President George Bush subjected Russia’s Vladimir Putin to a public lecture on the fundamentals of democracy yesterday, injecting a chill into a relationship that has – until now – been characterised by bonhomie.

Meeting in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava, Mr Bush emerged from a three-hour meeting with the Russian President joking and smiling and full of warm words. But his frequent references to “Vladimir” and the “fella” were peppered with targeted criticism of the state of democracy in Russia with which the more hawkish members of his administration are said to have lost patience.

An unsmiling, visibly irritated Mr Putin squirmed as he listened to Mr Bush tell a press conference he had been told that Washington had “concerns about Russia’s commitment in fulfilling” the “universal principles” of democracy. “Democracies always reflect a country’s customs and culture, and I know that,” Mr Bush said. “Yet democracies have certain things in common; they have a rule of law, and protection of minorities, a free press, and a viable political opposition.”
Full Article: independent.co.uk

All of which have been undermined in this ‘democracy.’

One woman dies from pregnancy-related causes approximately every 30 minutes. One in five children dies before the age of five from diseases that are 80% preventable.

An estimated one-third of the population suffers from anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress. Annual per capita income is $190 (£100). Average life expectancy is 44.5 years. Its education system is now “the worst in the world”.

These are just a few of the findings contained in a United Nations Development Programme report on Afghanistan published this week.

More than three years after the US and Britain declared victory in Kabul and promised to rebuild the country, it paints a disturbing portrait of “a fragile nation still at odds if no longer at war with itself that could easily slip back into chaos and abject poverty”.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Forty years after the great civil rights battles in the American South, one of the last bastions of formal racial segregation in the United States is set to topple, following a Supreme Court ruling decrying the California prison system’s practice of separating black, Latino and white inmates.

The nation’s highest court said the principle at stake was the same that led to a landmark ruling in 1954 ordering school desegregation – the idea that there is no way to separate people and say meaningfully that they still enjoy equal rights under the law. “We rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal … 50 years ago in Brown vs Board of Education,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said in the majority ruling, “and we refuse to resurrect it today.”
Full Article: independent.co.uk

There is something so essentially insane about this…

Israelis are paying a high but rarely acknowledged economic and social cost for nearly 40 years of occupation, says a report commissioned by Oxfam published today.

The report says that military spending, the cost of Jewish settlements to colonise Palestinian land, and the collapse of tourism and other enterprises because of the two intifada, have severely undermined the economy and greatly increased poverty.

The report by the Adva Centre in Tel Aviv, which monitors social and economic trends, concludes that the consequences go deeper, skewing Israeli politics and creating a more divided society.

It says: “The second intifada has hurt Israel deeply, resulting in a cessation of economic growth, in a lowering of the standard of living, in the debilitating of its social services, in the dilution of its safety net, and in an increase in the extent and depth of poverty.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

In the sprawling palace of Tervuren, in a leafy suburb of Brussels, Leopold, King of the Belgians has finally been dethroned. A daunting statue of the hook-nosed monarch has been heaved from centre stage in the royal museum that was his brainchild and built with the proceeds of his African adventure.

The avatar of the former national hero now skulks in a distant corner; in his place are a series of antique black and white photographs of mutilated bodies in turn-of-the-previous-century Congo. One of the stark and disturbing images shows a father from the Nsala tribe contemplating the chopped-off hand and foot of his daughter in front of him. The sepia-tinted horror show is part of “Memory of Congo, The Colonial Era” a remarkable exhibition that has set off a critical re-examination of Belgium’s grisly record in its only colonial possession.

As the decades roll by and the surviving archives are dusted off and opened up, the European powers that colonised Africa in the 19th century’s undignified scramble for land are becoming accustomed to an unpleasant, prickly emotion: shame. Whatever our own Gordon Brown may have said during his recent trip to the continent, the time for apologising for colonialism’s errors is by no means past. On the contrary, humble pie is more firmly on the menu now.
Full Article: independent.co.uk
(more…)

On a ragged patch of the sprawling El Charcote ranch, deep in the Venezuelan plains, Humberto Delgado is holding court. “The English are the invaders,” he tells the few dozen landless peasants who have squatted for four years on this land, owned by the British Vestey group. On a nearby fence, a battered banner proclaims: “Mr President – the people of El Charcote need to talk to you.”

It is rare, these days, to come across a part of the globe where machete-wielding peasants campaign for land rights and popular sovereignty to the cry of “English out”. But these are exciting times for peasant firebrands such as Mr Delgado, also known as “Yellowhair”.

This week, the left-wing Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez, said President George Bush was plotting to assassinate him to put a stop to the socialist “revolution” his government has embarked on. The squatters of El Charcote are in the vanguard of that struggle.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

Despairing Aids activists have accused the South African government of failing to deal with the soaring HIV epidemic, after a report indicated that the number of premature deaths in the country, many of them Aids-related, rose by 57 per cent over five years. Most of the deaths between 1997 and 2002 were attributed to tuberculosis, influenza and pneumonia, illnesses caught frequently by Aids patients.

Pali Lehohla, head of the government-run Statistics South Africa, which produced the report, said: “The numbers provide indirect evidence that the HIV epidemic in South Africa is raising the mortality levels of prime-aged adults, in that associated diseases are on the increase.” He added that the number of deaths of those aged 29 to 40 was increasing, a strong indicator of rising Aids-related mortality.

Aids lobby groups have seized on the figures to attack the government’s failure to come even close to meeting its own targets for the treatment of HIV sufferers.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

It seems pretty ridiculous to blame Mbeki. I suspect there are other forces at work. Smells like the lynch mob that tried to get Kofi Annan after he bad-mouth U.S. policy in Iraq. Mbeki has been doing such ‘unnaceptable’ things as pointing out that Winston Churchill was a racist, not to mention giving asylum to Aristide.

…I fall into the generation for whom apartheid was the dominant international cause of our youth. If baby-boomers were galvanised by Vietnam, then those who came of age in the 1980s were inspired by the campaign to transform South Africa. Even if we were not manning the 24-hour picket at Trafalgar Square, apartheid formed a kind of backdrop to the times. Cry Freedom was on at the movies, Free Nelson Mandela was the anthem at every college disco. What Thatcherism was at home, apartheid was abroad: the issue of the age.

That was nearly two decades ago. I assumed that a trip in the winter of 2005 would be to a wholly different country, with apartheid and all its works a bad, fading memory. That’s where I was wrong.

Of course, and as everyone knows, the formal structures of that dreaded system have long gone. The country is ruled by its second black president; “Whites Only” signs are to be found behind glass in a museum and nowhere else.

And yet, the rainbow nation, the “new South Africa” so constantly invoked and effectively publicised, proved elusive. What I found, during what one scholar calls the “banal encounters” of day-to-day life, was a set-up remarkably like the one I had imagined back when I was a student shaking a bucket for the anti-apartheid movement.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

The designation of John Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence recalls the Central American wars of the 1980s, where he played a critical, if deeply controversial, role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85. Despite feigning amnesia while questioned, Negroponte implicitly participated in questionable events at the time, including bribes handed down from the embassy to high ranking military and government officials and ties between Honduran death squads and the witnessed massacres of dissidents in nearby El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

For the neocons overseeing Washington’s occupation of Iraq, El Salvador was a significant success story which they hope to emulate. The recent exhumation of the phrase “Salvador Option” recalls for current and former ultra conservatives like then assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, Ollie North, Admiral Poindexter and Negroponte the glorious era when the feckless Jimmy Carter (who, of course, was overly concerned with human rights) was defeated by the Reagan-Bush ticket. In the aftermath of victory, the new administration committed itself to install freedom, democracy and free market economies throughout Central America. Given the congratulatory, if unmerited nature of the above beliefs, it’s hardly surprising that some Pentagon and White House officials are now talking openly about resurrecting the “Salvador Option” in Iraq-that is, to create “hit squads” composed of Kurdish and Shi’a paramilitaries to seek out and kill armed dissidents as well as non-violent sympathizers, just as the U.S. indirectly mobilized and financed death squads throughout Central America two decades ago.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

LONDON (Reuters) – More than 211 million children worldwide aged 5-15 are working full time, half of them in appalling conditions, some as prostitutes and miners, and huge aid increases are needed to help them, UNICEF’s UK branch said.

In a scathing report published on Monday, the British branch of the United Nations Children’s Fund said the only way to end child labor was to end poverty, and rich industrialized nations must give far more in development aid to poor countries.

“A huge amount still remains to be done to protect children’s rights all over the globe and to prevent their exploitation,” UNICEF UK’s executive director David Bull said.

From unregulated chemical plants in Asia to the giant open cast mines of Latin America and the stone quarries of West Africa, child labor is a scar on the conscience of the world in the 21st century, the report said.

Children are forced to work not only as soldiers in African wars or in the sweatshops of Asia, but also as cheap farm labor in north America and prostitutes in Europe, it said.

“Estimates of the number of young people working on farms in the U.S. vary from 300,000 to 800,000,” the report said. “Many are from minority groups, particularly Spanish-speaking immigrant families.”
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

According to the BBC, this represents one in twelve of the world’s children. Appeals to ‘conscience’ however, and ‘development aid’ disembodied from total system overhaul are simply worthless. Further, the condition of children speaks profoundly to the oppression of their mothers.