101 East travels across Australia visiting Aboriginal communities and talking to Aboriginal and government leaders to ask – What is the future for Australia’s Indigenous people?

Return to Main

“I will not run after two hares.” – Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi in July 1998

On Monday, the President will host a “fiscal responsibility summit” at the White House and he is to give a prime-time speech to Congress on Tuesday before unveiling a budget overview Thursday. According to USA Today, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed that the Administration pegs the current deficit at $1.3 trillion, or 9.2% of the overall economy, and projects that in four years the deficit will be down to $533 billion, or 3% of the economy as measured by the gross domestic product.

“The budget will cut the deficit that the president inherited upon assuming office at least in half by the end of his first term,” said Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget.

President Obama’s 2010 budget includes plans for defense cuts — including a rollback of the Iraq war — and ending the Bush administration’s high-income tax cuts. All laudable and necessary budget priorities but the Administration should continue to spend and invest in the American economy.

(more…)

The UK Guardian has an article today on how in the wake of Iceland’s economic collapse, it is the women of Iceland taking charge and on how they are determined to reinvent business and society by injecting values of openness, fairness and social responsibility.

On Bondadagur, or Husband’s Day, the menfolk of Iceland are spoiled by their wives and girlfriends, who serve them with traditional delicacies such as ram’s testicles and sheep’s head jelly, a recipe for which is handily included in the latest online edition of Iceland Review, alongside the latest bulletins on the economic meltdown.

Icelandic women, however, are more likely to be studying the financial news than the recipes – and more likely to be thinking about how to put right the mess their men have made of the banking system than about cooking them comfort food. The tiny nation, with a population of just over 300,000 people, has been overwhelmed by an economic disaster that is threatening its very survival. But for a generation of fortysomething women, the havoc is translating into an opportunity to step into the positions vacated by the men blamed for the crisis, and to play a leading role in creating a more balanced economy, which, they argue, should incorporate overtly feminine values.

The ruling male elite is scarcely in a position to argue. The krona has collapsed; interest rates and inflation have soared; companies and households which have borrowed in foreign currency are overwhelmed by their debts and unemployment is at record levels. An exodus of young people is feared from the capital only recently held up as a centre of cutting-edge cool. Walking along Laugavegur, touted until a year or so ago as the Bond Street of Reykjavik, the gloom is palpable.

The idea that Reykjavik, an attractive, low-rise provincial place, could be a financial nerve centre on a par with the gleaming skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and Wall Street now seems utterly absurd. Over the past 10 years, however, little Iceland became a test-bed for the new economic order. Led by businessmen such as Baugur boss Jón Asgeir Jóhannesson, a nation previously best known for cod and hot springs reinvented itself as an Atlantic tiger. The Icelanders bought stakes in huge tracts of the British high street, including House of Fraser, Whistles and Karen Millen. Their banks were equally buccaneering, adopting free market reforms with gusto and moving with relish into financial engineering. The upshot: they now owe at least six times the country’s income for 2008 and have been taken into state hands.

Unlike in the UK, Iceland’s women are at the forefront of the clean-up. The crisis led to the downfall of the government and the prime minister’s residence – which resembles a slightly over-sized white dormer bungalow – is now occupied by Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, an elegant 66-year-old lesbian who is the world’s first openly gay premier. When she lost a bid to lead her party in the 1990s, she lifted her fist and declared: “My time will come.” Her hour has now arrived – and the same is true for a cadre of highly accomplished businesswomen.

Prominent among them are Halla Tómasdóttir and Kristin Petursdóttir, the founders of Audur Capital, who have teamed up with the singer Björk to set up an investment fund to boost the ravaged economy by investing in green technology. Petursdóttir, a former senior banking executive, and Tómasdóttir, the former managing director of the Iceland Chamber of Commerce, decided just before the crunch to set up a firm bringing female values into the mainly male spheres of private equity, wealth management and corporate advice.

(more…)

Governor of Lagos state, Babatunde Fashola, has been nicknamed the ‘action governor’. The youngest person ever to run Nigeria’s commercial capital, Fashola’s practical approach to tackling chronic problems like poor infrastructure and healthcare means he’s radically transformed Lagos in just two years. Al Jazeera’s Mark Eddo reports from Lagos.

Return to Main

Al Jazerra travels to Sri Lanka to look at the Tamil Tigers.

Return to Main

It appears that the Obama administration has decided to expand the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan by increasing the use of predator drones. This week there were two more missile attacks inside Pakistan but unlike previous attacks on Al-Qaeda or Afghan Taliban targets, these attacks were on training camps run by a Pakistani Islamist group known as the Mehsud Network under the command of Baitullah Mehsud, a Pashtun tribesman from Waziristan, though the eponymous group reportedly does have links to Al-Qaeda.

From the New York Times profile of Baitullah Mehsud:

Mr. Mehsud, with foreign backing, has claimed to have hundreds of suicide bombers at the ready, and officials of both Pakistan and Afghanistan say he is responsible for many attacks on government and military targets. The Pakistani government blames him for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Mr. Mehsud has called for global jihad: In Spain, attacks on public transportation have been carried out in his name, government officials there say.

Though he is said to be uneducated and have no religious training, Baitullah Mehsud was thought to have modeled himself after Mullah Muhammad Omar, the elusive one-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban. But Mr. Mehsud has become far less reclusive than he was in the past and has begun to flaunt his power. He now openly operates terror training camps near the Afghan border. He is ruthless in assassinating rivals: at least 100 Waziri tribal leaders have been purged on his orders, intelligence sources say. In late 2007, a Taliban shura, a 40-member consultative council, chose him to unify its operations in Pakistan.

Various reports in late January 2008 said that Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban had broken with Mr. Mehsud because he was focusing on attacks in Pakistan, rather than in Afghanistan. Yet the Pakistani government has not acted forcefully against him. “If the army took firm action they could crush him in two months,” said one frustrated tribal leader. Experts say that the Pakistani government thinks Mr. Mehsud’s border presence might be useful if Pakistan ever went to war with India.

(more…)