Iraq Inquiry bombshell: Secret letter to reveal new Blair war lies

Iraq Inquiry bombshell: Secret letter to reveal new Blair war lies

By Simon Walters, Mail on Sunday Political Editor
Last updated at 1:48 AM on 29th November 2009

An explosive secret letter that exposes how Tony Blair lied over the legality of the Iraq War can be revealed.

The Chilcot Inquiry into the war will interrogate the former Prime Minister over the devastating 'smoking gun' memo, which warned him in the starkest terms the war was illegal.

The Mail on Sunday can disclose that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote the letter to Mr Blair in July 2002 - a full eight months before the war - telling him that deposing Saddam Hussein was a blatant breach of international law.

It was intended to make Mr Blair call off the invasion, but he ignored it. Instead, a panicking Mr Blair issued instructions to gag Lord Goldsmith, banned him from attending Cabinet meetings and ordered a cover-up to stop the public finding out.

He even concealed the bombshell information from his own Cabinet, fearing it would spark an anti-war revolt. The only people he told were a handful of cronies who were sworn to secrecy.

Lord Goldsmith was so furious at his treatment he threatened to resign - and lost three stone as Mr Blair and his cronies bullied him into backing down.

Sources close to the peer say he was 'more or less pinned to the wall' in a Downing Street showdown with two of Mr Blair's most loyal aides, Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan.

The revelations follow a series of testimonies by key figures at the Chilcot Inquiry who have questioned Mr Blair's judgment and honesty, and the legality of the war.

The Mail on Sunday has learned that the inquiry has been given Lord Goldsmith's explosive letter, and that Mr Blair and the peer are likely to be interrogated about it when they give evidence in the New Year.

Lord Goldsmith gave qualified legal backing to the conflict days before the war broke out in March 2003 in a brief, carefully drafted statement. As The Mail on Sunday disclosed three years ago, even that was a distortion as Lord Goldsmith had told Mr Blair a week earlier he could be breaking international law.

But today's revelations show that Lord Goldsmith told Mr Blair at the outset, and in writing, that military action against Iraq was totally illegal.

The disclosures deal a massive blow to Mr Blair's hopes of proving he acted in good faith when he and George Bush declared war on Iraq. And they are likely to fuel further calls for Mr Blair to be charged with war crimes.

Lord Goldsmith's 'smoking gun' letter came six days after a Cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, at which Ministers were secretly told that the US and UK were set on 'regime change' in Iraq.

The peer, who attended the meeting, was horrified. On July 29, he wrote to Mr Blair on a single side of A4 headed notepaper from his office.

Friends say it was no easy thing for him to do. He was a close friend of Mr Blair, who gave him his peerage and Cabinet post. The typed letter was addressed by hand, 'Dear Tony', and signed by hand, 'Yours, Peter'.

In it, Lord Goldsmith set out in uncompromising terms why he believed war was illegal. He pointed out that:

* War could not be justified purely on the grounds of 'regime change'.
* Although United Nations rules permitted 'military intervention on the basis of self-defence', they did not apply in this case because Britain was not under threat from Iraq.
* While the UN allowed 'humanitarian intervention' in certain instances, that too was not relevant to Iraq.
* It would be very hard to rely on earlier UN resolutions in the Nineties approving the use of force against Saddam.

Lord Goldsmith ended his letter by saying 'the situation might change' - although in legal terms, it never did.

The letter caused pandemonium in Downing Street. Mr Blair was furious. No10 told Lord Goldsmith he should never have put his views on paper, and he was not to do so again unless told to by Mr Blair.

The reason was simple: if it became public, Lord Goldsmith's letter could make it impossible for Mr Blair to fulfil his secret pledge to back Mr Bush in any circumstances. More importantly, it could never be expunged from the record as copies were stored in No10 and in the Attorney General's office.

Although Lord Goldsmith had Cabinet status, he attended meetings only when asked. After his letter, he barely attended another meeting until the eve of the war. Mr Blair kept him out to reduce the chance of him blurting out his views to other Ministers.

When Mr Blair is quizzed by the Chilcot Inquiry, he will be asked why he never admitted he was told from the start that the war was illegal.

Equally ominously for Mr Blair, a defiant Lord Goldsmith is ready to defend the letter when he appears before the inquiry. Friends of the peer, widely derided for his role in the Iraq War, believe it will vindicate him.

A source close to Lord Goldsmith said: 'He assumed, perhaps naively, that Blair wanted a proper legal assessment. No10 went berserk because they knew that once he had put it in writing, it could not be unsaid.

'They liked to do things with no note-takers, and often no officials, present. That way, there was no record. Everything could be denied.

'Goldsmith threatened to resign at least once. He lost three stone in that period. He is an honourable man and it was a terribly stressful experience.'

Lord Goldsmith's wife Joy, a prominent figure in New Labour dining circles, played a crucial role in talking him out of quitting.

'Joy was always very ambitious on Peter's behalf and did not want to see him throw it all away,' said a source.

Lord Goldsmith's letter contradicts Mr Blair's repeated statements, before, during and after the war on its legality.

In April 2005, the BBC's Jeremy Paxman repeatedly asked him if he had seen confidential Foreign Office advice that the war would be illegal without specific UN support.

Mr Blair said: 'No. I had the Attorney General's advice to guide me.' At best, it was dissembling. At worst, it was a blatant lie.

Mr Blair knew all along that Lord Goldsmith had told him the war was illegal, and that when the peer finally gave it his cautious backing, he did so only under extreme duress.

The Mail on Sunday has also obtained new evidence about the way Lord Goldsmith was bullied into backing the war at the 11th hour.

He was summoned to a No10 meeting with Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and Baroness Sally Morgan, Mr Blair's senior Labour 'fixer' in Downing Street. No officials were present.

A source said: 'Falconer and Morgan performed a pincer movement on Goldsmith. They more or less pinned him up against the wall and told him to do what Blair wanted.'

After the meeting, Lord Goldsmith issued his brief statement stating the war was lawful.

Lord Falconer said in response to the latest revelations: 'This version of events is totally false. The meeting was Lord Goldsmith's suggestion and he told us what his view was.'

Baroness Morgan has also denied trying to pressure Lord Goldsmith.

The legal row came to a head days before the war, when the UN refused to approve military action. Stranded, Mr Blair had to win Lord Goldsmith's legal backing, not least because British military chiefs refused to send troops into action without it.

On March 17, three days before the conflict started, Lord Goldsmith said the war was legal on the basis of previous UN resolutions threatening action against Saddam - even though in his secret letter of July 2002, he had ruled out this argument.

A spokesman for Lord Goldsmith said: 'This letter is probably in the bundle that has been supplied to the inquiry by the Attorney General's department. It is presumed they will want to discuss it with him. If so, Lord Goldsmith is content to do so.

'His focus is on the legality of the war, its morality is for others.'

A spokesman for the Chilcot Inquiry said: 'We are content we have obtained all the relevant documents.'

A spokesman for Mr Blair refused to say why the former Prime Minister had not disclosed Lord Goldsmith's July 2002 letter.

'The Attorney General set out the legal basis for action in Iraq in March 2003,' he said. 'Beyond that, we are not getting into a running commentary before Mr Blair appears in front of the Chilcot committee.'

Leading international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands said: 'The Chilcot Inquiry must make Lord Goldsmith's note of 29 July, 2002, publicly available to restore public confidence in the Government.'


Diary of deceit ... and how the Attorney General lost three stone


2002

April 6: Blair meets Bush at Crawford, Texas. They secretly agree 'regime change' war against Iraq.

July 23: Blair tells secret Cabinet meeting of war plan. Goldsmith is asked to check legal position.

July 24: Blair tells MPs: 'We have not got to the stage of military action...or point of decision.'

July 29: Goldsmith secretly writes to Blair to tell him war is illegal.

July 30: No10 rebukes Goldsmith. He is excluded from most War Cabinet meetings.

November 8: UN urges Saddam to disarm, but stops short of backing war.


2003

March 7: Despite duress from No10, Goldsmith tells Blair war could be unlawful.

March 13: Goldsmith is allegedly 'pinned against wall' by Blair cronies Charlie Falconer and Sally Morgan.

March 17: UN rules out backing war.

March 17: Goldsmith U-turn. In carefully worded brief 'summary', he says war is lawful.

March 20: War begins.


2005

April 21: Jeremy Paxman asks Blair if he saw Foreign Office advice saying war was illegal. Blair says: 'No. I had Lord Goldsmith's advice to guide me.'

April 24: Mail on Sunday reveals Goldsmith told Blair two weeks before war that it could be illegal.


2009

November 24: Chilcot Iraq War Inquiry begins.

Today: Mail on Sunday reveals Goldsmith's 'smoking gun' letter to Blair in July 2002.


Blair 'knew WMD claim was false'

By the time Tony Blair led Britain to attack Iraq, he had stopped believing his own lurid claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, according to an unpublished interview with the late Robin Cook, the former Leader of the Commons who resigned from the Cabinet just before the invasion in March 2003.

In the interview, which Cook gave me in 2004, the year before his death, he described Blair's actions as 'a scandalous manipulation of the British constitution', adding that if the then Prime Minister had revealed his doubts, they would have rendered the war illegal.

Cook, who was in almost daily contact with Blair in the months before his resignation, said that in September 2002, when the Government published its infamous dossier claiming Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons and could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes, Blair did believe these claims were true. But he added:

'By February or March, he knew it was wrong. As far as I know, at no point after the end of 2002 did he ever repeat those claims.'

On March 18, Blair had to face the Commons to ask it to vote for war but he knew, Cook added, 'that if he now publicly withdrew the dossier's claims, his position would be lost'.

Therefore Blair kept silent and so secured the war resolution, though 139 Labour MPs voted against him.

Cook added that if Blair had revealed his doubts, this would also have made it impossible for Lord Goldsmith to issue the fateful legal advice that Britain's Service chiefs had been demanding: that war would be lawful.

'What I've never seen satisfactorily defended by the Government is whether that opinion still stands up if the premise on which it was based - the claims in the dossier - turn out to be false,' Cook said.

'Tony didn't focus on WMDs only for political reasons, but for legal reasons. He knew he was not going to get the Attorney General on side on any basis other than that Saddam had illegal weapons and could not be disarmed by any means other than war.'

Cook's is not the only bombshell that remains unpublished. Last week, Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, told the Chilcot Inquiry that though Blair kept insisting almost to the end that 'nothing was decided' on Iraq, his decision to support the invasion actually went back to April 2002, when he visited President Bush's Texas ranch.

However, both Meyer and other British and American officials told me in 2004 that Blair made up his mind even before April and that even then, Blair was saying in private that Britain would join the attack as long as Bush got UN backing. That meant proving Saddam had active WMDs, as the UN would not authorise an attack on any other basis.

Meyer told me: 'Some time during the first quarter of 2002, Blair had become resigned to war.'

Having committed himself to war, Blair believed he had to get military action approved by the UN to make the invasion legal, and to get the support of his own party back home. But leading figures close to Bush were deeply hostile to this idea, and would have much preferred to attack unilaterally.

Perhaps the most shocking disclosures concerned Blair's propensity to bend the truth. For example, on July 26, 2002, Clare Short, then International Development Secretary, asked Blair whether war was looming.

His response was that she should go on holiday untroubled, because 'nothing had been decided, and would not be over the summer'.

In fact, at that very moment, his adviser Sir David Manning was engaged in feverish diplomacy in Washington - because although Blair thought Bush had promised to go to the UN, he seemed to be changing his mind. Manning even had a personal audience with Bush.

A few days later, Bush and Blair spoke by telephone. A senior White House official who read the transcript told me: 'The way it read was that, come what may, they were going to take out the regime. I remember reading it and thinking, "OK, now I know what we're going to be doing for the next year."'

Later, both leaders would state repeatedly that they had not decided to go to war. But the official said: 'War was avoidable only if Saddam ceased to be president of Iraq. It was a done deal.'

Yet the hawkish neo-conservatives at the Pentagon were still fighting hard to avoid the UN route, which would require a narrowing of focus on to WMDs. The crunch came at a summit at Camp David on September 7, 2002, when, most unusually, not only Bush but the neo-con vice president Dick Cheney met Blair. Cheney's role, Meyer said, was solely to try to persuade Bush not to go to the UN.

In desperation, Blair, according to another White House official, told Bush and Cheney that he could be ousted at the Labour conference later that month if Bush ignored the UN. Afterwards, the official said, he and his colleagues pored over the party's constitution, discovering that it was most unlikely that this threat would materialise.

But by then it was too late: a week after the summit, Bush spoke at the UN General Assembly, and announced America would be seeking what became Resolution 1442 - the resolution that, in Lord Goldsmith's eyes, allowed British soldiers to kill Iraqis without being prosecuted for murder.

But not all who once saw Blair as a friend have forgiven him. 'Blair was absolutely the reason why we went to the UN, because it was believed that his political fortunes absolutely demanded it,' said David Wurmser, formerly Cheney's chief Middle East adviser. 'It really was a political concession to Blair - and also a disastrous misjudgment.'

source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1231746/Secret-letter-reveal-new-Blair-war-lies.html

Attack at Complex Nightclub in St. Louis

Attack at Complex Nightclub in St. Louis
By 365gay Newswire

11.30.2009 11:45am EST

KSDK reported that three gay men were attacked early Saturday morning when leaving The Complex Nightclub in St. Louis.

One of the men attacked, Jacob Piwowarczyk said, “I have a soft tissue bruise on my elbow. I have six stitches in my eye and I have a mild concussion.”

Piwowarczyk recalled there were four attackers. “They came up out of the car and they start calling us faggots.”

He continued, “We kept telling them please leave us alone, we’re fine. From there, the one kid didn’t like what we told them and decided to punch me in the eye and I fell to the ground. And at that time my friend was laying on the ground and they started kicking him in the face.”

Gay rights advocates say existing state and new federal laws on hate crimes could mean harsh penalties for the attackers.

According to the Vital Voice, Missouri was one of the first states to include both sexual orientation and gender identity protections in its 1999 Hate Crimes Law.

Piwowarczyk said, “Health-wise we’re all fine. We’re just lucky to be alive. Could have turned out worse.”

KSDK also reported that the other two victims suffered a broken nose and fractured cheekbone.

The police department is still investigating.

Are We Going to Let John Die?

Are We Going to Let John Die?

Health Care Reform

Unfortunately, an emergency room won’t help — indeed, the closest E.R. has told him not to come back, he says. So, for those members of Congress who are wavering on health reform, listen to John’s story.

John is a sawmill worker from Yamhill County, Ore., where I grew up. He was a foreman at a mill, he felt strong and healthy, and he had very basic insurance coverage through his job. On April 18, he was married, at age 23, and life was looking up.

Ten days after the wedding, he was walking in his backyard carrying a neighbor’s dog — and he suddenly blacked out. That led, after rounds of CAT scans, M.R.I.’s and other tests, to the discovery that the left parietal lobe of his brain has a cavernous hemangioma. That’s an abnormal growth of blood vessels, and in John’s case it is chronically leaking blood into his brain.

John began to have trouble walking and would sometimes collapse. He developed spasms and restless leg syndrome, he began to use a cane, and his mind suffered.

“He forgets stuff a lot, he bumps into things,” said his new wife, Esther Brodniak. “But he keeps things light. He jokes about it.”

Perhaps the worst is the pain — blinding, incapacitating headaches that have left him able to sleep only in short intervals. He vomits daily when the pain surges.

“The pain is constant,” John said. “It’s a 7 or 8 on a scale of 10, and then it hits the high peaks and makes me vomit.”

With John unable to work, he lost his job — and his insurance coverage. Esther had insurance for herself and for her two children (from a previous marriage) through her job building manufactured homes. But she couldn’t add John to her plan because of his pre-existing condition.

Without insurance, John has been unable to get surgery or even help managing the pain. When he collapses or suffers particularly excruciating headaches, Esther rushes him to the emergency room of one hospital or another, but an E.R. can’t do much for him. One hospital has told them not to come back unless he gets insurance, they say.

Esther used up her family leave time to look after her new husband. “Then I went back to work, and he fell several times,” she said. “I told my boss that I had to quit. Taking care of John was more important than building someone else’s house.”

That meant that the couple had no income — and no insurance for anyone in the family, including the children. Neighbors have helped, and a community program has paid the rent so that they are not homeless. But bills are piling up, and John and Esther don’t know how they will cope.

The doctors warn that pressure from the growth could lead a major blood vessel nearby to burst, killing him. “They tell me I’m a time bomb,” John said. With a touch of bitterness, he adds, “It sort of feels as if they’re playing for time to see if it bursts, to save them from doing anything.”

I’m not a physician, and I certainly can’t speak to the medical issues here. But I have examined John’s medical records, and they appear to confirm his story.

John says the principal obstacle to treatment appears to be simply his lack of insurance. In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program, but he hasn’t been able to find a doctor who will accept him as a patient for surgery, apparently because the reimbursements are so low. Doctors tell him that his condition is operable — but that they can’t accept him without conventional insurance. He is increasingly frustrated as he watches his family crushed by the burden of his illness.

“The mill won’t let me go back to work until a doctor gives me a note saying I can go back,” he said. “I tried with several doctors. I said, ‘Just give me a note. ... I’ve got to do something for my family. But they won’t.” John and Esther agreed to tell me their story in hopes that somehow it would lead to medical help.

John’s story is not so unusual. A Harvard study, to be published next month in the American Journal of Public Health, suggests that almost 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a consequence of not having insurance. John may become one of them.

If a senator strolled indifferently by as John retched in pain, we would think that person pitiless. But isn’t it just as monstrous for politicians to avert their eyes, make excuses and deny coverage to innumerable Americans just like John?

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opinion/29kristof.html?ref=opinion

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When It Comes to Enabling the Terrorism of Gun Deaths in America, No One Beats the NRA

When It Comes to Enabling the Terrorism of Gun Deaths in America, No One Beats the NRA


By Mark Karlin

Did you know that the shooter at Fort Hood did not use an army issued gun? No, he bought his weapon legally at a firearms store with the name of "Guns Galore":

Law enforcement officials say a 5.7-millimeter pistol used in the Fort Hood shooting rampage was purchased legally at a Texas gun store.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

Records indicate Hasan bought the FN 5.7 at store called “Guns Galore” in Killeen, Texas, well before the attack that left 13 people dead. The pistol has been dubbed a “cop killer” by those who have tried to stop its use.

The most powerful type of ammunition for the gun is available only to law enforcement and military personnel. Gun control advocates call it a “cop killer” weapon because that ammo can pierce bulletproof vests, and its use by Mexican drug cartels worries police.

The National Rifle Association has made all this possible, including using its nearly omnipotent clout to forbid the FBI from stopping suspected terrorists from buying guns. That's right, the NRA believes people believed to possibly be terrorists have a "2nd Amendment" right to own guns!

While the right wing nut jubs revel in the politics of paraonia against anyone who is Islamic, the NRA is enabling around 10,000 gun homicides a year in the United States by good 'ole Americans. Now, that's a far larger death toll than 9/11 or Fort Hood.

The NRA represents a fanatical philosophy that is akin to the fundamentalism underlying terrorism, and -- as a result -- is our chief domestic enabler of terrorism (along with the right wing media) by making sure that guns are readily available to just about anyone with the cash to pay for them.

We have become so numb to everyday shooting deaths in America that we focus on tragic and sensational losses, such as Fort Hood, but can't see the forest through the trees. The NRA is so extremist, it even has kept a military sniper rifle on the market that can assassinate a person (public official) from nearly a mile away with accuracy. Given the heightened number of death threats against President Obama, you would think a .50 caliber sniper rifle would be banned for civilian purchase, but not with the NRA around to champion terrorist weapons. (Only the State of California bans civlians from purchasing the .50 caliber sniper rifle.)

Over Thanksgiving, I read of numerous shootings -- as is daily the case in America. There's always one or two that especially stick out, such as this massacre in Florida in which 4 members of a family were shot dead, allegedly by a cousin: "Six-year-old Makayla Sitton didn't get to act in The Nutcracker Ballet. The night before she was to go on stage, she was shot to death with three others in a home in Jupiter, Florida."

There could be effective regulation of firearms in the United States, but the NRA is more dangerous in terms of yearly homicides by resisting logical legislation than any terrorist acts we have experienced thus far in the United States.

The NRA ensures that there is a ready supply of guns that kill about 100,000 Americans in a decade in homicides, and many more in suicides and accidents.

No terrorists can match that figure, and if they tried, they would likely buy arms in the U.S., as the Fort Hood shooter did, not meant for civilian use and capable of either mass murder or an assassination.

When it comes to the terrorist watch list, the NRA -- which fans the flames of armed militia and white male paranoia in the U.S. -- should be at the top of the list.

They are primarily responsible -- along with the gun manufcaturers -- for turning America into a shooting gallery, with a mind-boggling death toll.
More:
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/9917

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Facing a sixth trial for the same crime

Facing a sixth trial for the same crime

By Tom Mangold
Radio 4, Crossing Continents

Curtis Flowers, a 39-year-old African-American is to stand trial for an unprecedented sixth time for the murder of four people in Mississippi in 1996. So far, two of his trials have resulted in mistrials and three in convictions that were later overturned.

James Bibbs, also an African-American, was a juror in Mr Flowers's 2008 trial, which ended in a mistrial. He was the only one of the 12 to vote against a conviction.

At the end of the trial, Mr Bibbs was hauled in front of the judge, harangued, threatened, arrested in court, led away in handcuffs, charged with perjury and spent the night in prison.

Mr Bibbs is in his early 60s. He's a retired school teacher, a Vietnam veteran, a local football referee - a patently decent man who was shocked by what had happened.

"The judge got real loud, and he said 'you are lying, you committed perjury'. I was disappointed, all these years you do all these things for the community, then you are called a liar like that out in the public, it was degrading."

The judge's outburst (the perjury charge has since been quietly dropped) came in a case that is extraordinary for many reasons.

Unprecedented

The prosecution of Curtis Flowers casts a sharp light on racial attitudes in America's South one year after the election of the nation's first black president.

He has been sentenced to death three times, only for each verdict to be overturned on appeal because of what the Mississippi Supreme Court described as prosecutorial misconduct. In one further trial, the jury failed to agree after dividing broadly on racial lines.

In the fifth trial, James Bibbs voted for acquittal, and a unanimous verdict was required.

Mr Flowers has spent 13 years on remand in prison.

The local district attorney, desperate to score a conviction in such a high-profile case, has played it dirty to win.

One of his tricks, exposed by a refreshingly impartial Mississippi Supreme Court, was to fiddle the jury selection to exclude black jurors.

Paradoxically, the DA is not generally held to be a racist himself.

Just to complicate matters even further, Curtis Flowers does have a strong case to answer.

He had a motive.

Mr Flowers had been employed by the owner of a furniture store who sacked him. There was a dispute about money owing.

Subsequently someone walked into the store, shot the owner and then coldly massacred three other employees. Mr Flowers has never produced an alibi for that terrible morning.

For his defence, the forensic evidence against him is wafer thin, and some witness evidence is contentious.

Post-racial society

The murders took place in the small town of Winona, in the heart of a state with the worst civil rights record in the US.

Winona is not far from Philadelphia, where three civil rights workers were infamously murdered in the early 60s - a story captured in the film Mississippi Burning.

The lynchings, the cross burnings, the overt violence and discrimination have long since disappeared.

But even one year after Barack Obama and the dream of a post-racial society, the Flowers case shows how short the march away from old attitudes has been.

The local state senator, Lydia Chassaniol has won few African-American hearts by introducing a bill that would widen the jury pool in such a way that critics say would make it easier to select an all-white jury.

She has joined a local chapter of the right-wing Council for Conservative Citizens and addressed their annual conference.

"I'll talk to anyone who wants me to talk to them," the senator told me, stressing her role as official tourist booster for the state.

But meet members of the council, as I did, in a modest motel outside Winona, and the nature of this rump of the red-neck, good 'ole white boys, confederate-flag-wavers is striking.

Their hatred of inter-racial marriage, homosexuals, liberals (aka communists) identifies an atavistic streak that still remains 150 years after slavery.

As one of them told me: "It's all right for them (non-whites) to practise their culture but they should not take ours away from us. We are probably the most discriminated race in the country."

Mr Flowers faces a sixth trial next June. In Britain, natural justice would have made it likely that the prosecution would be dropped after the second mistrial.

But this is Winona, Mississippi and a black man accused of a quadruple murder will not be allowed to walk away.

Black president or not, the state and its judicial servants are not ready for that yet.

Crossing Continents: Mississippi Smouldering is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday, 26 November 2009 at 1100 GMT and repeated on Monday, at 2030 GMT.

You can also listen to Crossing Continents on the
or subscribe to the
.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8377236.stm

Published: 2009/11/26 13:03:46 GMT

Hitting the Brakes on Afghanistan

http://www.fpif. org/fpifzines/ wb/6599

Hitting the Brakes on Afghanistan

By John Feffer
Foreign Policy in Focus: 11/23/09

Imagine finding yourself in the driver's seat of a car heading directly at a
brick wall. You panic: What to do?

Fortunately, there are three people in the car with you, and they all have
very firm advice. The person in the passenger seat tells you to push the
pedal to the metal. Right behind you in the back seat, your friend is urging
you to accelerate only modestly. And the fourth person in the car recommends
that you maintain your current speed.

You might be thinking: These are my only choices? I'll hit the brick wall
either really quickly, rather quickly, or pretty darn soon. The end result
will be the same. The car will be destroyed and all four of you will be in
the hospital.

Since these are the choices now being presented to President Barack Obama
for his Afghanistan policy, who can blame him for being slow to make up his
mind? His top general is telling him to send 40,000 troops. His vice
president is telling him to send 10-15,000 troops. And his secretary of
state and Pentagon chief are urging the middle course of 30,000 troops.

Isn't anyone out there telling the president that he has more levers at his
disposal than simply the gas pedal? Isn't anyone pointing out the obvious?

The brake, Mr. President, the brake!

Frankly, the car metaphor isn't precise. It's actually a bus heading toward
that brick wall. A really, really big bus. And we're all on board, the
entire U.S. population. The president's advisors are all clustered up at the
front. Their voices are pretty loud. But we can all make our voices heard if
we all shout together from the back of the bus.Call the White House at
202-456-1111 and keep the message simple: Don't send more troops to
Afghanistan, Mr. President.

Peace groups around the country are coordinating this call-in campaign in
these few days before Thanksgiving so that the president knows, before the
expected announcement of his Afghanistan policy next week, that there are
other choices. Here's a link to some additional talking points about
different congressional options.

"It is unlikely that we will soon have another president with the moral and
rhetorical force to talk us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be
sustained without shame and defeat," writes Garry Wills in The New York
Review of Books. "If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can
match it? During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would
rather be a one-term president than give up on his goals. Here is a goal no
other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching.
Presidents who just kick the can down the road are easy to come by. Lost
lives and limbs are not."

The crash can be avoided. But we must call the White House and let the
driver-in-chief know that we're here, we're clear, and we don't want this
war no more.

***

Irish Priest Admits Abusing 100 Kids

Irish Priest Admits Abusing 100 Kids
By Daniel Florien on November 28, 2009

The Pope Looking EvilA new report is out showing the Most Holy Chaste Catholic Church has been covering up child sex abuse for decades:

Following a three-year investigation in the Dublin Archdiocese, the country’s largest, the report concluded that four archbishops routinely protected abusers and failed to inform police of the allegations. One priest admitted to sexually abusing over 100 children, while another confessed that he had abused on a fortnightly basis over 25 years.

“The volume of revelations of child sexual abuse by clergy over the past 35 years or so has been described by a Church source as a ‘tsunami’ of sexual abuse,” said the report….

The judicial probe discovered that the archbishops did not report abuse to police until the 1990s as part of a culture of secrecy and to try and avoid damaging the reputation of the Church.

The report said: “All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities”.

It found children who complained “were often met with denial, arrogance and cover-up and with incompetence and incomprehension in some cases. Suspicions were rarely acted on”.

Some of my Catholic friends boycott large companies because they have donated to gay rights or pro-choice organizations. Yet they give their money and loyalty to an organization that has been abusing children and covering it up for decades (though it’s probably been more like 1,700 years). It’s mind-boggling.

source:

BBC - Prisoners Of Katrina

BBC - Prisoners Of Katrina

The shot of thousands of orange-clad prisoners, murderers and rapists among them, crouching on a broken bridge, held at bay, at gunpoint by a few overstretched guards, was one of the iconic images of the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina. But who were those prisoners? ‘What about the prisoners in the jail?’ the Sheriff had been asked as city leaders ordered the people of New Orleans to flee the hurricane heading their way. “The prisoners will stay where they belong” he decided.

This is the untold story of almost 7,000 inmates, some never even charged, who found themselves in Orleans Parish Prison as it flooded. A year after the hurricane, find out what happened inside the jail as panicked inmates, left without food or water, rioted and broke out. Olenka Frenkiel reports on a justice system, already near to collapse - and on its final tipping point - Katrina.

Download:
http://rapidshare.com/files/313563503/Prisoners.Of.Katrina.XviD.avi.001
http://rapidshare.com/files/313563512/Prisoners.Of.Katrina.XviD.avi.002
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UN DAILY NEWS from the UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE 28 November, 2008

UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
28 November, 2008 =========================================================================


DOHA FORUM CRUCIAL TO CRAFTING GLOBAL RESPONSE TO FINANCIAL CRISIS – BAN

A United Nations conference set to begin tomorrow in Doha provides a vital opportunity to plan a globally coordinated response to the financial crisis to ensure the well-being of millions worldwide, especially the poor, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed today.

Such a response “can protect developing countries, underpin our drive to a green economy, and stimulate a commitment to a renewed multilateralism,” Mr. Ban told a news conference in the Qatari capital on the eve of the Review Conference on Financing for Development.

The four-day meeting will focus on ensuring sufficient financing to meet key development goals amid mounting concern about the impact of the current global economic slowdown on poor nations.

“The Doha conference is crucially important for the well-being of people everywhere,” added the Secretary-General, who held a closed discussion attended by about 30 delegations, including 10 Heads of State, government and international agencies, on the implications of the financial crisis.

“It is also very timely, falling just two weeks after the emergency G-20 summit on the financial crisis,” he said, referring to the meeting in Washington on 15 November of the leaders of the so-called Group of 20 nations, aimed at promoting dialogue between advanced and emerging countries on key issues regarding economic growth and stability of the financial system.

One of the main goals of today’s discussion, and of the conference beginning tomorrow, is “to build a bridge between the G-20 and the rest of the world – the full community of nations,” he noted.

A summary of today’s discussion points out that leaders agreed that the Doha conference offers an opportunity “to listen to the perspectives and concerns of a larger group of countries. Broad participation in and support for the designs of reforms will make them more effective and sustainable.”

Mr. Ban told reporters that the financial crisis is not the only crisis the world faces. “We also confront a development emergency and accelerating climate change. These threats are inextricably linked. They must be dealt with as one.”

He emphasized the need for a truly global stimulus plan that meets the needs of emerging economies and developing countries. This includes protecting the poorest, as well as not reneging on commitments regarding official development assistance (ODA), which remains a crucial part of development finance for many countries.

It also includes ensuring resources to help countries meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the anti-poverty targets world leaders have pledged to achieve by 2015.

Also vital is to promote development that is sustainable and the fight against climate change. “Investments in green technologies will produce pay-offs in the long-term, in terms of a safer environment and more sustainable growth,” said the Secretary-General. “But the record already shows that green investment can produce jobs and spur growth in the here-and-now.”

He added that reform begins with the financial markets but it cannot stop there. “We also need fresh thinking about our food and energy systems, about financing for development and about our institutions.” This means giving a greater voice in global financial institutions to emerging economies and developing countries.

Ahead of the conference, World Bank President Robert Zoellick called on developed countries to boost aid to developing countries, which are facing a “perfect storm” of slowing world growth, higher interest rates, and a withdrawal of equity and lending from the private sector.

In a paper prepared for the conference, the World Bank says it is imperative that donors meet their previous commitments to debt relief and scaled-up aid.

Representatives of the World Bank will join those of governments, business and civil society at the forum, which is a follow-up to the International Conference on Financing for Development that took place in 2002 in Monterrey, Mexico, and resulted in the adoption of a landmark partnership agreement for global development.

Known as the Monterrey Consensus, the agreement covered a number of topics, including domestic resource mobilization, foreign direct investment (FDI), trade, ODA, debt relief and systemic issues.


* * *

SECURITY COUNCIL CONDEMNS ‘REPREHENSIBLE’ TERRORIST ATTACKS IN MUMBAI

The United Nations Security Council has strongly condemned the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that started on 26 November, which included the taking of hostages and caused numerous deaths and injuries in India’s financial capital.

“The members of the Security Council expressed their condolences to the families of the victims and to the people and Government of India,” the 15-member body said in a statement issued to the press last night.

The attacks, which have now stretched into their third day, targeted two major hotel complexes and several other locations in India’s largest city, leaving at least 140 people dead and more than 300 wounded. Rescue operations are still ongoing to try to free the remaining hostages.

Council members “underlined the need to bring perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of these reprehensible acts of terrorism to justice” and urged all States to cooperate with the Indian authorities in this regard.

“All acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation,” the Council reiterated in its statement.

The Mumbai attacks are just the latest in a series of acts of terrorism to strike the South Asian nation over the course of the past year. The north-eastern state of Assam and the cities of Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jaipur and Delhi have all fallen victim to the scourge.


* * *

NEARLY 10,000 CHOLERA CASES NOW REPORTED IN ZIMBABWE, UN SAYS

Almost 10,000 cases and over 400 deaths due to cholera have now been reported in Zimbabwe since the current outbreak of the disease began in August, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Nearly 500 new cases and 23 additional deaths have been reported since yesterday, with the largest increase in cases found in Budiriro and Beitbridge in the country’s south.

The UN continues to support the Government respond to the outbreak through water deliveries, education programmes, procurement of medical supplies and constructing latrines.

OCHA noted that more health professionals are needed to respond, given the scale of the outbreak, and that poor hygiene awareness and solid waste removal are propelling the increase in cholera infections.

Cases of the illness – an acute intestinal infection caused by contaminated food or water – have also been reported in neighbouring Botswana and South Africa, and the health ministries of these two countries and of Zimbabwe have been working with the UN World Health Organization (WHO) to address the spread.

WHO and its partners are responding to cases and supporting treatment centres in 26 districts, and the agency has airlifted emergency supplies from its Dubai warehouse.

The agency has identified several areas where there are gaps, including detection, response organization and surveillance.

It is also planning to dispatch a team – comprising epidemiologists and water and sanitation specialists, among others – to investigate and respond to the outbreak.

For its part, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has over 50 staff dedicated solely to tackling Zimbabwe’s cholera outbreak. The agency is working closely with authorities and along with its partners, has asked for $9 million as part of the UN Consolidated Appeal to address water and sanitation issues.


* * *

SOME SUDANESE REGIONS RIFE WITH ARBITRARY ARREST AND DETENTION, SAYS UN REPORT

Arbitrary arrest and detention are rife in many parts of Sudan, and are often linked to further serious violations such as torture, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) says in a report released today.

The 51-page report covers the capital Khartoum and other parts of northern Sudan, southern Sudan, and the three central areas of Abyei, Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile state. It does not cover the western region of Darfur, which has been the focus of previous OHCHR reports.

According to the report, intelligence and security services, police, and the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), as well as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the country’s south, have all committed violations of Sudanese and international law in the form of arbitrary arrests of civilians, in the length and manner of their detention, and in the physical treatment of detainees.

“In Khartoum and other parts of northern Sudan, the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) systematically use arbitrary arrest and detention against political dissidents,” states the report. The NISS has reportedly been responsible for a large number of cases involving ill-treatment and torture, including attempts to intimidate detainees, punish them, extract information or force them to incriminate themselves or others.

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) explicitly limits NISS’ mandate to an advisory role, focusing on information and analysis.

The report also notes that UN human rights officers have encountered many cases in which SPLA soldiers illegally arrested and detained civilians. Some prisoners have been detained for prolonged periods without charge, denied family visits or legal help, and kept in very poor living conditions, with insufficient or inadequate supplies of food, water and medical supplies.

The OHCHR report found “disturbing” patterns of arbitrary arrest and detention by police forces in the South including arrests of family members of suspects to pressure fugitives to turn themselves in.

The report also cites cases of women and children detained as a means of forcing their families to pay compensation in civil disputes, or in relation to dowry payments – especially in Southern Sudan, and cites examples of a 17-year-old girl sentenced to one year in jail in Yei for leaving her husband, and a 16-year old Dinka girl jailed for two months in Bor for running away from a forced marriage.

Impunity was an overarching concern in all of the areas covered by the report. “Even blatantly unlawful arrests rarely result in criminal or disciplinary actions against the officials involved.” However, it also says the problems “are not necessarily intractable,” adding that “reforming institutions is as important as changing individual attitudes.”

At the same time, the report also notes there have been “positive examples of judges, prosecutors, parliamentarians and police officers who have taken effective action against arbitrary arrest and detention.” The report cites cases where judges disregarded written confession statements that had allegedly been obtained under torture and acquitted defendants who had retracted their confessions in court.

OHCHR adds that the Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan have taken some positive steps to address the human rights concerns in the report. The Government of National Unity, for example, has announced its intention to table legislation to establish an independent human rights commission.

Meanwhile, the Government of Southern Sudan has established a human rights commission and is in the process of enacting legislation linked to its proposed functions.

OHCHR provides 28 specific recommendations designed to assist the authorities in their efforts to address the concerns identified in the report.


* * *

‘WE ARE GOING WHERE OTHERS DO NOT WANT TO GO’ – UN PEACEKEEPING CHIEF

The 18 United Nations peacekeeping operations worldwide are carrying out their work well under circumstances that are often extremely difficult and in areas where no other major organizations or countries are prepared to be involved, the head of the world body’s missions says.

“We are going where others do not want to go,” Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Alain Le Roy says in an extended interview with the UN News Centre to mark the first of its Newsmaker profile series. “Sometimes we are easy scapegoats. [But] on the contrary, on my field visits I see missions that in the vast majority of cases are being executed well.”

Mr. Le Roy, who took up his post in August, last month visited the Darfur region of western Sudan – now home to the joint UN-African Union mission known as UNAMID – and then this month travelled to the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the UN mission known as MONUC is responding to fierce recent fighting that has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians.

In the interview he notes the scale of the task facing UN peacekeeping missions, which collectively have about 110,000 personnel and a budget of more than $7 billion.

“That is huge. There has been a very great increase in our engagements in recent years. Some think that we have perhaps reached the limits. Of course, it is the Security Council that decides on the missions and troop levels it gives us.”

Mr. Le Roy says the recent decision by the Security Council to boost MONUC’s numbers by another 3,000 troops and police officers “is clearly very important to help us fulfil our mandate,” especially in North Kivu province, the scene of much of the recent fighting.

But he adds that the mission’s current total of blue helmets – about 17,000 – is comparatively small given the sheer size of the DRC, one of Africa’s largest countries.

In Darfur, the Under-Secretary-General says the administrative problems experienced by UNAMID, which replaced an under-resourced AU-only monitoring mission at the start of the year, are in the process of being resolved.

“On the other hand, the logistical aspect remains extremely complicated: the region is 2,500 kilometres from its nearest port and there are very few access roads.”

He adds that the mission is still waiting on 18 transport helicopters and six attack helicopters from Member States, despite earlier authorization for the craft from the Security Council.

“The States we have asked say they don’t have any available. It’s very damaging because that diminishes the effectiveness of the force. We sincerely hope that certain countries will supply us with these helicopters.”


* * *

INFRASTRUCTURE SHARING IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS NEEDED TO OFFSET INVESTMENT DROUGHT – UN

Strategies for sharing among telecommunications and information and communication technology (ICT) providers are needed to offset an investment drought stemming from the deepening global financial crisis, according to a new United Nations report.

“Sharing strategies are increasingly necessary to ensure that operators can deploy their networks at low cost while guaranteeing that consumers have access to affordable services,” UN International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Telecommunication Development Bureau Director Sami Al Basheer said on the release of the agency’s annual report.

“Now, more than ever, sharing strategies make sense as operators are forced to reduce the costs of network deployment as they compete for scarce investment funds. This is a forward-looking perspective in light of the current financial and economic uncertainty.”

Such strategies include sharing civil engineering costs in deploying networks, promoting open access to network support infrastructure (poles, ducts, conduits), essential facilities (submarine cable landing stations and international gateways), and access to radio-frequency spectrum and end-user devices.

The report – Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2008: Six Degrees of Sharing – details a set of regulatory strategies designed to lower the costs of network rollout. It notes that 2008 has been marked by unparalleled numbers of voice and Internet consumers in both the developing and developed world, the result of network growth and expansion.

The “Six Degrees of Sharing” theme was first discussed in Thailand during the ITU’s 2008 Global Symposium for Regulators last March. Few observers could then have anticipated the rough ride that would be in store for financial markets later this year.

Yet, the guidelines announced in March seem almost prophetic in today’s circumstances. Taking a broad and innovative view of sharing, the world’s regulators sought to capture the productivity of global networks and use it to expand the scope of opportunities for service and content providers and, ultimately, consumers.

Developing countries embraced sharing to make more affordable the expansion of ICT networks to rural and under-served areas. Many developed countries are looking at sharing to reduce the cost of rolling out ultra high-speed broadband networks that reach customers’ homes and apartment buildings.

What had been foreseen as ideal strategies to extend broadband network access in developing markets may now be viewed as a prescription for the entire world. If the sources of capital for network investment suffer a temporary drought, policymakers could take steps to make their markets more amenable to the shrinking pool of investment.

Such measures could include lowering investment barriers that inhibit capital flows from one country to another, reducing regulatory barriers (high licence fees or market-entry bans) that represent hostile environments for capital investment and market growth, and sharing essential facilities, such as cable landing stations, local switching centres or fibre backbone networks.

Other steps are: adopting rules to provide for infrastructure sharing, particularly “passive” sharing of towers, ducts, rights-of-way and other support facilities; overhauling and streamlining cross-agency processes to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for various network-related authorizations, such as land management, port access, environmental and safety permits; and adding innovative spectrum management mechanisms that promote increased sharing and efficient use of spectrum.


Regulatory frameworks could be amended to eliminate discriminatory rules that favour one company or industry over another in a converged services market and government policies and rules would be to ensure maximum ability for incumbents and market entrants to choose between different opportunities for business plans and long-term strategies, including resale, wholesale, and niche markets.


* * *

VOTER REGISTRATION FOR CôTE D’IVOIRE POLL PROCEEDING WITHOUT MAJOR INCIDENT, UN REPORTS

Identification and voter registration in Côte d’Ivoire is progressing without major incident for long-delayed elections, a key element in resolving a political crisis that in 2002 divided the West African country into a rebel-held north and Government-controlled south, the United Nations has reported.

The operation is attracting large crowds in Abidjan, the country’s largest city, in the south and in Bouaké, the former rebel stronghold, the UN Mission in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) said.

UNOCI hopes the population will participate just as eagerly when the operation spreads to other parts of the country in line with the deployment of identification teams, spokesman Hamadoun Touré told a news conference in Abidjan yesterday.

The mission will continue with its electoral assistance and logistical and material support by “making its vehicles and staff available in order to accelerate the identification and voter registration operation so that it takes place under the best possible conditions,” he said.

He urged the Ivorian authorities to continue along the right track and remain focused on the remaining stages so that they should lead to a definitive end to the crisis.

The identification and registration processes were launched in mid-September in preparation for the elections then slated for 30 November but the polls have now been delayed again for the third time since the signing of the north-south peace pact last year.


* * *

UNDERSTANDING MOST RECENT HIV INFECTIONS CRUCIAL FOR FURTHER PREVENTION, UN REPORT SAYS

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) today called on countries to realign their prevention programmes by better understanding how the most recent infections were transmitted and the reasons why they occurred.

“Not only will this approach help prevent the next 1,000 infections in each community, but it will also make money for AIDS work more effectively and help put forward a long-term and sustainable AIDS response,” UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said in a report issued to mark the 20th anniversary of the first observance of World AIDS Day.

Findings from countries that have conducted studies on the modes of transmission and developed incidence estimates have highlighted three broad trends. First, patterns of epidemics can change over time and therefore such analyses must be undertaken at regular intervals.

Second, in many sub-Saharan African countries with high HIV prevalence, new infections occur mainly as a result of having multiple sex partners and among discordant couples – that is where one partner is HIV positive and one is HIV negative.

Third, in many countries, even with high HIV prevalence among the general population, substantial numbers of new infections might also occur in populations at higher risk of exposure to HIV, including sex workers and their clients, injecting drug users, and men who have sex with men, groups who often receive little attention in prevention initiatives.

“There is no single magic bullet for HIV prevention, but we can choose wisely from the known prevention options available so that they can reinforce and complement each other and cut back the wave of ongoing new HIV infections that is stripping away gains in treatment,” Dr. Piot said.

Even though the number of new HIV infections has fallen in several countries, there are five new HIV infections for every two people put on treatment. As reported earlier in 2008, some 3 million people are now receiving antiretroviral treatment in low- and middle-income countries.

The global financial crisis could lead to funding cutbacks, which, in turn, will have harmful impacts throughout the developing world generally and in the AIDS response in particular.


* * *

UN AID AGENCIES BRING RELIEF TO FLOOD-HIT NORTHERN SRI LANKA

Three United Nations agencies are offering relief to tens of thousands of Sri Lankans who have been displaced from their homes after floods struck at least five districts in the north of the island nation this week.

Aid agencies held a coordination meeting in the town of Jaffna today to plan their response to the floods, which follow several days of heavy rains, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported.

Sufficient stocks of relief items, including food and shelter materials, are available across the Jaffna peninsula to help affected families for the next few days. The region is already affected by the conflict between Government forces and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is coordinating the distribution of non-food relief items and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) is providing dry rations at the request of local authorities. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is assisting with water and sanitation services.

OCHA reports that the floods are worst in five districts: Jaffna, Mannar, Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu in Northern province, and Trincomalee in Eastern province. Three reservoirs are at risk of overflowing, and vehicle movements across the north are being obstructed by flood waters and bad road conditions, thus hampering the progress of humanitarian convoys.


* * *

UN-BACKED FORUM URGES COMPREHENSIVE STRATEGY TO FIGHT SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN

A United Nations-backed forum to combat the sexual exploitation of children today called for a comprehensive strategy comprising laws, policies, regulations and services across all social sectors as well as a shift in social attitudes and practices, such as child marriage.

“There is no single intervention that protects children from sexual exploitation,” UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean Nils Kastberg said at the end of World Congress III Against the Sexual Exploitation of Children in Rio de Janeiro. “Building and strengthening child protection systems is critical and requires action from all actors to provide children with the protection they deserve.”

Representatives of 137 governments, meeting with children, international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private sector companies, conceded that ending the scourge is a long and difficult battle, but the Congress organizers said countries are in a better position now to win the fight as a result of days of work in developing a blueprint for action.

The Rio Declaration and Action Plan to Prevent and Stop the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents calls on governments to enact laws that protect all children in their jurisdiction, including undocumented migrants or those who have been trafficked so that every child is provided protection under the law. Governments are also asked to pass laws that do not criminalize children for crimes they have committed as a result of their sexual exploitation.

On prevention, the Rio Action Plan stresses the need for a comprehensive strategy and the involvement of all social sectors, especially social welfare, education, health, security and justice, to support prevention and respond to risks.

Unlike previous World Congresses, where the recommendations of young participants were prepared separately, in Rio de Janeiro the young people participated fully in the drafting of the action plan.

Studies indicate an increase in the sexual exploitation of the young and UNICEF noted that predators continue to use new tools to target children, including cyberspace and new generation mobile phone technologies, with adults preying on children in chat rooms and using the Internet to post or download pornography.

The gathering was co-sponsored by UNICEF, the Brazilian Government, ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes), a global non-profit network of organizations and individuals set up in 1991, and the NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Seven years after the last World Congress in Yokohama, Japan, which focused exclusively on commercial sexual exploitation of children, the current Congress also discussed strategies for combating non-commercial forms of child sexual exploitation, including the sexual exploitation of children in their homes, by religious leaders, teachers, peacekeepers and armed groups in war zones.

The First World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children took place in Stockholm in 1996, resulting in the ‘Stockholm Declaration and Agenda for Action,’ which was adopted by 122 countries. This committed countries to develop strategies and plans of action with agreed-upon guidelines and 161 countries have now signed on.


* * *

MINISTERS AT UN MEETING URGE NATIONS NOT TO SLASH EDUCATION BUDGETS AMID FINANCIAL CRISIS

With hundreds of millions of people around the world with little or no access to education, participants at a United Nations conference in Geneva urged governments not to cut funding for this critical sector amid the current financial turmoil.

Participants at the week-long International Conference on Education, which ended today, voiced concern at the impact of the global financial crisis, warning that it “will have a disproportionate impact on the poor – those who carry the least responsibility for these events.”

According to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which organized the conference, the hundreds of millions around the world with little or no access to education include 75 million out-of-school children – more than half of whom are girls and one third are disabled.

Many of these children are working and many belong to indigenous groups and linguistic minorities, or are living in conflict and post-conflict situations. There are also some 776 million adults who lack basic literacy skills.

In the current economic environment, providing quality education was all the more important since education was crucial to reducing poverty and improving health and livelihoods, stressed the participants, which included ministers, education experts and civil society representatives.

“Funding for education should be a top priority and… the financial crisis should not serve as a justification for a reduction in the allocation of resources to education at both the national and international levels,” they stated.

The conference recommended a number of steps that governments could take to improve their education systems and ensure more inclusive education. These include equipping teachers with the skills and materials they need to teach diverse populations, and promoting the greater participation of those concerned in decision-making.


* * *

IN NORTHERN KYRGYZSTAN, UN REFUGEE AGENCY FUNDS SCHOOL AND SANITATION PROJECTS

The United Nations refugee agency is supporting school and sanitation projects in rural areas of northern Kyrgyzstan that have served as home to former refugees from neighbouring Tajikistan.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported today that it has recently expanded a pre-school and opened a public bathhouse in the district of Ivanovka, which is located in Chui province.

The projects are part of UNHCR’s support to the local community, which has taken in the former Tajik refugees – despite limited resources – and is also home to ethnic Kyrgyz returnees and local villagers.

UNHCR representative Hans Schodder said about $100,000 was spent by the agency on the projects as part of a wider effort to support the greater integration of refugees in the poor Central Asian country.

More than 20,000 Tajiks fled to Kyrgyzstan after civil war erupted in their homeland in the early 1990s. Most eventually returned home, but about 9,500 have been successfully naturalized by the Kyrgyz Government.

Ivanovka is also home to Kayrlyrmans, ethnic Kyrgyz who returned to the region after the country declared independence in 1991, as well as numerous stateless people following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

UNHCR estimates that Kyrgyzstan is also host to at least 1,000 asylum-seekers and refugees, mainly from Afghanistan.


* * *

JUSTICE ESSENTIAL TO BREAKING CYCLE OF CONFLICT IN DR CONGO, UN RIGHTS CHIEF SAYS

Outbreaks of bloodshed will continue to occur in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where in the past few months escalating conflict has uprooted a quarter of a million people, unless impunity is ended for those guilty of the worst violations, the top United Nations human rights official said today in Geneva.

“The DRC runs the risk of becoming a case study in how peace processes can go awry without the will to make justice and accountability an integral part of these processes,” Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told a special session on the human rights situation in the east of the vast African nation.

The DRC has been trying to consolidate stability following a brutal six-year civil war – widely considered the most lethal conflict in the world since World War II – that ended earlier this decade and cost 4 million lives in fighting and attendant hunger and disease. Serious unrest has continued sporadically in recent years, despite the official end of the war.

Fighting has stepped up in recent weeks between Government forces (FARDC) and a rebel militia known as the Congress in Defence of the People (CNDP), led by renegade general Laurent Nkunda, mainly in North Kivu province, which borders Rwanda. Other armed groups, including the Mayi Mayi, have also been involved in deadly clashes, some of which have been along ethnic lines.

Ms. Pillay told the 47-member Council today that her office has documented a worsening human rights situation in North Kivu, with executions, kidnappings and looting occurring daily.

“The prevailing culture of impunity contributes to this wide range of serious human rights violations,” she said, adding that “unparalleled violence” against women continues, with rape being a particular concern.

The High Commissioner said Government forces had been involved in pillaging, rapes and killings in Goma, North Kivu’s capital. But such acts are not confined to North and South Kivu provinces, she underscored, pointing to the violations committed by other “brutal forces” in the region, including Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

“Past peace agreements have enabled well-known perpetrators of atrocities to be integrated into the army and police,” Ms. Pillay said. “This has exacerbated the current climate of impunity in the DRC, empowered human rights violators and further endangered the Congolese population.”

Four UN human rights experts today voiced their serious concern over violations in the country’s east, calling on warring parties to respect human rights and international humanitarian law, as well as abide by ceasefire commitments and allow aid workers access to the vulnerable.

“The international community has a responsibility to protect and should provide MONUC, the peacekeeping mission of the United Nations in the DRC, with the capacity to protect civilians at risk, where and when State authorities fail to do so,” according to a statement by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; Yakin Ertürk, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences; Margaret Sekaggya, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; and Walter Kälin, the Secretary-General’s Representative on the human rights of IDPs.

In a related development, former Nigerian president and the Secretary-General’s envoy Olusegun Obasanjo will be returning to the region today to resume diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict in the DRC’s east.

It was announced today that he is slated to visit Kinshasa tomorrow and Goma on Sunday, with other regional stops planned along the way.

Meanwhile, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) today reported that it has begun the voluntary transfer of displaced Congolese from camps in Kibati, on Goma’s northern outskirts.

The agency’s vehicles will take the first group of people with special needs such as disabilities and chronic illnesses will be transported to Muganga I camp, one of four sites in the area.

This is the first of several movements which will continue through the weekend, UNHCR spokesperson William Spindler told reporters in Geneva, and about 1,000 are expected to be moved to the camp by next week.

Shelter and basic services will be provided at the camp, and the new arrivals will join 25,000 other IDPs who have been sheltering there since 2006.

Ground has been broken on construction at Mugunga III, a new site proposed for voluntary relocation of the displaced who will travel from Kibati on foot.

Mr. Spindler also said that thousands of Congolese refugees have fled across the border to Uganda in the past two days to escape a new round of fighting and attacks by armed assailants in Rutshuru in North Kivu.

UNHCR staff have reported that 13,000 IDPs had entered the south-west Uganda border town of Ishasha, while 10,000 people crossed into the country today. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has expressed concern that the new arrivals may be carrying diseases, such as cholera, with them, and has been distributing clean water there.

After the latest influx, there are now 150,000 refugees in Uganda, one-third of them from the DRC, Mr. Spindler said.

For its part, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that relief has been reaching South Lubero, nearly 200 kilometres north of Goma, but cautioned that inaccessibility in certain areas could lead to an increase in malnutrition cases.


* * *

UPSURGE OF FIGHTING IN SOMALIA AMONG HEAVIEST IN RECENT MONTHS, UN REPORTS

The past week has seen some of the heaviest fighting in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, in recent months, with at least 55 civilians estimated to have been killed and more than 80 others wounded, according to local hospital records cited by United Nations humanitarian officials.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that more than 100,000 additional people have been forced to flee Mogadishu since 1 September in upsurge of fighting in a country that has been riven by factional conflicts and has not had a functioning central government since 1991.

Some 45,000 of those recently displaced moved to relatively safer areas in Mogadishu itself, while others sought safety along the Afgooye corridor, adding to a population of more than 360,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) who live in appalling conditions there, UNHCR said. An estimated 250,000 people have been displaced from Mogadishu this year alone.

During the past week, NATO and Dutch naval frigates successfully escorted three vessels through pirate-infested waters with 18,730 metric tons of UN World Food Programme (WFP) shipments to Mogadishu and the coastal town of Marka. WFP distributed food to nearly 360,000 people in various parts of the Horn of Africa country.

The agency has found that large areas of cultivated farms in the Lower and Middle Juba regions have been flooded and crops damaged. Food reserves stored in underground pits were also destroyed.

But the outlook for the ongoing short rainy season (September-December) is promising and expected to be normal throughout Somalia, according to a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) analysis. Grazing and water availability has improved countrywide and the cereal crop harvest is expected to be good in the main producing areas of the south.

Depending on the outcome of the cereal harvest and prices in areas of good crop production, the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance could decline over the coming six months.

On the political front, UN officials have welcomed the signing of a power-sharing decision in neighbouring Djibouti between the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and one of its Islamist opponents, the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS), to set up an inclusive and enlarged government and Unity Government.

“We are pleased to be supporting this initiative,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative for Somalia Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah said. The UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS) is facilitating a three-day workshop in Djibouti ending today to flesh out the decision.

“This is the first of many dialogues on a long journey gathering various stakeholders in the complex process of bringing peace and stability to Somalia, UN Development Programme (UNDP) country director Bruno Lenmarquis said.

The Independent Expert on human rights in Somalia Shamsul Bari also welcomed the power-sharing decision as well as one on the establishment of a commission of inquiry and an international court to address gross human rights and international humanitarian law violations.


* * *

SOUTHERN SUDAN NEEDS MORE HELP TO REBUILD EDUCATION, ROADS, HEALTH CARE – UN AID CHIEF

The United Nations relief chief today wrapped up a two-day visit to southern Sudan by calling on international donors to help the region develop basic education and health-care services and quickly build up its road system as it recovers after two decades of civil war.

John Holmes, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, met President Salva Kiir and other senior officials in the Government of Southern Sudan, which was set up as a result of the 2005 comprehensive peace agreement that ended the north-south civil war.

Mr. Holmes and Mr. Kiir – who met in Juba – discussed the scale of the south’s continuing development needs, as well as mutual concerns about the full implementation of the peace deal, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Mr. Holmes – who is also the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator – also assured southern Sudanese officials of the UN’s ongoing humanitarian support and urged donors to get behind construction and development initiatives.

Southern Sudan is lacking in basic infrastructure as a result of the prolonged civil war, and Mr. Holmes stressed that the capacity of the Government in the region must be built up so it can take over health-care, education and other services.

“A lot of has been achieved since I was last in Juba less than two years ago, but a huge amount remains to be done,” he said. “The UN must be here for the long haul, to support Government leadership, while the international community as a whole has to keep up its spending. Too much rests on the development of the south and the continued health of the north-south relationship for there to be any other option.”

Health care is a particular concern, with southern Sudan experiencing some of the worst child and maternal health indicators in the world, due in part to exceptionally low immunization rates. One in seven women, for instance, dies as a result of causes related to childbirth.

“It is simply unacceptable in the 21st century that women continue to die in childbirth at such rates, and that children and adults die needlessly of preventable diseases like malaria.

“Distributing mosquito nets to all the population, training enough staff and qualified midwives, and getting them out to the rural communities who are in dire need of primary health care: these must be top priorities.”

Mr. Holmes visited Agok, home to some 30,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) who fled Abyei, a town in an oil-rich area of central Sudan that remains in contention between the north and south despite the peace accord.

During their discussions the Under-Secretary-General and Mr. Kiir also emphasized the importance of a rapid solution to the separate conflict still engulfing the Darfur region of western Sudan.

Members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a notorious rebel group that has waged war against Ugandan Government forces since the mid-1980s and is accused of recruiting children to serve as soldiers or sexual slaves, have long operated out of southern Sudan, which borders Uganda.

Mr. Holmes and Mr. Kiir strongly urged the leadership of the LRA to follow through on promises to sign a peace agreement tomorrow.

The UN relief chief is now in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, for meetings with Government officials, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). He has already visited Darfur and neighbouring Chad on this visit.


* * *

UNICEF RAISES ALARM ABOUT CONDITIONS IN NORTHERN CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is voicing concern that security in the strife-torn north of the Central African Republic (CAR) has started to worsen, with fresh fighting between Government forces and rebels uprooting thousands more civilians in the deeply impoverished country.

Two separate attacks took place last week between the military and rebels, and one of the clashes led to half of a town’s population escaping into the nearby bush, UNICEF reported in a press release on Wednesday.

The agency warned that the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) – already estimated to be more than 200,000 – could swell even higher because of the recent security incidents.

This will further strain the capacity of aid agencies in the CAR, one of the poorest countries in the world, to reach and support IDPs and other conflict-affected civilians.

The Government and rebels are slated to hold two weeks of peace talks in the capital, Bangui, starting next Friday, and UNICEF said it is concerned that the latest insecurity could jeopardize those talks as well as the release and reintegration of child soldiers serving with rebels.

“UNICEF hopes the CAR’s ongoing political dialogue will pave the way for peace and recovery, but right now the country is on the edge,” said Mahimbo Mdoe, UNICEF’s representative in the CAR.

“Since the beginning of the peace dialogue, many positive developments for women and children have flourished. More fighting can only undermine this progress. It is time for the international community to pressure all the parties to show restraint.”

Last year the Security Council authorized the establishment of a multi-dimensional UN presence (known as MINURCAT) in the CAR’s north and in eastern Chad, where related fighting and instability has uprooted hundreds of thousands of civilians.


* * *

MALAWI’S PRESIDENT AWARDED UN PRIZE FOR ENHANCING NATION’S FOOD SECURITY

The President of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, has been honoured by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for his efforts in achieving food security and in transforming the economy of his nation, among the poorest in Africa.

FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf presented President wa Mutharika with the Agricola Medal – the agency’s highest award – yesterday during a ceremony in the Malawian capital, Lilongwe.

Mr. Diouf noted that in 2005, thanks in a large part to the adoption of an Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme piloted by the Government of President wa Mutharika, Malawi was able to restore national food security by increasing access to fertilizers and improved seeds by poor farmers and other vulnerable population groups.

In addition, despite sharply rising food and energy prices earlier in the year, and the negative impact of climate change, Malawi has been able to contain food prices to the extent that economic growth for this year is expected to be around 8 per cent.

Malawi was also one of the few countries to have surpassed the agreement reached among ministers at the 2003 Maputo African heads of State and government conference for a minimum budget allocation of 10 per cent for agriculture, by allocating as much as 16 per cent to the sector, said the Director-General.

Agriculture is crucial to the population of 13.2 million in Malawi, a largely rural and landlocked country in Southern Africa, where some 35 per cent of the population was undernourished in 2004.

Previous recipients of the Agricola Medal include Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, former French president Jacques Chirac, Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Pope John Paul II, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and German ex-president Johannes Rau of Germany.


* * *

WORLD’S FASTEST ANIMAL, IN RACE FOR SURVIVAL, TO GET ADDED UN-BACKED PROTECTION

The critically endangered cheetah, the world’s fastest land animal, is set to obtain added international protection next week at a United Nations-backed conference seeking to strengthen conservation of species that often cross national borders.

The cheetah, which reaches speeds of up to 120 kilometres per hour but is now racing against extinction with only about 10,000 adults surviving, is among some 30 endangered land and marine animals on the agenda of the 9th conference of parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS).

“Species that migrate across countries and continents are facing ever greater hurdles from loss of habitat and feeding grounds to unsustainable use and the unfolding and often complex threats emerging from climate change,” said Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) which administers the CMS.

“Indeed the world is currently facing a sixth wave of extinctions mainly as a result of human impacts. Urgent and accelerated action is needed to ensure that a healthy, productive and functioning planet is handed on to the next generation,” he added.

More than 100 government representatives at the five-day conference, beginning Monday in Rome, will consider proposals to strengthen conservation by putting the animals on CMS appendix I, listing them as in danger of extinction, or appendix II, listing them as suffering from unfavourable conservation status and in need of international cooperation. Some of these animals are important economically, providing a significant source of tourism revenue.

Proposed steps range from tackling over-hunting to removing physical obstacles on the animals’ migratory paths such as border fences to calling for regional agreements for protection.

Migratory animals to be considered include:

The cheetah, which has suffered a dramatic 90 per cent decline over the past century, becoming extinct in 18 countries of its original range, with less than 10,000 adults surviving in Africa and a meagre 50 in Asia, mainly around Iran's Kavir desert, due to severe habitat loss, over-hunting and poor breeding in captivity.
The Saiga antelope, which used to roam the Eurasian steppes but is now on the brink of extinction for the second time in just 100 years. After being nearly exterminated in the 1920s, numbers went up to 2 million thanks to Soviet conservation efforts, but have now shrunk to just 50,000 due to hunting and obstacles on migration routes. Today they are confined to isolated pockets in Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia.
Barbary sheep, agile climbers of the Sahara and Sahel region of Africa, are now also threatened by unsustainable and illegal hunting. The species is proposed for appendix I, committing all parties to prohibit hunting and removing obstacles to their migration like fences or habitat conversion.
The African Wild Dog has been eradicated from Western and most of Central Africa, with fewer than 8,000 estimated to survive due to conflict with humans and other animals, as well as infectious diseases. Fences on migration paths also endanger them. The proposed Appendix II listing would call on nations to establish regional agreements for their protection.
Other animals include seven species of whales, dolphins and porpoises, such as the reclusive Irrawaddy dolphins which used to inhabit coastal areas and estuaries throughout south-east Asia. Today, habitat loss, live capture, entanglement in fishing nets, electrocution and boat collisions put the survival of the remaining small populations at risk.

The Black Sea Bottlenose Dolphin, unique to one of the most degraded marine environments in the world, has also suffered from uncontrolled hunting and by-catch, despite the ban on cetacean fishery in the sea since 1983, while the West African Manatee, one of the world’s most camera-shy species, has been endangered by their only significant threat, humankind, due to poaching, habitat loss and other environmental impacts.

Other animals on the agenda include three shark species, spiny dogfish, and seven birds, such as the Saker falcon, prized as hunting companions by royalty and the aristocracy in Central Asia; the Egyptian vulture, poisoned by feeding on carcasses of feral animals laced with pesticides; and the Peruvian tern, threatened by disturbance in its breeding grounds from human activity.

“The Convention on Migratory Species is an important part of our international cooperative response to such challenges. It reflects the shared responsibility of nations for these species as each year they attempt their epic journeys across continents and oceans,” Mr. Steiner said.

Robert Hepworth, Executive Secretary of UNEP-CMS, added: “Many migratory species are now important parts of the local and international economy, generating income and supporting livelihoods via industries such as tourism. For example, an estimated 150,000 people visit the Serengeti (in Tanzania and Kenya) annually in order to see its famous wildlife. Based on 2003 figures, the park generates income of $5.5 million from tourists.”


* * *

PANAMA: UN FOOD AGENCY PROVIDES ASSISTANCE TO THOUSANDS OF FLOOD VICTIMS

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is rushing assistance to about 15,000 people along Panama’s Caribbean coast, where floods following a week of heavy rains have destroyed homes, roads and other infrastructure and left locals in urgent need of help.

The number of Panamanians affected by the floods could rise to 25,000, WFP reported yesterday, as aid agencies struggle to reach more isolated indigenous communities along the coast. The national Government has declared a state of emergency in all affected areas along the coast.

WFP is distributing enough high-energy biscuits from its Central American emergency response hub in El Salvador to feed up to 15,000 people for a period of four to five days.

The biscuits, which require no cooking or other preparation, contain fortified food of a high nutritional value and have been made specifically to feed people caught up in emergencies, many of whom have lost their crops and animals, as well as access to kitchens and clean water.


* * *










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UrukNet - Daily Information from Occupied Iraq - newsletter 27 Nov 2008

UrukNet - Daily Information from Occupied Iraq - newsletter 27 Nov 2008
Obliterating Iraq
Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat's Blog
Pakistan Daily published a list of Iraqi academics assassinated in Iraq during the US-led occupation. This is a particularly meaningful aspect of the Iraq genocide, the extermination of its intellectual classes. It wasn't enough to invade and occupy what was once the most advanced country in the Middle East and destroy its economy. Iraq had to be obliterated, its history re-written and its future denied. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) representative Roger Wright said in the October 2004 report: "Iraq used to have one of the finest school systems in the Middle East." Who remembers now that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was awarded the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) prize for eradicating illiteracy in 1982!....


Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49121
From fast death to slow death: Palestinian refugees from Iraq trapped on the Syria-Iraq border
ReliefWeb
Having fled killings, kidnappings, torture, and death threats, about 3,000 Palestinian refugees from Iraq are currently stranded in three camps along the border between Syria and Iraq. Denied asylum and refugee rights, they are extremely vulnerable in poorly situated camps. The Syrian government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are both open to third country resettlement on humanitarian grounds and on the basis of individual choice. Therefore, the challenge now lies with both traditional and emerging resettlement countries, in collaboration with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to accept these Palestinian refugees from Iraq for resettlement, allowing the inhospitable camps to be closed...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49124
Muthana Harith al-Dari: "The Resistance will continue till the exit of the occupiers"
Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI)
The responsible for Information Department of the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) Dr Muthana Harith al-Dari clarified that the resistance in Iraq will continue until the exit of the occupiers from the land of Mesopotamia. Dr. Muthanna Hareth al Dari told in a news conference held in the Yemeni city of Hadeidah after attending the opening of Salih Mosque which the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) founded as a cultural and humanitarian project to resist and prevent the occupation through the written, audio-visual media. In addition to the efforts undertaken by AMSI, Muthanna al Dari informed the participant about the relief campaigns of AMSI to the victims of the sons of Iraq both living in their country or in exile...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49131
Gaza's death throes, and no one's listening
Sonja Karkar
What kind of government in the 21st century can deny another people basic human rights -- that is, the right to food, water, shelter, security and dignity? What kind of government imposes draconian sanctions on another people for democratically electing a government not to its liking? What kind of government seals a heavily populated territory of 1.5 million people so that no person can enter or leave without permission, fishermen cannot fish in their own waters, and world food aid cannot be delivered to the starving population? What kind of government shuts off fuel, water and electricity and then rains down on the people, bombs and artillery fire?....

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49130
A whoring, lying state
Khaled Amayreh
Israel routinely claims to be "civilized, and democratic." However, in truth, Israel is neither civilized nor democratic. In fact, one can safely claim that Israel is actually a criminal, barbarian and utterly uncivilized state that lives and thrives on murder, theft and mendacity. The following observations are an irrefutable proof showing that Israel differs very little from criminal states throughout history, past and present. Take, for example, the ongoing daily rampages by Jewish thugs, otherwise known as settlers, against Palestinians and their property in the southern West Bank town of Hebron...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49132
Iran in about-turn towards security agreement
Najmeh Bozorgmehr
The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad has been unusually silent about the Iraqi government’s approval of the security pact with the US. But that may be because it has been loathe to publicise its dramatic change of attitude towards the agreement. People close to the government in Tehran said that after initially opposing it – and asking its Shia allies in the Baghdad government to resist it – Tehran has been relatively satisfied with the last-minute changes demanded, and won, by Iraq. Analysts see an additional reason for the about-turn: the election of Barack Obama as US president...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49133
Thank You America, For Killing Us
RickB
I assume that was a rejected headline for this AP report, instead they went with- Iraqi parliament OKs US troops for 3 more years- yeah they okayed it, real casual like- sure fellas you stick around for a while longer, it’s cool. But, it gets worse- (...) i>The war has claimed more than 4,200 American lives and killed a far greater, untold number of Iraqis, consumed huge reserves of money and resources and eroded the global stature of the United States, even among its closest allies.... But really 'untold number of Iraqis' well yes it is untold by you because you refuse to use the figures from peer reviewed scientific studies that in all other conflicts are accepted methodology, nor the survey results and extrapolation that tell us the untold truth it’s over a million dead. At this point pulling that kind of shit is basically Holocaust denial motherfucker...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49137
The Broken State
Nir Rosen
The situation in Afghanistan is not as bad as you've heard – its worse. Nir Rosen reports from Kabul and its surrounding provinces as the Taliban attempt to wrest control from Hamid Karzai's government. (...) As I saw on the road to Ghazni, the Taliban have succeeded in essentially cutting off Kabul from the rest of the country. The road southwest to Kandahar was lethal. "The Kabul to Ghazni road is gone," a British intelligence officer told me, "the Ghazni to Gardez road is exceedingly bad, the Wardak road is sh***, the Jalalabad road is sliding. The ambushes have become routine."...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49136
Kristallnacht in Hebron
Khaled Amayreh
Unconcerned about arrest by the police or prosecution by the Israeli justice system, fanatical Jewish settlers in the Palestinian town of Hebron (Al-Khalil) have been attacking Palestinians, damaging and ransacking their property, exactly like Nazi thugs did to Jewish-owned property in Germany 80 years ago.
The settlers, who claim to be acting in the name of true Judaism, espouse a messianic doctrine advocating violence and terror against non- Jews in Israel-Palestine for the purpose of creating a pure Jewish kingdom that would be ruled by Halacha, or Jewish religious law. The settlers, who represent the core of religious Zionism, believe that the ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in the Holy Land will eventually usher the messianic age and accelerate the appearance of the Jewish Messiah, or Redeemer, who would bring about redemption for Jews and rule the entire world from Jerusalem...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49138
Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory No. 47/2008 (20 - 26 Nov. 2008)
PCHR - Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
Israeli violations of international law and humanitarian law escalated in the OPT during the reporting period (20 – 26 November 2008): Shooting: During the reporting period, IOF wounded 7 Palestinian civilians, including 3 children, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On 21 November 2008, 5 Palestinian civilians, including 2 children, were wounded when IOF troops opened fire at dozens of civilians who organized a peaceful demonstration in protest to attempts of settlers to re-establish their presence in the evacuated "Homesh" settlement, northwest of Nablus. On 26 November 2008, a Palestinian child was seriously wounded during clashes between dozens of Palestinian civilians and IOF at the entrance of Qalandya refugee camp, south of Ramallah. During the reporting period, a Palestinian civilian was wounded when IOF used force against peaceful demonstrations organized in protest to the construction of the Annexation Wall west of Ramallah....

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49127
Mullahs Regional Hegemons, Code Pink in Iran
Reza Fiyouzat, Revolutionary Flowerpot Society
This one's a good one! Found it on Anti-War, who got it from Middle East Times (Nov. 26, 2008). I love this because now I, and thousands more like me, don't have to spell it out for the western leftists anymore. The ayatollahs in Iran now boast about the fact that they have become a regional hegemon. Congratulations, and I couldn't have said it better! Now ... a note to the uninitiated ... you don't become a power, be it a regional one, by playing nice all the time. But, things like that seem to have lost their ability to cause outrage, or even concern these days, among those that should be most offended by it....

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49125
Iraq parliament passes U.S. security pact
Ahmed Rasheed and Khalid al-Ansary, Reuters
Iraq's parliament on Thursday approved a landmark security pact with the United States that paves the way for U.S. forces to withdraw by the end of 2011, taking the country a big step closer to full sovereignty. The deal, which parliament linked after days of fractious negotiations to a series of promised political reforms and a public referendum next year, brings in sight an end to the U.S. military presence that began with the 2003 invasion...Lawmakers in Iraq's 275 seat parliament passed the deal with a majority of 149 out of 198 present, Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said...


Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49120
Israeli Crimes Under Observation of I.P.O
Kawther Salam
Ambassador Norma Giocochea Estenoz, the permanent representative of Cuba before the UN in Vienna, and Dr. Hans Koechler, President of the International Progress Organization, delivered the strongest speeches among other participants representing NGOs as well as international organizations and governments of various countries, among them many Arabs, during the special meeting in observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Dr. Hans Koechler exposed the Israeli violations of the International treaties and UN resolutions which must be implemented under the observance of the International community...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49129
Gaza: A Human Tragedy under Siege
Hany Ramadan
The Gaza Strip has been living under an Israeli 16-month-old despicable siege, which is now reaching its most harshly shocking pinnacle. In addition to blocking the flow of food, medical supplies, and basic needs, Israel has recently barred the fuel supplies from reaching the impoverished strip. As a result, wide blackouts have reigned over the besieged city of about 1.6 million civilians. The majority of Gazans are now using candles to light up their homes and streets...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49128
Petition for Palestine Directed to the UN Secretary General
Kawther Salam
Today I went to the United Nations in Vienna, to take part in an event with occasion of the "Annual Observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People". The representatives of many countries and international organizations assisted to this event. Some of them gave speeches. The speech of the chairwoman of the session, the representative of Cuba, called my attention because her reference to international treaties and how she characterized the occupation. She stated clearly that the occupation is a crime against humanity. Other persons who called my attention were the representative of the "International Progress Organization", who presented an outline of the treaties and international laws violated by Israel...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49134
The US-Iraq Deal Doesn't Bode Well
Robert Dreyfuss
... The ruling alliance of Shiite religious parties and Kurds, who moved forward with the tacit support of Iran, steamrollered opposition to the accord, which passed with at least 144 votes out of 198 members of parliament in attendance. "A huge number of members left the country, supposedly on hajj [to Mecca] or for other reasons," said a leading Iraqi insider. But, although the vote is a victory for Maliki, it says little about the future stability and security of the Iraqi state. And it says even less about the future of US-Iraq relations...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49126
Gaza Christians without Sunday mass
Yusef Daher, Jerusalem Inter-Church Centre - JIC
On Sunday, November 23rd -The Israeli authorities banned the Papal Nuncio in Israel Archbishop Antonio Franco from entering Gaza and celebrating mass there, despite previous coordination with relevant parties at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and senior Israeli Army command since last Tuesday. Papal Nuncio Archbishop Franco arrived this morning to Erez Crossing at about 8:15 AM, accompanied by Latin Patriarchate priests Fr. Shawqi Baterian and Fr. Humam Khzouz as well with the Nunciature secretary, but was banned to enter to Gaza...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49123
The Attack in Mumbai II
Moon of Alabama
...From asking "Qui bono?" I arrive at the BJP's door. The attack, designed to created fight-outs with police, killed the man who was the biggest danger for the BJP as he was revealing Hindu terrorism and made the BJP campaign against Muslim terrorism seem bigot. The current attack, which will reliably be charged on some Muslim entity, will help the BJP win against the Congress party. But me arriving at that door does not mean that the BJP really is responsible here, I only find it possible to likely...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49135
The struggle is not over: Remembering Mohammed al-Kurd
Pam Rasmussen writing from the United States, Live from Palestine
The saying that a man's home is his castle goes back to the 1500s. Whether it is a mansion or a mud hut, a home to which you can retreat and be safe is a basic human need. But since 2001, Abu Kamel (Mohammed al-Kurd), his wife and five children were forced to fight every day for the right to stay in the East Jerusalem home his family had lived in for decades. And although the Jewish settlers who tried to push them out -- literally -- didn't put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, they might as well have. Two weeks after the al-Kurds were finally evicted from their home on 9 November, Abu Kamel suffered a fatal heart attack. Now, Um Kamel (his wife, Fawzieh) who I grew to admire and respect while I camped on their patio as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) must wage the fight alone...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49122
Aide: Iraqi government rejects Sunni pact demands
AP
An aide to Iraq's prime minister says the government's Shiite bloc has rejected two conditions set by mostly Sunni lawmakers for their support of a security pact with the United States. The dispute is delaying a vote on the pact, which is now scheduled for Thursday. The deal would allow U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for three more years. Sami al-Askari, an aide to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, says the lawmakers have demanded the repeal of a law designed to weed out senior members of Saddam Hussein's now-outlawed Baath Party from government agencies...


Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49119
THIS IS GAZA ~~ A REPORT BY AMIRA HASS
Desertpeace
If it`s not the power getting cut, leaving entire neighborhoods in darkness, then it`s the water not reaching the top floors or the cooking gas running out. If you have an electric generator, some small part of it is bound to be broken and unfixable, because even before the hermetic three-week siege, Israel prohibited bringing in any spare parts for cars, machines and household electric appliances. And if you somehow manage to find the money for a generator that was smuggled through the tunnels (its price has doubled or tripled since last month), it`s at the expense of buying a heater (not electric, of course), English lessons, clothes for the children and visits to the doctor. This is Gaza in November 2008...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=49118


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