In its 4Q08 report released today, the UCLA Anderson Forecast for 2009 is rather grim reading. Widely respected, the UCLA Anderson Forecast predicts that the current recession affecting the US economy will last at least four quarters of negative growth (followed by very low growth rates of well under 3%) and rising unemployment rates that last through 2010. The UCLA Anderson Forecast unit expects real GDP to shrink by 4.1% this quarter and by another 3.4% and 0.8% in the first and second quarters of next year, respectively, as consumer and business spending weaken and as the foreign trade that had propped up growth much of this year sags. Indeed, the trade deficit widened today as exports fell. The unemployment rate, according to the report, is forecast to rise from October 2008’s 6.5% to 8.5% by 4Q09/1Q10. Put into numbers, that’s a loss of two million jobs over the next 12 months.
“Because Europe and Japan are already in recession and China and India are suffering from a significant slowdown in growth, the export boom of the past few years will wane,” the report said. “Make no mistake the global economy is in its first synchronized recession since the early 1990s.”
The executive summary of US Senate Armed Services Committee report released today on abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison concluded that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s actions were “a direct cause of detainee abuse” at Guantanamo and “influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques … in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to portions of a report released on Thursday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The report’s executive summary, made public by the committee’s Democratic chairman Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and its top Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said Rumsfeld contributed to the abuse by authorizing aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay on Dec. 2, 2002.
He rescinded the authorization six weeks later. But the report said word of his approval continued to spread within U.S. military circles and encouraged the use of harsh techniques as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report concluded that Rumsfeld’s actions were “a direct cause of detainee abuse” at Guantanamo and “influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques … in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own,” the executive summary said.
“Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at (Guantanamo).”
The detainee scandal at Abu Ghraib and later revelations of aggressive U.S. interrogations such as “waterboarding” led to an international outcry and charges that the United States allowed prisoners to be tortured, a claim denied by the Bush administration.
In Nairobi today the UN special envoy and former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo announced that talks to end fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have collapsed after rebel and government representatives failed to reach a ceasefire agreement over three days of talks in the Kenyan capital. More on the collapse of the talks from Al Jazeera.
It’s not easy to describe the genesis nor the rationale of this interminable war in the heart of Africa. There are certainly elements of ethnic hatred but I find this assessment rather hitting the mark.
Paul Pumphrey, the founding member of Friends of the Congo, told Al Jazeera that the talks had not focused on “the root cause of the problem”.
“This problem … is created around the industrialised world wanting to get their hands on the mineral resources of the Congo,” he said.
“Outside forces want to rob the minerals out of the Congo and not pay a fair share for those minerals. And they’ve used this war as a means to push people off their land and not pay royalties and the government at all.
“Ninety per cent of [the Congo's] population do not make $100 a year. So where would they buy guns from? These guns coming into this war are coming in from other sources, not the local community.
“Industry works hand in hand with government … Countries like the United States, like Great Britain, like France, like Japan, these are countries whose governments operate on the behest of their corporations.
“So I hold countries like the United States very much responsible for this war.”
Personally, I hold Paris responsible more than any other player in the region. France has long treated francophone Africa as its own mineral and natural resources domain. France’s role in supporting the old Hutu regime in Rwanda before the genocide of 1994 remains one of the least covered aspects of the genocide. From World Politics Review: French Complicity in the Rwandan Genocide: An Interview with Jean-Paul Gouteux.
In other DR Congo news, the EU is considering sending a “humanitarian” force but both the UK and Germany have expressed reservations. More from the UK Guardian.
Britain is refusing to take part in a proposed European armed intervention in eastern Congo despite a growing clamour for an EU force to help avoid a bigger humanitarian disaster.
At a summit of European leaders in Brussels last night, foreign ministers from the 27 countries discussed proposals to dispatch a force of up to 1,500 to North Kivu in eastern Congo.
While Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, several ministers and human rights groups pushed for a robust intervention under European command, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, argued any action should be taken through the UN and its 17,000-strong Monuc (UN organisation mission) peacekeeping contingent.
Eid al-Adha is a time of plenty and festivity for Muslims around the world. Eid al-Adha (Arabic: عيد الأضحى ) or the Festival of Sacrifice is a religious festival celebrated by Muslims and Druze worldwide and it follows the end of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The festival revolves the legend of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac.
But this year in Mauritania, the crushing economic downturn and the country’s political instability have left thousands of people with very little to celebrate and half of the population living in poverty.
Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall reports from Nouakchott.
Oil prices surged today up nearly 10% to $47.81 a barrel after the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, announced that Saudi Arabia had cut its daily production to 8.5 million barrels and that OPEC may in concert to further curtail supply to shore up global prices as worldwide demand for crude continues to slacken. The International Energy Agency now projects worldwide demand to fall by 200,000 barrels a day, to 85.8 million barrels a day, in 2008. This will mark the first year-on-year drop in global oil consumption in twenty-five years. More from the New York Times:
Global oil consumption will drop this year for the first time since 1983, as an economic downturn in the West and slower growth in China cuts fuel demand, according to the world’s main energy forecaster.
The International Energy Agency, an adviser to industrialized nations, said on Thursday that it projects worldwide demand to fall by 200,000 barrels a day, to 85.8 million barrels a day, in 2008. The new forecast is 350,000 barrels a day less than the agency’s last monthly report, which is widely read among energy experts.
Oil demand may recover somewhat next year, although at a much slower pace, as the global economy turns the corner in the second half of 2009, according to the energy agency. It sees consumption growing by 0.5 percent, or 400,000 barrels a day. That is still 260,000 barrels a day less than was expected last month.
While not entirely surprising, the outlook is more optimistic than most energy forecasts, many of which paint a far bleaker picture of the oil markets for the next 12 months. Many analysts had already predicted lower consumption this year, and some also expect demand to drop next year.
The Energy Department said earlier this week that global consumption would probably fall by 450,000 barrels a day in 2009, the first time in more than 30 years that demand declines for two consecutive years.
As a result of the global recession, the price of oil has fallen more than 70 percent since its peak this summer. Oil fell to $40 a barrel last week, after rising as high as $147 a barrel in intraday trading in July.
On Thursday, oil futures in New York surged $4.29 to $47.81 a barrel, after the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said that his country had cut its production to 8.5 million barrels a day, down more than 1.2 million barrels a day from its August peak.
The agency’s report could add grist to the view that OPEC producers must reduce their output to prevent a complete price collapse. The oil cartel is meeting next week in Algeria to consider reducing its output and stem the price drop.