The sources did not disclose the nationality of the foreign citizen identified as Aboud Djabel Schadi Hilal. According to French authorities, Aboud Djabel was sentenced in April, 2001, to eight years in jail for "participation in the importing, transportation and storage of illicit drugs and fraud."

The United States accused the 11 Colombians of crimes related to drug trafficking.

Such extradition used to be banned by the 1991 Colombian Constitution under the pressure of drug cartels. But in 1997 it was approved through a constitutional reform.

Since Colombian President Alvaro Uribe took office in August 2002, a total of 172 individuals have been extradited, most of them to the United States.
 

Fraud ruled out in Chavez's referendum victory
The National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela on Friday ruled out any possibility of a fraud, as claimed by the opposition, in the victory of President Hugo Chavez in the recall referendum held last Sunday.

A senior official of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena, said no irregularity has been spotted in the auditing of 150 electoral centers, as confirmed by the international observers.

In 15 percent of the audited centers, "we have not drawn a single ballot showing any irregularity," she added.

Representatives of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the US-based Carter Center, which jointly carried out the audit Thursday with the CNE at the request of the opposition, said that until Thursday, 35 percent of the random sampling of 150 voting centers, out of a total of 12,358, had been checked.

The audit, made on a random sampling of 400 voting machines, aimed to dispel fraud charges from the opposition in the referendum, which accused the government of tampering with electronic voting machines to give Chavez 59 percent of the vote, compared with 41 percent backing its recall.

However, opposition leaders boycotted the audit, saying it was not stringent enough, and demanded a far wider audit to include the touch-screen machines used in the referendum.

Chavez, who was elected in 1998 and reelected to a six-year term in 2000, rejected his opponents' accusation and said they are trying to stir up anti-government unrest in Venezuela.

On Friday, CNE Director Jorge Rodriguez also said the auditing of the votes of the recall referendum has "very overwhelming" results of the legitimacy of the process.

The auditing was carried out although there was no formal charges of fraud as claimed by the opponents of President Chavez, he noted.

Rodriguez insisted that until now, the CNE has not received a single charge of fraud. "Everything will be sufficiently cleared up by the time we present the auditing results which, from my perspective are overwhelming," he said.

"This is the last auditing by the CNE in order to bring calm to people who have been bombarded by a series of denunciations that are, from our perspective, unfounded," said Rodriguez.

Meanwhile, both the Carter Center and the OAS have expressed their attitude toward the fairness of the referendum.

"Based on our prior examination of the voting machines, we expect the audit will confirm the results," said Jennifer McCoy, leader of the Carter Center observer mission.

"If there is a significant pattern, ... this audit will demonstrate it," she added.

On Thursday, the OAS said the fact that the same results of the recall referendum were registered in different voting machines "isnot suspicious."

At a press conference, mission representative Edgar Castro said the results were similar in 47 voting machines.

According to a communique issued by the OAS, its international electoral observation mission validated the victory of Chavez, saying the results were "compatible with the internal controls effected by the mission."

"The electronic-voting system and the broadcasting of the results of the electoral journey were adequately audited, with alldue conditions to ensure the secrecy and fidelity of the vote," it added.

Beside the international observers, many foreign countries have recognized Chavez's win. The United States, the biggest buyer of Venezuela's oil, has said that "the process was credible and met international standards."

About 10 million Venezuelans cast their votes in Sunday's referendum to decide whether President Chavez should finish the remaining two years of his six-year term or step down.

A massive turnout forced the authorities to twice extend the closing time of the referendum and keep polling stations open well after midnight.

Bibles are selling fast in Brazil
A religious awakening in South America's biggest country over the past decade, the rapid advance of evangelical churches and smart business planning by publishers have made Brazil a leading world publisher of Bibles.

"All 136 country-chapters of the World Bible Society taken together published 21 million Bibles last year. Our share was 4.2 million," says Erni Seibert, marketing director of the Brazilian Bible Society. According to Roy Lloyd, a spokesman for the society's U.S. chapter, "more Bibles are produced in Brazil than at any of the other Bible societies around the world."

Brazil's other publishers printed an additional 1.5 million Bibles in 2003, according to Marino Lobello, vice president of the Brazilian Book Publishers Association. "There is no way to know for certain whether Brazil is the world leader," said Lobello. "But we sure put out a lot of Bibles!"

One reason is a decade-long religious revival led by evangelical churches, which have increased their numbers from 9 percent of Brazil's population in 1991, to 15 percent in 2000, according to the Brazilian Census Bureau. About 180 million people now live in Brazil.

"We base our religion on the Bible," says Roberto dos Santos, an Assembly of God pastor who preaches daily on a dusty square in front of Sao Paulo's Roman Catholic Cathedral. "We want to get people back to Jesus directly and the way to do that is for everyone to pack a Bible."

The Bible craze is not limited to Protestants. Seibert said the charismatic movement among Roman Catholics is also strong in Brazil, generating even more demand. The society, although rooted in Protestantism, does not hesitate to print Roman Catholic Bibles.

Brazil's tradition of piety has also made the Bible into a kind of status symbol and Lobello said nearly every family owns one.

In addition, the cost of producing Bibles has dropped dramatically, due to the society's huge printing plant, employing just-in-time management techniques in a Sao Paulo suburb.

"I can print a full-text Bible in imitation leather with a binding that will last through 20 years of daily readings for the equivalent of US$3," he said.

The price is so low that the society is able to produce - using a hi-tech computer imported from Norway - a full-text Portuguese-language Bible in braille, which is distributed for free, one book at a time in 38 volumes. So far, 2,000 people have signed up for the edition. And in a lesson taken from the corporate world, they focus only on their core business, printing Bibles, and do not plan to branch out in publishing.

But even when every Brazilian has a Bible, the society will have other markets to conquer.

More than a third of Brazil's annual output of Bibles goes overseas. The Bible Society alone publishes versions in 14 languages.

"We don't do the translations," says Seibert. "Our sister Bible societies, recognizing the cost-effectiveness of our printing operation, give us the templates and we print them."

Output also includes versions in languages other than Brazil's native Portuguese, a controversial aspect of the society's drive to distribute Bibles to all Brazilians but a source of pride for society members.

Since its founding in 1948, the Brazilian chapter has translated the Bible into 35 of the 180 known Indian tongues in Brazil, including language communities with as few as 450 members and as many as 35,000.

Such languages rarely exist in written form. It takes at least 20 years of day-to-day work with villagers for linguists to develop a written form of a language such as Guarani-mbya, the latest Bible translation released by the society. It takes decades more to complete a Bible translation. The Guarani-mbya version, for example, absorbed 46 years.

Critics such as University of Sao Paulo linguist Eduardo de Almeida Navarro call the society's work a form of cultural intrusion. In an article in Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper in June, Navarro wrote that the Guarani-mbya translation "created a hybrid symbolic sphere" for the Indians, one which was "neither wholly theirs nor wholly that of the missionaries."

But Seibert gently rebuts the critique, saying, "We only get involved when a tribe comes to us. The end product is a written language that helps the Indians become literate in their own tongue so they can write and preserve their own history and culture."