Second TV station comes under fire

May 30, 2007

CARACAS -- President Hugo Chavez yesterday called opposition news channel Globovision an enemy of the state and said he would do what was needed to stop it from inciting violence, only days after he shut another opposition broadcaster. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans marched in Caracas in a fourth consecutive day of protests over Chavez's closure of the RCTV network -- a move that has sparked international criticism that the leftist leader's policies are undermining democratic freedoms. (Reuters)

ETHIOPIA

ADDIS ABABA -- Ethiopia began counting its population yesterday, a daunting task in a country where asking personal questions is considered socially taboo but where the government and international donors sorely need more information to plan economic and social programs. More than 100,000 census takers, most of them schoolteachers, fanned out across Africa's second most populous country as part of a 10-day program. The last census was in 1994 when officials found out there were 54 million Ethiopians in the country. (AP)

Brazil

SAO PAULO -- A federal judge in a remote Amazon city will likely decide within two weeks whether to indict two US pilots and four Brazilian air traffic controllers for the South American country's worst air disaster, a court spokesman said yesterday. Prosecutors sought to charge the controllers and pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino, both of New York, for involuntary manslaughter and for exposing an aircraft to danger, crimes punishable by one to three years in prison . The pilots were detained for two months after the Sept. 29, 2006, crash in which 154 died. Lepore, 42, and Paladino, 34, were flying an Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet when it collided with a Boeing 737 operated by Gol airlines, sending the passenger jet crashing into the rain forest. (AP)