The war on poverty cannot be won unless much greater efforts are made to give women equality, says the annual UN Population Fund report, published yesterday.
The report calls for government action to free women from the poverty and ignorance often forced upon them by cultural confines in many countries, which has an economic as well as a social toll.

“I am here today to say that world leaders will not make poverty history until they make gender discrimination history,” said the UNFPA’s executive director, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, at the report’s launch. “We cannot make poverty history until we stop violence against women and girls. We cannot make poverty history until women enjoy their full social, cultural, economic, and political rights.”
guardian.co.uk

BALAKOT, Pakistan, Oct. 12 – From the valley of death, they pointed to the far reaches of desperation. Over there in the village of Gunela, said Mushtaq Ahmed, pointing to hills under a mass of clouds, it is very cold, and there is nothing more than a bit of corn to eat. In a village called Khesarash, said Abdul Wahid, who had walked from there, children have died for lack of food.

From across the river came Imdad ul-Haq Mian, bearing on his shoulders a frail old man with a broken arm. With the road still blocked by a landslide, Mr. Mian and his kinfolk had trekked six hours through the hills, across loose, slip-sliding rocks, to bring the wounded from Dabriyan to a makeshift clinic here.

Balakot was once a pretty little village on the eastern edge of North-West Frontier Province, nestled in a green valley next to a gurgling river. Today it is a putrid, enraged, aggrieved place. All the houses have fallen in on themselves. Tents have arrived, but they are so scarce that one man said his was occupied by five families on Tuesday night. The suffering has made people lose their minds, one man said. The townspeople were fighting amongst themselves for the meager aid that had arrived, he said.
nytimes.com

Months before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck, volunteer searchers found 6,251 homeless people living in the coastal areas of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama. The search was part of an unprecedented count of the nation’s homeless population that the federal government asked cities and counties to conduct.

That snapshot tally was 727,304 homeless people nationwide, meaning about one in 400 Americans were without a home, according to a USA TODAY survey of all 460 localities that reported results to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in June.
news.yahoo.com

Diane Wilson is facing four months of jail in Texas.

But she now says that she’s not going to jail until Warren Andersen, the former CEO of Union Carbide, is extradited to face manslaughter charges in Bhopal, India.

“I’m going to go on the lam,” Wilson told Corporate Crime Reporter today. “I realize I have to go to jail. I’m quite willing to do that. But Warren Andersen – who jumped bail 13 years ago – needs to go to jail too. I’m going to stay out to expose the inequality – corporate executives don’t go to jail for high crimes and little citizens go to jail for misdemeanors.”

In August 2002, Wilson scaled a Dow Chemical facility in Seadrift, Texas and unfurled a banner that read – “Dow Responsible for Bhopal.”

When she came down, she was arrested and charged with criminal trespass.

In January 2003, Wilson was convicted of that charge and sentenced to four months in prison and fined $2,000.

An appellate court affirmed her conviction earlier this month.

She is out on a $1,500 bond.

Andersen was CEO of Union Carbide on December 3, 1984 when a deadly gas leak from Union Carbide’s pesticide factory in Bhopal, India poisoned at least 500,000 people.

More than 8,000 people died within three days and over 20,000 people have died to date as a result of their exposure.

Andersen was charged with manslaughter by prosecutors in Bhopal.

He reportedly lives in Bridgehampton, New York.
commondreams.org

Countdown to a Legal Lynching
By PHIL GASPER

On the morning of October 11, the US Supreme Court declared that it will not hear the case of Stanley Tookie Williams, the most famous inmate on San Quentin’s death row.

Last February, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals turned down Stan’s request for a new hearing by a vote of 15 to 9. But the minority issued a blistering dissent, condemning the “blatant, race-based jury selection” in Williams’ original trial.

Williams appeal reached the Supreme Court in May, where it has been sitting ever since. A decision was originally expected last week, but the court delayed, reportedly to allow its new Chief Justice an opportunity to weigh in on the case. Now it has spoken in no uncertain terms.

Welcome to the racist Roberts’ court.
rastafarispeaks.com

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

University of Illinois College of Law Professor Francis A. Boyle will once again nominate former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize because of his courageous, heroic and principled opposition to the racist and class-based Death Penalty system in America. Due to George Ryan‘s continued and proven commitment to seek justice for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, and People of Color in America, he has become one of a handful of courageous voices calling for an end to the repressive political, legal, and social climate that keeps the death penalty alive in this country. George Ryan has performed more effective work against the death penalty than the entire American abolitionist movement put together.

As a consequence he has drawn the vindictive attention of the stridently pro-death penalty U.S. Department of Justice. It is no coincidence that the racist and pro-death penalty U.S. Department of Justice indicted George Ryan for allegedly misappropriating $167,000 over a ten-year period of time soon after he had liberated 167 human beings from the Illinois death row, two-thirds of whom were People of Color. This indictment and persecution were designed to send a message to George Ryan and to the American abolitionist movement that the U.S. Department of Justice will continue to fight its rearguard action against the mortally wounded death penalty system in America. It was Governor George Ryan who inflicted that grievous blow upon the entire American death penalty system. He is now paying a very heavy price for his courage, integrity, and principles. For that reason, he richly deserves to win the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

The constitution, if implemented, paves the way for secession of territories, leading the way to an oil rich Kurdistan in the North, a southern Shia state also controlling great oil wealth, and a western area, war torn and without resources, left for Sunnis to rebuild after a brutal and heavily damaging occupation.

As the U.S. continues its campaign in Western Iraq, and as questions about U.K. involvement in terrorism in the South continue to grow, the impossibilities of democracy under occupation are highlighted. Next weekend’s vote on the future of Iraq further illustrates the perversions to democracy that have recently been envisioned by a U.S. administration that itself gained power under this dark cloud that now looks to envelope and dissect Iraq. All that stands in its way is the resolve of a highly terrorized constituent, a constituent that is asked to register its opinion under the watchful eye of a security force that recently razed their communities. In Anbar, as in other provinces, it doesn’t take a great leap of reasoning to know that a vote against the referendum is a vote against the occupation, an occupation intent on pushing it through.
informationclearinghouse.info

The Daily Telegraph today appealed against a high court ruling that awarded George Galloway, the former Labour MP, £150,000 damages and costs after the newspaper published documents about him it found in Iraq in 2003.
guardian.co.uk

This phase of introspection reflects the broader trend. I spoke yesterday with Eival Gilady, who served as a close adviser to the Israeli prime minister on the Gaza disengagement. His message was clear: the ball is now in the Palestinians’ court. Under the internationally endorsed road map, the next step is for the Palestinians to put their own house in order, starting with a crackdown on terrorism.

If that were to happen, then Israel might make a further move. Revealingly, Gilady cites the unilateral disarmament steps taken by Mikhail Gorbachev, which paved the way for a mutually agreed arms pact later. “When you act unilaterally, it doesn’t stay unilateral,” he says. In other words, Israel moves first on Gaza. Then Abbas stabilises the PA. Then Israel will act again. Not a peace process exactly, but a series of one-sided moves: call it sequential unilateralism.

Under that logic, what would Israel’s next act be? In the past few days, the Israeli press has been bubbling with hints from key officials at further unilateral pullouts, this time from the West Bank. The scenario seems to be that Sharon sits tight for now, sees off Bibi, fights, wins an election next year – and then stages a series of mini-disengagements. Dr Gary Sussman, an analyst at Tel Aviv University, says the map for those withdrawals is already laid out. “The fence is the border,” he says, confident that Israel would pull back, more or less, to the line traced by the wall, or security barrier, it has built through the West Bank. That would entail dismantling a few isolated settlements – and keeping the large settlement blocs.

Such a move would see Israel out of, perhaps, 50% or 60% of the West Bank. Combined with Gaza that would represent the de facto Palestinian state, promised by the road map and now routinely demanded by George Bush, Tony Blair and everyone else.

The old guard of Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, are said to be deeply depressed at this prospect. For such an entity would leave them no access to Jerusalem and would represent substantially less territory than the Clinton parameters promised in December 2000. It would not be the two-state solution they sought for two decades but, says Sussman, something less: “A one and three-quarter state solution.”

What’s more, Sharon would make this move and win not just international acceptance but praise. The Gaza withdrawal won plaudits from the UN and EU; even Pakistan broke Muslim ranks to start a diplomatic engagement with Israel last month. If there were to be more pullouts in the West Bank, Sharon would be a hero once more. There would be no pressure on him; it would all be on the Palestinians, who would rapidly be cast as grudging and difficult for not receiving these chunks of the West Bank with gratitude.
guardian.co.uk

A one-state solution
…The question of whether Zionism can be reconciled with democracy has always been at the heart of the debate on the Palestinian problem. But it has dropped off the broader political agenda partly because a majority of Israeli Jews have been resistant to anything that smacks of a challenge to the very premise on which the Zionist enterprise was built, and partly due to the belief (on both sides) that the Palestinian problem is ultimately resolvable via a territorial partition that would separate the mass of Arabs from Jews.

However, a number of recent developments have challenged these assumptions. With an unbridled settlement policy now matched by a “separation wall” that merely consecrates the divide between Palestinians and Israeli settlers within the occupied West Bank, Sharon and his predecessors have all but destroyed the possibility of a viable and sustainable territorial settlement along national lines.

A Basic History of Zionism and its Relation to Judaism
It seems a bitter irony that a movement that initially saw itself as progressive, liberal and secular should find itself in an alliance with, and held to ransom by, the most illiberal reactionary forces. In my view this was inevitable from its inception although the founders, and most of us (including even people like myself, growing up in Palestine in the thirties), did not foresee this and certainly would not have wished it.

Nowadays the deliberate blurring of the distinction between Zionism and Judaism, which includes a rewriting of ancient as well as modern history, is exploited to stifle any criticism of Israel’s policies and actions, however extreme and inhuman they may be. This, incidentally, also plays directly into anti-Semitic prejudices by equating Israeli arrogance, brutality and complete denial of basic human rights to non-Jews with general Jewish characteristics.

Zionism has now assumed the all-embracing mantle of righteousness. It claims to represent and to speak for all Jews and has adopted the slogan of “my country right or wrong.” The West tolerates Israel’s continuous breaches of human rights–violations that it would not tolerate if perpetrated by any other country. Few Western states and not many Jews dare take a stand against Israel, particularly as many of the former still feel a sense of unease and guilt about the holocaust which Zionist Jews inside and outside Israel have exploited in what to me seems an almost obscene manner. In the USA, the Jewish Zionist lobby is still strong enough to keep successive governments on board. Moreover, the USA regards Israel as an important strategic ally in its fight against Middle Eastern “rogue” states which have supplanted the Soviet Union as the great satanic enemy of the free world.

The national conversation about New Orleans has shifted from relief to reconstruction. While alliances form among local and national elites, the majority of the city’s population faces being shut out of the discussion entirely. New Orleans is less than 30% white, but the white power structure is poised to seize control of the debate over the city’s future, while New Orleans’ distinct legacies of colonialism, white supremacy and Jim Crow, along with the personal loss and devastation faced by most city residents, has created a cocktail of obstacles in the path of forming a strong and unified resistance.

New Orleans artist, writer and muslim community activist Kelly Crosby writes, “New Orleans was at one time the heart of Creole country – octoroons, quadroons and mulattos. It was very common for French and Spanish aristocrats to keep Creole mistresses… There was also the forced concubinage of Black slave women…throw in the mixing between Native Americans and African Americans and what you get is Creole. My great, great grandmother could have passed for white, or passe blanc, as they used to call it.”

The Creole population, historically based in the 7th Ward Neighborhood, is seen by many as a wealthier, more conservative voting block, more aligned with white interests. And the Creole community is disproportionately represented in New Orleans business and political elite. As one New Orleanian said to me recently, “New Orleans has never had a Black mayor, we’ve only had White and Creole mayors.”

This white supremacist dynamic has also affected alliances between Black New Orleanians and other people of color, such as the city’s immigrant populations. As in many cities, tensions flare between immigrant business owners, who due to forces of economics generally have stores in poor Black communities, and community residents, who often see them as part the power structure. Crosby quotes her father as saying, “There is no way for African-American Muslims and immigrant Muslims to come together on anything in this community until we all address the problem of Muslim-owned corner stores.”
zmag.org

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – A retired elementary teacher who was repeatedly punched in the head by police in an incident caught on videotape said Monday he was not drunk, put up no resistance and was baffled by what happened.

Robert Davis said he had returned to New Orleans to check on property his family owns in the storm-ravaged city, and was out looking to buy cigarettes when he was beaten and arrested Saturday night in the French Quarter.

Police have alleged that the 64-year-old Davis was publicly intoxicated, a charge he strongly denied as he stood on the street corner where the incident played out Saturday.

“I haven’t had a drink in 25 years,” Davis said. He had stitches beneath his left eye, a bandage on his left hand and complained of soreness in his back and aches in his left shoulder.

A federal civil rights investigation was begun in the case. Davis is black; the three city police officers seen on the tape are white.

But Davis, his attorney and police spokesman Marlon Defillo all said they do not believe race was an issue.

“He does not see it as a racial thing,” said Davis’ lawyer, Joseph Bruno.
apnews.myway.com