China opens key economic work meeting, policies expected to continue

Chinaview | 2009-12-05 | 10:51:39

China’s decision makers gathered here Saturday to determine economic policies for 2010, aiming to better deal with the impact of the international financial crisis and consolidate the foundation for economic recovery. The Central Economic Work Conference, an annual event initiated more than a decade ago, started days after China said it would continue the proactive fiscal policy and moderately easy monetary policy next year. Analysts with the Development Research Center of the State Council, a government think tank, said coping with further impact of the international financial crisis would remain a major task for China in 2010.

To continue the fiscal and monetary policies and implement and enrich the economic stimulus package would help China achieve full economic recovery, the analysts said. They expected more efforts to transform the mode of development and in economic restructuring next year. Meanwhile, they believed the government would further deepen reform and opening up, push forward innovation, and improve people’s livelihood. However, they cautioned China should still prepare for a bumpy ride next year as the road of     

US & Afghan troops launch first major offensive after troop surge

Chinaview | 2009-12-05 | 22:16:15

U.S. and Afghan troops Saturday advanced into the Taliban heartland in southern Afghanistan in the first major offensive after U.S. President Barak Obama’s Wednesday announcement of troop surge in the insurgency-ridden country. The operation dubbed “Cobra’s Anger,” according to the statement, began Friday in the Nawzad district of Helmand province, with the involvement of some 1,000 U.S. Marines and 150 Afghan soldiers to disrupt Taliban supply and communications lines in the region. “So far as a result of the operation four militants have been killed and two were detained,” the Afghan Defense Ministry said Saturday in a statement, adding that the operation is scheduled to last for four days. The troops reportedly met little resistance from insurgents Saturday. No U.S. or Afghan casualties have been reported.

Nowzad is one of the hotbeds of hard-core Taliban militants in Helmand known as the Taliban safe haven and notorious for growing poppy in Afghanistan. The operation is one of several large offensives that U.S. Marines have carried out since July, when 4,000 of them seized the lower Helmand River valley. The offensive came on the same day when NATO and partner nations pledged an extra 7,000 military personnel for Afghanistan, in response to Obama’s call for an international military surge in the country. Obama on Wednesday unveiled his long-deliberated new strategy on Afghanistan by sending 30,000 troops, which will start arriving in Afghanistan in the coming months.      

Medvedev, Obama pledge to seek new arms cuts deal

Xinhuanet | 2009-12-04 | 22:39:23

Russia and the United States will continue to work on a new nuclear arms reduction treaty as the existing one expires, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama said in a joint statement on Friday. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1), signed in 1991 between the Soviet Union and the United States, expires on Saturday. “Recognizing our mutual determination to support strategic stability between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, we express our commitment, as a matter of principle, to continue to work together in the spirit of the START treaty following its expiration, as well as our firm intention to ensure that a new treaty on strategic arms enters into force at the earliest possible date,” says the statement, published on the Kremlin website.

Earlier in the day, the Russian Foreign Ministry said both countries were concluding talks on reaching new nuclear weapons cuts deal. Meanwhile, the Interfax news agency cited a source in the Russian Foreign Ministry as saying that Russian-U.S. talks on nuclear disarmament might continue in Geneva after the START-1 expires. Medvedev and Obama agreed in London in early April to find a replacement for the START-1, which obliges both sides to reduce their nuclear warheads to 6,000 and delivery vehicles to 1,600. The two countries’ presidents agreed at a July summit in Moscow on the outline of the new arms control treaty, including slashing their countries’ nuclear arsenals to 1,500-1,675 operational warheads and delivery vehicles to 500-1,000.

Discrimination keeps Palestinian women out of Israel’s workforce

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 30 November 2009

Israel’s finance minister was accused last week of trying to deflect attention from discriminatory policies keeping many of the country’s Palestinian Arab families in poverty by blaming their economic troubles on what he described as Arab society’s opposition to women working. A recent report from Israel’s National Insurance Institute showed that half of all Arab families in Israel are classified as poor compared with just 14 percent of Jewish families.

Yuval Steinitz, the finance minister, told a conference on employment discrimination this month that the failure of Arab women to participate in the workforce was damaging Israel’s economy. Eighteen percent of Arab women work and only half of them full time, compared with at least 55 percent of Jewish women. He attributed the low employment rate to “cultural obstacles, traditional frameworks and the belief that Arab women have to remain in their home towns,” adding that such restrictions were characteristic of all Arab societies. But researchers and women’s groups pointed out that employment of Arab women in Israel is lower than almost anywhere else in the Arab world, including such employment black-spots for women as Saudi Arabia and Oman.

“Most Arab women want to work, including a large number of female graduates, but the government has refused to tackle the many and severe obstacles that have been put in their way,” said Sawsan Shukha of Women Against Violence, a Nazareth-based organization. That assessment     

Interview with PA dissident: “I cannot just stay silent”

Marcy Newman | The Electronic Intifada | 27 November 2009

Abdel Sattar Qassem, a professor and author of numerous publications on Palestinian history and Islamic thought, is well-known for his pungent critiques of Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). As a result, he has been imprisoned by both the Israelis and the PA. Most recently, his car was blown up as a warning from the PA. Marcy Newman spoke with Professor Qassem on behalf of The Electronic Intifada at his home in the Palestinian city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank.

Marcy Newman: When did you become politically active?

Abdel Sattar Qassem: At the American University in Cairo, I wanted to be part of the revolution. I used to call it a revolution; I discovered later that it wasn’t. I went to Beirut three times: in 1970, 1971 and 1972 to join a Palestinian faction. Each time I was disappointed and left without joining. I noticed that they were not true revolutionaries. They drove their cars in an arrogant way in the streets of Beirut, said bad things to Lebanese girls on the street. I thought those were not revolutionary morals. I noticed that so many of them went to bars. At that time, I always thought that a revolutionary should be a clean guy. He should be somebody who sets an ethical example for others. I felt these people were not going to liberate Palestine. These people were going to surrender. So I spent four years in Cairo disappointed by the revolution.

MN: Who were the leaders you respected in those years?

ASQ: I always felt that George Habash was a good leader, unlike the rest of the leaders who were just aiming at being leaders. But he was a Marxist. I don’t believe in Marxism, although I believe in a just distribution of wealth. I thought Habash would have been more successful had he remained a pan-Arabist. When he moved to Marxism, he lost many supporters. He adopted Marxism in a society that does not accept Marxism and looks at it with a sense of animosity.     

Military Families Respond to Announcement of Increased Troop Deployments to Afghanistan

MRzine | 02.12.09

Military Families Speak Out, an organization of over 4,000 military families opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, issued the following statement in response to last night’s speech by President Obama regarding Afghanistan.

President Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by deploying another 30,000 troops has sent the message to military families across the United States that the President is willing to gamble in a no-win situation with the lives of our loved ones and the loved ones of others. President Obama’s surge of U.S. troops will not make the U.S. safer, nor will it bring peace and stability to the Afghan people; it will add more fuel to the fires now raging there. It will mean more deaths of military personnel and of civilians. Sending more troops will not end this war; bringing them home now will.

In the 9th year of this conflict, it should be clear that there is no military solution. Military families do not need more of our loved ones coming home in flag-draped coffins. New deaths will not honor those who have already died, or their families. We know that the increase in deaths we will see from this war escalation will not just come from weapons like IED’s and RPG’s. Record breaking rates of suicide, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Traumatic Brain Injury, depression, anxiety and substance abuse are the result of seemingly endless and pointless war.    

Barack Obama’s Myopic Iran Policy

The Hindu | Siddharth Varadarajan | 30.11.09

Siddharth Varadarajan is a columnist for ‘The Hindu’, a national news paper in India. This article was published in The Hindu on 30^th November, 2009.

………………………………………………………………………….

By giving Israel veto rights and threatening more sanctions, the U.S. is squandering the best chance we have for a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.

Ordinarily, it would have been easy to dismiss the latest resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency censuring Iran as a text, drafted by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But context is everything. Whether by design or default, the unhelpful resolution comes at a time when the Iranians are still in the process of working out the terms of a landmark agreement on a nuclear fuel swap. If implemented, this would represent the first genuine breakthrough in the nuclear arena since the present standoff between Iran and the West began in 2005. Under the terms of the original proposal made last month by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany (known collectively as the P5+1), Iran is to send to Russia most of its stocks of 3.5 per cent low enriched uranium (LEU) produced under safeguards at Natanz. There, the LEU would be enriched to 20 per cent and sent on to France for fabrication into fuel rods for eventual use at the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR).

The TRR was set up in 1967 with U.S. support and is used by the Iranians for the production of medical isotopes for cancer diagnostics. With the TRR’s fuel set to run out next year, Iran had asked the IAEA for help in procuring new supplies, failing which it would be obliged to up the level of its own enrichment activities so as to fuel the TRR domestically. The IAEA, in consultation with the United States, came up with the     

US unemployment rate eases to 10%

BBC NEWS | 2009/12/04 22:38:38 GMT

The US unemployment rate fell in November to 10% from 10.2% in October, Labor Department figures show. Employers in November cut the lowest number of jobs since the recession began in December 2007. In all, 11,000 jobs went over the month. That was far fewer than the 130,000 expected by most analysts. President Barack Obama said the figures were “good news”, but warned that there were “more bumps in the road to economic recovery”. “There is a lot more to do before we can celebrate… good trends don’t pay the rent,” he said. For an economy the size of the US, the change was so small that the Labor Department described employment as “essentially unchanged”. In further good news for the US economy, factory orders rose by 0.6% in October, Commerce Department figures showed. Analysts had expected orders to remain unchanged. The good data pushed the dollar higher against major currencies.

‘Much-needed progress’

Payrolls have fallen every month for almost two years, but this year, the pace of decline has slowed sharply. Revised figures for October also showed an improving trend. Originally, official estimates said 190,000 jobs were lost, that was revised down to 111,000. The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said the sharp slowdown in job losses showed “much-needed progress”, but added that the Obama administration was still looking at providing help to the labour market. More than 15 million Americans are out of work, twice the number at the start of the     

‘Climategate’: Scientists, Politicians War Over Hacked E-Mails

ABC News | Dec. 4, 2009

global_warming (Click to enlarge)

Henry Stimson, secretary of war under Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously said, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.” He would never last in the rough-and-tumble world of climate politics. The heat is still rising over the hacked e-mails from scientists at the University of East Anglia in Britain, in which scientists argue — at times rudely — over research on civilization’s effect on the world’s temperatures. Political conservatives say the e-mails, in the words of blogger Michelle Malkin, “promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” proving that scientists were trying to exaggerate their findings and quiet their critics. Liberals say the files only show honest debate among experts, and that the truth remains that human industry is warming the global climate. There are more than 1,000 e-mails, some dating back to 1999, that were taken — some say stolen — from the university’s computer system and posted widely on the Internet.

Today the head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra K. Pachauri, said the issue was serious and the I.P.C.C. would be looking into it in detail. “We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,” he said in an interview with the     

Govt. says stake sale funds not for cutting deficit

Reuters | Fri Dec 4, 2009 | 1:28pm IST

India has no intention of using the proceeds of stake sales in state-run firms to cut its fiscal deficit, but would use them to fund social support programs, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee told the parliament on Friday. Mukherjee said the government would use a quarter of the stake sale funds for to revive ailing state-run firms and the rest for social schemes. “I can assure the members, the intention is not to utilise the disinvestment proceeds to reduce the fiscal deficit but to utilise them for expenditure on the social sector schemes,” he said.

Last month, the cabinet approved a rule change to use preceeds from divestments up to the end of 2011/12 to fund social schemes, in contrast to the previous practice of putting them in a National Investment Fund. It was aimed at easing the pressure off the government as it struggles to manage a bloated fiscal deficit that is estimated to touch 6.8 percent of gross domestic product by March 2010. The government would return to the status quo after March 2012, Mukherjee said on Friday.

Last month, a senior finance ministry official said the government has identified 10 listed and about 50 unlisted firms as candidates for stake sales. Since its re-election in May, the Congress-led coalition has revived divestment plans. It has had initial success with public offers in NHPC and Oil India that raised $1.8 billion. The government plans to sell shares in NTPC, Rural Electrification Corp and Satluj Jal Vidyut by the end of the current fiscal year in March 2010.

India economy could grow 8-9 pct in 2 years – World Bank

Reuters | Fri Dec 4, 2009 | 2:59pm IST

India could return to a higher growth trajectory of 8-9 percent in two years, but it needs to invest more in infrastructure for sustaining such growth, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said on Friday. Asia’s third largest economy expanded 6.7 percent in the fiscal year that ended in March 2009, slower than 9 percent or more in the previous three years. Government officials forecast growth between 6.5 and 7 percent for 2009/10.

Sehwag confirms destructive reputation

Reuters | Fri Dec 4, 2009 | 8:27pm IST

India's Virender Sehwag gestures as he walks towards the pavilion for a break (click to enlarge)

India opener Virender Sehwag confirmed his reputation as the most destructive top-order batsman in the modern game during his sixth test double century in the third and final test against Sri Lanka. Sehwag fell seven short of a record three test triple centuries on Friday when he was caught and bowled by Muttiah Muralitharan in the fourth over of the day but his innings had already put India within reach of a series win. “It is a missed opportunity but I think there is always the next time,” he told reporters. “I am very happy that I at least scored 293. I tried to take my time; maybe the ball was not there to be hit. I tried to take a single off that ball, but I misjudged the length and hit it straight to Muralitharan. Sehwag lashed 40 fours and seven sixes in his 254-ball effort, the second fastest double hundred.

Twelve of his 17 test centuries have been scores of 150 and over and he holds the record for three of the four fastest double hundreds. His strike rate of 80 runs for every hundred balls is the best by any player who has scored more than 6,000 test runs. Sehwag, 31, who also averages over 50 in test cricket, said the secret behind his success was his simple approach to batting. “If there is a ball to be hit I just hit it and I don’t worry about the runs or the dot balls, but just bat,” he said. Sehwag, who smashed 319 against South Africa in Chennai last year, said he had also begun focusing on occupying the crease. “I always tell myself that I can bat a full day. I knew that if I bat the full day, we would be in a good position in the test match. I was able to bat the full day and we are in a good position. They were planning to stop my runs, they were not trying to get me out,” he said.

‘Half year notice’ on Iran sites

BBC NEWS | 2009/12/04 | 11:28:01 GMT

Iran will inform UN nuclear inspectors where 10 planned installations are only six months before they become operational, Tehran has said. Friday’s announcement came after the US warned Iran that “time was running out” if it wanted to avoid sanctions over its nuclear programme. International inspectors have demanded information on all planned facilties. It maintains that its programme is peaceful, despite international fears it is trying to build nuclear weapons. Iran argues that under international agreements it is only required to give 180 days’ notice before it begins operating a new facility.

But the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says that Iran must abide by a subsidiary agreement it signed in 2003 and give information on plants still at the design stage. Tehran has continued to defy the six nations – the US, UK, France, Germany, China and Russia – trying to negotiate a deal over their nuclear material. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced last week that his country would build another 10 secret facilities to enrich uranium, although experts doubt whether it has the resources to do so. He has also said Iran plans to enrich uranium to 20%, a higher level than at present. On Friday, Iranian officials said they would allow nuclear inspectors in to the plants six months before they started up centrifuges used to enrich uranium.    

Bernanke defends his Fed record

BBC NEWS | 2009/12/04 00:12:34 GMT

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has defended the central bank’s response to the global crisis. He made the statement to a Senate panel sitting to consider his nomination for a second four-year term. Under Mr. Bernanke’s tenure, the Fed has cut interest rates close to zero, as well as spending $3 trillion (£1.8tn or Rs. 1.5 Crores of Crores) to buoy the credit markets. He also said that a retreat from low interest rates “will require careful analysis and judgment. My colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee and I are committed to implementing our exit strategy in a manner that both supports job creation and fosters continued price stability,” he told the panel. Opening the hearing, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said he would support Mr. Bernanke’s re-nomination, saying it would send the “right signal” to financial markets.

It is expected that the Senate will vote on the renewal of Mr. Bernanke’s tenure before Christmas, which is up for renewal at the end of January. But not everyone is in agreement that Mr. Bernanke should remain in the post. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is angry about the bailouts and says he will attempt to block the nomination when it reaches the senate floor. “I absolutely will not vote for Mr. Bernanke. He is part of the problem. He’s the smartest guy in the world, why didn’t he do anything to prevent us from sinking into this disaster that Wall Street caused and     

Mafia witness links Berlusconi to bombing campaign

BBC NEWS 2009/12/04 13:26:51 GMT

A Mafia informant testifying at a trial in the Italian city of Turin has linked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to a bombing campaign by the Sicilian Mafia. Gaspare Spatuzza is giving evidence in an appeal by the co-founder of Mr. Berlusconi’s party, Marcello Dell’Utri. He said that a clan boss convicted of the bombings had named Mr. Berlusconi in connection with the 1993 attacks. A spokesman for Mr. Berlusconi, who denies the allegations, suggested the Mafia was trying to discredit the PM. Mr. Spatuzza, a protected witness, gave evidence from behind a screen in the courtroom, surrounded by several bodyguards.

‘Revenge’

The informant recounted an alleged meeting in 1994 with a Mafia leader, Giuseppe Graviano, who was later convicted along with his brother for the bombings in Rome, Milan and Florence. “Two names were mentioned, one of them was Berlusconi’s,” he said. “I asked if he was the one from Channel Five and he told me ‘yes’.” “Graviano told me that thanks to the seriousness of these people we had the country in our hands,” he added. The spokesman for Mr. Berlusconi, who is not formally linked to the case of his political associate, said the Mafia was attempting to get its revenge on Mr. Berlusconi’s administration for its fight against organised crime. “It is completely logical that the Mafia would use its members to make statements against the prime minister of a government that has acted in a determined and concrete way against organised crime,” Paolo Bonaiuti said, quoted by to Reuters news agency. Marcello Dell’Utri is appealing against a conviction for Mafia association and a nine-year prison sentence.