The global economic downturn has also spread to the largest and richest state in the United States.
California is facing a multi-billion dollar budget deficit meaning the government running the world’s eighth largest economy is almost broke and nearly one in ten Californians is looking for work. Al Jazeera’s Tom Ackerman reports.
Riz Khan interviews Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the President of Colombia.
Last May, Ma Ying-jeou was sworn in as Taiwan’s new president and promised to improve relations with mainland China. Worldfocus correspondents Dave and Amy Marash traveled to Taiwan to learn more about the country and its progressing relations with mainland China.
In August, US airstrikes in Herat province drew harsh criticism from the Afghan government and the UN. According to the Afghan government, 90 civilians were killed in Azizabad. The US maintains “only” 30 civilians died. President Hamid Karzai visited the area; promising justice and assistance but the aid has not been forthcoming. Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr returns to the village to find people waiting for the promises to be fulfilled.
Here’s a Washington Post story on the strike from last September:
The U.S. Central Command will send a senior team, headed by a general and including a legal affairs officer, to reinvestigate a U.S. air attack last month that U.N. and Afghan officials say killed 90 civilians, amid mounting public outrage in Afghanistan and evidence that conflicts with the military’s initial version of events.
The U.S. decision to again probe the Aug. 21 attack in Azizabad, near the western city of Herat, came at the urging of Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. McKiernan said he was prompted by “emerging evidence” that threw into question the finding of a U.S. investigation that five to seven civilians died. McKiernan had earlier said he concurred with that finding.
The attack and the widely divergent accounts of its toll have exposed long-standing tensions between U.S. forces in Afghanistan and other major players in the war there, including the government of President Hamid Karzai, the U.N. assistance mission and the NATO military command. Underlying the dispute over civilian casualties are a lack of communication, a diffuse command structure and differing military rules of engagement.
Military officials said the new evidence included a cellphone video showing dozens of civilian bodies, including those of numerous children, prepared for burial in Azizabad after the attack. McKiernan was shown the video Friday by Kai Eide, the chief U.N. representative in Afghanistan.
“The footage that is there on this shows horrendous pictures of these bodies and clearly identifies women and children. In some cases, the bodies are not in one piece,” a U.N. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Whether you say it was 76 or 82 or even 92 — it was clearly not seven who were killed there.”
Said a senior U.S. military official: “Whatever information McKiernan got that was shared by Afghan and U.N. representatives led him to believe there was good cause to want to look at all of this more deeply.”
In a statement , McKiernan said: “The people of Afghanistan have our commitment to get to the truth.”
The U.S. military official said the general in charge of the new investigation, to be named Tuesday, will come from inside the Central Command but outside Afghanistan. The team, including a military legal representative and a colonel with Afghan ground experience, will “immediately deploy” and will review the initial investigation before visiting the area of the attack. There, the official said, the team will speak with family members of victims and with others to determine “who, in fact, was there and who has died,” the official said.
In an atmosphere of local antagonism and without being able to exhume bodies, “it’s going to be pretty challenging,” he said.
Contrary to Pakistan’s wishes, the Obama administration has continued launching US strikes against militant hideouts inside Pakistani territory — following the same policy as the former Bush administration. Top U.S. officials say the al-Qaida threat from that area of Pakistan is real and significant. VOA’s Ravi Khanna has the story.
A new ad on behalf the Employee Free Choice Act from American Rights At Work, a nonprofit advocacy organization whose mission is to support workers’ rights to a free choice and a fair chance to join a union. The group describes its vision describes its vision as “a nation where the freedom of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers is guaranteed and promoted.” Both John Edwards and Hilda Solis have served on its board of directors which is currently headed by Congressman David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan.
The ad is 30 second spot.
France24 English’s Raphael Kahane asked Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, what kind of future awaits the world economy in 2009 and his opinion on the US stimulus package.
Mr. Stiglitz is a Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He served in the Clinton Administration as the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors and a Chief Economist at The World Bank. He is often a voice of dissent and one of the few economists who views increasing income inequality as a problem.
The Swat Valley is an area few journalists are able to operate in and it appears that despite the presence of thousands of extra Pakistani troops the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and its local affliliate, Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, remain firmly in control. Policemen have been beheaded in the streets, men have been lashed and dozens schools have been burnt down under the Taliban justice and their version of Sharia law. Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder travelled to the Swat Valley from where he sent this exclusive report.
The Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi is an Islamist group founded by Sufi Muhammad in 1992 and banned by President Musharraf in 2002 after the group sent fighters into Afghanistan to repel the American-led NATO assault. According to reports, the Taliban and Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi now control the Swat Valley and have banned 40,000 girls from attending schools. More than 170 schools have been burned since the battle for Swat begun in November 2006.
The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is an umbrella group for Taliban activities in Pakistan. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is a Wahabi Sunni sectarian group with ties to Saudi Wahabism. The Wahabi school of Islamic though originated with the Arab (Nejd) religious leader Mohammed Ibn Abd al-Wahab (1703-1791), the Wahabis preach a return to the basic Islam of the seventh century. Wahabism is essentially Islam in its purest seventh century Arab form. It was both a religious and a nationalist movement. Wahabism rejects all of the transformations that Islam has undergone in the intervening centuries. It is the state-sanctioned and state supported religion of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its rise in Pakistan is largely due to the Saudi funding of religious madrassas in the country.