Veteran Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau is on Hugo Chavez's case.

Morgenthau warned last week at Washington's Brookings Institution that Iran is using Venezuela's financial system to avoid international sanctions so it can acquire materials to develop nuclear weapons and missiles.  He urged more scrutiny of the "emerging axis of Iran and Venezuela" in an op/ed article in the Wall Street Journal, in which he said a number of mysterious Iranian factories had sprung up in remote parts of Venezuela.

Chavez's man in Washington, Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez, called the allegations "outrageous ... unfounded and irresponsible" in a letter to the district attorney seen by Reuters.

True, leftist President Chavez has done little to endear himself to Americans. A fierce critic of the United States, his foreign policy rule of thumb is my enemy's enemies are my friends. His last trip abroad included visits to Libya, Algeria, Syria, Iran, Belarus and Russia. He loudly announced plans to buy Russian tanks and anti-aircraft missiles.

But Chavez maintains the weapons are needed to defend Venezuela, which he says is threatened by a growing U.S. military presence in neighboring Colombia. And he swears he has no intention of developing an atomic bomb.

Besides vast oil reserves, Venezuela has large deposits of uranium, though there are no signs of any plans to mine them.

"Venezuela would never participate, directly or indirectly, in any project to help any country produce weapons of mass destruction," Alvarez wrote to Morgenthau.

The ambassador said the DA's suspicions about Iranian factories were "particularly irresponsible" because they produce food, farming equipment, plastic goods, bicycles and dairy products.

"Sadly, your claims bring to memory the allegations of weapons of mass destruction that were said to exist in Iraq and led to that country's invasion and the consequent loss of many Arab and American lives," Alvarez wrote.

The diplomat said the district attorney was feeding "an unfounded and dirty campaign" against Venezuela.

Without hard evidence to show, is Morgenthau fear-mongering? What do you think?

Photo credit: Reuters/handout (Chavez speaks next to Iran's Ahmadinejad in Tehran), Reuters/Brendan McDermid  (Morgenthau at Reuters Financial Regulation Summit in New York, April 24, 2009)

-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.

It is a sad contrast, since the country has a per capita income comparable to Spain’s or Italy’s and development indicators more like Afghanistan’s. For just one sad example, infant and child mortality actually has increased -- from an already-dismal 103 deaths per thousand in 1990 to 124 per thousand in 2007. Similarly, under-5 mortality rates increased from 170 per thousand in 1990 to 206 per thousand in 2007.

The president and his family are doing just fine, though. They lead lavish lifestyles while most people live in crushing poverty.

A series of corruption scandals involving government officials and their families will give you some idea of how bad it is.

In 2004, a U.S. Senate investigation into the country’s dealings with the now-defunct Riggs Bank detailed how President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo used the country’s oil wealth to finance numerous personal transactions, including spending $3.8 million to buy two mansions in a suburb of Washington, D.C. That investigation led to one of the largest fines against a bank in U.S. history, and ultimately the bank’s takeover.

Obiang’s eldest son, Teodorin, bought a $35 million property in California in 2006. In 2004, he spent about $8.45 million for mansions and luxury cars in South Africa. His only known income was a $4,000 monthly salary as a government minister. His $43.45 million in spending on his lavish lifestyle from 2004 to 2006 was more than the $43 million the government spent on education in 2005.

The people of Equatorial Guinea have no way to hold their government accountable. Obiang has been in power since 1979, when he deposed his uncle in a coup. The government severely curtails press freedom and independent civil society, and the political opposition is weak and faces constant government harassment, intimidation, and arrests. In the most recent parliamentary elections in May 2008, Obiang and his allies won 99 out of 100 seats.

The government has joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an effort to make natural resources benefit everyone by setting a global standard for openness in oil, gas, and mining. However, the government has been very slow to implement the initiative’s standards. The danger is that EITI may give the government a veneer of legitimacy even while it stifles its critics and opposes real scrutiny.

Perhaps the best prospect for reform lies with the Obama administration since most of the investment in Equatorial Guinea’s oil comes the US. There are in fact things the administration can do now to break the cycle of corruption in a place like Equatorial Guinea. It should hold the government accountable for human rights and insist that it rigorously enforce anti-corruption laws. Under the Bush administration, that did not happen.

The same month in 2006 that Obiang’s son bought a $35 million Malibu mansion, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Obiang in Washington and called him “a good friend” at a news conference.

Unless the Obama administration makes it clear to Equatorial Guinea’s leaders that they must share the oil wealth with the country’s people , the human cost of the oil that the US imports from that country will continue to be staggering.

Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua has laid out the details of a 60-day amnesty programme for militants and criminals in the Niger Delta. Under the deal, all gunmen who lay down their weapons during a 60-day period ending in October will be immune from prosecution. The offer extends to those currently being prosecuted for militant-related activities, meaning Henry Okah – the suspected leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) – could also walk free if he agrees to renounce the notion of armed struggle.

Several factional leaders – including Ateke Tom, Farah Dagogo, Soboma George and Boyloaf – have said they accept the idea of amnesty in principle but want talks with President Yar’Adua to hammer out the details.

Advocates say such an amnesty would meet one of the key demands of militant groups and is the only way to bring an end to instability which costs Nigeria billions of dollars in lost oil revenues each year, prevents the development of the very communities the militants claim to represent and causes world energy prices to rise further, which ultimately falls back on the Nigerian consumer.

Critics say amnesty simply provides a get-out-of-jail free card to those responsible for kidnappings, acts of sabotage and banditry and that the promises to re-educate and reintegrate them into civilian society would require years of investment. The government has said it will not offer a “buy back” programme – money for surrendered weapons – but does the scheme reward those who have taken up the armed struggle while leaving peaceful protesters with nothing?

It is not the first time amnesty has been offered to armed gangs in the Niger Delta. Yar’Adua’s predecessor Olusegun Obasanjo struck such an agreement in 2004 with militants including Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, whose Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force turned over thousands of weapons in return for amnesty. But the deal later broke down when some factions accused others of profiting from disarmament at their expense, and Asari was later arrested and charged with treason.

Is Yar’Adua’s amnesty offer a serious attempt at resolving the crisis in the Niger Delta or will it suffer the same fate as the previous amnesty deal? Is it simply an attempt to win political currency for the ruling party in the Niger Delta ahead of elections in 2011? What happens after the amnesty? What hope is there that the resources and political will are there to ensure the longer-term development of the Niger Delta and prevent a resurgence of the cycle of the frustration, unemployment and violence that has characterised the region for so long?

    The recent run-up in oil prices could have further to go as most analysts are likely to begin raising their year-end oil price targets, according to market research firm Birinyi Associates in Stamford, Connecticut.
    “Given several considerably lower expectations, we think it is reasonable to expect upgrades,” they said in a research commentary, noting that crude oil prices were already above most firms’ year-end targets.
    U.S. front-month crude hit an intraday high of $73.23 on Thursday, the highest intraday level since prices hit $75.69 on Oct. 21.
    A year-end oil price target of note recently came from Goldman Sachs, which raised its end-of-2009 oil price forecast on June 4 to $85 a barrel from $65.
    Oil’s climb partly reflects weakness of the U.S. dollar and expectations that demand may be picking up as the global recession abates.

— Graphic courtesy of Birinyi Associates, Inc.

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.

Angola’s hard-hitting beat electrifies the poor

It’s not break-dance, it isn’t rap either. The name is kuduro and its beat is electrifying dancers from Luanda to Lisbon and New York City. In Angola’s capital city, men and women are often seen performing robotic moves, bouncing off walls or pretending to drop dead once kuduro’s hard-hitting beat stops. The creator of kuduro, which means “hard-ass” in Portuguese, said he came up with the sound while watching martial arts expert Jean Claude Van Damme dance in a 1994 movie.

Cattle rustling on the rise as U.S. recession bites

Cattle theft is a growing problem as thieves realize that stealing cows is a relatively easy way to raise a quick buck. Stolen cattle are often taken straight from their farm or ranch to auction at a stockyard.  “When people think cattle rustling they think John Wayne. But it’s not like that. Cattle thieves are … technologically savvy. “

Fiat expansion stirs resentment in Italy’s south

Staring at the locked gates of a Fiat car factory, Mimmo Vacchiano says many families in this poor corner of southern Italy face a stark choice unless its turnstiles reopen. “If they close this plant, there’s nothing else here, only unemployment or the mafia.” Pomigliano d’Arco, a town of 40,000 people in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, relies on Fiat for its lifeblood. Residents now fear they may pay the price for cash-strapped Fiat’s high-stakes strategy to survive the recession by expanding to become the world’s second largest car maker.

Signs of recovery appear in Zimbabwe hospitals

The odors of death and decay are gone from the corridors of Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital, replaced by the smells of medicines and food for the patients who are once again coming for treatment. Nowhere is the change in Zimbabwe more evident than in the hospitals that just months ago failed so woefully to cope with a cholera epidemic that killed more than 4,000 people. Doctors and nurses have returned to Harare’s Parirenyatwa General Hospital. UNICEF has been helping to pay allowances to some doctors and nurses while the government is now paying them $100 a month like other state employees.

Boom-and-bust corner of California sees new hope

If the U.S. recession has an epicenter in California, it may be the  working-class neighborhoods called the “Inland Empire,” full of boarded-up homes, vacant storefronts, jobless workers. It faces years coping with foreclosed homes, jobless rates over 10 percent, a poorly educated workforce and empty warehouses.

Slain leaders’ heirs vie for Lebanon votes

The memory of assassinated Lebanese leaders lives in symbols and slogans of their heirs who are battling for Christian votes crucial to deciding the parliamentary election. Nayla Tueni and Nadim Gemayel are young, even by the standards of Lebanon’s dynastic politics. Running as allies in the June election, both evoke memories of fathers killed for their views.

Everglades swamped with invading pythons

The population of Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades may have grown to as many as 150,000 as the non-native snakes breed in the fragile wetlands. Wildlife biologists say they have been dumped by  owners who no longer want them and pose a threat to endangered species like the wood stork and Key Largo woodrat. “They eat things that we care about,” said an Everglades National Park biologist.

By Mohammed Abbas                                      

Many developing countries are mired in dated bureaucratic practice and tangled in red tape, but of all of them, Iraq can perhaps least afford to see its crucial post-war development suffocated under mounds of paperwork.
What hangs in the balance is nothing less than whether oil-rich Iraq can emerge from years of war as a prosperous, democratic and secure state — or whether it sinks back into the bloodshed that almost tore it apart.
A love of official stamps, seals and documents in triplicate is by no means only an Iraqi phenomenon. Receiving shipments at Cairo airport, for example, involves one queue to buy a ticket, another to receive it and a third to get it laminated.

But if Iraq is to rebuild its crumbling infrastructure, develop its oil fields and find jobs for legions of restless unemployed — who have easy access to guns — it must make doing business and governing as smooth as possible.
Would-be foreign investors are likely to steer clear if Iraqis themselves find the country’s bureaucracy a nightmare.
Born in Iraq, I was technically eligible to vote in recent provincial elections, but a trip to a government office to apply for a required residency card was a shocking reminder of the mountain of bureaucracy Iraqis must climb.
Hundreds of people shuffled from room to room down long, dim corridors with unmarked doors, clutching sheaves of faded paperwork. A crowd would clamour at a door whenever an official turned up, but otherwise many sat on the floor despondent.
Some looked like they had been there for days.

In one office, two officials let people in one at a time. Noise and paper-waving from the crowd outside erupted each time the door opened.
“Fake. Fake. This one’s okay, take that to the district office and apply there,” said one official, lazily flicking forged identification cards back at a woman before advising her to go and queue at yet another government building.
Far from instilling order, the bureaucracy has fostered an industry in forged documents and fixers versed in byzantine official process, who can apply on your behalf for a hefty fee. Some of that money probably goes to officials. Iraq came second to last out of 180 countries in corruption watchdog Transparency International’s 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index.
Meanwhile, roads remain unpaved, sewage disposal is abysmal and millions have no access to decent housing and healthcare, partly because bureaucracy has made it hard to execute Iraq’s budget.
For journalists, the insistence on long-winded procedure is maddening.
Recent Reuters requests to meet senior Iraqi officials were rejected because the envelope had not been stamped correctly, or because it did not have a randomly generated reference number.
Many officials insist on lengthy honorifics and encourage obsequious preambles to questions, which eats away at press conference time and takes up newspaper space.
The leads of many Gulf newspaper articles, for example, consist of little but long-winded honorifics.
“Noble Leader, Master of the Seven Sand Dunes, who Blesses us with his Beneficience, Sheikh xxxx of xxxx bin xxxx abdul xxx met …” That’s only a mild exaggeration.
Democracy has been touted as a way for Iraqis to reconcile after years of war, and last month they voted in local polls. Incumbents fared badly, and the result was seen as a vote against years of perceived corruption and incompetence.
The pressure is now on Iraq’s new crop of officials to cut the red tape and show democracy works.

Much of the news that comes out of the Niger Delta, the vast network of creeks home to Africa's biggest oil and gas industry, is generated either by militant leaders claiming spectacular attacks on oil industry installations or by the military, keen to publicise its victories flushing out crude oil thieves from camps nestled deep in the mangroves.

Rarely heard are the voices of the "boys" who have taken up arms and make up the rank and file of the militant gangs. Oil theft on an industrial scale or kidnappings for ransom make some of their bosses rich. Peace negotiations see others rewarded with the veneer of political legitimacy and a comfortable new government-funded lifestyle. But the grunts tend to share little of the spoils.

So an initiative to take them out of the militant camps and send them abroad to be immersed in the teachings of non-violent activists from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela raised - after the initial scepticism - a strong dose of curiosity. After the attempt to "reorientate their psyches", the candidates would be schooled in skills meant to make them employable once they returned back home.

Would they be convinced that they could renounce violence and still fight for their rights? Did they really believe that theirs was a political struggle or were they simply interested in emulating some of their leaders and growing rich from stolen crude, ransom money and government pay-offs?

There are precedents in West Africa. Former child soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone who spent their formative years living by the gun have been reschooled and retrained, some integrated into the national army, others starting lives with newly-learned skills as carpenters or welders.

Negotiators trying to build peace in divided countries such as Ivory Coast or Democratic Republic of Congo have brought former rebels into the fold by making them stakeholders in the future of their countries, with varying degrees of success.

Could the same philosophy of constructive engagement work with the armed youths of the Niger Delta?

Some of the young men waiting in Lagos airport to begin the overseas part of their "reorientation training" reminded me of former child soldiers I had met in Liberia and Sierra Leone, or young Tuareg rebels in northern Mali and Niger. They had similar aspirations as young adults anywhere -- to earn a decent living, be able to look after themselves and win respect from their peers.

"Anybody in violence wants out of violence, it's just a question of finding a way," one of them, Patrick, commented.

So could the programme work? If, with new skills, these former militants can return home and earn a living, could they persuade others in the community to lay down their weapons? Or is it an expensive waste of money, rewarding former criminals with the sort of opportunities that many in Nigeria can only dream of?

After the Algerian parliament changed the constitution to lift presidential term limits, north Africans are asking whether Algeria now has a president for life.

In making the change, Algeria has followed a route taken in recent years by other African countries such as Cameroon, Chad and Uganda, all of which removed the limit of two presidential terms.

The change means that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika looks certain for relection in the April 2009 election, although he has not yet confirmed he will stand.

Democracy campaigners see it as a dark day for the economically powerful but politically fragile country, which has a history of violence and intolerance.

Are five more years of the socialist-minded Bouteflika what Algeria needs to promote pluralism, inclusive politics and business, as well as to continue rebuilding after the civil war of the 1990s, as his supporters argue?

Or will the secretive military-based system that sits behind the presidency continue to monopolise oil income, a governance model that opponents say perpetuates catastrophic levels of unemployment, poverty, homelessness and social unrest?

Returning to Nigeria for the first time in five years, nothing is more striking than the mobile phones ringing wherever you go.

The phone signal barely drops on a drive some five hours out of Abuja, through countryside where the only people visible are hoeing the red earth and balancing unwieldy stems of sugar cane on bicycles. A growing number of village households now have phones.

It marks a big change in a country where not long ago it was often easier to visit someone than to try to call.

As elsewhere in Africa, free access to mobile phones has created a new industry and made business easier for everyone – helping to propel the continent’s fastest growth in years.

But finding somewhere to charge a mobile phone’s battery can be problematic.

Nigeria, like some of its neighbours, has had far less success in bringing the reliable power supplies that business also needs to take off.

Nigerians blame that failure as much as anything else for holding back Africa’s giant. They increasingly question the ability of President Umaru Yar’Adua to make a difference, despite campaign promises ahead of last year’s election and a pledge to declare a “national emergency” to improve power supplies.

For many Nigerians, the lights rarely – if ever – come on. It is not only frustrating, it forces businesses to run their own generators, pushing up costs and eating into profits.

The growing economy and population have only made the shortfall more dramatic.

To put Nigeria’s failure to meet its power needs in context, South Africa suffered crippling outages early this year despite having 10 times Nigeria’s generating capacity for only one third of the population.

The success of mobile phones in Nigeria was not so much because of anything the previous government did as the fact that it was able to remove longstanding official obstacles to private firms eager to invest in a country of over 140 million.

The power sector is a bigger task, given the huge investments needed, but there is little sign of government action to address the problem despite an investigation into billions of dollars that the previous administration is accused of misusing in its failed efforts to improve electricity supplies.

In fact, there is concern among Nigerians and foreign investors alike at the slow pace of government under President Yar’Adua, now widely dubbed “Baba Go-Slow”.

A new cabinet has yet to be announced despite the sacking of 20 ministers and there are doubts over progress on the 2009 draft budget. Worries over Yar’Adua’s health have added to the mood of uncertainty.

Meanwhile, the economic environment is getting harsher with prices for the crude oil on which Nigeria relies now closer to $60 a barrel than the $140 they topped earlier this year. Turmoil in the Niger Delta continues to restrain oil production. Nigeria’s main stock market index has lost nearly half its value since March.

Is Yar’Adua going to be up to the task of turning on the lights? Is anyone? What do you think?