Could the tsunami disaster be a turning point for the world?
As the international aid effort grows and George Bush launches a fresh appeal, we ask politicians and commentators if 2005 might see a new determination to tackle global poverty
THE RIGHT REV TIM STEVENS, Bishop of Leicester
I am hopeful, but we must see a real commitment to changing the economic relationships between the West and the poorer countries. As well as charitable giving, we need to tackle these fundamental issues.
RORY BREMNER, Comedian
On an individual level, it is not just about what we are prepared to give, but what we are prepared to give up. Having left Afghanistan and Iraq in their wake, can our leaders be trusted to fight a war on poverty?
KANYA KING, Founder, Mobo awards
No longer can we exist in isolation when we see lives and livelihoods being destroyed. All of us need to be pro-active to change things, but we have shown that public opinion and the media can influence government.
STEPHEN TINDALE, Executive director, Greenpeace
It seems churlish to say it, but while it's relatively easy for most of us to give £50, it would be much harder for us to make the changes in our modern lifestyles that are needed if we are to move to a fairer world.
DR GHAYASUDDIN SIDDIQUI, Leader of Muslim Parliament
Compassion, care and concern for mankind joins each of us - whatever our faith or ethnicity. The tragedy has shown there is a formula on which all mankind can be united to help each other. Mankind has moved forward.
Full Article: independent.co.ukOne of the opinions expressed here is that of a female (Kanya King, I think). There is no possible way to 'tackle poverty' without dealing with militarism. And I am going to go out on a limb and declare that the deeper issue is male violence. There is interesting and widespread evidence that our female ancestors, "Lysistrata"-style, formed "menstrual compacts," which involved withholding sex en masse at certain time in order to focus the gents on group survival activities such as hunts. The male initiation rituals and menstrual taboos that are so strikingly similar throughout the world point to a time when the power of the feminine was revered and even feared until males gained the upper hand and placed strict limits on the time women could spend with each other. It is only in the last generation that women's voices have finally begun to be heard again.
India has been too busy building nukes to aim at Pakistan to bother with the expense of an earthquake/tsunami warning system which could have saved thousands in India, Sri Lanka, and Africa. The Indonesian army is still busy slaughtering Acehnese 'insurgents' at ground-zero of the vast natural (one hopes) holocaust caused by the quake. Of course, since they have forced the people away from the coasts, it was probably many many Indonesian soldiers who were swept away to sea.
A real 'turning point' for the world would be signalled by our willingness to come to terms with this endless war-mongering. No matter how well-intentioned, charity is not what the world or its poor people need. All charity does is apply band-aids, and worse, it alows the guys to feel good about themselves. It also allows them to continue viewing people not as fellow humans, but as objects to be saved here, slaughtered with impunity there. We very well know where the vast bulk of our tax dollars is going, and it is indescribably offensive that the entire US efforts in the Andaman represent a single day's expenditure in Iraq. How long are we in the US going to sit back and allow this to go on? How long are the mothers and wives and sisters and daughters going to stand for it?
rootsie on 01.04.05 @ 05:34 PM CST [
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When Worlds Die With Them
by Gary Leupp
I'd been wondering about the Andamans and Nicobars. These are hundreds of small islands that rise out of the Andaman Basin northwest of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. They stretch out five hundred miles towards the Bay of Bengal, and constitute a Union Territory of India with their capital at Port Blair. Most of the islands are uninhabited, the whole archipelago's population only some 350,000. The people are mostly from the Indian mainland, but there are also "tribals" of what the New Delhi calls "Mongoloid" and "Negrito" stocks.
Negritos, dark-skinned, peppercorn-haired people of short stature, extend from the Andamans to the Malay Peninsula to the Philippines and even Taiwan. Their ancestors may well have been the earliest human inhabitants of Southeast Asia, and may have been isolated from the rest of humanity for as much as 60,000 years. Western accounts from the second century (Ptolemy) to the thirteenth (Marco Polo) describe those in the Andamans as cannibals. My first encounter with the Andamans was in Marco Polo's book (Book III, Chapter XIII), which I read as a boy:
"The people are without a king and are Idolaters, and no better than wild beasts. And I assure you that all the men of this Island of Angamanaian [Andaman] have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are all just like big mastiff dogs! They have a quantity of spices; but they are of a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race."
There seems to be no modern confirmation for these details. But they captured the European imagination, and dog-headed beings from the archipelago decorate early-modern maps. I remember the dog-faced men from the illustrations in the Yule-Cordier edition of the Travels of Marco Polo.
Full Article: rastafarispeaks.com
rootsie on 01.04.05 @ 05:34 PM CST [
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Britons rank Israel 'worst country'
British people rate Israel as the country least deserving of international respect, as well as one of the world's "least democratic countries," according to a recent survey.
Research company 'YouGov' carried out a survey for the British Telegraph, asking Britons to rate almost two-dozen countries on the basis of 12 different criteria.
The online survey was carried out on 2,058 adults across Great Britain between December 17 and 20.
The respondents were required to rate the three best and three worst countries according to those criteria.
Israel was ranked number one country where British people would least like to live or visit on holiday. Out of several other criteria measured, Russia alone scored lower overall than Israel.
Israel gained the title of the world's least beautiful country and New Zealand the prettiest.
In addition, Israel was rated the most unfriendly country after France and Germany.
Australia, New Zealand and Canada were among the most favored countries.
Results regarding America were mixed, with 19 percent of Britons regarding the US as "most deserving of international respect," and 25% rating America as "least deserving of international respect.
Full Article: jpost.com (jerusalem post)
rootsie on 01.04.05 @ 05:23 PM CST [
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Texas Thinking Big on Transportation
HOUSTON — Do not mistake the Trans-Texas Corridor for a mere superhighway.
As imagined by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the $175-billion project will be a transportation behemoth of mind-boggling proportions: 4,000 miles of mostly toll lanes perhaps a quarter-mile wide, capable of carrying cars, trucks, and high-speed freight and commuter trains.
There would be room underground for oil, water, electric and gas pipelines, and the whole works would be built largely with private money.
"It's a blueprint for our transportation and population needs for the next 50 years," Texas Department of Transportation spokeswoman Gaby Garcia said. "It's the wave of the future to plan for different modes [of transport] in one corridor."
Opponents call the ambitious scheme ill-conceived and absurdly expensive.
"It's so grandiose and outlandish that people at first didn't think it would happen," said David Stall, who founded a group called Corridor Watch to keep tabs on the project. "But they're railroading it through — and most Texans don't even know what it is."
Perry introduced what he called a "visionary transportation plan" during his 2002 reelection campaign, and continued to push for it after he was sworn in. In 2003, he signed a transportation bill that authorized construction of the mammoth roadway.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 01.04.05 @ 05:19 PM CST [
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Palestinian Leader Assails 'Zionist Enemy'
BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Moderate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called Israel "the Zionist enemy" for the first time on Tuesday after an Israeli tank killed seven Palestinian youths in a Gaza strawberry field.
The words were certain to stir concerns in Israel where images of Abbas embracing fighters during the campaign for a Jan. 9 election have led some to question hopes for reviving peace talks after Yasser Arafat's death.
The Israeli army said it had targeted militants who had crept into the strawberry field and fired mortar bombs into a nearby Jewish settlement in the occupied territory.
Palestinian witnesses and medics in Beit Lahiya, a north Gaza village, said the militants had vanished by the time the tank shell crashed and all the dead were youths aged 11-17 from two farming families. Four people were critically wounded.
The field, where farmers had been harvesting strawberries, was spattered with blood and body parts.
Word of the incident clearly angered Abbas, widely tipped to win the presidential election, as he continued campaigning in the Gaza Strip despite further fighting between militants and the Israeli army.
"We are praying for the souls of our martyrs who fell today to the shells of the Zionist enemy," Abbas told a rally in the south Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis, a hotbed of militants.
It was Abbas's first known resort to the language of radicals sworn to Israel's destruction. Abbas, 69, long known as a relative moderate, has raised peace hopes since Arafat's death by condemning militant violence in favor of talks with Israel.
Full Article:reuters.myway.comWell geez: see what 50 years of murderous occupation does to 'moderates.'
rootsie on 01.04.05 @ 12:56 PM CST [
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Zarqawi arrested? Tres inconvenient.
U.S. military and intelligence sources are denying print and broadcast reports that terrorist Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi has been arrested in Iraq, MSNBC reported Tuesday.
MSNBC said senior U.S. military and intelligence sources told it the reports are not true. A newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, al-Bayane, reported in its Tuesday edition that the Jordanian-born terrorist had been arrested in Baqouba, Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan radio also reported the arrest of al-Zarqawi.
The U.S. military in December said al-Zarqawi likely is in the Baghdad area.
x x x x x
URGENT: 'TARGET #1': al-Zarqawi reportedly arrested in Iraq
Tue Jan 04 2005 09:49:47 ET
DUBAI, January 4 (Itar-Tass) - Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, whom the US occupation authorities declared to be the "target number one" in Iraq, has been arrested in the city of Baakuba, the Emirate newspaper al-Bayane reported on Tuesday referring to Kurdish sources. Al-Zarqawi, leader of the terrorist group Al-Tawhid Wa'al-Jihad, was recently appointed the director of the Al-Qaeda organisation in Iraq.
The newspaper's correspondent in Baghdad points out that a report on the seizure of the terrorist, on whom the US put a bounty of 10 million dollars, was also reported by Iraqi Kurdistan radio, which at one time had been the first to announce the arrest of Saddam Hussein.
There have been no official reports about the arrest of the terrorist. Al-Zarqawi, 38, a Jordanian, whose real name is Ahmad al-Khalayleh, aims to turn Iraq into a "new Afghanistan". According to Arab press data, Al-Tawhid Wa'al-Jihad group has divided Iraq into several emirates. The group's independent subdivisions at a strength of 50 to 500 militants operate in the cities of Al-Falluja, Al-Qaim, Diala, and Samarra.
The personnel of the group is on the whole 1,500-strong and includes Iraqis and citizens of Arab and Islamic countries. There are demolition experts and missilemen among them.
The group has depots of weapons and explosives in various parts of the country. It intends to frustrate the upcoming parliamentary elections that are scheduled for the end of this month. Al-Tawhid Wa'al-Jihad threatens to do away with Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and members of the interim government.
Developing...
drudgereport.com
rootsie on 01.04.05 @ 12:43 PM CST [
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Monday, January 3rd
The Trouble with Optimism
By Kathleen Christison
We need to be very clear on one vital point about Palestinian-Israeli relations, particularly in this time of promised movement toward peace: there will be no real Palestinian state anytime in the foreseeable future, and this will not be the Palestinians' fault. Despite all the Cheshire-cat optimism in the media and among politicians around the world since Yasir Arafat's death, despite the sanctimonious hopes that Palestinian "terrorism" will end now that Arafat is gone, despite the patronizing visions of Palestinian "reform," despite the demise of the Palestinian bogeyman who supposedly stood as the only obstacle to peace, we must not lose sight of the fact that there will be no Palestinian independence, and therefore no peace and no justice, anytime soon, for the simple reason that Israel does not want it.
Full Article: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 10:21 PM CST [
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Is There One Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
by Dave Lindorff
Perhaps the most powerful moment in Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9-11" was the stony silence in the hall of the joint session of Congress as a line of African- American and other non-white representatives stood up and pleaded for just one senator to issue an official challenge to the Florida electoral college delegation and its vote in favor of candidate George Bush.
This Thursday, we are destined to have a repeat of that dramatic event.
Congressman John Conyers, (D-Michigan), the representative who has chaired hearings into the Republican-led efforts in Ohio to keep people from registering, to keep voters from voting, and to mess with the vote totals to keep the vote for Democrat John Kerry as low as possible-in short the "vote suppression" effort that was deliberately made over the course not just of election day but of the months leading up to the balloting--has vowed to challenge the state's delegation to the Electoral College.
Under the Constitution, it requires only one representative and one senator to initiate a challenge, which would then mandate an official inquiry into the state's election, and delay certification of the national presidential election results.
While it is unlikely, with a Congress firmly in the hands of the Republican Party, with the attorney general's office packed with Bush appointees, and with the FBI run by Republican party hacks, that any serious effort would be made to find out what actually happened in Ohio, such an investigation would at least serve to embarrass Republican officials, and to undermine the ludicrous Bush claim of a mandate for his second term of office.
Full Article: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 10:13 PM CST [
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Chisholm, 'Unbossed' Pioneer in Congress, Dies
Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in Congress and the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, died on Saturday night at her home in Ormond Beach, Fla. She was 80. She had suffered several strokes recently, according to a former staff member, William Howard.
Mrs. Chisholm was an outspoken, steely educator-turned-politician who shattered racial and gender barriers as she became a national symbol of liberal politics in the 1960's and 1970's. Over the years, she also had a way of making statements that angered the establishment, as in 1974, when she asserted that "there is an undercurrent of resistance" to integration "among many blacks in areas of concentrated poverty and discrimination" - including in her own district in Brooklyn.
"Just wait, there may be some fireworks," she declared after winning her seat in Congress in 1968 with an upset victory in Brooklyn's 12th Congressional District, which had been created by court-ordered reapportionment.
Her slogan was "unbought and unbossed" - in the primary, she had defeated two other candidates, William C. Thompson, whom she maintained was the candidate of the Brooklyn Democratic organization, and Dolly Robinson. "The party leaders do not like me," Mrs. Chisholm said at the time.
But about 80 percent of the registered voters in the district - which included her own neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant - were Democrats. That edge helped her in her race against James Farmer, a leader of the Freedom Rides in the south in the early 1960's, who ran as an independent on the Republican and Liberal lines, and Ralph Carrano, who ran as the Conservative candidate.
"I am an historical person at this point, and I'm very much aware of it," she told The Washington Post a few months after she was sworn in.
Soon she was challenging the seniority system in the House, which had relegated her to its Agriculture Committee, an assignment she criticized as irrelevant to an urban district like hers.
"Apparently all they know here in Washington about Brooklyn is that a tree grew there," she said in a statement at the time. "Only nine black people have been elected to Congress, and those nine should be used as effectively as possible."
She said that the House speaker, John W. McCormack, had told her to "be a good soldier" and accept the agriculture assignment. Instead, she fired a parliamentary salvo at the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur D. Mills, who handed out the committee assignments. Before long, she was reassigned, first to the Veterans Affairs Committee, and eventually to the Education and Labor Committees.
Winning a better committee assignment did not make her any less acerbic on the workings of Washington. "Our representative democracy is not working," she wrote in a 1970 book that borrowed her campaign slogan as its title, "because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men."
In 1972, when she entered the presidential primaries, she did not expect to capture the Democratic nomination, which ultimately went to George S. McGovern. "Some see my candidacy as an alternate and others as symbolic or a move to make other candidates start addressing themselves to real issues," she said at the time. She did not win a single primary, but in 2002, she said her campaign had been a necessary "catalyst for change."
She was also aware of her status as a woman in politics. "I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black," she told The Associated Press in December 1982, shortly before she left Washington to teach at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. "When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men."
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Nov. 30, 1924. Her father worked in a factory that made burlap bags, and her mother was a seamstress and domestic worker. They sent their daughter and her three sisters to Barbados, where the children lived with a grandmother until 1934. Mrs. Chisholm later described the relatives she encountered there as "a strongly disciplined family unit."
But she had her own strength, too: "Mother always said that even when I was 3, I used to get the 6- and 7-year-old kids on the block and punch them and say, 'Listen to me.' "
Her professors listened to her at Brooklyn College, where she won prizes in debating. Some of them told her she should think about politics as a career.
First, though, she taught in a nursery school and earned a master's degree in elementary education at Columbia University. Working as the director of the Friends Day Nursery in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center in Lower Manhattan, she became widely known as an authority on early education and child welfare. She argued that early schooling was essential, saying she knew there were experts who maintained that children's eyes were not developed enough for reading. "I say baloney, because I learned to read when I was 3½," she countered, "and I learned to write when I was 4."
From 1959 to 1964, she was an educational consultant in the day care division of the city's bureau of child welfare. But she laid a foundation for her eventual political career, working as a clubhouse volunteer and with organizations like the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League and the League of Women Voters.
So, when she decided to run for the New York State Assembly in 1964, she said the decision was straightforward: "The people wanted me."
She moved on to the House four years later, in the year when President Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to run for re-election. A year later, she confirmed her reputation for independence when she endorsed John V. Lindsay, who was running for re-election as mayor of New York
as the Liberal Party candidate.By 1982, the political climate had changed, and Mrs. Chisholm left Washington after seven terms in the House, saying that "moderate and liberal" lawmakers were "running for cover from the new right." But she also had personal reasons for deciding not to seek re-election that year: Her second husband, Arthur Hardwick, a Buffalo liquor store owner who had been in the New York State Assembly when Mrs. Chisholm was, had been injured in a car accident. (Her first marriage, to Conrad O. Chisholm, ended in divorce in 1977. Mr. Hardwick died in 1986.)
"I had been so consumed by my life in politics," she said in 1982. "I had no time for privacy, no time for my husband, no time to play my beautiful grand piano. After he recovered, I decided to make some changes in my life. I truly believe God had a message for me."
She also sounded frustrated, saying she had been misunderstood for much of her career. She mentioned her hospital visit to George C. Wallace, the Alabama governor who built his political career on segregation, after he had been wounded in an assassination attempt in 1972.
"Black people in my community crucified me," she recalled. "But why shouldn't I go to visit him? Every other presidential candidate was going to see him. He said to me, 'What are your people going to say?' I said: 'I know what they're going to say. But I wouldn't want what happened to you to happen to anyone.' He cried and cried and cried."
She maintained that her visit had paid off. "He always spoke well of Shirley Chisholm in the South," she said, adding that she had contacted him in 1974, when she was looking for votes for a bill to extend federal minimum-wage provisions to domestic workers. "Many of the Southerners did not want to make the vote. They came around."
Mrs. Chisholm moved to Florida in 1991 and said in 2002, "I live a very quiet life." She said she spent her time reading biographies - political biographies.
"I have faded out of the scene," she said.
When she left Washington, she said she did not want to go down in history as "the nation's first black congresswoman" or, as she put it, "the first black woman congressman."
"I'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts," she said. "That's how I'd like to be remembered."
nytimes.comI watched a documentary about Shirley Chisholm not long ago, and those who knew her were unanimous in saying what a warm person she was. "Steely"? Why is it so natural to view strong females as cold and asexual?
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 09:31 PM CST [
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At last, women lash out at hip hop's abuses
by Stanley Crouch
The most successful black women's magazine, Essence, is in the middle of a campaign that could have monumental cultural significance.
Essence is taking on the slut images and verbal abuse projected onto black women by hip hop lyrics and videos.
The magazine is the first powerful presence in the black media with the courage to examine the cultural pollution that is too often excused because of the wealth it brings to knuckleheads and amoral executives.
This anything-goes-if-sells attitude comes at a cost. The elevation of pimps and pimp attitudes creates a sadomasochistic relationship with female fans. They support a popular idiom that consistently showers them with contempt. We are in a crisis, and Essence knows it.
When asked how the magazine decided to take a stand, the editor, Diane Weathers said, "We started looking at the media war on young girls, the hypersexualization that keeps pushing them in sexual directions at younger and younger ages."
Things got deeper, she says, because, "We started talking at the office about all this hatred in rap song after rap song, and once we started, the subject kept coming up because women were incapable of getting it off their minds."
At a listening session that Weathers and the other staffers had with entertainment editor Cori Murray, "We found the rap lyrics astonishing, brutal, misogynistic. ... So we said we were going to pull no punches, especially since women were constantly being assaulted."
Full Article: nydailynews.com
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 09:20 PM CST [
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Move to Ease Ethics Rules
After Tom DeLay is snared in an ethics probe, House Republicans consider ways to make it harder to discipline members of Congress.
THE JUSTIFICATION: DeLay's office says opponents of easing would like to mire the House in an ethics war.
DEFENDERS OF THE TOUGH STANDARD: Congressional watchdogs say easing rules are aimed at helping DeLay.
Full Article:guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 09:15 PM CST [
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US plans permanent Guantanamo jails
The United States is preparing to hold terrorism suspects indefinitely without trial, replacing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with permanent prisons in the Cuban enclave and elsewhere, it was reported yesterday.
The new prisons are intended for captives the Pentagon and the CIA suspect of terrorist links but do not wish to set free or put on trial for lack of hard evidence.
The plans have emerged at a time when the US is under increasing scrutiny for the interrogation methods used on the roughly 550 "enemy combatants" at the Guantanamo Bay base, who do not have the same rights as traditional prisoners of war.
A leaked Red Cross report described the techniques used as "tantamount to torture."
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 09:12 PM CST [
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Witness says Thatcher had role in coup plot
The star witness against Sir Mark Thatcher has revealed the most detailed allegations yet of his role in a West African coup attempt, including claims that he helped test a helicopter for the operation.
Coup pilot Crause Steyl, in a plea-bargain in South Africa, has testified to a hitherto unknown string of meetings involving Sir Mark as an "investor".
This development comes as Simon Mann, the jailed former SAS officer alleged to have masterminded the coup attempt in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, has launched a vigorous counterattack against his accusers, claiming he was tortured into confessing to a role in the plot.
Mann, who was jailed for seven years in Zimbabwe in November on charges connected to the coup attempt, attempted to exonerate Sir Mark from any involvement in the botched plot in an affidavit drawn up by his lawyers and seen by the Guardian.
But Mr Steyl, a South African pilot convicted last month of violating South Africa's foreign military assistance act, has agreed to testify against Sir Mark in South Africa in return for escaping a hefty jail term.
Mr Steyl has confirmed to the South African authorities that he was recruited to provide air support by Mann, the old Etonian who was arrested at Harare airport along with 70 mercenaries allegedly bound for Equatorial Guinea.
He has told the authorities that he was introduced to Sir Mark by Greg Wales, the London-based businessman who has been accused of a central role in the plot, at Lanseria airport, north-west of Johannesburg, in December 2003.
He said that when he was introduced to Sir Mark it was explained: "He [Thatcher] would finance the helicopter for Equatorial Guinea."
He claims to have subsequently met the son of Lady Thatcher on at least two further occasions with Mann, including in Cape Town when Sir Mark, who is a qualified pilot, is said to have personally tested a helicopter due to be used in the coup attempt.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 09:08 PM CST [
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Ethiopian Jews Yearn for Entry to Promised Land: Israel
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Nearly a decade ago, a mixture of religious devotion and desperation prompted Meles Mandefro to sell off his family's possessions, abandon his farmland in rural Ethiopia and move to this crowded capital, where he and his family settled in a hovel on a hillside near the Israeli Embassy.
Mr. Mandefro, whose weathered face makes him look older than his 47 years, and thousands of other Ethiopians who made similar treks did not plan to stay long in Addis Ababa. They were Falash Mura Jews, and word had reached their villages that Israel would fly them soon to the Jewish state. All they had to do was get to the capital, turn in an application to the Embassy and wait.
More than nine years have passed, and Mr. Mandefro and his family are still waiting. So are more than 15,000 others, some in Addis Ababa and some in the northern town of Gondar, another place where Jews have congregated to pass the time while Israel processes their papers.
Over the years, dozens of Mr. Mandefro's relatives have been tapped to join the 300 people who go every month to Israel, including his younger brother, Gizat, and his wife's parents. Countless friends and neighbors are now leading new lives in Israel, as well.
"The waiting is too much," said Mr. Mandefro's wife, Tilanesh Gulma. "Even if we're walking around, we're dead inside. We've stopped living here. Our families are there in Israel. Our lives are there."
Full Article: nytimes.com
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 08:27 PM CST [
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Ukraine Leader's Promises Checked by Gas Setback
KIEV, Ukraine (Reuters) - President-elect Viktor Yushchenko, whose defeated pro-Russian rival has quit as prime minister, on Monday promised Ukrainians a modern market economy, even as prices of vital gas imports soared by one-third.
Turkmenistan cut gas supplies to Ukraine on Jan. 1 and the central Asian state only promised to reopen the taps Monday after Kiev agreed to the price increase.
Dearer gas adds to Ukraine's economic worries including a bulging budget deficit and average wages of $60 a month -- just a tenth of those in European Union newcomer Poland -- eroded by years of policy neglect and corruption.
But Yushchenko, a west-leaning liberal who beat Viktor Yanukovich in an election re-run last month, said his country of nearly 50 million should feel the benefits of sound government within a year. Yanukovich announced Friday he was resigning as prime minister.
``Ukraine is still sleeping to the east of Europe, but I am ... convinced that it will become the most modern market in eastern Europe,'' Yushchenko said in remarks broadcast by Polish news channel TVN 24.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reutersSee also: 2000 Rand report on Caspian oil and gas.
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 08:19 PM CST [
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Abbas Says He Won't Confront Palestinian Militants
GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said in a presidential campaign speech Monday he would never take up arms against militant groups whose dismantlement is part of a U.S.-sponsored peace ``road map.''
``They are freedom fighters ... and should live a dignified and safe life,'' said Abbas, whose call for an end to violence in a 4-year-old Palestinian uprising has been rejected by militants whose support he is courting in the Jan. 9 election.
Abbas, front-runner in the race to succeed Yasser Arafat, said he was determined to ensure only one authority was in charge of the Palestinian territories, a message to armed groups that attack Israel and have rejected his cease-fire appeals.
But he said he would achieve that goal through ``dialogue and discussion'' as he pursued national unity.
``Palestinians taking up arms against each other will not happen,'' Abbas pledged.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 08:14 PM CST [
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Anger Rises as Does Toll in Remote Indian Islands
PORT BLAIR, India (Reuters) - Tempers flared over the sluggish pace of aid efforts in India's remote and restricted Andamans and Nicobars Sunday as hundreds of bodies lay scattered around the islands a week after the tsunami struck.
Local authorities said a local government officer was manhandled by people angry at not getting relief supplies in Campbell Bay, the main town in the southernmost island of Great Nicobar, where widespread devastation has been reported.
Police had to send reinforcements.
...Also home to hundreds of stone age tribespeople, many of the islands are off limits to foreigners and mainland Indians alike.
Mistrust of outsiders by the military and local bureaucracy has compounded the practical difficulties of the aid effort.
Aid workers from foreign relief groups Medicins Sans Frontieres and Oxfam have languished in Port Blair, unable to reach the badly hit southern islands.
...Ruled directly from New Delhi, the islands housed a notorious jail during British colonial rule. Even today, critics say the welfare of locals is low on New Delhi's priorities.
``Times have changed but not mindsets,'' the Indian Express wrote Sunday.
``The Andaman and Nicobar archipelago is a collective second class citizen. Welcome to India's in-house colony,'' it said.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 08:10 PM CST [
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Criminals Prey on Tsunami Victims Across the World
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Thieves, rapists, kidnappers and hoaxers are preying on tsunami survivors and families of victims in Asian refugee camps, hospitals and in the home countries of European tourists hit by the wave.
Reports and warnings came in from as far apart as Britain, Sweden, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Hong Kong on Monday of criminals taking advantage of the chaos to rape survivors in Sri Lanka or plunder the homes of European tourists reported missing.
In stark contrast to a worldwide outpouring of humanitarian aid in response to the Dec. 26 tsunami, whose death toll stood at nearly 145,000 people by Monday, a women's group in Sri Lanka said rapists were attacking homeless survivors.
``We have received reports of incidents of rape, gang rape, molestation and physical abuse of women and girls in the course of unsupervised rescue operations and while resident in temporary shelters,'' the Women and Media Collective group said.
Save the Children warned that youngsters orphaned by the tsunami were vulnerable to sexual exploitation. ``The experience of earlier catastrophes is that children are especially exposed,'' said its Swedish chief, Charlotte Petri Gornitzka.
In Thailand thieves disguised as police and rescue workers have looted luggage and hotel safes around Khao Lak beach, where the tsunami killed up to 3,000 people. Sweden sent seven police officers there on Monday to investigate the reported kidnap of a Swedish boy of 12 whose parents were carried off by the wave.
The United Nations also warned of the danger of pirates hindering its relief efforts off the west coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island, which took the brunt of the tsunami.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 08:01 PM CST [
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Cuba Restores Contacts with European Embassies
HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba ended a diplomatic deadlock with eight European Union nations on Monday in response to proposals by EU officials to stop inviting dissidents to National Day receptions in Havana.
Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Cuba was reopening official contacts with the embassies of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Austria, Greece, Portugal and Sweden.
European diplomats welcomed the announcement as a major step toward normalizing relations between Cuba and the European Union, the island's main trade and investment partner. But they said Cuba could not expect Europe to abandon the dissidents.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 07:28 PM CST [
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Mosul election staff quit en masse
The entire staff of Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission in the northern city of Mosul, amounting to about 700 emplo-yees, have resigned amid growing violence in the country.
Staff members said on Thursday their resignation followed threats they received in the past few days. The withdrawal of the Iraqi Islamic Party from the election also figured in their decision, Aljazeera has learned.
In its response, however, the electoral commission has vigorously denied the report. "That's not true. We have our staff in Mosul and al-Anbar," Abd al-Hussain al-Hindawi, the head of Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission, told AFP.
Al-Hindawi was also referring to the explosive province of al-Anbar, home to the strife-torn towns of Ramadi and Falluja. He declined to give staff numbers for Mosul, but said: "We have a larger staff than we did before across Iraq."
Legal action
In a related move that could affect the 30 January elections, Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr's political office announced it was taking legal action against the interim Iraqi government for alleged torture and murder of its members.
Full Article: aljazeera.net
rootsie on 01.03.05 @ 07:24 PM CST [
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Sunday, January 2nd
Guantanamo Briton 'in handcuff torture'
A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists.
The reason, the prisoner says, was that he was caught reciting the Koran at a time when talking was banned.
He says he has also been repeatedly shaved against his will. In one such incident, a guard told him: 'This is the part that really gets to you Muslims, isn't it?'
The strappado allegation was one among many made about treatment at both Guantanamo and the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan made to the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith when he visited his clients Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar at the Cuban prison six weeks ago, having tried for the previous 14 months to obtain the necessary security clearance.
But it is clear the disturbing claim is only the tip of the iceberg. Under the rules the United States military has imposed for defence lawyers who visit Guantanamo, Stafford Smith has not been allowed to keep his notes of meetings with prisoners, and will not be able to read them again until they have been examined and de-classified by a government censor.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 01.02.05 @ 12:09 PM CST [
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Cambodia Saved from Tsunami by Astrologer - Sihanouk
PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Former Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk says an astrologer warned him that an ``ultra-catastrophic cataclysm'' would strike, but that his country would be spared if proper rituals were conducted.
``My wife and I decided to spend several thousand dollars to organize these ceremonies so our country and our people could be spared such a catastrophe,'' Sihanouk, who abdicated last year, wrote on his Web site at www.sihanouknorodom.info.
Cambodia was unscathed by the 10-meter (30-foot) tsunami waves generated by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake under the sea off Indonesia's Sumatra island on Dec.26. The waves rolled through the Indian Ocean, devastating coastal communities and killing more than 126,000 people.
Sihanouk offered his deepest condolences to the families of the dead and said he would give ``a very humble and extremely modest'' contribution of $15,000 to international relief efforts for each of the stricken countries.
Full Article: nytimes.com
rootsie on 01.02.05 @ 12:06 PM CST [
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A Troubled Haiti Struggles to Gain Its Political Balance
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Jacques Rafael stood in front of the Moderne Store in downtown Port-au-Prince where his boss, a 52-year-old woman, was recently shot to death by members of the gangs who control this city's slums.
"They say the former government was no good," he said, referring to the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, overthrown in February. "But when Aristide was here, we could stay open until 10 p.m. Now we can't even stay open until 4 in the afternoon."
Around the corner, at the nearby school, Lycée Pétion, the students were headed home at 9 a.m. The police recently wounded three students there during a shootout with gang members, and the fearful teachers had stayed home, as they do many days now.
"We're the ones paying for what is going on," said Franzo Caryce, 19. "We expected more from Latortue."
Nine months after taking office, the interim government of Prime Minister Gérard Latortue is besieged by mounting criticism from every sector of society. Recent street fighting, some of it involving gangs that supported Mr. Aristide, has claimed an estimated 200 lives and left much of Port-au-Prince's business district deserted. Many business owners are in hiding after a wave of kidnappings, and rebels control large swaths of the country.
"Latortue is not serious about the security situation," said a member of a government panel who insisted on anonymity. "The civil wars in Somalia and Lebanon started like this and that's where we are heading."
Many politicians and experts said in recent interviews that the election scheduled for next November to restore democracy here was in danger of being compromised or canceled.
"Latortue may or may not survive as prime minister - that's almost beside the point," said Henry Carey, a professor and Haiti scholar at the University of Georgia. "He shows no credible signs of holding elections. He doesn't have an election commission that is working."
Outside the country, there is also growing alarm. "Haiti is on the verge of becoming a permanently failed state hemorrhaging instability throughout the Caribbean in the form of refugees, violence and drugs," said a report in November from the International Crisis Group.
Two recent studies prepared by experts on Haiti for the United States Southern Command of the United States Army refer to "the now-discredited Latortue government" and recommend consideration of a plan to turn the country into an international protectorate, an idea openly debated in the Haitian media.
Full Article: nytimes.com
rootsie on 01.02.05 @ 12:02 PM CST [
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Bush Donates a Day in Iraq
$100 billion is what the US spent last year fighting its war in Iraq.
Bush donated $350 million for tsunami relief. That's about what the US spends in Iraq in a day.
Now how's that for generosity?
rootsie on 01.02.05 @ 12:34 AM CST [
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Saturday, January 1st
In Death, Imperialism Lives on For the Western Media
It is Clear That a Tourists' Tragedy is More Important Than That of the 'Locals'by Jeremy Seabrook reprinted from
The Guardian(UK)The number of fishing boats from Sumatra, Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu at sea when the Boxing Day tsunami hit will never be known. There is scarcely any population tally of the crowded coasts. Nameless people are consigned to unmarked graves; in mosques and temples, makeshift mortuaries, people pull aside a cloth, a piece of sacking, to see if those they loved lie beneath. As in all natural disasters, the victims are overwhelmingly the poorest.
This time there was something different. The tsunami struck resorts where westerners were on holiday. For the western media, it was clear that their lives have a different order of importance from those that have died in thousands, but have no known biography, and, apparently, no intelligible tongue in which to express their feelings. This is not to diminish the trauma of loss of life, whether of tourist or fisherman. But when we distinguish between "locals" who have died and westerners, "locals" all too easily becomes a euphemism for what were once referred to as natives. Whatever tourism's merits, it risks reinforcing the imperial sensibility.
For this sensibility has already been reawakened by all the human-made, preventable catastrophes. The ruins of Galle and Bandar Aceh called forth images of Falluja, Mosul and Gaza. Imperial powers, it seems, anticipate the destructive capacity of nature. A report on ITN news made this explicit, by referring to "nature's shock and awe". But while the tsunami death toll rises in anonymous thousands, in Iraq disdainful American authorities don't do body counts.
One of the most poignant sights of the past few days was that of westerners overcome with gratitude that they had been helped by the grace and mercy of those who had lost everything, but still regarded them as guests. When these same people appear in the west, they become the interloper, the unwanted migrant, the asylum seeker, who should go back to where they belong. A globalisation that permits the wealthy to pass effortlessly through borders confines the poor to eroded subsistence, overfished waters and an impoverishment that seems to have no end. People rarely say that poor countries are swamped by visitors, even though their money power pre-empts the best produce, the clean water and amenities unknown to the indigenous population.
In death, there should be no hierarchy. But even as Sri Lankans wandered in numb disbelief through the corpses, British TV viewers were being warned that scenes they were about to witness might distress them. Poor people have no consoling elsewhere to which they can be repatriated. The annals of the poor remain short and simple, and can be effaced without inquiry as to how they contrive an existence on these fragile coasts. What are the daily visitations of grief and loss in places where people earn less in a year than the price that privilege pays for a night's stay in a five-star hotel?
Western governments, which can disburse so lavishly in the art of war, offer a few million as if it were exceptional largesse. Fortunately the people are wiser; and the spontaneous outpourings of humanity have been as unstoppable as the waves that broke on south Asia's coasts; donations rapidly exceeded the amount offered by government. Selflessness and sacrifice, people working away at rubble with bare hands, suggest immediate human solidarities.
But these are undermined by the structures of inequality. Promises solemnly made at times of immediate sorrow are overtaken by other urgencies; money donated for the Orissa cyclone, for hurricane Mitch in Central America, the floods in Bangladesh, the Bam earthquake - as for the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq - turns out to be a fraction of what is pledged.
Such events remind us of the sameness of our human destiny, the fragility of our existence. They place in perspective the meaning of security. Life is always at the mercy of nature - whether from such overwhelming events as this, or the natural processes that exempt no one from paying back to earth the life it gave us. Yet we inhabit systems of social and economic injustice that exacerbate the insecurity of the poor, while the west is prepared to lay waste distant towns and cities in the name of a security that, in the end, eludes us all.
Assertions of our common humanity occur only at times of great loss. To retrieve and hold on to it at all other times - that would be something of worth to salvage from these scenes of desolation.
Jeremy Seabrook is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty
commondreamd.org
rootsie on 01.01.05 @ 02:42 AM CST [
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