...it may be that the Iranian government has decided that the public statement taking responsibility for an attack that killed 14 people and injured many more provides it with enough leverage to expose what it considers American double standards or hypocrisy regarding terrorism.
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"Things on the ground," e-mailed a friend from a groaning Zimbabwe, "are absolutely shocking -- systematic violence, abductions, brutal murders. Hundreds of activists hospitalized, indeed starting to go possibly into the thousands." The military, he says, is "going village by village with lists of MDC [Movement for Democratic Change] activists, identifying them and then either abducting them or beating them to a pulp, leaving them for dead."
In late April, about the time this e-mail was written, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa -- Zimbabwe's influential neighbor -- addressed a four-page letter to President Bush. Rather than coordinating strategy to end Zimbabwe's nightmare, Mbeki criticized the United States, in a text packed with exclamation points, for taking sides against President Robert Mugabe's government and disrespecting the views of the Zimbabwean people. "He said it was not our business," recalls one American official, and "to butt out, that Africa belongs to him." Adds another official, "Mbeki lost it; it was outrageous."
It is also not an aberration. South Africa has actively blocked United Nations discussions about human rights abuses in Zimbabwe -- and in Belarus, Cuba, North Korea and Uzbekistan. South Africa was the only real democracy to vote against a resolution demanding that the Burmese junta stop ethnic cleansing and free jailed dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. When Iranian nuclear proliferation was debated in the Security Council, South Africa dragged out discussions and demanded watered-down language in the resolution. South Africa opposed a resolution condemning rape and attacks on civilians in Darfur -- and rolled out the red carpet for a visit from Sudan's genocidal leader. In the General Assembly, South Africa fought against a resolution condemning the use of rape as a weapon of war because the resolution was not sufficiently anti-American.
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When Plan Colombia (the multibillion dollar US assistance program targeted at curbing drug smuggling and supporting Colombia against armed guerrillas) started, coca was cultivated in 12 of Colombia's 34 provinces. Today it is grown in 23 of those provinces.
In 2006, after five years of Plan Colombia, four years of the regional Andean Counterdrug Initiative, and after spending $5.5 billion, some 1,000 metric tons of cocaine were produced between Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. That's about the same amount that was produced in 2002 when President Ãlvaro Uribe took office.
The head of the White House Office of Narcotics and Drug Control Program, John Walters, admitted at a press conference in Haiti recently that last year that cocaine production had risen to 1,400 metric tons in 2007 – a whopping 40 percent hike. Not surprisingly, his staff is scrambling to rephrase that.
Washington is focusing on the most easily replaceable link of the cocaine production chain – the impoverished campesino – through aerial spraying and forced eradication. These poor farmers feel unfairly singled out, since too many at the top of the chain – drug traffickers and illegal armed combatants – survive or are quickly replaced by equally brutal traffickers. This administration's policy of targeting the poorest is wrong.
Law enforcement and interdiction are essential to control drug trafficking, but not sufficient. A massive increase in rural development would provide a far better chance of reducing the drug supply flowing from the Andean ridge countries than eradication alone.
Colombia is faced with a continuing insurgency, which finances itself from drug revenues, and the Peruvian and Bolivian coca growers are among the continent's most impoverished indigenous communities. That's why it's so important for Washington to support a massive increase in rural infrastructure investment, rural governance, and public service extension into those communities now.
Congress made a good start last year by voting to shift Plan Colombia funding away from military to economic development and rule of law. Unfortunately, the administration opposed it. Now Congress needs to go one step further and push this administration, and the next one, to rethink a counterdrug policy that has not achieved its goals. Fundamental changes are needed in both supply and demand policies if there is going to be a decline in cocaine trafficking into the US.
In 2002, just under 9 percent of the US population from 12 to 25 years of age admitted to using cocaine the previous year. In 2006, the same percentage said they snorted cocaine. Since the population has grown, simple math shows that in absolute terms many more used cocaine.
A one-size-fits-all demand reduction policy essentially aims to put everyone who touches cocaine in jail – whether they are one-time or weekend users, addicts or traffickers. Certainly for traffickers, the only option is more effective law enforcement that works closely with other nations to go after their money, their assets, and their structures.
For cocaine users, it is time to build on the best models of dealing with addicts through a public health lens, with hospitals, clinics, and treatment replacing jails. And a massive public service effort should be launched to target recreational users that equates cocaine use with drunken driving – unacceptable destructive behavior. Their weekend fun kills young people in Colombia and Los Angeles and Miami. It has to stop.
Today on Fox News, the former New York bureau chief of the Washington Times, Liz Trotta, discussed Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) recent remarks about Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. After mistakenly calling Obama "€œOsama",€ Trotta joked that it would be nice to see them both killed:
TROTTA: And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that sombody knock off Osama — Obama. Well, both, if we could.
HOST: Talk about how you really feel.
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One of Sen. Hillary Clinton's top financial supporters offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization's two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse the New York Democrat, a high-ranking official with YDA told The Huffington Post.
Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment magnate and longtime Clinton supporter, denied the allegation. But four independent sources said that just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Saban called YDA President David Hardt and offered what was perceived as a lucrative proposal: $1 million would be made available for the group if Hardt and the organization's other uncommitted superdelegate backed Clinton.
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“Main Core,†a program that authorizes “computer searches through massive [unspecified] electronic databases†in order to discover “potential threats†in the event of a “national emergencyâ€:
According to a senior government official…â€There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.†… One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.
These so-called “Continuity of Governance†plans, Radar notes, “are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts.†“Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets,†said a former military operative. Furthermore, the NSA domestic surveillance program reportedly “suppl[ies] data to Main Core.â€
According to Radar, a “number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations†say Main Core is strikingly similar to what Comey refused to authorize at Ashcroft’s bedside:
[T]he program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government’s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
“We are at the edge of a cliff and we’re about to fall off,†said constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability.â€
Israel and Syria have begun indirect peace talks, mediated by Turkey, aimed at reaching a comprehensive peace accord, the three governments announced in a coordinated statement Wednesday. The disclosure was the first public confirmation of the negotiations by all three sides.
The statement is official confirmation of what was already widely suspected of being ongoing contact between Syria and Israel, directed by Turkey. In the past months, Israel had been reluctant to make the negotiations public. But the negotiations now seem to have made enough progress that all sides decided they should acknowledge the meetings.
A senior official in the office of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the talks with Syria and the decision to make them public had been coordinated and agreed with the United States. The public disclosure that Israel, albeit indirectly, is talking with Syria, one of its most implacable enemies and a sponsor of groups that both Israel and the United States consider terrorists, came less than a week after President Bush, speaking to the Israeli Parliament, created a stir by criticizing those who would negotiate with “terrorists and radicals.â€
Mr. Bush’s remarks have become an issue in the American presidential campaign because they were widely perceived as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic front-runner, who has advocated the kind of engagement that Israel and Syria are now undertaking.
The Hezbollah-led Shiite opposition and the Lebanese government backed by the West and Saudi Arabia, reached an agreement on Wednesday to resolve an 18-month political crisis that has crippled the country and recently triggered the worst fighting since the 1975-1990 civil war.
After five days of fraught negotiations among Lebanon’s rival political groups in Doha, the Qatari authorities said the agreement called for moves within 24 hours for Parliament in Beirut to begin the process of electing Gen. Michel Suleiman, the commander of Lebanon’s army, as president.
The deal was also expected to lead to the formation of a cabinet in which Hezbollah, supported by Iran and Syria, along with its allies will enjoy the veto power it had sought in the negotiations .
Under the trms of the agreement, the government will also debate anew electoral law designed to provide better representation in the country’s sectarian system of power-sharing.
US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran in the upcoming months, before the end of his term, Army Radio quoted a senior official in Jerusalem as saying Tuesday.
The official claimed that a senior member of the president's entourage, which concluded a trip to Israel last week, said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for.
However, the official continued, "the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice" was preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an attack on the Islamic Republic, for the time being.
The report stated that according to assessments in Israel, recent turmoil in Lebanon, where Hizbullah de facto established control of the country, was advancing an American attack.
In a supplemental report to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) made public today, the U.S. government revealed that it has no comprehensive policy in place for dealing with youth detained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, including nearly 2,500 youths under the age of 18 that have been held in U.S.-run facilities overseas to date. In a separate report, the American Civil Liberties Union charged that the lack of safeguards in place for the treatment of youth under the age of 18 in U.S. military custody violates internationally accepted standards.
"It is shocking to know that the U.S. is holding hundreds of juveniles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even more disturbing that there is no comprehensive policy in place that will protect their rights as children," said Jamil Dakwar, Director of the ACLU Human Rights Program. "Juveniles and former child soldiers should be treated first and foremost as candidates for rehabilitation and reintegration into society, not subjected to further victimization."
According to the ACLU, the lack of protections and consideration for the juvenile status of detainees violates the obligations of the U.S. under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict that the U.S. ratified in 2002, as well as universally accepted international norms. The CRC oversees compliance with the Optional Protocol, which mandates countries to protect children under 18 from military recruitment and guarantees basic protections to former child soldiers. The CRC will question a U.S. government delegation on its compliance with Protocol obligations on May 22 in Geneva.
The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children's children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like "liberty" and "individual freedom" invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to "promote the general welfare" have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn't necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam's palace grounds wailing "The Greeks are coming." Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what's happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft's essential imperatives: connect the dots.
The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments -- genuine savings -- in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.
And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek "bundlers" who turn the spigots of cash on and off.
The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly "veneration for wealth" are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. "Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.
In the most cynical act I can recall, Myanmar's military leaders have denied the right to life of tens thousands of refugees of Cyclone Nargis for greed and political reasons. Rather than pulling out all stops by accepting all aid possible to save as many lives as possible, the government is deliberately allowing death on a massive scale to ensure they are credited with the aide that does get through, and to allow some aide to cyphoned off to line their pockets. I'm sure they have decided they already have too many people, and the storm presents a means to cull the herd.The directors of several relief organizations in Myanmar said Wednesday that some of the international aid arriving into the country for the victims of Cyclone Nargis was being stolen, diverted or warehoused by the country’s army.
The United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said there was a possibility that “a significant tropical cyclone†— a second big storm — would form within the next 24 hours and head across the Irrawaddy Delta, the region that suffered most from the first storm that struck on May 3.
In Yangon, the main commercial city, winds were already beginning to whip up Wednesday evening, but it was unclear how strong the storm would become.
Thailand’s prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, flew to Yangon on Wednesday to persuade Myanmar’s leaders to allow more foreign aid workers into the country. The members of the military junta told him they were in control of the relief operations and had no need for foreign experts, he told reporters after returning to Bangkok, The Associated Press reported.
The government said there were no outbreaks of disease or starvation among the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the cyclone. In Yangon, Mr. Sundaravej met the prime minister, Lt. Gen. Thein Sein, The A.P. said.
The aid directors in Myanmar declined to be quoted directly on their concerns about the stolen relief supplies for fear of angering the ruling junta and jeopardizing their operations, although Marcel Wagner, country director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, confirmed that aid was being diverted by the army. He said the issue would become an increasing problem, although he declined to give further details because of the sensitivity of the situation.
When a group of Iraqi envoys headed to Iran recently, they were fully prepared for some tense moments. But they also hoped to come away with something to show for it: pledges of cooperation on weakening Shiite militias in Iraq.
Instead, they got a scolding from some of Iran's most powerful voices - accusing the Iraqi leadership of bowing to Washington and forgetting about Tehran's support for Shiites persecuted by Saddam Hussein.
The swipes during the April 30-May 2 meetings - described to The Associated Press by members of the Iraqi delegation and other senior officials - signified more than a passing spat between the main Shiite centers of gravity in the region.
Relations between Iraq's Shiite-led government and the rulers in neighboring Iran have come under unprecedented strains as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki moves against rivals and negotiates long-term pacts with Washington.
There's almost no chance it could lead to a full-blown rupture. Iran's influence runs too deep in Iraq: from the main political bloc in al-Maliki's government to elements within the powerful Mahdi Army militia.
[..]On Monday, the hard-line Iranian newspaper Jomhuri-e-Eslami accused al-Maliki of lacking backbone in alks with Washington, which include the long-range status of U.S. military operations in Iraq. The daily, which is considered close to Iran's ruling clerics, claimed Washington wants a "full-fledged colony" in Iraq.
It was a rare public jab at al-Maliki, a Shiite. But it was mild compared with the closed-door recriminations during the high-level Iraqi visit, according to accounts by Shiite politicians close to Iraq's prime minister.
The five-member delegation sought to pressure and cajole the Iranians into cutting suspected support for Shiite militias that have battled U.S. and Iraqi forces. But the Iraqis mostly received a scolding, the politicians said.
"The Iranians were very tough and even angry with us," said one of the delegates in the Tehran talks. "They accused us of being ungrateful to what Iran has done for the Shiites during Saddam's rule and of siding with the Americans against Iran."
The Iraqi politicians, five in all, spoke to the AP in separate interviews on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Two of them took part in the talks with the Iranians. The rest were briefed on the meetings.
At one point, a key leader within Iran's Revolutionary Guards accused the Iraqi delegation and their leaders of being tools of Washington and showing ingratitude for years of Iranian support to Iraqi's majority Shiites, who suffered attacks and persecution under Saddam, the politicians said.
Brig. Gen. Ghassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force unit of the Guards, accused the Iraqis of offering U.S. forces "a permanent home on our doorsteps," the politicians told the AP.
The Iranians also rejected what the Iraqis called "evidence" of Iranian ties to Shiite militiamen, including seized weapons that bore Iranian markings, the politicians said.
Responding to accusations that Shiite militiamen were training in camps outside Tehran, the Iranians claimed the facilities were being used to house members of the Mahdi Army who fled Iraq to escape arrest.
The leader of the Mahdi Army, militant Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, has lived in Iran for the past year - partly because he fears for his life in Iraq and because he is studying for the high clerical rank of ayatollah.
Shaken by a Hezbollah military offensive in recent days, Lebanon's pro-Western parties have launched an intensive campaign to lobby allies in Washington, Europe and the Arab world to intervene diplomatically or even militarily on their behalf, officials here said.
But there was little sign Monday that the West was prepared to intervene.
[..]"Yes, we are maintaining a watchful eye on the area, but not any more than we have been recently," a Defense official in Washington told The Times, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Israel bombed Hezbollah for 33 days in 2006 without significantly reducing the militia's fighting power or audacity.
Unlike Iraq or the Persian Gulf, Lebanon is devoid of strategically vital oil and gas reserves. But March 14 supporters hope the Americans and others will come to their aid.
"We're not asking them to fight our fight for us," said Mouawad, the minister. "But at least don't let us be slaughtered by total indifference."
There is no evidence that voting by noncitizens is a significant problem. Illegal immigrants do their best to remain in the shadows, to avoid attracting government attention and risking deportation. It is hard to imagine that many would walk into a polling place, in the presence of challengers and police, and try to cast a ballot.
There is, however, ample evidence that a requirement of proof of citizenship will keep many eligible voters from voting. Many people do not have birth certificates or other acceptable proof of citizenship, and for some people, that proof is not available. One Missouri voter, Lillie Lewis, said at a news conference last week that officials in Mississippi, where she was born, told her they had no record of her birth.
Proof of citizenship is just one of an array of new barriers to voting that have been springing up across the country. Indiana adopted a tough new photo ID voting requirement, over objections from Democrats that it would prevent eligible voters from casting a ballot. The critics were right. In last week’s Indiana primary, a group of about 12 nuns in their 80s and 90s were prevented from voting because they lacked acceptable ID.
As with Missouri’s proposed amendment, the driving force behind strict voter ID requirements in general is not a genuine effort to prevent fraud, since there is virtually no evidence that in-person voter fraud is occurring. It is, rather, the Republican Party’s electoral calculations. Barriers at the polls drive down voter turnout, especially among the poor, racial minorities and students — groups that are less likely than average to have driver’s licenses, and that are more likely than average to vote Democratic.
The imposition of harsh new requirements to vote has become a partisan issue, but it should not be. These rules are an assault on democracy itself. The current conservative Supreme Court showed last month, in its ruling upholding the Indiana ID law, that it will not perform its historical role of protecting voters. That puts the burden on state legislators, governors, state courts and ordinary citizens to ensure that the right to vote is not taken away for partisan political gain.
At least half a dozen countries have also said in the past four years that they are specifically planning to conduct enrichment or reprocessing of nuclear fuel, a prospect that could dramatically expand the global supply of plutonium and enriched uranium, according to U.S. and international nuclear officials and arms-control experts.
Much of the new interest is driven by economic considerations, particularly the soaring cost of fossil fuels. But for some Middle Eastern states with ready access to huge stocks of oil or natural gas, such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the investment in nuclear power appears to be linked partly to concerns about a future regional arms race stoked in part by Iran's alleged interest in such an arsenal, the officials said.
Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.
The Pentagon program, which clearly violated U.S. law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.
The office of the official responsible for protecting federal workers from political interference was raided by F.B.I. agents on Tuesday as part of an investigation into whether he himself mixed politics with official business.
The raid took place at the office of Scott J. Bloch, the head of the Office of Special Counsel. Computers and documents were seized by agents trying to determine whether Mr. Bloch obstructed justice by hiring an outside company to “scrub†his computer files, The Associated Press reported. Investigators also searched Mr. Bloch’s home in suburban Virginia after obtaining a subpoena.
“It is not clear to us what they are searching for,†James Mitchell, a spokesman for the office, told Reuters. “We are cooperating with law enforcement.†Mr. Mitchell said about 20 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation took part in the raid.
The Office of Special Counsel gives advice to federal employees on which activities are proper and which are not allowed under the Hatch Act, which is supposed to guard against direct political interference in governmental affairs. Mr. Bloch’s duties including shielding whistle-blowers who disclose such political meddling.
Mr. Bloch was in the news a year ago when his office began to look into political briefings given to employees of several agencies by aides to Karl Rove, who was then President Bush’s chief political adviser. The White House insisted at the time that the briefings met the definitions of allowable activities.
Mr. Bloch’s critics quickly accused him of announcing an inquiry into the Rove-inspired briefings simply to draw attention away from his own shortcomings. At the time, he was the target of a complaint filed by a group of employees who accused him of trying to dismantle his own agency, of illegally barring employees from talking to journalists and of reducing a backlog of whistle-blower complaints by simply discarding old cases.
On a frozen island near the North Pole, a huge hole has been blasted out of the side of an Arctic mountain, and a tunnel has been drilled deep into the rock. When the facility under construction here is completed, it will be lined with one-meter-thick concrete, fitted with two high-security blast-proof airlock doors, and built to withstand nuclear war, global warming, terrorism, and the collapse of the earth's energy supplies.
It's known as the "Doomsday Vault," and in it will be stored millions of seeds and mankind's hope for the future of the world's food supply. The idea is that in the event of massive ecological destruction, those seeds could be used to reconstruct the planet's agricultural systems. Exactly who might remain to begin replanting the earth after such a catastrophe is only one of the questions this astounding project raises. The more immediate question is, are seeds in peril?
The answer is yes, especially the seeds that provide us with food, fiber, and fuel. Both the diversity and the integrity of seeds are threatened, in the wild and on our farms. They are being put at risk by agricultural technologies, patents and corporate ownership, and the overall degradation of the environment. The plight of seeds is one of the most important environmental stories of our time. Until now, however, this critical issue has not received the attention it deserves.
Seeds are as critical to our survival as air, water, and soil. And yet despite the everyday miracles that they perform, we tend to take them for granted. Seeds sustain the beauty and vitality of the earth. Seeds are essential to the regenerative capacity of the planet. We will need their natural resilience and adaptability even more as temperatures rise.
[..]We find ourselves at a dramatic turning point for life on earth. Population and consumption are rapidly expanding. Industrial food production is exhausting the planet's basic biological support systems, making them even more vulnerable to the effects of global warming. The natural world is experiencing catastrophic losses of biodiversity, fresh water, and fertile soil. All of these trends are threatening seeds and forcing us to take a careful look at how we will feed ourselves in the future. It comes down to this: Whoever controls the future of seeds controls the future of life on earth.
Is industrial agriculture, with its focus on chemical and genetic technologies, the best choice for ensuring a healthy future? Genetic engineering is a commercial technology controlled by private corporations, who use it to dominate agricultural production from seed to stomach and to profit from every bite. Given the enormous environmental stress the planet is under right now and increasing demands on our natural resources from all forms of human activity, can this one technology provide for our food and environmental security? The answer is, unequivocally, no.
Russia's deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war "very close", a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday.
Separately, in comments certain to fan rising tension between Moscow and Tbilisi, the "foreign minister" of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia.
"We literally have to avert war," Temur Iakobashvili, a Georgian State Minister, told reporters in Brussels.
Asked how close to such a war the situation was, he replied: "Very close, because we know Russians very well."
"We know what the signals are when you see propaganda waged against Georgia. We see Russian troops entering our territories on the basis of false information," he said.
Three words -- high food prices -- emerged like a gatecrasher at an event hosted by the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) here that was originally billed as a celebration of the bank’s new vision for poverty eradication in Asia.
Participants at the event discussed the AsDB’s ‘Strategy 2020’ -- the long- term strategic framework (LTSF) for the 2008-2020 period -- and raised the alarm about the current global food crisis. It is a reality that the bank cannot ignore, they said, in light of the millions who could be condemned to a life of hunger and poverty in the region.
"The rising food prices are a threat to food security and a threat to poverty reduction, and we stress that food security must be adopted as a challenge of the LTSF," D. Subba Rao, secretary of India’s finance ministry, said during a Sunday morning seminar for the central bank governors of the AsDB’s 67 member countries.
"The food crisis cannot be remedied through emergency measures. We have to put back money in rural development," added Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
They were comments echoed by a ranking finance official from Bangladesh, who said that "the food problem is not a cyclical problem but a structural problem."
Such concerns exposed a deep flaw in the bank’s new quest to direct development in Asia. The LTSF makes little reference to aiding the continent’s agriculture sector in the rural areas -- home to a majority of the 600 million Asians living in absolute poverty, on less the one dollar a day.
A spokesman for the Iraqi government's Baghdad security operations says 925 people have been killed in Sadr City. The spokesman, Tahseen al-Sheikhly, said Wednesday 2,600 others have been wounded. Sadr City has been the scene of fierce clashes pitting U.S. and Iraqi forces against Shi'ite militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The death toll announced Wednesday is much higher than previous estimates, which indicated about 400 people had been killed in Sadr City in the past month.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has vowed to disarm militias by force and disband the Shi'ite Mahdi Army, Sunni insurgent groups and al-Qaida in Iraq.
