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King Abdullah of Jordan’s ultimatum: peace now or it’s war next year

From The Times

May 11, 2009

Richard Beeston and Michael Binyon in Amman

America is putting the final touches to a hugely ambitious peace plan for the Middle East, aimed at ending more than 60 years of conflict between Israel and the Arabs, according to Jordan’s King Abdullah, who is helping to bring the parties together.

The Obama Administration is pushing for a comprehensive peace agreement that would include settling Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and its territorial disputes with Syria and Lebanon, King Abdullah II told The Times. Failure to reach agreement at this critical juncture would draw the world into a new Middle East war next year. “If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12-18 months,” the King said.

Details of the plan are likely to be thrashed out in a series of diplomatic moves this month. Chief among them is President Obama’s meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu, the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, in Washington a week today.

Pakistani civilians flee Swat valley as major ground offensive draws closer

• Army orders residents to leave during lull in fighting

• Exodus prompts warning of humanitarian crisis

Declan Walsh in Islamabad and Sana ul Haq in Mingora

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 May 2009 23.03 BST

The Pakistani army ordered residents to flee the Swat Valley during a lull in fighting , triggering a further exodus of frightened people and raising expectations of a significant ground offensive against the Taliban.

Miles of traffic jams snaked out of the war-torn valley as tens of thousands of people fled using all available means, from donkey-drawn carts to rickshaws.

In the battlezone the army said it had killed another 200 militants, most of them in a strike on a training camp in Shangla district and 55 in Swat. The fight is being closely watched from the US.

USA

Health Groups Vow Cost Control

$2 Trillion in Savings Offered Over Decade, White House Says

By Michael A. Fletcher and Ceci Connolly

Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, May 11, 2009

Volunteering to “do our part” to tackle runaway health costs, leading groups in the health-care industry have offered to squeeze $2 trillion in savings from projected increases over the next decade, White House officials said yesterday.

The pledge comes amid a debate over how, or whether, to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, and Obama administration officials predicted that it will significantly increase momentum for passing such changes this year.

The groups aim to achieve the proposed savings by using new efficiencies to trim the rise in health-care costs by 1.5 percent a year, the officials said. That would carry huge implications for the national economy and the federal budget, both of which are significantly affected by health-care expenses.

Administration Plans to Strengthen Antitrust Rules



By STEPHEN LABATON

Published: May 11, 2009

WASHINGTON – President Obama’s top antitrust official this week plans to restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share.

The new enforcement policy would reverse the Bush administration’s approach, which strongly favored defendants against antitrust claims. It would restore a policy that led to the landmark antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Intel in the 1990s.

The head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Christine A. Varney, is to announce the policy reversal in a speech she will give on Monday before the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy research organization. She will deliver the same speech on Tuesday to the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Middle East

Economic downturn finally hits Iraq

Many thought Iraq, with its unsophisticated banking and high oil revenues, would be unaffected by the global crisis. But with oil prices tanking and consumer spending down, the economy is stalling.

By Liz Sly

May 11, 2009

Reporting from Baghdad — The financial crisis that has sent economies reeling the world over is finally seeping into Iraq, with potentially grave implications for the stability of the country.

Car sales have plummeted. The once-booming property market has skidded to a halt. Electronic goods that were flying off the shelves a few months back are staying put. And in a country still threatened by an insurgency, more than a quarter of men ages 18 to 29 are unemployed.

The economic crisis took its time getting here, in part because Iraq received a revenue bonanza from high oil prices last year and its unsophisticated banking sector has little exposure to the outside world. But optimistic projections made as recently as February that Iraq would remain immune to the global downturn have proved horribly wrong.

iPhones in Iraq – the US Army’s new weapon

Applications prove invaluable for soldiers on the battlefield

By Kim Sengupta in Basra

Monday, 11 May 2009

In Basra’s Hayaniyah district, a notorious stronghold of Shia militias, a US army sergeant leading a patrol faced two suspects in the street. Amid rising tension he produced a gadget from his pocket and after a few minutes of its use the matter was amicably resolved. The Iraqis and the Americans went their separate ways.

The equipment being used – described by the US Army as ideal for 21st-century warfare – was an Apple iPod Touch. In a matter of minutes the soldier had established through words and images that the two men were not considered to be serious threats and detaining them was unnecessary.

Africa

Tsvangirai insists Mugabe is ‘part of Zimbabwe’s solution’

Zimbabwe’s prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai attempts to win over western donors by playing down differences with president

David Smith, Africa correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 May 2009 14.46 BST

Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s prime minister, has insisted that President Robert Mugabe is “part of the solution” to the country’s chronic problems as he seeks to win over sceptical donors in the west.

Tsvangirai declared Zimbabwe open for business and eager for investment and described his first 100 days in office, blighted by personal tragedy, as “the most wonderful and awful” of his life.

Critics argue that Mugabe has been winning the battle of wills against his rival since they signed a power-sharing agreement in February. They point to the president’s control of key ministries and the continuing detention of political prisoners and seizures of white-owned farms.

Zuma’s first cabinet fails to include veteran finance chief

New face in charge of economy as South Africa heads into recession

By Phumza Macanda, Reuters, in Pretoria

Monday, 11 May 2009

South Africa’s veteran finance minister Trevor Manuel was replaced in a government shake-up yesterday but appointed to head a powerful new planning body, keeping him at the heart of policy-making in President Jacob Zuma’s first cabinet. A day after taking office, Mr Zuma named the tax authority chief Pravin Gordhan to replace Mr Manuel in another sign of continuity as Africa’s biggest economy heads towards its first recession in 17 years.

Mr Manuel had been in the job for 13 years, making him the world’s longest-serving finance minister. Investors approved of the tight monetary and fiscal policies he kept in place.

Europe

Silvio Berlusconi under fire over anti-immigration remarks

From Times Online

May 10, 2009

Richard Owen

Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, today came under fire from the Catholic Church as well as the Left after declaring that Italy was not and should not be a multi-ethnic society.

Mr Berlusconi’s centre Right coalition won power a year ago partly by vowing to crack down on crime and illegal immigration. This weekend he praised Libya for taking back 500 would be migrants who have been intercepted by Italian naval vessels over the past five days, under a new Italian-Libyan accord.

“The Left’s idea is of a multi-ethnic Italy,” Mr Berlusconi told a news conference. “That is not our idea, ours is to welcome only those who meet the conditions for political asylum.”

Putin Says NATO Exercises in Georgia Hinder U.S.-Russia Relations



By ELLEN BARRY

Published: May 10, 2009

MOSCOW – Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said Sunday that the planned “reset” in relations between Russia and the United States had been hampered by NATO exercises in Georgia, and that he hoped the United States would “step on the brake hard” to prevent the relationship from deteriorating.

In an interview with Japanese news services before a visit to Tokyo, Mr. Putin also said negotiations on strategic nuclear weapons should be linked to changes in the United States’ planned missile-defense system. Russia has long complained that proposed missile-defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic would pose a threat to Russia, and Mr. Putin said offensive and defensive capacities were “inseparably bound up.”

“I don’t think you have to be an expert to see that if one side wants to or has an umbrella against various threats, it can begin to suffer from the illusion that it is permissible to do whatever it likes, and then its actions will become many times more aggressive and the threat of a global confrontation will reach a danger level,” he said.

Asia  

 China quake: From rubble, civil society builds

Volunteerism stands strong one year later – and has even won support from local authorities normally wary of grass-roots movements.

By Peter Ford and Staff writer

MIANZHU, CHINA – When the Sichuan earthquake hit her mountain village a year ago, recalls young mother Wang Hong, her instinct said that her daughter had been killed at kindergarten.

She was wrong, though, and two days later Chinese soldiers and her mother-in-law helped Ms. Wang carry her little girl down the mountain to safety. “I felt so lucky and grateful that I didn’t even cry,” Wang says.

Instead she became a volunteer. Today she is in charge of bathing dozens of children in the temporary housing camp where she lives, and teaching the children’s parents the rudiments of healthcare.

Her program is run by the international charity Save the Children. “I just felt so touched when I heard that name, I volunteered out of gratitude,” Wang explains.

Wang has very personal reasons for her newfound sense of public spiritedness. But she is not alone.

Japan’s opposition head ‘to quit’

Japanese opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa has told his party he will resign, according to Japanese media sources.

The BBC

Mr Ozawa had been under pressure to go after a close aide was charged in a fundraising scandal in March.

Before the scandal broke, Mr Ozawa was thought likely to unseat the flailing prime minister, Taro Aso, in elections later this year.

But recent opinion polls have suggested that his popularity has waned as a result of the scandal.

Just a few months ago, Mr Ozawa’s Democratic Party was confident of victory in the next general election, which must be called by October.

Such a victory would end almost 50 years of unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which is facing huge voter discontent amid the worsening economic gloom.

But ever since the funding scandal broke, Mr Ozawa has been under pressure to quit.

Latin America

A trip to Mexico’s Museum of Drugs

The museum, which is used to educate soldiers and is closed to the public, offers powerful testimony to the inventiveness and huge resources that traffickers continue bringing to the fight.

By Ken Ellingwood

May 11, 2009

Reporting from Mexico City — Army Capt. Claudio Montane wants one thing clear from the start: This place is not not a narco-museum. The point is not to glorify drug traffickers.

“Its purpose is to show Mexico and the world the efforts and the good results that we have achieved,” Montane said, opening a tour of a military collection officially called the Museum of Drugs.

But spend a couple of hours examining the exhibits with Montane, in his crisp dress uniform and spit-shined shoes, and you wonder if a better name would be the Museum of Mexico’s Long and Unwon War Against Drug Traffickers Who Keep Finding Clever New Ways to Feed the U.S. Habit.

Just as the museum outlines the army’s 33-year-old role in this war, it offers powerful testimony to the inventiveness and enormous resources that traffickers continue bringing to the fight.

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