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Campaign Over, Venezuelans Are Left to Tensely Wait (and Tweet)

By ELIAS E. LOPEZ
Supporters of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela at a campaign rally this week.

There were no debates but plenty of vitriol, and now Venezuela's intense and sometimes surreal presidential campaign is officially over.

The two candidates in the oil-rich country, President Hugo Chávez and Henrique Capriles Radonski, ended their campaigns on Thursday with huge rallies and one final pitch during televised interviews before the polls open on Sunday.

Supporters of Henrique Capriles Radonski, the opposition candidate in Sunday's presidential election in Venezuela.

After nearly 14 years in charge, Mr. Chávez is facing his strongest political challenge in Mr. Capriles as his government struggles with rampant crime, food shortages and high inflation. He still enjoys strong backing among many of the poor who have benefited f rom his social programs, but with that support somewhat eroded, the fate of his 21st century socialist revolution may hang in the balance.

As my colleague William Neuman reports today, polls give no clear winner and many Venezuelans are “anxious about casting their ballot out of fear that voting against the president can mean being fired from a government job, losing a government-built home or being cut off from social welfare benefits.”

“There is wide agreement that Mr. Chávez is vulnerable as never before,” he writes. “Handicapping the election is complicated by the angst felt by many Venezuelans that a simple vote for the opposition could bring retaliation.”

But over the last several months, Mr. Chávez, 58, and Mr. Capriles, 40, engaged in a fierce battle and now the country is ready to vote.

On Thursday, under an unrelenting rain in Caracas, Mr. Chávez addressed thousands of his supporters, most dressed in the red of his political m ovement, and urged them to turn “this Bolivarian avalanche that has traveled the country” into an “avalanche of votes next Sunday.”

“We'll give a beating to the bourgeoisie,” Mr. Chavez roared.

Ever the master showman, he then led the crowd with a traditional song dedicated to Venezuela. “I feel your light and your aroma in my skin” he sang.

Hugo Chávez sang to his supporters in Caracas on Thursday.

His campaign came under attack after the rally, with the opposition charging that most people in attendance had been bused in from all over the country. A Capriles supporter on Twitter sought to drive the point home with the help of Photoshop.

But Mr. Chávez waged a strong campaign despite a fight with cancer, although ques tions still remain about his health. He did follow a lighter schedule than in past elections, choosing his appearances strategically and keeping his famously lengthy speeches in check. He also never mentioned his opponent by name, opting to taunt him with insults like “imperialist” and “majunche,” which roughly translates to slob or loser.

Mr. Capriles, on the other hand, avoided confronting the president directly, saying Venezuelans were tired of Mr. Chávez's insults and ready for someone to unite the deeply polarized country. The young governor of Miranda, one of the country's most populous states, also visited hundreds of cities and small towns in a campaign that began “casa por casa” â€" or house by house â€" and succeeded in siphoning support from Chavista strongholds.

An annotated Google map produced by the newspaper El Universal shows the sites visited by Mr. Capriles in blue, and by Mr. Chavez in red.


View Recorrido de los candidatos presidenciales in a larger map

Though the opposition this time is united under the young and vibrant Mr. Capriles, Mr. Chávez still has vast advantages, including tight control over a state apparatus that includes the coffers of the national oil company PDVSA.

During an interview Thursday night with an opposition channel, Mr. Capriles looked directly at the camera and, with a hoarse voice, said, “I want you to think about the life that you have and the life that you could have. We all know that we can do better.”

Interview with Henrique Capriles Radonski on the last day of the campaign in Venezuela.

Mr. Capriles wore his signature baseball cap with the colors of the Venezuelan flag â€" an accessory that earned him a rebuke from election officials for violating campaign laws that forbid candidates from using national symbols. As Francisco Toro, who blogs at Caracas Chronicles, explai ned in a post on our Latitude blog in August, the cap became a symbol of its own among the opposition and even got its own account on Twitter.

Ironically, an update to that account on Friday reminded voters to respect campaign rules and not to wear the popular cap to the polls.

Social networks have become useful tools for political activism in Venezuela, where Mr.Chávez's government has been gradually dismantling more independent outlets and building a state-run media empire, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

But the government has also embraced Twitter and Facebook to counter opponents and rally supporters. In June, Mr. Chavez even awarded a young woman a new home for becoming the three millionth follower of @chavezcandanga.

So even if the presidential campaign is officially over in the physical world, the battle rages online, where many vent, speculate and argue while they tensely wait for the outcome.



Steve Jobs\'s High School Girlfriend to Publish Memoir

October 4, 2012, 12:01 pm
By JULIE BOSMAN

Chrisann Brennan was one of Steve Jobs's first serious loves, his high school girlfriend and the mother of his daughter Lisa. Now Ms. Brennan will tell the story of her relationship with Mr. Jobs, the Apple co-founder who died in 2011, in a new memoir to be published next year. St. Martin's Press, part of Macmillan, said on Thursday it had acquired the rights to an untitled memoir by Ms. Brennan, who is now a painter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

After meeting him at Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif., Ms. Brennan later lived with Mr. Jobs in a cabin, meditated with him and attended lectures. “At 17, Steve had more than a touch of the cool sophistication of a Beat poet,” Ms. Brennan wrot e in an article in Rolling Stone after his death. While in her early 20s, she became pregnant and gave birth to their daughter, who is known as Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Mr. Jobs initially denied paternity of his daughter but later developed a closer relationship with her.

St. Martin's said Ms. Brennan's memoir would cover a range of subjects, including her relationship with Jobs, the founding of Apple and “Jobs's enormous appeal, energy and drive as well as his developing ambition and ruthlessness in business and personal dealings.”



Romney\'s Attack on Big Bird Sows Confusion Abroad, and Feeds It at Home

By ROBERT MACKEY
Video from Le Monde of Mitt Romney's promise to cut the federal subsidy for public broadcasting during Wednesday's debate.

Mitt Romney's promise, during Wednesday debate, to cut into America's debt by ending the federal subsidy for public broadcasting generated an Internet backlash, and at least one popular new Twitter account, largely because the former management consultant appeared to suggest that the beloved “Sesame Street” character Big Bird was surplus to requirements.

Mr. Romney's decision to run against Big Bird gladdened American conservatives, who have long complained of a liberal bias on public television and radio channels, but puzzled many viewers abroad, where local versions of the educational program are po pular and well-respected. In France, Le Monde reported that the slight against le Gros Oiseau threatened to spiral into “l'affaire Big Bird,” after President Barack Obama - experiencing a certain esprit d'escalier - came up, a day late, with the retort: “Thank goodness somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird. It's about time. We didn't know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit.”

The German magazine Der Spiegel explained to readers that Mr. Romney's threat to the character viewers of “Sesamstrasse” know as Bibo generated a Twitter-Sturm during the debate that reached maximum intensity in just 20 minutes.

A sad day for Bibo, the German version of Big Bird.

In a useful round-up of the comic images of an unemployed Big Bird circulating on social networks, the Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported, somewhat inaccurately, that Mr. Romney had tried to soften the blow by first telling viewers, “I love Garibaldo,” which is the name the character goes by in “Vila Sésamo.”

Garibaldo, star of the funkier Brazilian version of “Sesame Street.”

At least some of the confusion among viewers watching the debate from outside the United States centered on the question of how Mr. Romney expected to get votes by pledging to eliminate state support for televised educational programming, and news, which is taken for granted in much of the developed world.

As Joshua Keating explained in a post for Foreign Policy, scholars at NYU reported last year that Americans spend far less per capita on public broadcasting than a representative sample of 13 other nations, includ ing France, Britain, Germany, Japan, Australia and Canada.

Even factoring in money provided by states and local governments, American pay less than $4 a year for the television and radio programming they get from PBS and NPR. Canadians and Australians pay about 8 times more per capita; the French and Japanese 14 times more; Britons 24 times more; Germans 41 times more.

In a statement decrying Mr. Romney's comments, PBS noted, “The federal investment in public broadcasting,” about $500 million a year, “equals about one one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget.”

In the context of the debate, though, what is probably more important than the fact that Americans actually pay a relatively small amount of money for public broadcasting is evidence that they are convinced they are paying a lot more.

As Politico reported, “Most Americans think public broadcasting receives a much larger share of the federal budget than it actually does,” according to a poll conducted for CNN last year. The results of that survey, which asked respondents to estimate what share of the federal budget was spent on certain programs, found that just 27 percent of Americans knew that the money for PBS and NPR was less than 1 percent of government spending. Remarkably, 40 percent guessed that the share was between 1 and 5 percent and 30 percent said it was in excess of 5 percent - including 7 percent who said that more than half of the federal budget was spent on television and radio broadcasts.

Asked if the spending on PBS and NPR should change, 53 percent called for it to be increased or stay the same, while just 16 percent said it should be eliminated entirely.

It might seem strange for anyone who knows that the federal government spends so little on PBS to begin a discussion of necessary cuts there, but perhaps Mr. Romney has calculated that the undecided voters he is chasing might be among the three-quarters of the American population that thinks the subsidy is far, far larger than it is.

A spokeswoman for PBS, Anne Bentley, told USA Today that the Congressional subsidy does not go to PBS, or NPR, but to local stations around the U.S. that pay fees in exchange for broadcast rights to their programs, which are produced with donations and revenue from other sources. Ms. Bentley added that Congressional support accounts for up to 50 percent of the operating budgets for some local stations in rural areas. “They're really in jeopardy of going dark if they don't receive funding.”

The producers of “Sesame Street,” offered a comic tweet in the voice of Big Bird the morning after the debate, and a statement explaining that while they are “a nonpartisan, nonprofit, educational organization,” they are also “dependent on PBS to distribute our commercial-free educational programming to all children in the United States.”

Without support from the public, educational programming would be interrupted by commercials and need to take the concerns of advertisers for higher ratings into account.

As Alyssa Rosenberg noted on the liberal Web site Think Progress, Mr. Romney has been talking about Big Bird on the campaign trail. In an exchange with a voter concerned about the federal debt caught on camera by CNN in Iowa last December, he said: “I'm going to see PBS is going to have to have advertisement. We're not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird's going to have advertisements.”



Protesters March Against War in Istanbul as Tension With Syria Escalates

By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleagues Tim Arango, Sebnem Arsu and Anne Barnard report, the conflict in Syria spilled over its border with Turkey again on Thursday, as the Turkish military struck Syrian positions in retaliation for cross-border shelling that killed five Turkish civilians a day earlier.

After Turkey's Parliament voted to authorize further military action against Syria, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that another Syrian shell had landed in Turkish territory, the newspaper Today's Zaman reported. Despite assuring reporters that his government “could never be interested in something like starting a war,” as he stood next to Iran's visiting vice president, Mr. Erdogan added: “The Turkish Republic is a state capable of defending its citizens and borders. Nobody should try and test our determination on this subject.”

Late Thursday, thousands of anti-war protesters marched to Taksim Square in the center of Istanbu l. The blogger Serhatcan Yurdam documented the protest using Instagram, and curated a collection of photographs uploaded to Twitter by observers and participants in the march.

Raw footage of the protest posted online by the Turkish news agency DHA showed the protesters chanting “No to War!” and “U.S.A. Get Out of the Middle East!”

Video of an anti-war protest in Istanbul on Thursday night, posted online by DHA, a Turkish news agency.

Among the slogans written on signs and banners carri ed by the protesters were:”This War Is Not My War,” No to Imperialist Intervention in Syria,” “We Will Halt the AK Party's War Politics,” “We Won't Be the Soldiers of Imperialism,” and “U.S.A. Take Your Hands Out of the Middle East.”

An overhead view of the protest, posted on a Turkish-language Facebook page for supporters of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, appeared to show that it was attended by thousands of demonstrators.

Video, said to show an anti-war protest in Istanbul on Thursday night, posted on YouTube by a supporter of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

The sound of pre-dawn shelling from Turkey into Syria early Thursday was caught on video by the Turkish news agency Cihan.

Video of Turkish shelling across the border into Syria early Thursday, from Turkish news agency Cihan, uploaded to YouTube by the newspaper Today's Zaman.

The Turkish military action followed the death of five civilians on Wednesday when mortar fire from Syria killed two women and three children in the southern Turkish border town of Akcakale. Video of the chaotic scene moments after the shelling was broadcast on Turkish television.

Video from Turkish television shot immediately after five Turkish civilians were killed by mortar fire from Syria on Wednesday.

At funerals for the five victims on Thursday, the newspaper Hurriyet reported that “Akçakale residents expressed their fury at the authorities who came.” Addressing civilian and military officials, one mourner asked, “You are protected by so many men, why are we unprotected?”

Juliette Cezzar contributed reporting.



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