By Hanna Hindstrom The Burmese government has questioned the findings of a new independent report, which alleged that riot police used white phosphorous in a brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters near a controversial Chinese copper mine last year, and accused its authors of attempting to “influence” the official investigation. “We will only consider the report [...]
Burma Govt Rejects Report Alleging Use Of ‘White Phosphorous’ In Crackdown
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Indigenous Peoples Find A New Dialogue Forum – Analysis
By R. Nastranis The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations, has opened a new chapter in its longstanding engagement with indigenous peoples, majority of whom live in rural areas and face the dual challenges of poverty and marginalization. They were offered an important platform of dialogue at the [...]
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Five Issues Troubling The Ongoing Colombia: FARC Peace Talks – Analysis
By Trent Boultinghouse “We didn’t come here to waste time.” A defensive Iván Márquez, spokesman of the decades-old Colombian FARC revolutionary group uttered these words on January 31, during the latest round of peace talks between Bogotá and the insurgent movement.[1] Now, some media outlets routinely have latched onto the automatic narrative that the negotiations [...]
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India: Tear Gas Fired At Hindu Worshippers
Police fired tear gas at Hindus in central India’s Dhar district on Friday after they refused to leave a place of worship when a Hindu festival coincided with Muslim prayers. At the end of a week which has seen a ramped up police presence and arguments over whether Muslims would be allowed to pray as [...]
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G20 Ministers Vow To Refrain From Currency Warfare
(RFE/RL) — Group of 20 (G20) finance ministers have pledged to refrain from devaluing their currencies to gain economic advantage and to crack down on corporate tax avoidance. A two-day meeting in Moscow ended on February 16 with a joint communique that included a promise that the G20 member states will “refrain from competitive devaluation” [...]
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Syria Accuses Turkey Of Arming Terrorist Groups
Syria’s Foreign and Expatriates Ministry said that the Turkish government “continues to flagrantly interfere in the Syrian domestic affairs in breach of the UN charter, the international law, and the rules governing relations among countries.” According to the state-run news agency SANA, in two identical letters addressed on Friday, Feb 15, to head of the [...]
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Biotech Seed Patent Case Goes To US Supreme Court
By Steve Baragona The giant American agrichemical and biotech seed company, Monsanto, will be the subject of arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday. It’s a case that asks: Who owns the offspring of a product that copies itself? The answer could affect the future of genetically modified organisms, as well as emerging software, medicine, [...]
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Burma: Students Taken By Kachin Army
Rebels in Burma’s Kachin state are forcibly recruiting civilians, including children as young as 16, to join their ranks in a fight for independence against Burmese government troops, despite recent peace talks, a Kachin pastor said Friday. The Rev. Thomas Gwan Rai Aung, an ethnic Kachin Roman Catholic pastor, said that soldiers from the Kachin [...]
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How Will Obamacare Affect Health Savings Accounts? – OpEd
If you are one of the more than 22 million people [1] enrolled in a Health Savings Account (HSA) or a Health Reimbursement Arrangement or if you work for the one of every two employers who now offer one of these consumer-driven health plans, in the future you will have fewer options. The new healthcare [...]
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My Take On AgustaWestland Helicopter Deal – OpEd
The 12 AgustaWestland helicopters ordered for the Air Force for VVIP duties were meant for use by the Special Protection Group (SPG) for the transport of SPG protectees and also for the transport of other VVIPs not entitled to SPG protection. While the Air Force was responsible for the procurement of the best copters available [...]
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Much Ado About Israeli And Palestinian Textbooks – OpEd
By Michael Felsen Like so much else that touches on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a just-released three-year-long study of how textbooks on both sides portray the “other” has provoked a firestorm of controversy. The fruit of a seed first planted in 2008 by a post-Annapolis Conference committee of Israelis and Palestinians dedicated to promoting education on [...]
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Macedonia To Focus On Regional Security, NATO Bids
By Miki Trajkovski The focus of Macedonia’s presidency of the Adriatic Group will be to advance regional security co-operation and to boost member country’s NATO bids. The group, which is comprised of Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) facilitates frequent meetings and steady contacts. Antonio Milososki, former Macedonian minister of [...]
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Burma: May President Prevail To Increase Educational Funds? – OpEd
By Zin Linn Investment in education is the most profitable development venture for the nation, President Thein Sein said during Friday visit to University of Kalay in Chin State which located in western Burma bordering with the Indian state of Manipur in the north and the Indian state of Mizoram in the west. There, President [...]
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Turkmenistan: Activists Freed After Unjust Jailing, Says HRW
Two Turkmen civil society activists convicted on politically motivated charges were freed on February 16, 2013, after serving out their prison terms, Human Rights Watch said today. Sapardurdy Khajiev and Annakurban Amanklychev, wrongfully imprisoned since their arrest in June 2006, suffer numerous health problems from their incarceration. “Every single second Khajiev and Amanklychev spent behind [...]
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De-Politicising Sri Lanka Policy – Analysis
By N Sathiya Moorthy Independent of India’s vote, if it came to that at the UNHRC meeting at Geneva in March, there is an urgent need to de-politicise the nation’s ‘Sri Lanka policy’ nearer home. This has more to do with the attitude and approach of political parties in southern state of Tamil Nadu, where [...]
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South Africa Economy Doing Well, Despite Global Woes – Zuma
South Africa is holding up amid the suppressed global economy and the continuing uncertainty over the Eurozone, President Jacob Zuma said on Friday. Speaking at a New Age Business Briefing following the State of the Nation Address in Parliament last night, Zuma called for persistence among South Africans as he acknowledged that the economic challenges [...]
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U.S. Should Back India’s Membership In APEC – Analysis
By Walter Lohman and Derek Scissors, Ph.D. It has been a bad half-decade for American foreign economic policy. The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha round was mortally wounded in 2008. The last three bilateral trade agreements were stalled and then renegotiated. The next one is not even on the radar screen. While the 11-nation Trans-Pacific [...]
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Saudi Arabia Weekend Shift Is Practical, Not Sinister – OpEd
By Alaa Alghamdi It is an established but not uniformly accepted fact that progress has to bring with it changes in cultural practices, and that these often involve alterations in time-honored customs. It is distressing, perhaps, when these changes are not so much the result of a natural progression, but of outside influences. And yet, [...]
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Iran: End House Arrests Of Mousavi, Karroubi, And Rahnavard
The Iranian authorities should immediately release from arbitrary house arrest two former presidential candidates Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, an author and political activist, the Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi and six leading human rights groups said today. The authorities should also stop harassing or detaining without cause the [...]
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Conflict In Mali And French Intervention – Analysis
By Melissa M. Cyrill The recent French intervention in Mali comes almost after a year of turmoil in the country, which saw the complete breakdown of its democratic system, an army coup in the capital, and a virtual Islamist takeover of the vast northern part of the country known for its difficult desert terrain. Nevertheless, [...]
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