http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05/28/index.php?section=opinion&article=004o1pol
Astillero
Julio Hernández López
¡Libertad (golpista)!
Similitudes mexicanas
Televisoras y fraude 2006
Diez años de astillar
La defensa de un canal venezolano de televisión ha sido convertida en bandera estridente de presunta defensa de la libertad de expresión en un país como México, donde las principales empresas electrónicas de comunicación, en especial las dos grandes televisoras, Televisa y Tv Azteca, han practicado formas de golpismo político, social y electoral parecidas a las que en Venezuela realizó en 2002 Radio Caracas Televisión para apoyar una rebelión militar contra un gobierno legítimo (apoyado en comicios por la mayoría de los ciudadanos) que libró esa trampa organizada por Estados Unidos y grupos empresariales nativos, y que hoy, en ejercicio de una facultad constitucional, ha decidido no renovar la concesión a un consorcio mediático que ha infringido de manera clara y grave sus obligaciones públicas.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05/28/index.php?section=opinion&article=002a1edi
Editorial
La reacción, contra el DF
Por si quedara alguna duda que los recursos de inconstitucionalidad contra la despenalización del aborto en el Distrito Federal, presentados ante la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (SCJN) por la Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) y el presidente de la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH), José Luis Soberanes Fernández, forman parte de una acción concertada, a la ofensiva de la reacción se sumaron el Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) capitalino y uno de los membretes al servicio de la jerarquía eclesiástica, el Colegio de Abogados Católicos, en tanto que el titular de la comisión capitalina de Derechos Humanos, Emilio Alvarez Icaza, dio a conocer las presiones de que ha sido objeto esa entidad por diputados locales panistas.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/index.html
Climate change myths
Prof. John Mitchell OBE FRS, Chief Scientist at the Met Office explores some of the common myths about climate change.
The Met Office recognises that climate change is a complex subject. There are genuine areas of uncertainty and scientific controversy. There are also a number of misunderstandings and myths which are recycled, often by non-climate scientists, and portrayed as scientific fact.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05/28/index.php?section=politica&article=003n1pol
Reconoce como ''grave error político'' haber mantenido a la maestra en el partido
Ser muy cauteloso con Gordillo, recomienda Madrazo a Calderón
''Se le ha cedido el control de la educación, el ISSSTE, la Lotería y una parte de la seguridad nacional''
CIRO PEREZ SILVA
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/427797.html
El 81% de mujeres que se practican un aborto son católicas, revelan
Asegura el secretario de Salud del DF, Manuel Mondragón, que hasta que nos e resuelva la acción de inconstitucionalidad se continuarán realizando las interrupciones del embarazo
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/427748.html
Crean comité en seguridad internacional y terrorismo
La nueva instancia será presidida por la Segob y será la autoridad nacional responsable del enlace con otros países; entrará en vigor a partir de mañana martes
http://www.milenio.com/mexico/milenio/nota.asp?id=514022
Por carta informó a los consejeros de la CNDH su decisión
Soberanes eludió a su Consejo en la acción antiaborto
El ombudsman nacional comunicó su determinación la semana pasada al Consejo Consultivo de la Comisión, que en otros casos ha sido considerado para las resoluciones.
http://www.milenio.com/mexico/milenio/nota.asp?id=513928
Fervor de Buenos Aires, publicado en 1923
Subastan en 5 mil euros primera obra de Jorge Luis Borges
La colección, perteneciente al matrimonio Daniel Devoto y Mariquiña del Valle-Inclán, incluía muchos de los grandes nombres de la Literatura en español del siglo XX en ediciones poco habituales.
http://www.milenio.com/mexico/laaficion/nota.asp?id=514045
Sin discusiones
La quinta
Cinco copas, con cinco técnicos mexicanos y una sola directiva. Al ganarle el título del Clausura 2007 al América, Pachuca demostró la efectividad de su organización.
28-Mayo-07
Pachuca tiene que ser llamado hoy justo campeón con la misma tranquilidad que tuvo para nunca, pero nunca en serio, poner en riesgo su coronación durante los 180 minutos que duró la serie contra América.
Video: The Path of the Mayos (Part I)
With the Other Campaign in
By Promedios
Indymedia
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/chiapas/the_path_of_the_mayos_part_i.mp4
Video: The Path of the Mayos (Part II)
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/chiapas/the_path_of_the_mayos_part_ii.mp4
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2588985.ece
By Peter Popham in
Published:
For three days and three nights, these African migrants clung desperately to life. Their means of survival is a tuna net, being towed across the
The astonishing picture shows them hanging on to the buoys that support the narrow runway that runs around the top of the net. They had had practically nothing to eat or drink.
Last night, on the
This is the latest snapshot from the killing seas of the southern Mediterranean, the stretch of water at the European Union's southern gate that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says "has become like the Wild West, where human life has no value any more and people are left to their fate".
On Friday, The Independent reported how a Maltese plane photographed a crazily overloaded boat in this area carrying 53 Eritreans, several of whom telephoned desperate pleas for help to relatives in
Frontex is expected to begin joint patrols in the
The Maltese captain of the Budafel refused to land the men, he later explained, because he had $1m-worth of tuna in the pen. If he had taken them to
The captain informed the Maltese authorities. The Maltese phoned the Libyans - the Africans were about 60 miles from the Libyan coast, within
The 27 had by this point spent three days and nights standing on the walkway, which is 18 inches wide. The Budafel's captain said he wouldn't mind being on the walkway for an hour. Any longer - under the fierce sun, or in the chill of the night - no thanks.
The Libyan government eventually sent a fax saying they would pick the men up. But no help arrived. The Maltese steadfastly refused to take the initiative. In the past five days, 157 illegal immigrants have come ashore on the Maltese coast. The small island is full to capacity. The impasse continued all Saturday.
By a stroke of luck an Italian navy vessel, Orione, was not far away: last week
The Italian navy dispatched first a plane and then the Orione. By
Up to 10,000 people are believed to have drowned trying to cross the
"Governments must encourage fishermen to save human life," says Laura Boldrini. "Now they fear that if they help, they can be stuck for days and weeks. But international maritime law says governments have a duty to allow the speedy disembarkation of people rescued at sea. We say, let's save human lives first. This must be the priority for all the parties involved."
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2588916.ece
Leading article: This obscenity is a wake-up call for
Published:
It ought to inspire shame throughout
It may not. Even the most powerful images of stranded or dead illegal migrants seem to have lost the power to shock. People in the
The consensus is that at least 6,000 have perished in the past few years, trying to cross the
It would be convenient but pointless to blame
Mediteranean countries in turn put pressure on Mahgreb states to halt sub-Saharans and Eritreans in their tracks and prevent them from reaching their ports. What happens? Last Christmas,
We need to stop passing the buck and admit that tightening the barriers round Fortress Europe is a hopeless and ineffective strategy. Soaring populations and global warming, leading to desertification, as well as the vast and growing discrepancies in incomes between those living north and south of the Straits of Gibraltar mean that the flow of migrants will increase.
We need to find more positive ways to address this challenge. The EU has a good idea to open job centres in
These are small examples of imaginative thinking, but we need many more. What we must not do is continue to look away, hoping someone else will deal with this crisis. If we do, we must brace ourselves for yet more of these degrading and outrageous incidents.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2589328.ece
AP
Published:
Toshikatsu Matsuoka, 62, was found in his apartment today unconscious and declared dead hours later. The death comes just ahead of important elections in July, and as support for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet is plunging.
Japanese media reported Matsuoka was found hanging from a door in his apartment and that he left a suicide note. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki, however, said police were still investigating the cause of death.
Abe, looking shaken after visiting the hospital where Matsuoka died, said although the minister had been "under intense questioning" in parliament, he had continued to be a useful member of the Cabinet.
"I am very disappointed," he said. "When I saw his face, he seemed to be at peace."
Matsuoka, the first Cabinet minister to kill himself while in office since World War II, had faced criticism over a scandal involving suspicious bookkeeping practices and was scheduled to appear before a parliamentary committee this afternoon for further questioning.
He allegedly claimed more than 28 million yen (US$236,600) in utility fees even though he rented a parliamentary office where utility costs are free. Matsuoka also faced separate scandals related to bid-rigging and political contributions.
Abe had defended Matsuoka, saying the agriculture minister reported to him all the alleged issues were properly handled and his dismissal was not needed. However, media reports said there were calls for his resignation within the ruling party.
"The minister has refused to provide a detailed explanation on the allegations, merely repeating that he is in line with the law," said an editorial in the Yomiuri newspaper published on this morning.
Matsuoka's death struck Abe's government ahead of elections for the upper house of parliament on July 22.
Abe's government was just hit by a fresh scandal last week over the missing pension payment records for more than 50 million people, who have been unable to get the money they are entitled to receive.
Today, support for the Cabinet hit its lowest level since he took office last year.
Approval of Abe's Cabinet fell to 32 percent, down 11 percentage points from a similar poll in April, according to a survey by the national newspaper Mainichi. A separate poll by the Nikkei business daily showed Abe's popularity falling to 41 percent, down 12 percentage points from the previous month.
Both cited dissatisfaction with the government's apparent loss of the pension payment records.
"This is a big blow for Abe's government," said political analyst Eiken Itagaki. "I believe Abe will struggle to maintain the slim majority the ruling coalition has in the upper house."
Matsuoka had been dogged by scandal.
He was forced to apologize just three days after taking office for not declaring 1 million yen (US$8,500) in political donations from a scandal-linked group. He acknowledged the undeclared funds, which came in the form of purchased tickets to a fundraising party, saying he was unaware that the contributions had not been reported.
The government announced that Environment Minister Masatoshi Wakabayashi would take the agriculture portfolio temporarily.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article2588976.ece
US and
By Andrew Gumbel in
Published:
US and Iranian diplomats are scheduled to meet in
Any hopes for detente between the two countries has been overshadowed, however, by new
The Iranian government yesterday summoned the Swiss ambassador - who looks after US interests in the absence of diplomatic relations between
Today's talks mark a softening in the Bush administration's stance, which previously rejected dialogue with
A number of diplomatic observers expressed doubts that the
However, officials said that the issue of the detained citizens would not be on today's agenda, which focuses on
The White House sees its relationship with
Responding to the new allegations of
The White House spokesman Dana Perino did not respond to the allegations themselves, commenting: "We urge
Iran said it had "succeeded in identifying and striking blows at several spy networks comprised of infiltrating elements from the Iraqi occupiers in western, south-western and central Iran," using shorthand for the US and its allies.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article2556428.ece
The Big Question: What does the World Bank do, and where does it go from here?
By Stephen Foley
Published:
Why is the World Bank in the spotlight?
Because of a woman called Shaha Riza, the girlfriend of the slightly more famous Paul Wolfowitz, who is the neo-conservative advocate of military action in
Ms Riza worked for the World Bank before her partner took over as president in June 2005. She was moved to the US State Department to avoid a conflict of interest, but stayed on the bank's payroll, with a salary - negotiated with Mr Wolfowitz - that shot up from nearly £66,500 a year to £90,000. After charges of favouritism, an internal investigation damned the pay rise as excessive and said Mr Wolfowitz broke bank rules in the way he decided the issue. He was negotiating terms of his departure yesterday, still protesting that he had done nothing wrong.
What is the World Bank anyway?
The organisation was set up in 1944, amid the ashes of the Second World War, to fund reconstruction and economic redevelopment. Its first loan was to devastated
Surely Ms Riza's pay rise is a trivial affair?
It looks that way if you get bogged down in the minutiae of whether Mr Wolfowitz tried and failed to recuse himself from decision-making on Ms Riza's pay, or of whether the bank's ethics rules are as black and white as they should be. But the reality is that the issue is a pretext for Mr Wolfowitz's enemies inside the bank to take issue with his leadership. He has made too many enemies because of an autocratic management style and because he has surrounded himself with cronies from his Pentagon days. And then there is the bigger question over the direction he is taking the bank.
Mr Wolfowitz has pushed "anti-corruption" to the top of the World Bank agenda, promising to use its power to pressure developing world dictators who have skimmed World Bank loans to fund their own lifestyles.
But more recently Mr Wolfowitz has argued to make loans conditional on political change by corrupt regimes . It is a strategy that opponents say is unfair, since the US-dominated bank gets to judge who is corrupt and who not. So far, the bank has threatened withholding funds from
Who claims the bank is exacerbating poverty, and why?
Hilary Benn, the
Mr Benn is aligning himself with a community of non-governmental organisations which have long fought the World Bank's agenda. Its loans have traditionally been tied to pledges from receiving governments that infrastructure projects should be privatised - generating work in many cases for Western companies - or that other public sector reforms be enacted along Western lines. From Ghana to Bolivia, where the privatisation of essential services has ended subsidies for water supplies, to Haiti, where an end to rice subsidies impoverished the country's rice farmers, World Bank conditions have been blamed for exacerbating the suffering of the very poorest.
Non-governmental organisations have begun a wave of protests which started at the bank's meeting in
Are there criticisms in other areas?
It is not only in the area of social and economic policy that an anti-globalisation alliance has been developing a critique of the bank. On the environment, it stands accused of often disregarding the well-being of local peoples and, by its continued support for oil and gas and mining projects in the developing world, exacerbating global warming. In 2001, after years of criticism from green groups, the bank agreed to study its fossil fuels projects, and a report prepared by
What's the World Bank's defence?
The bank says that it must set conditions on loans. Though in most cases they are at low, or no interest rates, they are loans, after all, and it needs to be assured that they are paid back. Criticisms that it is favouring Western companies have stung it into reforms, it says, and it is operating in a more transparent way than it was a decade ago. Its September 2005 review of the issue said its conditions had been "transparently disclosed and clearly defined". The Wolfowitz affair, though, puts all these issues back on the table and the debate over a successor - including even whether it should no longer be an automatic American appointee - means that the World Bank's future direction is unclear as never before.
So who might take over?
With so much controversy, the choice of a successor to Mr Wolfowitz is likely to be an agonising one, particularly since the organisation has been revealed to be split along US-European lines. There could be pressure to end the practice of having the
In the event that a new president comes from the
Has the World Bank been good for the world's poor?
Yes...
* It has backed infrastructure projects that have brought clean water and electricity to millions
* It loans or grants more than $11bn (£5.5bn) to around 300 development projects every year
* World Bank loans give confidence to other investors and businesses and stimulate local economies
No...
* The insistence on Western-style governance as a condition of loans promotes policies that hurt the poor
* Refusing to deal with corrupt regimes only compounds the misery for their citizens
* By supporting fossil-fuel development, it is contributing to global warming
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2588908.ece
Leading article: An attack on civil liberties that won't make us safer
Published:
As ever, Tony Blair is artfully presenting the proposals using tried and tested anti-elitist language: those arguing against the new powers are lambasted as the selfish and squeamish few who prize "their" freedoms above the right of 60 million law-abiding "ordinary" people to walk the streets in safety. They are the dreaded liberal snobs who care only about the rights of bombers. It's the old refrain, and one that distorts and paralyses so much public debate in this country.
What looks likely to get lost in this exchange is the fact that the police are about to gain a very significant increase in powers; the principle that citizens have to commit a crime before the police can detain them - a basic cornerstone of this country's notion of liberty - is about to be severely undermined. Once surrendered, these rights will be difficult to claw back. Moreover, the potential victims of this change may not always be the robed and bearded bombers of popular imagination.
Libertarian arguments not the only ones to be made against this change. There is a reasonable suspicion that what we are seeing here is not far-sighted statesmanship but short-termist party politics.
The two sponsors of "stop and question", Mr Blair and John Reid, are both about to leave the stage this month and in a hurry to secure their respective legacies. This offers part of the explanation for the haste with which the proposals have been introduced, with a view to their becoming law in the autumn. Their probable aim appears to be to lock Gordon Brown into following the Blairite security agenda and to embarrass the Tories by putting them on the wrong side of the same agenda.
There could also be great practical problems when it comes to putting these proposals into effect. One reason why the old "sus" laws were rightly abandoned was because they left an entire community feeling stigmatised and singled out. The result was the Brixton riots of 1981. This time it will be young Muslims rather than blacks who will be the unwanted recipients of police attention. The worry is that the outcome - the homogenisation of an entire ethnic or religious community, leading to serious disturbances - will be the same.
This government has got too used to bouncing Parliament and the country into accepting ever more stringent restrictions of civil liberties by uttering the talismanic words "security" and "terror". It feels enabled to do so by opinion polls that appear to show that the public values its safety, loosely conceived, above almost all other considerations, including liberty, no doubt because most people believe it is someone else's liberty rather than their own that is at risk.
Messrs Blair and Reid can thus relax in the certain knowledge that most people will greet whatever they do in the field of civil liberties with a degree of indifference. Whether they are advancing the struggle against terrorism with these instruments is questionable, however. The most potent weapon against Islamist terrorism in this country is the enthusiastic co-operation of the law-abiding majority of Muslims with the forces of law and order. They may well be less inclined to lend the police that co-operation if they feel that the police have been given special powers to harass their community.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/letters/article2588946.ece
Letters: Charities and politics
Charities will regret becoming involved in politics
Published:
Sir: As the manager of a non-charitable civil liberties campaign group (I write in my own capacity, and these are not necessarily the views of NO2ID) I have the greatest admiration for Baroness Kennedy, but I fear her piece "Charities must be free to engage in politics" (25 May) is politically naive. Charities Law has just undergone a revolution, and we have this weekend seen the consequence that many predicted: the state flexing its muscles and "suggesting" that charitable schools must do what politicians want if they are to keep their privileges. There will be more where that comes from.
For the 400 years before 2005 charitable status was not justified by a quid pro quo. Once a function was deemed charitable, and the organisation stuck to that function, it was safe from political interference. We've lost that already. Pitching charities fully into political sphere as Helena Kennedy suggests, would add to the institutional dangers.
She supposes charities would retain their present ethos, and just add to their public voice. However, when the massive resources provided by the public's generosity are potentially available to wield for advocacy purposes, charities and charitable conduct will become (more than the present administration has already contrived to make them) political battlegrounds, and political instruments, with a vicious circle of ever more regulation and more lobbying. The Electoral Commission would get involved. There would be a quango to check what was being said in political advertising, whether it matched the declared goals of the organisation, and to trace the funds used. Other non-profits would be smeared as "buying" freedom from regulation by not taking tax-breaks. To see where this ends look to Putin's
It is a distinguishing feature of liberal societies, and British society in particular, that they have a private civil society with varied institutions having their own goals independent of power politics. That is in danger already. Pace Baroness Kennedy, we should fear the Office of the Third Sector's mission to "promote" voluntary activity; promotion inevitably means colonisation, as the compliant are weaned on subsidy and subsidy is conditional on compliance. We should welcome a political role for and in charities as warmly as we do MRSA in hospitals.
GUY E S HERBERT
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