Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
from The Great Debate UK:
Squandered oil wealth, an African tragedy
-Arvind Ganesan is the Director of the Business and Human Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. The opinions expressed are his own.-
Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country of about half a million people on the west coast of Africa, but is the fourth-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa.
Most of the investment in the country’s multi-billion dollar oil industry comes from the United States. ExxonMobil, Hess and Marathon are all there. Right now, the U.S. imports up to 100,000 barrels of oil a day from Equatorial Guinea, or about a quarter of the country’s oil production.
Oil money gives the country the means to be a model for development and human rights. The economy is nearly 130 times as big as it was when oil was discovered in 1995. But as a report released by Human Rights Watch today details, the government has squandered or stolen much of the money at the expense of its people.
A foreign policy tell-all from Rice?
NEW YORK - When her eight years in the Bush administration end on Jan. 20, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to write a book about U.S. foreign policy.
Asked in a Reuters interview on Friday if it would be a tell-all memoir and reveal secret meetings in the build-up to the Iraq war, Rice replied: “Tell-all? What’s a tell-all?”
Rice eats way through North Africa during Ramadan
RABAT – How many Iftars can you eat in a day?
For U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, that became a concern during her tour of North Africa in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
On Saturday, Rice joined Algeria’s leaders to break the fast after sundown. Then she flew to neighboring Morocco to indulge in another Iftar, the traditional meal to end a day of fasting. The previous night, she shared Iftar with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, eating soup and other treats.
Russia’s Cold War anger over U.S. shield: misjudged?
Russia’s angry response to an accord between Washington and Prague on building part of a U.S. missile defence shield in the Czech Republic is reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow still wants talks on the missile shield, his Foreign Ministry has threatened a “military-technical” response if the shield is deployed.
That phrase could have come straight out of the Soviet lexicon and seems more at home in the second half of the last century than now. Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer called it psychological pressure to try to encourage opposition to the missile system among Europeans, and described it as “the same sort that was used in the 1980s by the Soviet Union when the United States deployed cruise missiles in Europe.”
