I received this message from a regular reader of Vheadline:

We regret that it is no longer possible to give access to any of the 71,000+ pages on our websites VHeadline.com (English edition) and our Spanish Edition VHeadline.com en Español. We are looking to resolve a series of urgent problems to enable us to resume service as soon as possible!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's what you get at www.vheadline.com these days. The site had advertising support and subscribers to its premium pages, so it shouldn't be a money problem. It did, however, provide a forum in which people sympathetic with Venezuela and its leader could promote their ideas and air their beefs against the American menace. But it ran off of American servers.

By its own admission the Bush regime is currently conducting a massive Internet censorhsip campaign. It claims its targets are only porn and terrorist communications, but the ugly face of Christian extremism appears anyway. In Alabama the other day, two security guards wearing uniforms of the Homeland Security department, barged into a library and demanded that people on the Internet leave adult sites immediately. A head librarian later said the library's Internet lab was designed to give users individual privacy to avoid this kind of problem. It also turned out the guards had no powers within their job descriptions to police the library or anyone's private communciations online or off. In this climate it is not unreasonable to assume that Vheadline has come under the kind of technological attack that has plagued Aljazeera and other information sources considered to be opposed to the religious extremists in the Yank government.

Besides, what the PNAC/Nazi monsters call porn is often art to the rest of us.

Gary

Vheadline url:

http://www.vheadline.com/

In its global spectrum, especially read in the USA and Canada, over the last years, VHeadline.Com was the only major website that has published daily, continuous information about Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution in the English language.

Not even Venpres and Aporrea, the major sources of information about Venezuela, have functioning English editions or translations of daily materials. Narconews has published invaluable information about Venezuela in English over the years, but it is also threatened permanently.

It was a website that received worldwide recognition, and whose articles were linked by other web sites regularly. It was nothing unusual that articles written by its editorial staff were visited over 400 000 times a day ... this was the case of my Venezuela-Fallujah article, a while ago ... and, as was to be expected, we were maliciously and viciously attacked by the international agents of disinformation wars.

Ironically, we were accused that we are on the "pay-roll of Chávez"; the truth is, that we by our own political human conviction were contributing our grain to the Bolivarian Revolution, and we financed everything on our own (to run a huge site like VHeadline.Com properly, at a minimum costs $US 4.000 a month), also the site was kept alive via advertisements, that the CIA eventually also destroyed ... and, although we warned about the coming danger, and asked for urgent help over the last 6 months, nothing materialized from anywhere. VHeadline was left alone in agony, to the obvious joy of the reactionary forces, and to the detriment of the Bolivarian Revolution, and now it is off cyber space.

Any aid and suggestions we will gladly receive, see the documentation of the last hours of VHeadline.Com below, whom we are convinced, that like Phoenix will soon arise out of its own ashes, to fulfill its English historic revolutionary mission: to continue to publish the Truth about Venezuela!

As Che and Fidel stated decades ago, the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution; similarly, it is the duty of every revolutionary Latin American to disseminate the truth about Venezuela, and it is the constitutional duty of the Bolivarian Revolution, in its own international class interest, worldwide to aid any individual and collective efforts that struggle to further the global, permanent revolution. In this spirit, we ask for solidarity with VHeadline.Com, and to aid it financially to comply with its historic, informative task.

Source

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

quote:

---

After a long and courageous struggle to get the essential funding it needs, VHeadline is now at the end of its financial rope as the coffers are nearly bare and once they are the lights will go out and VHeadline will go dark.

It's that close to the end now, and this is the last day Roy is able to post any articles as there are no further resources to do it. He'll maintain the site for a short time longer with the final resource scraps still on hand, but once they're gone, and unless those asked to help do it as we still hope they will, a wonderful and important chapter of online web journalism will have ended.

What a tragedy if it happens, and as I write it looks like it will.

If it does, I want to use this final column and these ending thoughts to thank Roy and all the wonderful, dedicated VHeadline contributors I've gotten to know for all they've done giving readers real information on what's happening in Venezuela, what the Bolivarian Revolution is all about, and how important it is for the people of Venezuela for it to grow and spread elsewhere as I hope so much it will.

I, Roy, and all of us at VHeadline are proud to have been part of an important effort to help make it happen. We won't stop working for that wherever we turn up, but with VHeadline gone, the people of Venezuela and all those working for the success of their Revolution will have lost an invaluable resource and ally in the battle for social equity and justice and the kind of better world we all want or should.

---

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

quote:

---

Lately, over the last decades, the few independent newspapers and mass media which tried to disseminate the truth about corporate imperialism all find themselves on the brink of economic bankruptcy ... they are being sabotaged in all kinds of ways. The authors and editors themselves are forced to perform extra work to finance a website like VHeadline.com in defense of world truth.

On Internet, CIA hackers destroy our computers (four of them over the last weeks), send hundred thousands of viruses, to shut them up forever. Hence, the defense of truth has become cyber guerrilla warfare ... a very expensive and dangerous venture.
....
Many promises are being made, many are helping, but all this cannot keep our site alive. Internet is big business, it is the future of still bigger business to come. Our loyal readers, some institutions and organizations are helping as far as they can, but all this is simply not enough to arm such a formidable weapon of self-defense of real democracy against the violent assaults of the disinformation campaigns and of the raging, terrorist information war.

Finally, if we should not see us again very soon on VHeadline.com, allow me to utter the following words of departure. In Africa, long ago my now-deceased father told me: “Son, you can take a horse to the river , but you cannot force him to drink.”

Hence, this is not the moment to complain ... not to beg for any cent from anybody, it is the glorious moment of farewell: we did all that we could do; more we cannot do ... and less we should not do.

We wish the Bolivarian Revolution an informative success around the globe, and that the millions of dollars already spent on information projects really should bear the necessary democratic and socialist fruits of emancipatory enlightenment. In this way, we will deepen the revolution not only here, but across the globe.

All of us ... the whole crew of VHeadline.com ... will continue the battle wherever we will face the enemies of emancipation, our voices will be heard in cyberspace, our spring nobody and nothing can stop. Of course, even if the rats are already leaving the sinking Titanic, nonetheless, we, as our own revolutionary hope, still stand in full battle array.

---

quote:

---

11,468 computer viruses were eliminated in the space of one hour by VHeadline.com's firewall at around 7:00 p.m. New York time yesterday, November 22 [2004]... the corporate enemy is becoming desperately dangerous ... all this reminds me of a fatally wounded man-eater that launches the barbaric "law of the jungle," that becomes more ferocious as it nears its inexorable demise.

---

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]