and development projects."

A spokesman for NFU Scotland, confirming the union’s "No" to an increase announced earlier this week said that a reduction in HGCA activity was an unfortunate legacy of depressed combineable crop incomes for the past five years.

A cargo of 6,000 tonnes of groats - oats with the husks removed - will leave Dundee this week for Venezuela where the product will be rolled into porridge oats or manufactured into cereal bars.

The final shipment in a 20,000 tonne contract signals, according to Ian Harper, logistics manager with Quaker Oats in Cupar, a major opportunity for Scottish cereal growers.

He said: "This is business we have been trying to get for years. There is a potential market for Scottish oats in Latin America of at least 40,000 tonnes each year. Currently most of the oats for this market are from the US and Canada, but we can compete on both cost and quality."

The Quaker plant in Cupar handles 80,000 tonnes of oats each year and throughput has been growing recently at 20 per cent year on year. The Scottish harvest usually yields about 100,000 tonnes of oats but Harper is keen to see an increase to end "imports" from England to meet orders.