KABUL, MAY 9: Afghan President Hamid Karzai opened an investment conference on Tuesday with a plea for businesses to come and make money while acknowledging there were still problems including red tape and corruption.

Surging violence is largely confined to the Afghan south and east but economists say it is a huge deterrent to investment.

And for many of the businesses that do enter the Afghan market, security is a significant extra cost. Nevertheless, Karzai said Afghanistan provided numerous opportunities.
financialexpress.com

DAMASCUS, 9 May (IRIN) – Some 244 Palestinian refugees, the majority of whom had been stranded at the Iraq-Jordan border for nearly two months after fleeing violence in Iraq, have been allowed to cross into Syrian territory.

“I’ve been at the border since 19 March. I’m extremely glad to find a country to live in at a time when all the Arabs have rejected us. I’m sure I will live in Syria safely,” said Iyhab Tim, 30, a Palestinian from Baghdad who left Iraq with his wife and a child after being subjected to “harassment and continuous threats”.

Nine busloads of Palestinians, 181 of whom had been camping since mid-March at the Trebil border point just inside Iraq, rumbled across the Tanef crossing on Tuesday, some 300km northeast of Damascus, under the auspices of the United Nations Refugees and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).

The Palestinians were received at the border by the head of the General Administration for Palestinian Arab Refugees in Syria and a three-man delegation from Hamas, the ruling party in the Palestinian Territories. Two Syrian ambulances and a food-laden truck were also awaiting the refugees at the border.
alertnet.org

“We need to warn against any attempt to bring about the collapse of the Hamas government,” says former Israeli minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.

Ben-Ami, who served as minister for public security and later for foreign affairs, played a key negotiating role during the Middle East peace summit at Camp David in July 2000. Those talks were conducted between former U.S. President Bill Clinton, former chairman of the Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

“We have the thought that when you discard supposedly an extremist option, what you get is a more moderate option. But you might get a more extremist option,” Ben-Ami told IPS in an interview following a meeting on the Middle East held in Madrid. “You may also have a civil war. See the Algerian example, when in 1991 the Islamic Salvation Front was elected and the army toppled it. This led to a civil war that still persists.”
antiwar.com

Abbas urges calm after new Hamas-Fatah clashes
GAZA CITY (AFP) – Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas has issued a plea for calm among supporters of the rival Hamas and Fatah factions as fresh armed clashes left at least 13 people wounded, including five schoolchildren.

A day after three people were killed in internecine violence, gunfire again erupted outside the Gaza City home of a Fatah leader, leaving the children aged between seven and 14 caught up in the crossfire as they walked to school.

KEY international peace brokers will pay the salaries of cash-strapped Palestinian civil servants by setting up a trust fund through the office of President Mahmoud Abbas that bypasses the Hamas Government.

Up to 165,000 Palestinian workers in the West Bank and Gaza are to receive salaries this month after not being paid for almost 12 weeks. The funds dried up after militant group Hamas won the Palestinian election in late January, sparking a US-led boycott of dealings with the governing authority.

But the Quartet of the US, the European Union, the UN and Russia have now agreed to fund the salaries, providing Hamas has no role in paying them.

The move follows a financial squeeze that many observers believed was threatening a humanitarian disaster in the Palestinian territories.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh reacted warily to the decision last night, claiming the caveats that came with the deal were unworkable.

“The Quartet has set conditions,” he said. “They aim to push the Palestinian Government to make concessions that harm our rights … and give the Israeli occupation legitimacy.”

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the decision had been reached on humanitarian grounds after reports the financial squeeze was taking a toll on aid relief. “It is to provide assistance to the Palestinian people so they do not suffer deprivation,” Dr Rice said.
theaustrailian.news.com

Ahmed Ayad was unfortunate to fall sick under what Israel and its allies in the west are defining as the “ministries of terror”.
The 42-year-old Palestinian father of five began kidney dialysis at a hospital in Gaza City six weeks ago at just about the time Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and international sanctions against the Hamas government began to bite in the health ministry.

The resulting shortages of drugs and others supplies have forced Shifa hospital to cut back Mr Ayad’s dialysis treatment.

“The day they reduced my treatment I was so so tired. I’m afraid they will reduce it more. Look at my face. I feel like a dead person,” he said.

But Mr Ayad has been lucky. Shifa hospital says four people receiving dialysis have died over the past three weeks because of the shortages. It is the same in the cancer ward, where there is a diminishing supply of chemotherapy drugs, and other parts of the hospital where even basic antibiotics have not arrived for a month.

Mr Ayad is also fortunate that there is someone to treat him. None of the medical staff at Shifa has been paid for the past two months. It is the same for the rest of the Palestinian Authority’s 160,000 workers whose wages usually come from a mix of foreign aid and customs duties now frozen by Israel with increasingly serious consequences for the 1 million Palestinians – one in four of the population – supported by government salaries.
guardian.co.uk

We wrote “The Israel Lobby” in order to begin a discussion of a subject that had become difficult to address openly in the United States. We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters or misrepresent our arguments. We have also been gratified by the many positive responses we have received, and by the thoughtful commentary that has begun to emerge in the media and the blogosphere. It is clear that many people — including Jews and Israelis — believe that it is time to have a candid discussion of the U.S. relationship with Israel. It is in that spirit that we engage with the letters responding to our article. We confine ourselves here to the most salient points of dispute.
alertnet.org

A little scrutiny of a recent Associated Press report about Venezuela provides a lesson in how the English-language press often gets the story wrong. Take the first sentence: “President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that Venezuelan voters should have the chance to decide whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years.”

No, such a referendum would not be about “whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years.” A referendum would be about whether Chavez would be permitted to run every six years and –in the event that he were to continue winning elections– serve multiple presidential terms. The AP report’s opening sentence makes it sound as if such a referendum would do away with elections in Venezuela, as if its intent would be to grant Chavez a new 25-year term in office! The website of The Calgary Sun even titles the wire report “Chavez seeking 25-year term”!!

This is obviously an extremely poor piece of reporting. Chavez made it clear that, if the opposition committed to participating in the upcoming presidential election, he would not convoke a referendum to end presidential term limits. He explained that the intent of his threat to convoke such a referendum was not to perpetuate himself in power but rather to defend the Bolivarian Revolution.

Fortunately, Agence France Press (AFP) got the story right. The opening sentence of AFP’s Spanish-language report reads, “Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez claimed Saturday that, if the opposition decides not to run candidates in the December presidential election, he could decree a referendum to permit his reelection for multiple terms until 2031.”

So the choice for the opposition is simple. If they don’t want a referendum that would end presidential term limits, they shouldn’t pull out of the upcoming presidential election. As far as I’m concerned, the threat of a referendum is a perfectly reasonable (and democratic) way to dissuade the opposition from trying to delegitimize Venezuela’s electoral process.

When Venezuela’s opposition knows it’s going to lose an election, it has a tendency to try to delegitimize the electoral process. Instead of facing up to the fact that it is unpopular, the business-led opposition tries to shift the blame for its electoral misfortunes to the National Electoral Council (CNE). The opposition claims that the CNE could commit “fraud” and that the vote might not be secret. Opposition conspiracy theories of this nature are legion. Never mind that there have been international observers on hand that have testified to the fairness of Venezuela’s elections. Never mind that even the opposition’s own polls show that Chavez is much more popular than they are.
venezuelanalysis.com

Forty young men and women in ill-fitting army fatigues, clutching flintlocks and pistols, stand in the shade of a mango tree. Beside them flaps a red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle.

In a show of strength, the soldiers creep up on imaginary enemies through long grass. Armed with weapons and the opinions of the doctrinaire left, these guerrillas, or Naxalites as they are known, are part of a hidden war in the middle of India’s mineral-rich tribal belt.

The Naxalites are heirs of the revolutionary ideology of Mao Zedong. Unlike their ideological cousins in Nepal, the guerrillas are not prepared to consider exchanging the bullet for the ballot box. Across a wide swath of India, from Andhra Pradesh in the south to the Nepalese border, there are daily reports of underground armies hijacking trains, mounting audacious jailbreaks and murdering local politicians.

Last month the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, described the rebels as “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country”. Nowhere is this conflict more acute than in the dense forests of southern Chhattisgarh state, the scene of violent land disputes and social clashes. In the past year the state has armed thousands of villagers with guns, spears and bows and arrows. Child soldiers are often ranged against opponents of similar age. In Chhattisgarh a battalion of Indian paramilitary forces has backed this militia, known as Salva Judum (Peace March), against the Naxalites, turning the forest into a battlefield.

Entire villages have been emptied as tribal communities flee from the burnings, lootings and killings. The civil conflict has left more than 50,000 people camping under tarpaulin sheets without work or food along the roadsides of southern Chhattisgarh.
guardian.co.uk

Nearly half of the nation’s children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, and the percentage is increasing mainly because the Hispanic population is growing so rapidly, according to a census report released today.

Hispanics are the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority group. They accounted for 49 percent of the country’s growth from 2004 to 2005, the report shows. And the increase in young children is largely a Hispanic story, driving 70 percent of the growth in children younger than 5. Forty-five percent of U.S. children younger than 5 are minorities.
washingtonpost.com

CHICAGO America may be the world’s superpower, but its survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among modern nations, better only than Latvia.

Among 33 industrialized nations, the United States is tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with a death rate of nearly 5 per 1,000 babies, according to a new report. Latvia’s rate is 6 per 1,000.

“We are the wealthiest country in the world, but there are still pockets of our population who are not getting the health care they need,” said Mary Beth Powers, a reproductive health adviser for the U.S.-based Save the Children, which compiled the rankings based on health data from countries and agencies worldwide.

The U.S. ranking is driven partly by racial and income health care disparities. Among U.S. blacks, there are 9 deaths per 1,000 live births, closer to rates in developing nations than to those in the industrialized world.
chron.com

Afghanistan, Iraq Near Top Of Infant Mortality Table
PRAGUE, May 9, 2006 (RFE/RL) — A new study says Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq are among the countries with the highest death rates for newborns in the world.

The study by the U.S.-based independent charity Save the Children says the African nation of Liberia has the world’s highest newborn mortality rate, with 65 out of 1,000 babies dying.

The report says Liberia is followed by Afghanistan, where 60 out of every 1,000 babies die.

Behind them come Iraq and Sierra Leone, with 59 of 1,000 newborns dying, and Pakistan, which has a rate of 58 deaths.

The report says illiteracy, poverty, malnutrition, poor hygiene, and crippled health-care systems are among the factors contributing to the high rates of death among infants and mothers during or soon after birth.