Global News Journal

Cattle Rustling, Pythons and Boogie Angola Style …. the best reads of May

Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health. These pests and others are expanding their ranges in a warming world, which means people who never had to worry about them will have to start.

Spain rearranges furniture as economy sinks

Moving a 17-metre high monument to Christopher Columbus 100 metres down the road is how the Spanish government is interpreting the advice of John Maynard Keynes. The economist once argued it would be preferable to pay workers to dig holes and fill them in again, rather than allowing them to stand idle and deprive the economy of the multiplier effect of their wages.

Picking up the pieces from Afghanistan’s war

U.S. gunners scanned a lush Afghan valley from their helicopter, as a  white van containing a badly burned baby inched toward another Black Hawk waiting at the army outpost. Eight soldiers had flown into the heart of hostile eastern Afghanistan, in a convoy of one air ambulance and one “chase” helicopter for protection, to collect 18-month-old Amanullah who knocked a pot of scalding water over his legs, penis and scrotum.

In Brazil, extreme weather stokes climate worries

No one could say they hadn’t seen it coming. The sand dunes had been advancing for decades before they swallowed the houses of families in Ilha Grande, an island in Brazil’s Parnaiba river delta. Standing on a dune that covers his old home, one man describes the landscape of his childhood — cashew trees as far as he could see. Not a dune in sight.

Novelist Vargas Llosa stirs up left and right in Latin America

The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who in his youth was a champion of the Latin American left and later evolved into an outspoken conservative, has been caught up in a struggle between two presidents camped out on opposite ends of the political spectrum — Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Peru’s Alan Garcia.

The two presidents frequently trade barbs as Chavez positions himself as the leader of the left in Latin America who favors nationalizing companies, while Garcia presents himself as the polar opposite who has won the support of conservatives by vigorously defending free enterprise, signing free trade deals, and strengthening ties to the United States.

On Thursday, Garcia jumped on Chavez after Vargas Llosa was delayed for more than an hour while passing through immigration in Caracas, where authorities told him that because he was a foreigner he was prohibited from making political comments while in Venezuela. “Any attack against free thought and expression is unfortunate, intolerant and anti-democratic,” Garcia said of the delay. Vargas Llosa, who was on his way to speak at a conference hosted by the Cedice think tank that promotes free markets, called the warning an “intimidating gesture” and said “nobody can put limits on free speech.”

Vargas Llosa also defied the prohibition and warned that “Venezuela is getting closer and closer to being a Communist dictatorship and farther and farther away from a liberal democracy.” Venezuela’s state news agency, ABN, focused on Vargas Llosa’s softer comments, running with the headline “Vargas Llosa recognizes that this isn’t a totalitarian country” after the writer said that “If Venezuela were a totalitarian dictatorship we wouldn’t be here.” Chavez has yet to address the Vargas Llosa episode.

Vargas Llosa, who many critics say is one of the finest Latin American novelists ever, has been criticized by his peers for abandoning the left and has never won the Nobel prize. He was once an admirer of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, but later became a sharp critic. He also had a high-profile falling out with Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was a longtime supporter of Castro. Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez were once great friends but came to blows in a famous fight three decades ago that was ostensibly over a woman but was widely believed to be about politics as well.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Edwin Montilva. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa speaks to the media in Caracas May 28, 2009

(Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel and Marco Aquino)

A return of “ignore Germany” under Obama?

It’s not quite as bad as it was back in 2003 when Gerhard Schroeder publicly chastised George W. Bush for invading Iraq and Condi Rice introduced a new policy in the White House called ”ignore Germany” (France was to be punished and Russia forgiven for their opposition to the war).

But relations between Berlin and Washington are probably as poor as they’ve been since Angela Merkel replaced Schroeder in 2005 and set Germany on a course of reconciliation with the United States.

After becoming accustomed to dinners in the White House, barbecues and back-rubs with Bush in his Europe-friendly second term, Merkel and her advisers in Berlin are agonising over a series of slights (perceived or real) from Obama since he came to office in January. 

First came the message from Washington that Obama might not continue the regular videoconferences Merkel held with Bush. In the end the White House came around, but it took two months to set one up.

Berlin also got the cold shoulder when Merkel tried to arrange a trip to Washington ahead of a G20 meeting in London at the start of April. Messages from Berlin with proposed dates went unanswered for days until Merkel’s team abandoned the idea completely, an official close to her told me.

This week came the latest signal, at least from Berlin’s perspective, that the Obama team is not taking German concerns seriously. 

The rescue of Opel, the German unit of U.S. carmaker General Motors, has become the central theme of a slow-to-get-started German election campaign that pits Merkel against her Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. A misstep on Opel and Merkel’s bid for a second term could be doomed.

Flowers, twitter, brass band shake up German election

Traditionally, the election of the German president is a dignified and strictly choreographed event.  More than 1,200 parliamentarians and state representatives come together in Berlin’s Reichstag building, they cast a secret vote underneath the assembly’s giant symbolic eagle, the parliament’s president announces the result, and everybody sings the national anthem. But Saturday’s re-election of conservative Horst Koehler has sparked a lively debate about whether several parliamentarians, the early appearance of an orchestra and a series of flower bouquets gave the results away too early. 

“People. You can watch the soccer in peace. The election round has worked,” conservative MP Julia Kloeckner wrote on Twitter, 10 minutes before parliamentary president Norbert Lammert announced that Koehler had scored a one vote victory and defeated the Social Democrat (SPD) candidate Gesine Schwan. Kloeckner’s SPD colleague Ulrich Kelber even announced the results on Twitter three minutes earlier — including the exact vote count. Germany’s president has largely representational functions, but Saturday’s election was seen as a test of party discipline for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives four months ahead of a federal election. Merkel’s allies only held a one seat majority in the special election assembly, and Koehler’s failure to secure a majority in the first round would have triggered a second vote.

That prospect seemed impossible to many observers, however, when musicians and staff with flower bouquets had already entered the assembly before Lammert announced the result. Bild daily called Koehler’s election the “Twitter-flower bouquet-brass band affair”.  “It’s undignified for musicians and ushers to take away the result of the presidential election in advance,” SPD parliamentarian Christian Lange told the daily Die Welt.  SPD deputy Sebastian Edathy called on Lammert to apologise for the organisational problems. The twittering Kloeckner said she was sorry she had sent her online message, telling Bild: “The timing was a bit early, even though the pictures told their own story.” 

Merkel however shrugged off the incident, saying apparently television viewers had been able to see more of what was going on in the assembly than she had. “I just sat in my seat and waited (for the results),” she said. Horst Seehofer from Merkel’s Bavarian CSU sister party took an even lighter stance on the event, signalling it might help revise some prejudices people held against his countrymen. ”It’s OK for Germans not to be perfect in everything. It’s OK to be human sometimes,” he said.

Changing the pandemic rules

The World Health Organisation literally changed the rules of the game while playing it last week, when it said it was rethinking the criteria it would use to declare a global flu pandemic is underway.

Britain and other countries affected by the newly-discovered H1N1 virus were pushing WHO Director-General Margaret Chan to pause before raising the six-point pandemic scale to its highest notch, as her United Nations agency’s rulebook says she should do once it is spreading in more than one region of the world.

Those rules were developed in anticipation of a pandemic from the toxic H5N1 bird flu strain, which kills about half those it infects but so far has not passed easily from person to person.  The WHO activated that alert system when it saw the new strain — which has genetic pieces of swine, bird and human viruses — was killing people in Mexico, including the young and seemingly healthy.  But it caused milder symptoms as it spread worldwide, and health experts now say that many of those infected may not even realise it.

So does its global spread still represent a pandemic?

After weeks of trying to explain that its alert scale is based on the way a potentially dangerous virus is spreading, not the severity of its effects at the present time, the WHO capitulated to pressure and changed its guidance.  Top official Keiji Fukuda told reporters on Friday that “what we are looking for and what we will be looking for is something, events, which signify a really substantial increase in risk of harm to people.”  This means that although there are pockets of sustained transmission in Japan, Britain, and Spain, the WHO will not have to issue the top alert unless the virus mutates or reverts to a more dangerous form.

While many nations are congratulating Dr. Chan for adding “flexibility” to the pandemic rules, others are raising questions about whether the WHO erred in yielding to the pressure from the mainly-rich countries with confirmed flu infections so far, who would be compelled to cough up money, drugs, vaccines, diagnostic tests, and other technology to poor nations if the world was on edge about Phase 6 flu.  A less severe threat level means less urgency in addressing those health-system shortcomings that affect not only poor countries’ response to H1N1, but also other deadly diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, dengue and cholera.

While the WHO has said gaps in the world’s “pandemic preparedness” must be addressed as a matter of priority, it is apparent that this particular flu is not seen as enough of a trigger do so.  And that could have as much to do with politics as with science.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

India, Pakistan and the rise of China

India has been fretting for months that it could be pushed into the background by the United States' economic dependence on China and by the renewed focus on Pakistan by President Barack Obama's administration.  That anxiety appears to have increased lately -- perhaps because the end of the country's lengthy election campaign has opened up space to think more about the external environment -- and is focusing on China.

In an interview with the Hindustan Times, Indian Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi Major said China posed a greater threat than Pakistan.  “China is a totally different ballgame compared to Pakistan,” he was quoted as saying. “We know very little about the actual capabilities of China, their combat edge or how professional their military is … they are certainly a greater threat.”

The Mint newspaper followed up with a editorial calling China "perhaps the gravest external threat" to India's security. "That India is in an unstable neighbourhood is clearer than ever this summer," it said. "But troubles from Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Nepal pale when compared with China."

The increased anxiety has been driven by the end of the war in Sri Lanka, where the government's victory was attributed partly to a supply of Chinese weapons, and where China has been building a new port on the island's southern coast.

"This is part of a broad move by China into the Indian Ocean, which India has traditionally considered its sphere of influence," said British newspaper The Times. Chinese engineers are building another port at Gwadar in Pakistan; roads are being cut or improved through Burma to help trade routes between Yunnan province in China and the Indian Ocean; ties are being improved with island nations such as the Seychelles; surveillance stations are being sited or upgraded on Burmese islands."

But even without the Sri Lankan trigger, Indian analysts have suggested that India may no longer enjoy the favoured position that developed under former president George W. Bush, when Washington forged close ties with Delhi, in part as a counterweight to China.  Facing the twin challenges of financial crisis and a military stalemate in Afghanistan, the Obama administration is dependent on India's two main rivals -- China to pay for American debt and Pakistan to help it defeat the Taliban.

Merkel flirts with FDP as German election heats up

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her would-be allies, the opposition Free Democrats, did not waste any time putting their spin on the re-election of President Horst Koehler on Saturday – a razor-thin victory for the conservatives over the rival candidate put up by their coalition partners, the Social Democrats, in a vote four months before the parliamentary election.

Mere minutes after Koehler squeaked out a one-vote victory in the 1,224-seat Federal Assembly to win a second term as Germany’s ceremonial head of state, a beaming Merkel popped up on national television alongside FDP chairman Guido Westerwelle for a joint impromptu news conference rich with symbolism; it was the first time they appeared together in such a formal setting since the 2005 campaign.

“It’s no secret that we are working on achieving a majority together,” said Merkel at the briefing with the opposition leader while her coalition partners, the SPD, licked their wounds. “Today was certainly not a bad day as far as that goal is concerned,” added the chancellor, whose hopes for a centre-right coalition with the FDP after the 2005 election were spoiled when her conservatives got hit by a powerful downdraught at the very end of the campaign.

Westerwelle and Horst Seehofer, the chairman of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union, stood next to Merkel and called Koehler’s narrowest of victories an important “signal” for the September parliamentary election.

But was it?

Aside from the fact that all three previous incumbents who ran for a second term were re-elected, Koehler’s victory in 2004 had no tangible impact on the 2005 parliamentary election. The CDU/CSU and FDP also elected Koehler in 2004, when he beat the same SPD candidate Gesine Schwan for the first time. They all hailed that a harbinger of a new centre-right federal coalition as well. But a year later they fell short of winning a majority in the parliamentary election — and the CDU was forced to settle for a loveless grand coalition with the SPD.

Opinion polls this year suggest the centre-right coalition could win between 46 and 50 percent of the vote. That might be just enough for a majority and a renewal of the coalition that last ruled for 16 years (1982-98) under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Or that might fall short again — with roughly the other half of the electorate casting their ballots for left of centre parties like the SPD, Greens and Left party.

U.N.’s Ban in Sri Lanka: Victory dance or somber visit?

Small children dressed in dark blue pants and light blue shirts clutched U.N. and Sri Lankan flags as they sang a song in honor of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s arrival at the Manik Farm refugee camp. This is the temporary home to some 220,000 people who fled the final battle between Tamil Tiger rebels and government forces. The camp, Sri Lanka’s biggest, was plastered with posters of a smiling Ban and Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa that said, “Welcome Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to our motherland.”U.N. officials traveling with Ban had voiced concern that his visit could be exploited for propaganda purposes in a kind of victory dance for the Sri Lankan government. The secretary-general was the first major international figure to visit the island nation since the government won a 25-year-old war against the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) earlier this month. The officials said Ban would stay on message, demanding full and immediate access to some 290,000 refugees in camps in northern Sri Lanka and urging President Rajapaksa to reach out to the country’s Tamil minority to prevent a renewal of violence.During his visit to Manik Farm, Ban went to a small field hospital, where he saw severely emaciated elderly people attached to saline drips and children with shrapnel wounds. The picture could have been uglier. U.N. officials said the most severely injured – amputees, victims of mine explosions or heavy artillery blasts – were at other hospitals the delegation was not shown.A group of refugees at the Manik Farm camp, the country’s biggest displaced persons camp with over 210,000 residents, said they were outside the conflict zone in northern Sri Lanka but were rounded up by the government in April and brought to the camp. Asked in New York about the refugees’ unverified comments, U.N. humanitarian affairs chief John Holmes said he had no details about any such round-ups. However, he said it was possible that some people outside what was once called the “no-fire” zone were moved by the government into the camps. He noted that all of northeastern Sri Lanka was a war zone in a sense since it had previously been controlled by the Tamil Tigers.Ban and his delegation also flew over the former conflict zone in a tiny strip of coast in northeastern Sri Lanka where U.N. officials have accused the LTTE of using hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians as human shields as they struggled to fight off government forces. During the low-altitude helicopter flight, U.N. officials and reporters saw thousands of empty tents, piles of bicycles and other personal items abandoned in a hurry when the masses of starving civilians were fled for their lives. The burnt-out buses and cars, uprooted and smashed trees and craters filled with water appeared to provide evidence that heavy weapons were despite denials from the government and Tamil Tigers.At the end of the trip, Ban met for an hour with the president to press his demands. Afterwards Ban and Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogllagama spoke to reporters. Ban was asked if he saw evidence of “massive bombing” during the flight over the former battle zone. His answer was that “the fighting must have been severe.” Bogllagama was more direct when asked if he was confident Sri Lanka had committed no war crimes as human rights groups have said. His answer: “Absolutely.”Was Ban’s trip a success? One senior U.N. official told Reuters that Bogllagama repeatedly said “yes, yes, yes” in response to Ban’s demand for immediate and unimpeded access to the camps, though it was not clear when the access would come. A ban on the use of motor vehicles by U.N. or other aid agency personnel, however, remained in place for several more days as the government tried to prevent the escape of any Tigers hiding in the camps. (A few days after Ban left Sri Lanka, the government agreed to allow aid agencies to use cars and trucks at Manik Farm, though without flags and not in convoys.) Aid officials continue to complain that restrictions are crippling aid distribution in the camps.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan, from Swat to Baluchistan via Waziristan

The Pakistan Army is engaged in what appears to be a very nasty little war in the Swat valley against heavily armed Taliban militants.  With journalists having left Swat, there have been no independent reports of what is going on there, though the scale of the operation can be partly measured by the huge numbers of refugees - nearly 1.7 million - who fled to escape the military offensive.

Dawn newspaper carried an interview with a wounded soldier saying the Taliban had buried mines and planted IEDs every 50 metres.  ‘They positioned snipers in holes made out of the walls of houses. They used civilians as human shields. They used to attack from houses and roofs," it quoted him as saying. ‘They are well equipped, they have mortars. They have rockets, sniper rifles and every type of sophisticated weapons."

Al Jazeera's correspondent said that the battle was about to get worse as the army prepared to enter Mingora, the main town in the Swat valley. The BBC's Urdu service managed to talk to a couple of people trapped inside Mingora, one of whom mentioned coming across an Arab among a group of militants.

President Asif Ali Zardari has talked of extending the battle into Waziristan, believed to be the hideout of al Qaeda, and now Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said a U.S. military offensive in southern Afghanistan could push Taliban fighters from there into Pakistan's Baluchistan province. (To get a sense of the geographical scale of this, scroll down to the map at the bottom of this page to see how far Quetta, the main city in Baluchistan, is from the Swat valley.) Mullen said both U.S. and Pakistani forces were aware of the risk of a spillover from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and were planning measures to prevent it.

He did not say how they would do this, although the Wall Street Journal said earlier this week that the United States was sending 25 to 50 Special Forces personnel into Baluchistan to train Pakistanis, bringing U.S. troops deeper into Pakistan. The Special Forces would focus on training Pakistan's Frontier Corps, but were not meant to fight alongside them, it said. But it added, "A senior American military officer said he hoped Islamabad would gradually allow the U.S. to expand its training footprint inside Pakistan's borders. A former U.S. official familiar with the plans said the deployments would 'get more American eyes and ears' into the strategically important region."

U.S. officials say Quetta is the base for the Afghan Taliban and its leader Mullah Omar, who are able to hide in the Afghan refugee camps that sprang up after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Mukhtar Khan at CTC Sentinel has a detailed report on the Afghan Taliban in Quetta which you can find by scrolling down on this pdf document.)

But taking on the Afghan Taliban in Baluchistan, while also chasing the Pakistan Taliban out of Swat, and pursuing al Qaeda in Waziristan would be a massive operation. It's not clear whether there is some kind of masterplan and timeline for all this that we have yet to be told about, or if as Cyril Almeida worries in a column in Dawn, the Pakistan government is simply "steering blindfolded" with "a mix of lucky breaks and nonsense planning."

Poets mirror feelings of Afghans caught in conflict

    (Hanan Habibzai is an Afghan writer who has reported from  his country for Reuters and the BBC, and has recently moved to  London. Any opinions expressed in this blog are his own.)

    Intellectuals and poets have a commanding presence in Afghan  society. It is the poets who often mirror the feelings of  ordinary people, revealing much about the mindset of Afghans in  the face of occupation and civil war.

    Now, it is the smell of fresh blood rather than the delights  of Afghanistan’s mountains and fields that occupies the poets.  As an Afghan, when I read their works, I am shocked by the state  of my country, and see in that state the failures of my  government and the international community.

    When Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election last  year, many Afghans, intellectuals included, believed the end of  the Bush era meant a let-up in their suffering.

    But after the U.S. bombardments on the western province of  Farah on May 4/5, the latest of many in which scores of  civilians have been killed, most have lost faith.

    Local elders say the strikes took 147 lives. If true, that  makes the strikes the bloodiest since the war began in 2001,  though the U.S. military accuse civilians of inflating the  numbers.