China ‘trying to block publication of UN Darfur report’
Beijing is trying to prevent the release of a report which says Chinese bullets have been used against Darfur peacekeepers, unnamed UN diplomats say.
The BBC 21 October 2010
The report is being discussed by a United Nations committee which monitors sanctions against Sudan, including an arms embargo on Darfur.Beijing says it is vaguely worded and full of flaws.
Ceasefires and peace negotiations have failed to end the conflict in the volatile western Sudanese region.
The report says that a dozen different brands of Chinese bullet casings have been found in Darfur, some at sites where attacks on UN troops took place.The BBC’s Barbara Plett at the UN in New York says the allegations are controversial, but adds that China has the right to sell munitions to Khartoum as long as they are not used in Darfur.
What’s So Bad About Parallel Societies?
Germany’s Integration Blinkers
A Commentary by Henryk M. Broder
When Mr. Hu and his wife arrived in Germany 30 years ago, they were both in their early 20s, had no money to speak of and spoke not a word of German. All of their belongings could fit into two bags. To get started, they brought along a notebook with a few recipes and a scrap of paper with the addresses of some Chinese people who had been living in Germany for a while. Immediately after their arrival, they moved into a small attic apartment and began working — as kitchen help in a Chinese restaurant.Since then, not much has changed — aside from the fact that the Hus now have their own restaurant, known for its authentic dishes, and that they now live in a roomy apartment which they own. Mr. Hu works in the kitchen, directing the labors of five cooks, while Mrs. Hu takes orders from the restaurant’s guests.
USA
Efforts to Prosecute Blackwater Are Collapsing
By JAMES RISEN
Published: October 20, 2010
WASHINGTON – Nearly four years after the federal government began a string of investigations and criminal prosecutions against Blackwater Worldwide personnel accused of murder and other violent crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cases are beginning to fall apart, burdened by a legal obstacle of the government’s own making.
In the most recent and closely watched case, the Justice Department on Monday said that it would not seek murder charges against Andrew J. Moonen, a Blackwater armorer accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice president on Dec. 24, 2006. Justice officials said that they were abandoning the case after an investigation that began in early 2007, and included trips to Baghdad by federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents to interview Iraqi witnesses.
Florida activists read between the lines on foreclosure paperwork
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Write
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Nearly a year before the national furor over foreclosures began, Lisa Epstein, a nurse, ran into three other amateur sleuths who separately were investigating shoddy practices at mortgage companies.
While meeting for the first time in November at an old one-story law office in this city, the four strangers compared notes and began to piece together the scope of the problem: All over the United States, big financial firms might have been using fraudulent paperwork to evict struggling borrowersfrom their homes.
Europe
French fuel blockades force thousands to call off their holidays
By John Lichfield in Paris Thursday, 21 October 2010
One great French tradition, the right to strike, threatened to collide with another yesterday – the right to go on holiday.As protests against pension reform continued to disrupt the country, the government hopes, and its opponents fear, that school half-term and All Saints’ holidays starting tomorrow will dampen the ardour of protesters.
A widespread shortage of petrol and diesel is, however, forcing hundreds of thousands of French people to cancel, or reconsider,their holiday plans.
Eastern Europe confronts fake medicines trade
by Mihaela Rodina (AFP)
Eastern Europe is a key route in a multi-billion-dollar trade in often-dangerous counterfeit medicines that has grown exponentially on the Internet, experts said at a regional meeting this week.
More than 120 anti-counterfeit specialists from six Eastern European countries met in Romania on Wednesday and Thursday to step up the fight against a risky business estimated to be 75 billion dollars (54 billion euros) worldwide in 2010.
“There is an important Balkan route for fake medicines, which is the same as for heroin and other narcotics,” Hungarian customs officer Karolyi Szep told AFP at the meeting called by the world’s leading pharmaceutical company Pfizer.
Middle East
A three-handed game in the Middle East
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS – The Middle East is witnessing a fury of diplomatic traffic. On Monday evening, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad went to Saudi Arabia for a meeting with King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz only days after receiving Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Damascus.Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri had arrived in the Saudi capital a day earlier, while US Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman landed in Beirut for talks with President Michel Suleiman, days after a state visit by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad to Lebanon.
Ex-US president Jimmy Carter wrapped up talks in Gaza and headed to Damascus where, along with a senior delegation from the Elders, he met members of Hamas on Tuesday while Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is expected in the Syrian capital on Wednesday
Israeli settlers building 544 new homes
By KARIN LAUB, Associated Press Writer
KARMEI TZUR, West Bank – Israeli settlers have begun building new homes at an extraordinary pace since the government lifted its moratorium on West Bank housing starts – almost 550 in three weeks, more than four times faster than the last two years.
And many homes are going up in areas that under practically any peace scenario would become part of a Palestinian state, a trend that could doom U.S.-brokered peace talks.
According to an Associated Press count, ground has been broken on 544 new West Bank homes since Sept. 26, when Israel lifted its 10-month freeze on most new settlement building..
Asia
Nato surge on Taliban stronghold drives civilians into the line of fire
As troops step up their attack on the militants’ Kandahar heartland, Julius Cavendish meets the ordinary people caught on the frontline
Thursday, 21 October 2010
The first eyewitness accounts of Nato’s assault on the final Taliban sanctuary threatening Kandahar City have begun to emerge, painting a picture of sporadic fire fights, steady progress by Afghan and coalition forces, and flight by those inhabitants wealthy or lucky enough to escape the violence.Earlier this week, Nato began its final and critical phase of a major offensive designed to clear Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, with hundreds of troops carrying out an air assault on the main insurgent base in the region. In interviews with The Independent, tribal elders, government officials and civilians in Kandahar City provided vivid descriptions of special forces night raids and Nato’s bombardment of the area in the preceding month – designed to damage the local Taliban leadership – and the tactics the insurgents used to cow inhabitants before fleeing in the face of coalition firepower.
Beijing warned its belligerence on islands is ruining relations with Tokyo
JOHN GARNAUT
October 21, 2010
A leading figure in Japanese international relations who helped mend fences with China in the 1980s says Beijing’s ”diplomatic shock and awe campaign” over disputed islands in the East China Sea has reduced the relationship to ”ground zero”.Yoichi Funabashi, editor in chief of Asahi Shimbun, said the consequences of China’s firebrand response would have a larger impact in Japan than Richard Nixon’s secret moves towards normalising US relations with China in the 1970s.
”Japan and China now stand at ground zero, and the landscape is a bleak, vast nothingness,” Funabashi wrote in a letter sent to dozens of high-ranking friends in China.
Africa
Crackdown on Egyptian media before poll
The Irish Times – Thursday, October 21, 2010
MICHAEL JANSEN
EGYPT’S PRESIDENT Hosni Mubarak yesterday issued a decree fixing November 28th for his country’s parliamentary elections. The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), three other legal parties and the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood are set to compete for the 508 seats.In the run-up to the poll, the government has been cracking down on the media, on mobile phones and on the Brotherhood. Egypt’s main satellite provider, Nilesat, has shut down 17 private television channels for violating broadcasting regulations.
Another 20 were threatened with suspension of their licences.
Backlash as miners shot by Chinese overseers
Aislinn Laing
October 21, 2010
JOHANNESBURG: A backlash against China’s powerful presence in the Zambian economy has been triggered by an incident in which 11 miners were shot by Chinese managers.Police said the Chinese executives opened fire on workers protesting against poor pay and conditions at the Collum coalmine in the Sinazongwe district of Southern Province on Friday.
Eleven people were treated for wounds to the stomach, hands and legs and two are understood to remain in a critical condition.
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A foreign ministry official in Beijing said the shooting was a ”mistake” but the incident has led to demands to curb China’s dominant position in mining investments. It invested $402 million in Zambia’s mining industry last year.
Latin America
Student becomes new police chief in Mexican town
Marisol Valles, 20, who is studying criminology, has yet to make an arrest but is being called Mexico’s bravest woman
Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 October 2010
She is a petite 20-year-old college student who paints her nails pink, has an infant son and believes in non-violence: meet Marisol Valles, the newest police chief in Mexico’s drug war cauldron.The town of Praxedis G Guerrero on the Texas border has astonished Mexico by appointing Valles to head a police force in the heart of a traditional route for narco-traffickers.
The criminology student has yet to make an arrest but has already been hailed Mexico’s bravest woman for taking such a post in Juarez valley, a strip of about a dozen towns and villages where shadowy groups slaughter and mutilate police and civilians with impunity.
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