A source close to the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan said it was too early to declare the UN plan dead. “Bolton wants to knock down the plan and start from scratch,” the source said. “He will find that his opinions are not shared by most of the rest of the world.”

The president of the UN general assembly, Jean Ping from the Gambia, has been working on the draft, covering issues of poverty, climate change, genocide, small arms, the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping capability and reform of the UN management structure, for the past year.

A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that the UK and the European Union, of which Britain holds the presidency, “are broadly content with the summit draft. It reflects the ambitious agenda thrown up by Kofi Annan”.

The spokesman said it was “important that we do not row back from previous high-level summits”, such as the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July and the UN millennium summit in 2000.
Full:guardian.co.uk

A source close to the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan said it was too early to declare the UN plan dead. “Bolton wants to knock down the plan and start from scratch,” the source said. “He will find that his opinions are not shared by most of the rest of the world.”

The president of the UN general assembly, Jean Ping from the Gambia, has been working on the draft, covering issues of poverty, climate change, genocide, small arms, the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping capability and reform of the UN management structure, for the past year.

A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that the UK and the European Union, of which Britain holds the presidency, “are broadly content with the summit draft. It reflects the ambitious agenda thrown up by Kofi Annan”.

The spokesman said it was “important that we do not row back from previous high-level summits”, such as the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July and the UN millennium summit in 2000.
Full:guardian.co.uk

LONDON (AFP) – Campaigners rallied outside Britain’s interior ministry in London to protest against the deportation of Iraqi nationals back to their homeland.

Around 50 demonstrators chanted slogans and waved banners as the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees handed in a petition to the Home Office.

Dashty Jamal, the group’s spokesman in London, said 33 people were removed last week and a further 43 are expected to be deported Sunday.

Britain is host to around 7,000 Iraqi asylum seekers, of which 250 are currently in detention centres, Jamal said.

“They sent them back by force, they are victims of war and terrorism,” he said.
Full: news.yahoo.com

LONDON (AFP) – Campaigners rallied outside Britain’s interior ministry in London to protest against the deportation of Iraqi nationals back to their homeland.

Around 50 demonstrators chanted slogans and waved banners as the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees handed in a petition to the Home Office.

Dashty Jamal, the group’s spokesman in London, said 33 people were removed last week and a further 43 are expected to be deported Sunday.

Britain is host to around 7,000 Iraqi asylum seekers, of which 250 are currently in detention centres, Jamal said.

“They sent them back by force, they are victims of war and terrorism,” he said.
Full: news.yahoo.com

A regional committee of the World Health Organization declared tuberculosis an emergency in Africa. Controlling the epidemic, which kills 540,000 Africans a year, will require $2.2 billion in new spending in 2006 and 2007 and a number of measures to detect cases and oversee treatment, the panel said.

Other needs include increasing the number of trained health workers and making antiretroviral drugs available to people infected with both tuberculosis and the AIDS virus. Worldwide, there are nine million cases of active tuberculosis and two million deaths each year, making tuberculosis second to AIDS as a cause of illness and death among adults.
Full: nytimes.com

Africa is just one big giant ’emergency’ to the WHO and NGO and pharmaceutical profiteers: since virtually nobody is tested for either AIDS or TB in Africa and the ‘trained health workers’ largely absent, where are all these numbers coming from? Add malaria to the mix too.

In the spring of 1993 South African photojournalist Kevin Carter was covering the famine in Sudan. While visiting a feeding station, a starving child crawling through the dust caught his eye. Behind the child stalked a large vulture.

The resulting image shocked the world. It did much to raise awareness about the plight of the Sudanese and increased the potential for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to raise money for relief and feed the starving.

Carter won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for his picture and his career seemed to be reaching its peak — but then the recriminations started. How could he photograph the child instead of helping? How could he profit from such an appalling tragedy?

The pressure eventually took its toll and Carter, who suffered from emotional problems and drug addiction, took his own life a few months later.

The debate that Carter found himself unwittingly thrust into the centre of rages to this day. When does interest become exploitation? Where do you draw the line between news and voyeurism? Do images of starving children help the victims of famine in Africa or enforce an unfair and possibly racist stereotype?
Full: socialistworker.co.uk

“Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement,” Robertson said. “I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.”

But he compared Chavez to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler and quoted German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “[That if a madman were] driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis for his involvement in a 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

Robertson’s rationale for his statement remained unchanged.

“I said before the war in Iraq began that the wisest course would be to wage war against Saddam Hussein, not the whole nation of Iraq,” Robertson said. “When faced with the threat of a comparable dictator in our own hemisphere, would it not be wiser to wage war against one person rather than finding ourselves down the road locked in a bitter struggle with a whole nation?”

…”We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” he said. “We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”
Full: cnn.com

Chávez taunts US with oil offer
…In a typically robust response to remarks by the US televangelist Pat Robertson, Mr Chávez compared his detractors to the “rather mad dogs with rabies” from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and unveiled his plans to use Venezuela’s energy reserves as a political tool.

“We want to sell gasoline and heating fuel directly to poor communities in the United States,” he said.

…Venezuela, the world’s fifth largest crude exporter, supplies 1.3m barrels of oil a day to the US. It remains unclear how poor Americans might benefit from the cheap petrol offer, but Mr Chávez has set up arrangements with other countries for swapping services in exchange for oil. Cuban doctors are working in the poorer areas of Venezuela in exchange for cheap oil going to Cuba.

Jamaica yesterday became the first Caribbean country to reach an agreement with Venezuela for oil at below-market terms. The Petrocaribe initiative is a plan to offer oil at flexible rates to 13 Caribbean countries. Jamaica will pay $40 a barrel, against a market rate of more than $60.

Mr Chávez said oil importers such as the US could expect no respite from the oil market, predicting the price of a barrel would reach $100 by 2012.

US-based Westinghouse Electric Co could be awarded a multi-billion dollar contract for a set of nuclear reactors during the upcoming visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to Washington, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Westinghouse is the US nuclear arm of British Nuclear Fuels PLC, and has been vying with companies from France and Russia for contracts to build four pressurized water reactors in China.

The paper said a Chinese official at China National Nuclear suggested a deal could be in the works, but Westinghouse executives said they hadn’t heard about their bid.

Hu will meet with his counterpart George W. Bush in Washington on September 7 and is expected to visit the US companies of Boeing and Microsoft in Seattle, Washington.
Full: spacewar.com

Boise, Idaho affiliates CBS and FOX have refused to air a television ad in which Cindy Sheehan asks President Bush questions about the Iraq war.

Sheehan “claims the President lied about, among other things, the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” said Jeff Anderson the Vice President of sales at Fisher Broadcasting Inc., which owns KBCI (CBS). “There is no proof that we are aware of regarding the truthfulness of her claim. We require proof of claims such as this. Until that is provided, our station will not carry this ad.”
Full: huffingtonpost.com

TONY Blair is expected to join one of the most exclusive groups of businessmen in the world after he leaves Downing Street.

The PM is being lined up for a highly lucrative position with the Carlyle Group – an American-based investment giant with strong links to the White House and the defence industry.

The firm has been nicknamed “The Ex-Presidents Club” because it has had a host of former world leaders on its books including George Bush Senior, his former secretary of state James Baker and former British PM John Major. There a also a large number of former US Army top brass.
Full: sundaymirror.co.uk