VENEZUELA: Prisoners In Guatire Take 22 Hostages Charging TB Neglect.

GUARDIAN/

    Inmates at the El Rodeo II prison in Guatire just outside Caracas have taken the prison director and 21 other officials hostage over an alleged tuberculosis outbreak.
   The prisoners demand doctors be sent to the jail to treat the alleged outbreak.
   Officials refuse to negotiate until all hostages are released...and deny there is a tuberculosis outbreak.
   President Hugo Chavez has promised often to build new prisons but most of the 48,000 inmates are housed in old delapidated facilities.

VENEZUELA: 2 Dec. UPDATE: At Least 29 Dead, Thousands Homeless After Rains; Chavez Lets 26 Families Live In His

LINK CHANGE/  2 Dec./  11x FOTOS/
   Gov. Henrique Capriles has decreed a "state of alarm" in the state of Miranda, including parts of Caracas, to aid flood victims after floods and landslides killed at least 29 and forced more than 5,000 from their homes and idled the Cardon oil refinery and the nearby 645,000 bpd Amuay refinery, Venezuela's largest.
 AND: President Hugo Chavez will take 26 families to live into his presidential palace. More than 33,000 people are already reported to be living  in temporary shelters.
  “I have a proposal for you families: stay here for a year,” Chavez said. “When you leave,” he said, “it will be to an apartment of your own.”
    His critics see this move less generously considering the thousands left homeless. “Philanthropy can be virtuous,” wrote the columnist Simón Boccanegra in the newspaper Tal Cual, “but it can also be demagogic, exhibitionist and when taken to its extreme, truly grotesque and tacky.”
 FOR DETAILS, SEE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/world/americas/02venez.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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