World economic leaders act to counter financial, food crises
13/04/2008 21h24
©AFP/File – Saul Loeb
WASHINGTON (AFP) – World economic leaders here this weekend took steps to alleviate the worst financial shock in decades and a food price crisis that is sparking deadly unrest in developing countries.
In three days of meetings that ended Sunday, finance ministers and central bankers grappled with the credit squeeze and inflation emergencies against the backdrop of an apparent US recession and a sharply slowing global economy.
The Group of Seven industrialized countries set the alarmed tone on the eve of the annual spring meetings of the 185-nation International Monetary Fund and its sister institution, the World Bank.
Confronted by what the IMF head says is the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Great Depression, finance chiefs from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States decided only greater transparency in the financial system could restore normalcy to the markets.
The G7 endorsed recommendations from an international forum and set for some of them a deadline for implementation unprecedented in its brevity — 100 days.
Recommendation is a “gentle word,” said Bank of Italy governor Mario Draghi, who also chairs the Financial Stability Forum that made the proposals. “In fact some of these recommendations are actually policy decisions.”
©AFP/File
The sudden nosedive in the global economy after several years of robust growth “even six months ago would have been unthinkable,” he added.
At the October meetings of the G7, the IMF and World Bank, the market turmoil that had erupted in August from rising defaults in the US high-risk subprime home loan sector was largely viewed as a contained event that did not threaten the broader world economy.
With the credit squeeze still spreading, the IMF recently warned that the US economy, the world’s biggest, was entering a recession and world growth was deteriorating so sharply a global recession was also in view.
The IMF estimated the crisis would cost the global financial system nearly one trillion dollars.
The IMF on Saturday wrapped up its meeting with a call for “strong action and close cooperation” to combat the financial crisis.
©AFP – Paul J. Richards
“Policymakers should continue to respond to the challenge of dealing with the financial crisis and supporting activity, while making sure that inflation is kept under control,” said the IMF, whose core mission is to promote global financial stability.
“While each country’s situation is different, coherent action must be taken.”
The IMF and World Bank urged efforts to address the food crisis that is stoking violence and political instability, and the longer term needs of development and poverty reduction, the bank’s main function.
Basic foodstuff prices have all risen sharply in recent months, sparking violent protests in many countries, including Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Indonesia.
“Based on a rough analysis, we estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty,” World Bank president Robert Zoellick said at the end of the anti-poverty development lender’s meeting Sunday.
“This is not just a question about short-term needs, as important as those are. This is about ensuring that future generations don’t pay a price too.”
Zoellick said the bank’s steering committee had endorsed his proposed “New Deal” for global food policy, similar in scope to a 1930s program under US president Franklin D. Roosevelt to tackle the problems of the Great Depression.
Calling on governments to begin work, Zoellick said: “We have to put our money where our mouth is now so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It’s as stark as that.”
http://www.wash.afp.com/english/news/stories/newsmlmmd.7d6f503b9f24bfb…..
Iraq Dismisses 1,300 After Basra Offensive
BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government announced Sunday that it had dismissed 1,300 soldiers and policemen for refusing to fight or performing badly during last month’s offensive against Shiite militias in the southern city of Basra.
Maj. Gen. Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said that 500 soldiers and 421 policemen were fired in Basra, including 37 senior police officers up to the rank of Brigadier General. Police officials said the remainder were fired in Kut, where fighting also spread.
“Some of them were sympathetic with these lawbreakers, some refused to battle for political or national or sectarian or religious reasons,” General Khalaf said in Basra.
The dismissals were an implicit admission of failures during the government offensive, which was widely criticized as being poorly planned. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s forces failed to disarm Shiite militias, in particular the Mahdi Army militia loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. However, they claim to have restored order to the streets, and the nearby ports vital to Iraq’s oil industry.
American officials, who praised the Iraqi forces’ progress in being able to move 6,600 reinforcements south to Basra so quickly, conceded that they had not been fully consulted in advance.
The Basra clashes pitched the country’s two most powerful Shiite forces against each other — the Mahdi Army and the government security forces dominated by Mr. Sadr’s most powerful internal Shiite rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
On April 3, Mr. Maliki promised to dismiss and prosecute the worst offenders among the more than 1,000 who deserted, laid down their weapons or refused to fight against their fellow Shiites and tribesmen. At the time one of his senior officials acknowledged that fear of the militias was a principal factor. “One of the main reasons is that they felt the other party was too strong, and too courageous and they couldn’t confront them,” he said.
Putting further political pressure on Mr. Sadr, Ali al-Dabbagh, an Iraqi government spokesman, said Sunday that the cabinet had agreed on a draft law that would ban any party from taking part in the October provincial elections unless they disband their militias. But it was unclear how much effect any law could have, given that the two dominant Shiite parties in government — the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq — are both closely affiliated with their armed wings.
In Baghdad, the Mahdi Army’s Sadr City stronghold was reported to be quieter on Sunday, after a week of heavy clashes with Iraqi government and American troops.
The Iraqi and American forces have taken control of southern neighborhoods in an effort to deprive the Mahdi Army of areas from which it can fire rockets and mortars at Baghdad’s high-security Green Zone three miles to the west.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/world/middleeast/14iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
‘Terrorist’ link puts Barack Obama under fire
A PAST association with a former terrorist has returned to haunt Barack Obama as the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination nears its end game.
Republicans are turning on Obama for his connection with William Ayers, once a member of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group that bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department in the 1970s.
Ayers was loosely involved in Obama’s election as an Illinois state senator in the late 1990s, when he was introduced to local activists at a meeting in his house. He also donated $200 to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2001.
Obama served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic foundation, for three years and shared a platform with him at two academic conferences.
Republicans believe they have found new evidence that Obama lacks judgment and patriotism just as the controversy over the Rev Jeremiah Wright, his pastor, who said, “God damn America”, is dying down.
The Weathermen, a small band of extreme leftists who got their name from lines in a Bob Dylan song – “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” – conducted a bombing campaign against targets such as police headquarters, prisons and courthouses for three years to “bring the [Viet-nam] war home”.
Two police officers were killed in 1981, when members of the Weathermen and Black Liberation Army stole $1m from an armoured car. It was their last action.
Ayers, 63, turned himself in to police that year, when charges against him were dropped because of mishandled FBI surveillance. He is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is admired in progressive political and educational circles.
He wisely remained silent as stories about his connection with the 46-year-old presidential candidate began to circulate – until he was goaded into the open last week by repeated taunts from Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News television host, who described him as an “unrepentant terrorist”.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, joined in the controversy on Hannity’s show. “It’s part of a general pattern in which Senator Obama is very comfortable with the hard left and the people who are in many ways fundamentally antiAmerican and certainly anti-American-government,” he said.
Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s former election guru, said the connection with Ayers was troubling. “There’s been talk in the past about friendship,” he said. “They made speeches together. He was a supporter of him in his race for the state senate. It would be interesting to know how close the links are.”
John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, was asked what he thought about Ayers and declined to offer an opinion. It was Hannity’s questioning of McCain, though, that provoked Ayers to respond.
In a lecture to college students in North Dakota last week, Ayers said: “I was trying to go to sleep, flipping through the channels real quick, and Hannity said, ‘Stay tuned. John McCain and I will talk about William Ayers.’ And I said, damn, I will have to stay tuned for an hour.”
Ayers went on to tell the students: “People ask, ‘Do you regret anything you did against the government in those days?’ And my answer is: no, I don’t.”
In an interview in The New York Times on the day of the September 11 attacks, when he was promoting Fugitive Days, his book on the Weathermen, Ayers said: “I don’t regret setting bombs,” and added: “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
He defended the comments on his blog www.billayers.org last week by claiming: “I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Vietnam and I say: no, I don’t regret anything I did to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.
“Sometimes I add: I don’t think I did enough. This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.”
The Obama campaign believes a very slender connection with Ayers is being used to smear their candidate.
Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman, said: “Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of criminal violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect him with events of almost 40 years ago is patently ridiculous.”
Sam Ackerman, a Chicago political activist and neighbour of Ayers, said: “The whole thing is preposterous. I held the first fundraiser for Obama, when he ran for the state senate, in my house. A lot of people held little coffee meetings. It wasn’t a big deal.”
He added: “In the past 20 years Bill Ayers has become a nationally renowned educator and is a highly respected professor at the University of Illinois. I think Barack Obama should tell people, ‘I’m not in the renouncing business’.”
The controversy comes at a sensitive time for Obama. Joe Klein, writing in Time magazine, described patriotism as “sadly, a crucial challenge for Obama now” and advised him to be “corny” about America.
Obama has just finished a four-day swing through Indiana, a conservative-leaning state, which will hold its primary on May 6. Prayers and the pledge of allegiance were said. As the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, Obama has emphasised: “I owe what I can to this country, this country that I love, and I will never forget it.”
Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA said: “They’re going to kill him with this. The guy is an unrepentant terrorist, so please, Barack Obama, explain why you aligned yourself with him. It is a fundamental question of judgment. By the time he [Obama] was hanging around with Ayers, his position was well known. He [Ayers] was not a freedom fighter; he belonged to a violent terrorist group.”
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, said earlier this year that the two were “friendly” but in the sense that “their kids attend the same school”, but Ayers’ children left long ago. A campaign aide later clarified that the connection was with Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, who was still involved with the school.
Dohrn is another former leader of the Weather Underground, who also went on the run in the 1970s and served just under a year in jail.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections…..
World’s largest Sept. 11 exhibit to open in France
PARIS — On the shores of Normandy where thousands of Americans died in the cataclysm that was D-Day, a museum that aims to be more than a collection of rusting relics is preparing to commemorate another day that changed the world: Sept. 11, 2001.
More than 120 mementos, from building keys to a smashed vehicle, are being shipped from New York to the French city of Caen for the first such exhibition outside the United States—and the largest anywhere on the attack, its roots and aftermath.
That France is playing host to the exhibit might surprise Americans who remember the “freedom fries” uproar that greeted Paris’ opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. But the director of the Caen Memorial, a museum of conflict and peace, said the exhibit would have neither an American nor French take on events surrounding Sept. 11 but rather a global view.
“The people who died in those buildings were from 16 countries and every religion,” museum director Stephane Grimaldi said. “It was an attack against America. It was an attack against democracy and human rights. We want to tell that story.”
The exhibit, titled “A Global Moment,” is expected to open June 6 at the museum, which was built to remember those who died on D-Day in 1944 and in the Battle of Normandy that followed.
Grimaldi said that although the relationship between the French and Americans had been complicated in recent years by post-Sept. 11 politics, museums that try to explain the meaning of war are valuable as a way to discuss peace and shared democratic values.
“The American troops’ coming to Normandy to free Europe was a turning point in World War II,” he said during an interview in Paris. “While we still don’t know the historical significance of 9/11, we know it is a turning point, and it is time to begin to understand and explore it together.”
Grimaldi said he chose the Sept. 11 exhibit to mark his museum’s 20th anniversary because the act of terrorism that day in 2001 was so important to contemporary politics and everyday life.
“The world today is the world of 9/11,” he said, “and our museum is here not to be just another collection of things from the past, of old tanks and helmets, but to understand the world of today that is so marked by terrorism.”
The show is being done in conjunction with the New York State Museum in Albany, which has assembled a vast Sept. 11 collection for its permanent exhibit and a traveling show that has visited cities across the U.S.
Mark Schaming, the state museum’s director for exhibitions and public programs, said the French show was not only the largest in scale, with 7,000 square feet of displays and a catalog, but also in scope.
“What we decided to do in France is a much broader story than focusing just on the events of Sept. 11,” he said. “We decided to step back a little and tell more about Al Qaeda itself and profile the 19 terrorists and look at the hours of the day with a timeline and with people involved, all done in greater depth. … It’s a much more all-encompassing narrative.”
Profiles of 10 victims and people who helped in the rescue effort will be illustrated by their possessions, either recovered from building debris or donated later to the Albany museum, such as battered shoes belonging to a woman who walked down more than 80 flights of stairs in a tower before it collapsed.
Los Angeles Times
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-9-11_museum_12apr12,1,7047887.story
US strike kills own soldiers in Baghdad
AP
Sunday, 13 April 2008
The US military says an Apache helicopter has accidentally destroyed one of its own armoured vehicles in eastern Baghdad.
The military says the incident occurred yesterday afternoon, when the chopper spotted a group of four militants placing roadside bombs. It says a Hellfire missile hit the group, killing two gunmen.
Sunday’s statement says that a second Hellfire was then launched. But it missed its target and struck a US armoured vehicle instead.
Iraqi police confirm that a Humvee was set ablaze in the Mashtal area of eastern Baghdad. They say two US soldiers and three Iraqi civilians were wounded and that American troops immediately blocked off the neighbourhood.
Car Powered By Water An Absolute Reality
Along Florida’s Gulf Coast, water is everywhere. From the bay to the beach to the town of Clearwater, that is where we found Denny Klein. A man driven by water, literally.
Klein has invented the world’s first water powered car. It runs on what he calls “Aquygen.” Aquygen is water or H2O, broken down and turned into HHO gas, something scientists once thought impossible.
“Any PhD or library, they say you can’t mix hydrogen and oxygen. And still to this day we get a lot of people who don’t believe us because that’s what they were taught,” Klein said.
But people are quickly learning Klein and his car are for real.
Klein says his design will retrofit any piston engine.
An economic development team from the county and local government TV got a demonstration while we were there.
Klein says he initially developed Aquygen to create a safer, less polluting blowtorch. Klein realized Aquygen would clean up car emissions as well. The only thing that would come out of the tailpipe was water.
Soon, his vision became a reality.
Like most alternative fuel cars, the prototype is actually a hybrid. It runs on a gas and Aquygen mixture. Whenever you’re ready, you flip the switch and the Aquygen kicks in.
The result is up to a 50 percent jump in gas mileage. Klein’s Ford Escort prototype gets 384 miles on a tank of gas. 576 miles with a little Aquygen mixed in.
Klein sees a totally Aquygen powered car sometime in the future. With that, he says you could drive 100 miles on 4 ounces of water. “You just drive it like a regular car. The infrastructure is already in place to get it serviced so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Klein said.
For now, Denny Klein is content to perfect the hybrid version of the car. He says it could hit the market in as little as 2 years.
Aquygen units for industrial use are already for sale and Klein says other uses for it remain on the horizon. After all, with Aquygen, the possibilities are as endless as the supply.
If you’re worried about losing power, don’t. Unlike some other alternative fuel cars, Klein says he actually gets a couple extra horsepower when he uses Aquygen.
There are two hurdles to a car that runs totally on Aquygen. One: long-term impact on the engine. Will the water speed up rust or corrosion over time? Two: figuring out a process to tank the gas for distribution.
-
Archives
- August 2008 (1)
- July 2008 (3)
- June 2008 (1)
- April 2008 (50)
- March 2008 (14)
-
Categories
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
