VENEZUELAN BEAUTY

A DICTATOR NOT SO WELL EDUCATED

Police dispersed opponents of President Hugo Chavez's government on Saturday as thousands demonstrated both for and against an education law that critics fear will lead to political indoctrination in schools. Officers fired tear gas, a water cannon and rubber bullets to scatter opposition marchers as they tried to break through a police barrier.

Protesters including Miguel Rivero, a 43-year-old lawyer, said they requested but did not receive permission to march to the National Assembly.

"It's totally unjust," Rivero said, wiping tear gas from his eyes. "This repression is totally unnecessary."

Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami accused the protesters of "inciting violence" by throwing rocks and other objects at police.

Health authorities said they treated dozens of people for tear gas inhalation and at least 14 who were hit by rubber bullets or displayed other minor injuries. Interior Vice Minister Juan Francisco Romero said at least a dozen police were mildly injured.

The law approved by the largely pro-Chavez National Assembly last week orders schools to base curricula on "the Bolivarian Doctrine" — a reference to ideals espoused by 19th-century independence hero Simon Bolivar, such as national self-determination and Latin American unity.

Critics are quick to note that Chavez uses the term "Bolivarian" to describe his political movement, and some believe his socialist government intends to win over hearts and minds through classroom indoctrination.

Chavez says the law is necessary to change Venezuela's "bourgeois" educational system.

"This is political, nothing more," said Nancy Gonzalez, a 54-year-old retired education professor, adding that the law's vague language leaves many articles open to interpretation.

Pro-government legislators deny the law aims at political indoctrination.

Government supporter Adriana Lombardi — one of thousands who marched peacefully across town in favor of the measure — said she believes the law will mean her 3-year-old son will gain an improved understanding of Venezuelan history.

"This is our identity, where we come from," she said. "It's important, it's fundamental."

Venezuelan police have fired teargas to stop thousands of protesters against a new education law from breaking past a security cordon in the capital Caracas.

Protesters accuse the government of President Hugo Chavez of indoctrinating children into backing socialist values.

Health officials said dozens of people were treated for minor injuries.

Rallies for and against the law, which passed last week, have been held for over a week. Last Friday's protests also met a tough response from police.

Elsewhere in the capital on Sunday, thousands of Chavez supporters held a counter-rally.

They say the new law will give everyone equal access to education, regardless of their economic position.

The government says changes to the law - which among other things, broadens state control over schools and makes the education system secular - were long overdue.

But the Catholic Church and university authorities in Venezuela have opposed the law.

The BBC's Will Grant in Caracas says some parents have threatened to take their children out of school if there is any socialist material on the new curriculum, while teachers' unions warn that they will boycott classes, and university students say they will stage further protests.

Analysts say parts of the law are open to interpretation and that it will only become clear how it will be applied once students return from their summer break.

The law requires schools to base their teaching on "the Bolivarian Doctrine" - a reference to the ideals of 19th Century independence hero Simon Bolivar, such as Latin American unity and national self-determination.

A previous attempt at education reform was one of the factors that led to mass protests in 2002, eventually culminating in a failed coup attempt against Mr Chavez.

MOON DAY

The measure of what humanity can accomplish is a size 9 1/2 bootprint.

It belongs to Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. It will stay on the moon for millions of years with nothing to wipe it away, serving as an almost eternal testament to a can-do mankind.

Apollo 11 is the glimmering success that failures of society are contrasted against: "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we ..."

What put man on the moon 40 years ago was an audacious and public effort that the world hasn't seen before or since. It required rocketry that hadn't been built, or even designed, in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy declared the challenge. It needed an advance in computerization that had not happened yet. NASA would have to learn how to dock separate spaceships, how to teach astronauts to walk in space, even how to keep them alive in space - all tasks so difficult experts weren't sure they were possible.


Forty years later, the moon landing is talked about as a generic human achievement, not an American one. But Apollo at the time was more about U.S. commitment and ingenuity.

Historian Douglas Brinkley called the Apollo program "the exemplary moment of America's we-can-do-anything attitude." After the moon landing, America got soft, he said, looking for the quick payoff of a lottery ticket instead of the sweat-equity of buckling down and doing something hard.

In years since, when America faces a challenge, leaders often look to the Apollo program for inspiration. In 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer, his staffers called it "a moon shot for cancer." Last year, then-candidate Barack Obama and former Vice President Al Gore proposed a massive effort to fight global warming, comparing it to Apollo 11. An environmentalists' project to tackle climate change and promote renewable energy took the name "Apollo Alliance."

Those still-unfinished efforts recall May 25, 1961, when President Kennedy, fresh from a disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, announced that America would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely home.



"I thought he was crazy," said Chris Kraft, when he heard Kennedy's speech about landing on the moon.

Kraft was head of Mission Control. He was the man responsible for guiding astronauts to orbit (which hadn't been done yet) and eventually to the moon. Kraft first heard about a mission to the moon when Kennedy made the speech.

"We saw that as Buck Rogers stuff, rather than reality that would be carried out in any time period that we were dealing with," Kraft recently told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Houston.

Less than three months later, Kraft was in the White House explaining to the president just how landing on the moon would be done. Kraft still didn't believe it would work.

"Too many unknowns," he said.

It was the Cold War and Russian Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man in space. Kennedy chose landing a man on the moon because experts told him it was the one space goal that was so distant and complicated at the time that the United States could catch up and pass the Soviet Union, Kennedy adviser Ted Sorensen said.

The idea in a world where American capitalism was pitted against Soviet communism on a daily basis was "to prove to the world which system was best, which one was the future," Sorensen said.

"It's not just the fact that the president wanted it done," Sorensen recalled. "It was the fact that we had a specific goal and a specific timetable."

In another speech, Kennedy famously said America would go to the moon and try other tasks "not because they were easy, but because they were hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

They weren't just skills with rockets and slide rules. Bringing together countless aerospace companies, engineers, scientists, technicians, politicians and several NASA centers around the nation was a management challenge even more impressive than building the right type of rockets, said Smithsonian Institution space scholar Roger Launius.

And it cost money. The United States spent $25.4 billion on the Apollo program, which translates to nearly $150 billion in current dollars - less than the U.S. spent in both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.

Yet, in the view of those heavily involved in the challenge, what made Apollo work was two tragedies: the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 and the fatal Apollo 1 fire in 1967.

The assassination of Kennedy made the Apollo program and its budget politically nearly untouchable. The moon-landing goal - which Kennedy later talked about modifying and even including the Soviets on - became a symbol of the martyred president. NASA's launch center was renamed from Cape Canaveral to Kennedy.

The Apollo fire, which occurred during ground testing, killed three astronauts, including Armstrong's neighbor. The main problem was that there was 100 percent oxygen in the capsule, which made fire spread rapidly.

Kraft, in a July interview said he is convinced that NASA couldn't have reached Kennedy's target were it not for the Apollo 1 fire and the way it made the space agency rethink everything: "We were building inferior hardware at that point in time.

"The whole program turned around, both from a hardware and management point of view," Kraft said. "You really learn from failure."

So NASA drilled astronauts and flight controllers ceaselessly with simulations. Failures kept being thrown at the astronauts and the controllers, some just plain unsolvable.

One of the last failures simulated before Apollo 11's launch was an alarm on the lunar lander that signaled the computer was overloaded. During the simulation, Mission Control in Houston aborted the landing. But controllers were later told it was just an "indication" signal and that if they had thought about it, the computer really was working fine. Controllers thought the test was unfair, according to an account in the new book, "Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon" by Craig Nelson.

But during the real mission, as the Eagle lunar lander approached the moon, that test-run computer signal appeared. This time controllers knew everything was OK. They didn't abort the moon landing.
Still, there were more hurdles to come. In another example, experience and nerves paid off. As Eagle neared the landing area in the spot called Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong saw too many boulders and craters to come down safely. So he kept flying horizontally, 100 feet off the ground, scouring the moonscape for a smooth place.

Eagle's fuel tank neared empty. Alarms went off. Mission controllers in Houston fretted.

"We still needed to get down," recalled Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. "I'm not telling Neil, 'Hey Neil, hurry up, get on the ground.' I'm sort of conveying this with body English."

There were only 17 seconds worth of fuel left. Finally, the radio at Mission Control crackled with Armstrong's voice: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

Two hours later, humans walked on a place other than Earth, a place truly foreign.

"This is a very desolate place," recalled Aldrin, second to step on the moon. "It's just boring. It's all one color that varies depending on the sun angle. But the sky is black, it's all black except the one object there, the Earth, and the object behind us, the sun."

The world watched on television as the first two men walked on the moon. But one person close to the action couldn't. He was the third crew member of Apollo 11, command module pilot Michael Collins, who was orbiting the moon alone. He didn't get to see what was happening. But he could hear Neil Armstrong say his famous first words.

Decades later, Armstrong called his first words on the moon "a pretty simple statement, talking about stepping off something."

But Armstrong wasn't merely talking about that small step of his. What came next was the big deal. It was, as he said on the moon 40 years ago, "a giant leap for mankind."
It still is.

CHAVISM IS NOT WELCOME HERE

Honduran military ousts president ahead of vote. Soldiers ousted the democratically elected president of Honduras on Sunday and Congress named a successor, but the leftist ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced what he called an illegal coup and vowed to stay in power.

The first military takeover of a Central American government in 16 years drew widespread condemnation from governments in Latin America and the world, and Chavez vowed to overthrow the country's apparent new leader.

President Manuel Zelaya was awakened Sunday by gunfire and detained while still in his pajamas, hours before an unpopular constitutional referendum many saw as a power grab. An air force plane flew him into forced exile in Costa Rica as armored military vehicles with machine guns rolled through the streets of the Honduran capital and soldiers seized the national palace.

"I want to return to my country," Zelaya said in Costa Rica. "I am president of Honduras."

Congress voted to accept what it said was Zelaya's letter of resignation, with even Zelaya's former allies turning against him. Congressional leader Roberto Micheletti was sworn in to serve until Jan. 27 when Zelaya's term ends. Micheletti belongs to Zelaya's Liberal Party, but opposed the president in the referendum.


"My slogan will be the reconciliation of the grand family of Hondurans ... and a grand national dialogue," Micheletti said after Congress gave the military a long standing ovation.

Zelaya denied resigning and insisted he would serve out his term, even as the Supreme Court backed the military takeover and said it was a defense of democracy.

His ouster came hours before polls were to open on a constitutional referendum that Zelaya was pushing ahead even after the Supreme Court and the attorney general said it was illegal. The constitution bars changes to some of its clauses, such as the ban on a president serving more than one term, they said.


Some businesses in the capital, Tegucigalpa, closed earlier this week amid the rising tension, and many speculated there would be a coup. Those who opposed the referendum warned against voting, fearing violence at the polls.

Countries throughout Latin America and the world condemned Zelaya's expulsion, and Chavez said before Micheletti was sworn in that if he was appointed president, "we will overthrow him." Chavez said Venezuela "is at battle" and put his military on alert.

In Havana, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez vowed to work with allies to push for Zelaya's return to power. He said Cuban Ambassador Juan Carlos Hernandez was held briefly in Tegucigalpa after he and other foreign diplomats tried unsuccessfully to prevent soldiers from taking away Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas.


Chavez said troops in Honduras temporarily detained the Venezuelan and Cuban ambassadors and beat them.

President Barack Obama said he was "deeply concerned" and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Zelaya's arrest should be condemned.

"I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter," Obama's statement read.

Coups were common in Central America for four decades reaching back to the 1950s, but Sunday's ouster was the first military power grab in Latin America since a brief, failed 2002 coup against Chavez. It was the first in Central America since military officials forced President Jorge Serrano of Guatemala to step down in 1993 after he tried to dissolve Congress and suspend the constitution.


"We thought that the long night of military dictatorships in Central America was over," said Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who sat beside Zelaya at a news conference.

Zelaya told the Venezuela-based Telesur network that he was awoken by gunshots and the shouts of his security guards, who he said resisted troops for at least 20 minutes. Still in his pajamas, he jumped out of bed and ducked behind an air conditioner to avoid the bullets, he said.He said eight to 10 soldiers in masks escorted him onto an air force plane that took him to Costa Rica.

Zelaya said he would attend a scheduled meeting of Central American presidents in Nicaragua on Monday and that Chavez, who also plans to attend, would provide transportation.

Zelaya called on Honduran soldiers to back him, urged citizens to take to the streets in peaceful protests, and asked Honduran police to protect demonstrators.

About 100 supporters congregated in front of locked gates outside the national palace, where they hurled rocks at soldiers and shouted "Traitors! Traitors!" They hung a Honduran flag.

"They kidnapped him like cowards," screamed Melissa Gaitan. Tears streamed down the face of the 21-year-old, who works at the government television station. "We have to rally the people to defend our president."

The vote did not take place on the referendum, which asked whether another vote should be held on convoking an assembly to rewrite the constitution.

Meanwhile, the United States considers President Manuel Zelaya to be the only constitutional president of Honduras despite his forced ouster from the country, an official said Sunday.

"We recognize Zelaya as the duly elected and constitutional president of Honduras. We see no other," the Obama administration official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

US President Barack Obama said earlier he was "deeply concerned" over reports that Honduran troops ousted Zelaya and flew him out of the country to regional neighbor Costa Rica.

"I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms (and) the rule of law," he said, adding that "any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference."

The United States has been in touch with Zelaya since the upheaval, the official said, adding that Washington had also been in contact with the Honduran armed forces and other institutions.

Earlier Sunday, Honduran forces were taking calls from the US embassy in Tegucigalpa, but were no longer doing so later in the day, he added.

The US embassy has urged Americans in Honduras to "be careful in their movements," he added. "Given the nature of this event and given the potential for conflict, we would urge great caution."

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a statement that Zelaya's ouster "violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic charter and should be condemned by all."

The US diplomacy chief called on Honduras to uphold "the very principles of democracy" that were reaffirmed during an Organization of American States (OAS) meeting hosted by Honduras earlier in June. The regional body was holding an emergency meeting Sunday at its headquarters in Washington.

The OAS Permanent Council was working on a consensus resolution "that will condemn the efforts to depose President Zelaya of Honduras, calling for his return to Honduras and for a full restoration of democratic order," the administration official said.

Another top US official said: "this is not a process that should be interfered with bilaterally by any country in the Americas," responding to accusations by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that the United States was meddling in the political crisis in Honduras.

"Ultimately the answer is going to arise from a resolution of the political tensions that led us to this moment," the official said.

The drama, which ended a bitter power struggle with the military over Zelaya's bid to secure a second term saw parliament swiftly voting in a new leader. Some 200 troops had swooped on Zelaya's home at about dawn and flown him out of the country.

A leading Honduran government official, Armando Sarmiento, told AFP that at least eight cabinet members were also detained including Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas.

Washington's ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, has called for the release of all those detained "immediately."

Zelaya's planned referendum had been ruled illegal by the country's top court and was opposed by the military, but the president said he planned to press ahead with it anyway and ballot boxes had already been distributed.

Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran president who has been forced out of the country, stood for the Liberal Party in the November 2005 presidential election and won by a narrow margin.

Despite his centre-right credentials, the former businessman moved Honduras away from its traditional ally the US, winning the support of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other leftist leaders.

Mr Zelaya campaigned for office on a law and order ticket but, Reuters news agency reports, it remains a major drug-trafficking transit point, overrun by street gangs and violent crime.

Limited to a single four-year term in office under the current constitution, he was accused of seeking to change the law to allow him to stand for a second term.

Mr Zelaya won the hotly contested vote in 2005, beating Porfirio Lobo of the ruling National Party. He pledged to tackle gang warfare and poverty in one of Central America's poorest nations.

But food prices rose and violent crime continued.

Publicly backed by such leftists as Mr Chavez, Bolivian President Evo Morales and former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Mr Zelaya began to lose the support of his own party.

In May 2007, Mr Zelaya ordered all of the country's TV and radio stations to carry government propaganda for two hours a day, accusing them of giving his government unfair coverage.

In August 2008, he took Honduras into the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (Alba), an organisation set up by Venezuela as an alternative to the stalled US plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Mr Zelaya's decision to hold a national poll on whether or not to run a referendum on allowing a Honduran president to run for two consecutive terms angered many.
News of his detention by troops emerged as voting was about to begin.

"He is surely a good man, with a healthy dose of tradition and amazing talent."

This was Fidel Castro's description of Mr Zelaya after a meeting in March with the Honduran leader who, in the Cuban ex-leader's words, "cannot be accused of being either a Marxist or a Communist".

In the same article, Mr Castro expressed his admiration for a man whose political background might have suggested a more conservative outlook.

"Coming from a family of noble descent, he received a Catholic education and... like Hugo Chavez, he found the source of inspiration nourishing his sense of justice in the ideas of Jesus Christ," Mr Castro wrote about Mr Zelaya, a former businessman and civil engineer with logging and ranching interests.

The Honduran president's popularity with Latin America's most prominent radicals raised questions at home about the man who had been elected as a Liberal.


According to Heather Berkman, an analyst at Eurasia Group, Mr Zelaya "alienated the business and political elite during his tenure".

He did not appear willing to operate within Honduras' established institutions, she told Reuters in an interview a few days before he was forced out.

"That raises very serious questions about how things are going to move forward," the analyst added.

THE END OF THE KING