Boycott

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Venezuela's firebrand president, Hugo Chavez, took overwhelming control of the National Assembly yesterday after five major opposition parties boycotted a national election for all 167 congressional seats. Venezuela's leftist government increased its slight majority to take nearly all the congressional seats, the ruling party said, as up to 75 percent of eligible voters stayed away from the polls. The outcome will permit the National Assembly to change the Constitution easily, as well as enact major changes supported by Chavez in areas ranging from Venezuela's health system to the criminal code.

The e-mail alerts zip across the nation, fomenting outrage: Levi-Strauss donates to Planned Parenthood. Don't buy their blue jeans! Johnson & Johnson advertises Tylenol in a gay magazine. Click here to register your disgust! In the past 12 months, conservative advocacy groups have urged their millions of members to stop buying brand after trusted brand. Boycotts have long been a mainstay of both the right and the left, but analysts say there's a new intensity to the protests, as social conservatives test their ability to punish companies for taking liberal stances.

Rosa Parks, the Alabama seamstress whose simple act of defiance on a segregated Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 stirred the nonviolent protests of the modern civil rights movement and catapulted an unknown minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to international prominence, died yesterday of natural causes at her home in Detroit. She was 92. Her death was announced by her longtime employer, Rep. John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat. Often called the mother of the movement that led to the dismantling of institutionalized segregation in the South, Mrs. Parks became a symbol of human dignity when she was jailed for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white person when she was riding home from work on the evening of Dec. 1, 1955.

In a mark of organized labor's badly broken solidarity, four major unions said yesterday they would boycott the AFL-CIO's Chicago convention, and three appear poised to bolt the federation that has loosely bound the nation's unions together. Officials from the 1.3-million member Teamsters and the 1.8-million member Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO's largest union and the spark behind the rebellion, said they would meet today and announce their plans. Joe Hansen, president of the 1.3-million member United Food and Commercial Workers Union, one of six dissident unions that have formed their own coalition, said he was inclined to pull his union out of the AFL-CIO, but he needed time to talk with UFCW leaders.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraqi transitional President Jalal Talabani said yesterday that his government had agreed to security requests by Sunni Arab delegates who serve on the nation's constitution-drafting committee, an olive branch that could end a Sunni boycott of the charter-writing process. Sunni delegates, who launched a boycott after the killing last week of one of their colleagues and a legal adviser, also indicated they are ready to resume work on the document, which is due to be approved by Aug. 15. The announcements came as new U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad arrived in Baghdad.

When several Catholic bishops argued last year that they had a responsibility to deny Holy Communion to politicians who support abortion rights, Baltimore's Cardinal William H. Keeler was not among them. He instead offered that taking the sacrament was a personal matter, saying, "We don't need bishops to get into the act." Keeler said yesterday that he was not doing a turnabout in boycotting Loyola College of Maryland's commencement ceremony today. Keeler is not attending because of the abortion-rights stance of the keynote speaker, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Cardinal William H. Keeler told Loyola College of Maryland yesterday that he will not attend its commencement ceremony tomorrow because he disagrees with the keynote speaker, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who supports abortion rights. The decision comes amid planned protests, led in part by a conservative Catholic group, outside tomorrow's ceremony at the 1st Mariner Arena in downtown Baltimore. Loyola's interim president, David Haddad, received a strongly worded letter from the cardinal yesterday, saying Keeler would not attend - nor would any auxiliary bishops or any other representative of the archdiocese, college and archdiocese officials said.

THE BRITISH Association of University Teachers has created a blacklist against Jewish Israeli academics reminiscent of the worst abuses of McCarthyism. And just as McCarthyism was a barrier to peace between the United States and the Soviet Union - by contributing to a dangerous atmosphere in which each side vilified and threatened the other - so, too, does the British lecturers' boycott endanger the progress now being made toward peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. It is not surprising, therefore, that even the Palestinian Al-Quds University in Jerusalem released a statement against the AUT blacklist, saying, "We are informed by the principle that we should seek to win Israelis over to our side, not to win against them.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The hard-line Sunni religious organization that had called on its followers to boycott Iraq's election said yesterday that it would "respect the choice" of voters and accept the new government, hinting at the beginnings of an accommodation with the political process. Amid growing concerns about the ramifications of the apparently low voter turnout in Sunni areas, the Association of Muslim Scholars complained that the elections "lack legitimacy because a large segment of different sects, parties and currents boycotted."

Some local officials are boycotting an event today at which Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. plans to ceremonially hand over the keys to armored police vehicles, saying he is trying to take credit for a local initiative. The Maryland Emergency Management Agency acted as a middleman for federal homeland security money used to buy the armored vehicles, but the state was not involved in the decision to buy them or in the actual purchase, local officials said. Some of the seven jurisdictions have had the vehicles for a month.