After Arrest on Boat Delivering Humanitarian Aid to Gaza
Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire speaks to us from her jail cell in Israel. She was taken into custody along with twenty others, including former US Congress member Cynthia McKinney, when the Israeli military boarded their ship in international waters as it tried to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Democracy Now for more
By Frida Berrigan | June 30, 2009 Foreign Policy In Focus
Editor: John Feffer
The phrase “Obama has a lot on his plate” is the understatement of the year. The president has a to-do list a mile long, and every day a new crisis (like the coup in Honduras) gets added to the list. Can we really fault him if he sneaks the occasional smoke?
But before he heads out to the presidential woods, one of the tasks still undone is to update and revise U.S. arms export policy. The last official version of U.S. arms export policy is from the Clinton years. In addition to the usual rhetoric about promoting regional stability, ensuring U.S. military superiority, and promoting “peaceful conflict resolution and arms control, human rights, democratization,” Presidential Decision Directive 34 (February 1995) inserted a new consideration: “enhanc[ing] the ability of the U.S. defense industrial base to meet U.S. defense requirements and maintain long term military superiority at lower costs.” In other words, a potential arms sale should be judged in part on whether it is good for weapons manufacturers.
Not every administration needs a formal export policy. Under the guise of the global war on terror, President George W. Bush fast-tracked weapons sales, released countries from arms embargoes, and pumped more money into foreign military aid. His policy was — in essence —sell, sell, sell, and he did it without issuing a formal policy statement.
But now, President Barack Obama needs to decisively break with Bush era practices. Unfortunately, so far the administration is opting for less clarity and more verbiage.
FPIF for more
By PARTHA CHATTERJEE
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s (1922-2009) ebullience and introversion easily made him. the most exciting instrumentalist.
THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Ali Akbar Khan. Any raga played by him received his distinctive, multidimensional treatment.
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, who passed away on June 18, was perhaps the most gifted of all the instrumentalists to have graced the Hindustani music scene in the past hundred years, that is, in the era of recorded music and the public concert stage. Those who have had the privilege of having heard sarod players of generations earlier than Ali Akbar’s have, almost to the man, put their prejudices aside, to acknowledge him as the most complete of all the instrumentalists. His knowledge of the grammar of ragas was formidable. In this respect, he was equal to his sister, the unsung genius Annapoorna Debi, and his former brother-in-law Pandit Ravi Shankar. His interpretation of the roop and aakaar, inner and outer raiments of many ragas, left both the connoisseur and the layman utterly astonished.
Much has been said of his command of varying tempi – laya – and rightly so; it was as adventurous as that of his confrere, Ravi Shankar, but something in his mercurial personality made it so beguiling. Mind you, this quality would come and go; he was not a consistent performer, but when it was there he was the King. The romantic vaishnav in him would have scoffed at the idea. On a good day, his laya manipulation combined with his insight into a given raga could create magic.
Frontline for more
AP Published: July 02, 2009, 17:24
Washington: After his capture, Saddam Hussain told the FBI that he falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, which he considered a bigger threat than the United States.
Saddam also dismissed Osama Bin Laden as a “zealot,” and said he had never personally met the Al Qaida leader and that the Iraqi government did not cooperate with the terrorist group against the US, according to FBI interview notes made public by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute.
The institute obtained the FBI summaries through a Freedom of Information Act request and posted them on its website on Wednesday.
The former Iraqi leader was interviewed by the FBI after he was captured in December 2003, nine months after the US and its allies invaded Iraq.
Gulf News for more
By Yotam Feldman
Ramallah’s intellectual elite, foreigners and curious spectators gathered last Saturday at the Friends School in Ramallah to hear writer and political activist Naomi Klein lecture to a packed auditorium.
Following a musical interlude by a string quintet, one of whose members is blind, Klein took the stage. She chose to speak in Ramallah about her Jewish roots.
“There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way,” she said. The debate boils down to the question: “Never again to everyone, or never again to us?… [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card…There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that say, ‘Never again to anyone.'”
Haaretz for more
Goa’s land allocation policy to SEZs has been indicted for massive irregularities by the Comptroller and Auditor General. The list of violations is more or less a case the fence eating the crop, finds out Himanshu Upadhyaya.
30 June 2009 – In an audit report tabled in Goa assembly during the last week of March 2009, the supreme audit institution – Comptroller and Auditor General of India – has once again pronounced critical remarks on SEZs, this time around on massive irregularities in land allotments by Goa Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) to SEZ promoters.
The main opposition party (BJP) as well as resistance movements against SEZs were quick to grasp the moment putting forward a demand for CBI probe and criminal inquiry. The CAG audit report had probed into land allotments to Dona Paula IT Park on the outskirts of Panaji (2,85,296 square metres), the Quintol Food Park (4,19,000 square metres) and seven SEZs (38,41,000 square metres) as part of the performance audit of government companies.
On closer examination what emerges is an even more worrisome problem. Land acquired in past for ‘public purpose’ remains unutilised and undeveloped for years, and despite this, repeat land acquisition quests were undertaken by the government. Worse, the current legal regime has no space for handing back such land to persons from whom it was acquired in the first place.
India Together for more
July 3rd, 2009
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org
Much ado about nothing?
What is there about the Iranian election of June 12 that has led to it being one of the leading stories in media around the world every day since? Elections whose results are seriously challenged have taken place in most countries at one time or another in recent decades.
Countless Americans believe that the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen by the Republicans, and not just inside the voting machines and in the counting process, but prior to the actual voting as well with numerous Republican Party dirty tricks designed to keep poor and black voters off voting lists or away from polling stations. The fact that large numbers of Americans did not take to the streets day after day in protest, as in Iran, is not something we can be proud of. Perhaps if the CIA, the Agency for International Development (AID), several US government-run radio stations, and various other organizations supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (which was created to serve as a front for the CIA, literally) had been active in the United States, as they have been for years in Iran, major street protests would have taken place in the United States.
The classic “outside agitators” can not only foment dissent through propaganda, adding to already existing dissent, but they can serve to mobilize the public to strongly demonstrate against the government.
In 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, they paid people to agitate in front of Mossadegh’s residence and elsewhere and engage in acts of violence; some pretended to be supporters of Mossadegh while engaging in anti-religious actions. And it worked, remarkably well.1 Since the end of World War II, the United States has seriously intervened in some 30 elections around the world, adding a new twist this time, twittering. The State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown of its service to keep information flowing from inside Iran, helping to mobilize protesters.2
The New York Times reported: “An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).” 3
In recent years, the United States has been patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with warships, halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas or for other illegal reasons, financing and “educating” Iranian dissidents, using Iranian groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran, kidnaping Iranian diplomats in Iraq, kidnaping Iranian military personnel in Iran and taking them to Iraq, continually spying and recruiting within Iran, manipulating Iran’s currency and international financial transactions, and imposing various economic and political sanctions against the country.4
“I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs,” said US President Barack Obama with a straight face on June 23. “Some in the Iranian government [have been] accusing the United States and others outside of Iran of instigating protests over the elections. These accusations are patently false and absurd.”5
Killing Hope for more
By Lawrence Repeta
Introduction
How can Japan move toward gender equality, the elimination of authoritarian police practices and realization of the human rights enshrined in its laws and treaty obligations? Many Japanese human rights lawyers and activists believe that one important path forward lies through international institutions, especially those created under the auspices of the United Nations. In the latest round of an ongoing battle to enforce international norms in Japan, lawyers and activists presented a powerful case before the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva and succeeded in persuading the Committee to deliver stinging criticisms of Japan’s failures to take action to remedy several longstanding human rights problems.
The World’s Most Important Human Rights Treaty and Japan
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the “Covenant” or “ICCPR”), adopted by UN General Assembly resolution in 1966, is the most comprehensive and widely recognized human rights treaty. More than 160 states have ratified the Covenant. Japan did so in 1979. The Covenant does more than merely proclaim a long list of civil and political human rights. It also imposes obligations on member states to take action to promote observance of those rights through such action as adopting appropriate legislation, insuring that victims of right abuse have access to effective remedies, and training government officials (including judges) in their obligations to enforce the Covenant. The implications of Japan’s access to the Covenant have only gradually become apparent over the past four decades.
Japan Focus for more
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger waves to tourists as he walks to a news conference with his chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, and Finance Director Mike Genest at the Capitol in Sacramento. The governor declared a fiscal emergency for California.
State finance officials set the interest rate at 3.75% for banks that accept the vouchers. Nearly 29,000 IOUs worth $53.3 million will be sent, mostly to residents awaiting tax refunds.
By Eric Bailey and Patrick McGreevy (LA Times) 11:17 AM PDT, July 2, 2009
Reporting from Sacramento — With budget negotiators at loggerheads and California government facing a cash crisis, the state controller’s office will start printing IOUs this afternoon for the first time in 17 years.
The presses are set to start at 2 p.m., churning out 28,742 IOUs worth $53.3 million that will be dispatched mostly to residents throughout the state still awaiting their income-tax refunds.
A panel of state finance officials this morning set the interest rate for the IOUs at 3.75% for banks and other financial institutions that are willing to accept the scrip. Some banks have already agreed to honor the paper, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo, which will do so until July 10. Some have not made a decision. Recipients who don’t have a bank that will cash them can redeem them Oct. 2.
Wells Fargo’s agreement came with a nudge. “We are reluctant to take this step, but are doing so to help our customers who are not at fault and with the expectation that the Legislature and governor will complete the budget within days,” Lisa Stevens, a bank official in California, said in a statement.
LA Times for more
By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI – The world’s largest search engine is caught up in another Indian legal battle, one of many ongoing around the globe. A leading cardiologist from Mumbai is complaining to the city’s High Court over 20 Google blogs he says defame him.
The cardiologist’s case is timely, raising important questions about freedom of expression in the Internet age, and Google’s huge global presence. It has equally important implications for the curious phenomena of individual publishing on the Internet, such as blogs.
The legal conflict revolves around freedom of expression becoming entangled with abuses of personal freedoms. In effect, it gives a 21st-century, online dimension to A G Gardiner’s classic essay On the Rule of the Road, which spoke of the need for traffic lights, traffic policemen and speed limits.
In the pre-World War II essay, a stout old Russian lady strides down the middle of a road in Petrograd. When told it would be safer to walk on the footpath, she retorts, “I’m going to walk where I like. We’ve got liberty now.” It does not occur to the old lady, wrote Gardiner, that if her liberty entitled her to walk in the middle of the road, it also entitled the cab driver to drive on the footpath.
In other words, the end result of too much individual freedom can be anarchy.
Similar charges of anarchy can be applied to the content produced by the world’s estimated 1.3 billion Internet users. Google leads the content flood, declaring itself to be “the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of information online – with more than 3 billion web pages, images and newsgroup messages”.
Asia Times for more