The Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, has delivered an uncharacteristically stinging attack on the Church of England over its decision to disinvest in companies profiting from the occupation of Palestinian land.

Writing for today’s Jewish Chronicle, Sir Jonathan describes as “ill-judged” the General Synod’s decision last week to back disinvestment from a US company that makes giant bulldozers used by the Israeli army to demolish Palestinian homes. The timing of the vote could “not have been more inappropriate”, he said.
news.independent.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AFX) – The House of Representatives is to consider a resolution today on withholding US assistance from the Palestinian Authority unless Hamas revokes its call for the destruction of Israel.

The measure states that “no United States assistance should be provided directly to the Palestinian Authority if any representative political party holding a majority of parliamentary seats within the Palestinian Authority maintains a position calling for the destruction of Israel.”
www.iii.co.uk

The French foreign minister has accused Iran of pursuing a clandestine military nuclear programme.

Speaking on France 2 television on Thursday, Philippe Douste-Blazy said: “No civilian nuclear programme can explain the Iranian nuclear programme. So it is a clandestine Iranian military nuclear programme.

“The international community has sent a very firm message by saying to the Iranians: ‘Come back to reason. Suspend all nuclear activity and the enrichment of uranium and the conversion of uranium’.

“They are not listening to us.”
aljazeera.net

The Bush administration made an emergency request to Congress yesterday for a seven-fold increase in funding to mount the biggest ever propaganda campaign against the Tehran government, in a further sign of the worsening crisis between Iran and the west.
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said the $75m (£43m) in extra funds, on top of $10m already allocated for later this year, would be used to broadcast US radio and television programmes into Iran, help pay for Iranians to study in America and support pro-democracy groups inside the country.

Although US officials acknowledge the limitations of such a campaign, the state department is determined to press ahead with measures that include extending the government-run Voice of America’s Farsi service from a few hours a day to round-the-clock coverage.

The sudden budget request, which follows an outlay of only $4m over the last two years, is to be accompanied by a diplomatic drive by Ms Rice to discuss Tehran’s suspect nuclear weapons programme. She is to begin with a visit to Gulf states. Ms Rice told the Senate foreign affairs committee that Iranian leaders “have now crossed a point where they are in open defiance of the international community”.

She added: “The United States will actively confront the aggressive policies of the Iranian regime. At the same time, we will work to support the aspirations of the Iranian people for freedom and democracy in their country.”
guardian.co.uk

The administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has come under severe criticism from Amnesty International in a report entitled “New government fails to address dire human rights situation”, which was published this week.
ahwaz.org.uk

Who’s watching the ‘human rights’ watchers?

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the leaders of the Iraqi insurgency, was sentenced to death yesterday – for the third time – by a court in Jordan for his part in plotting chemical attacks.

Zarqawi, 40, who was born in Jordan, was sentenced in his absence. He has already been sentenced to death twice by Jordanian courts, once for planning the murder of a US aid worker in Amman, and for planning a suicide car bomb attack on the Iraqi-Jordanian border in 2004.
guardian.co.uk

Well, he’s been reported dead at least three times, so this only makes sense…

Late Saturday night, on the eve of a crucial vote to choose Iraq’s next prime minister, a senior Iraqi politician’s cellphone rang. A supporter of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr was on the line with a threat.
“He said that there’s going to be a civil war among the Shia” if Sadr’s preferred candidate was not confirmed, the politician said.

Less than 12 hours later, and after many similar calls to top Shiite leaders, Sadr got his wish. The widely favored candidate lost by one vote, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the interim prime minister, was anointed as Iraq’s next leader. “Everyone was stunned; it was a coup d’état,” said the politician, a senior member of the main Shiite political coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance.

It was a crowning moment for Sadr, whose sudden rise to political power poses a stark new set of challenges for Iraq’s fledgling democracy. The man who led the Mahdi Army militia’s two deadly uprisings against American troops in 2004 now controls 32 seats in Iraq’s Parliament, enough to be a kingmaker. He has an Islamist vision of Iraq’s future, and is implacably hostile to the Iraqis closest to the United States — the mostly secular Kurds, and Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister.
iht.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Rene Preval was declared the winner of Haiti’s presidential election early Thursday under an agreement between the interim government and electoral council, staving off a potential crisis over the disputed vote in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.

With nearly all the votes counted, Preval had been just shy of the 50 percent margin needed to avoid a runoff next month. Under the agreement, some of the 85,000 blank ballots cast in the Feb. 7 election were subtracted from the total number of votes counted, giving Preval a majority, said Michel Brunache, chief of Cabinet for interim President Boniface Alexandre.

“We acknowledge the final decision of the electoral council and salute the election of Mr. Rene Preval as president of the Republic of Haiti,” Prime Minister Gerard Latortue told The Associated Press in a phone interview after the agreement was made.

The agreement, which Brunache said was signed by members of the electoral council and several government ministers, came during a late night meeting of government and election officials in the electoral council offices.
washingtonpost.com

Behind the Manipulation of Haiti’s Election
…After a number of delays, Haiti finally had its presidential and parliamentary elections on February 7. At first, things seemed hopeful, with the polling taking place peacefully. But then trouble started.

The leading candidate, Rene Preval, looked like he was on his way to securing a comfortable majority when things started getting murky. By February 14, with 90 percent of the votes counted, Preval had suddenly dropped in the vote count. His proportion of the vote currently stands at 48.7 percent, a tad short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff.

It is hard to say what exactly happened. But Preval’s abrupt drop off seems to be dubious, to say the least. And doubts about the vote are heightened by the fact that a member of the nine-person electoral council has come out and alleged fraud.

“According to me, there’s a certain level of manipulation,” Pierre Richard Duchemin told AP. “There is an effort to stop people from asking questions.”

Another official, Jean-Henoc Faroul, has also alleged deceit. “The electoral council is trying to do what it can to diminish the percentage of Preval so it goes to a second round,” Faroul, president of one electoral district, told AP.

Who would be behind the manipulation?

Gee I just cannot guess.

Africa is poor and destined to remain poor for quite some time because of bad governance, failure to develop natural resources, corruption, inadequate or non-existent primary educational, scientific and technical training. Western countries and Euro-America are rich, because they have good governance, have developed their natural resources, have credible legal systems that are able to deal effectively with corruption, have educated their populations, and have a wealth of scientific and technical skills. This script, for some, adequately contrasts the poverty and the wealth of nations.

…In 1884 certain Western European nations, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium to mention some, convened the Berlin Conference to colonize Africa. King Leopold II of Belgium, a smaller and less important nation, extracted the Congo as his prize – territory then deemed of little economic importance. The turn of the century witnessed the invention of the automobile and a consequential global demand for rubber. The Congo had a rich supply of natural rubber. The Congolese were an available labor source to harvest the vines from which the rubber was extracted. Leopold II turned the Congo into his personal fiefdom – an actual slave colony. In 1908 when he handed the colony to Belgium, there had been some 10 million Congolese people slaughtered.

In 1956 the Congo had its first university graduate. Between 1908 and 1960, when the Congo became politically independent, there were a mere 17 university graduates from the already decimated Congolese population of some 13.5 million.
blackcommentator.com

In Africa everything is bigger. Since the second intifada began in 2000 approximately 4,480 Palestinians and Israelis have died – but that is equivalent to a long weekend in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where, the UN says, 1,200 people are dying every day from war-related causes. Since 1997, nearly 4 million have died, their passing relatively unremarked and unreported.

Hurricane Katrina temporarily displaced tens of thousands in the southern US last summer amid worldwide media coverage. In Sudan, about 2 million civilians remain homeless three years after the Darfur conflict ignited. Almost unnoticed, their numbers rose by 30,000 in January due to renewed militia depredations.

In Congo and Sudan the international community’s efforts to do better gathered pace this week. But the vast scale of the countries’ problems, coupled with doubts about the developed world’s commitment to resolving them, does not encourage optimism, says Tom Cargill, of the Africa programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
guardian.co.uk

oh oh…the Royal Institute of International Affairs.