Word: chavez
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...Hugo Chavez has gone through more chiefs of staff than Venezuela has had Miss Universes - which is quite a few. So when the Venezuelan President tapped his older brother Adan for the job last year, few outside Miraflores Palace took notice. They should have. Adan, since then appointed education minister, is Hugo's chief Marxist consultant - and a driving force behind Chavez's harder-than-usual left turn since his re-election last month. Chavez has announced plans to shut down an opposition-run TV network and nationalize Venezuela's largest telephone and electricity firms, while pushing his rubber-stamp...
...many in Washington, the emergence of Adan is one more reminder of Chavez's autocratic urges - and of the possibility that Chavez himself is Fidel Castro's real successor in Latin America. His nationalization scheme evokes the seizure of private businesses in Cuba after Castro's 1959 communist revolution: it ousts U.S.-based companies like Verizon, part-owner of the Venezuelan telecom giant CANTV, and the AES Corporation, which controls Venezuela's main power utility. Chavez asserted this week that while he'll compensate both U.S. firms, he won't pay them a market rate. And when the Bush Administration...
...objective standards, Chavez is still not Castro. Says one Chavez official, "We're a hell of a long way from a [Castro-style] regime." Chavez gushingly admires and subsidizes Castro. But many officials in Caracas, especially younger ones, wince when you equate the two. They insist their democratically elected commandante is hardly poised to snuff out free speech and free enterprise or stoke armed revolution abroad. Chavez may control the hemisphere's largest oil reserves, but they believe he can't afford to squander a more valuable commodity - his democratic legitimacy, something Castro never had and which gives Chavez...
...people who want to have more than four dogs must obtain an additional permit. There is even a provision in the new law that requires dog owners to clean up after their pets in their own yards every week. While authorities won't be checking backyards for hardened poop, Chavez says that additional animal control officers have been hired, to make sure any animals they pick up have been neutered or spayed...
...bring even more attention to the issue in Albuquerque, Mayor Chavez now brings a selection of shelter pets to news conferences, department meetings and public appearances. In most cases, the pets find new homes on the spot. The city's euthanasia rate has been cut in half, and Albuquerque is now adopting out more pets than it kills. Chavez's long-term goal: to be able to brag that Albuquerque is a city where all animals that are suited for adoption find homes. "We can't be a complete city as long as we euthanize animals," he says...