Here is the Friday, July 18th, 2008 edition of news and events from the around the world.

Belgian Crisis
The King of Belgium has refused to accept the resignation of his prime minister, but has put the immediate political future of the country in the hands of three other people. More including a video report from Euro News. And Fistful of Euros offers some commentary on Belgie versus Belgique. Flanders Today offers a Flemish perspective.

Tensions between Thailand and Cambodia Worsen
A Cambodian general said a border standoff between his soldiers and Thai troops came close to a shoot-out overnight as the confrontation over disputed territory surrounding an ancient temple entered its fourth day Friday. Reports from Radio Australia and the BBC.

ASEAN Ministers to Meet to Discuss Oil Prices on the Region
Ministers from the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are expected to hammer out possible solutions to rising oil and food prices amid warnings inflation could threaten political stability, officials said. The problem, if left unchecked, could pose a challenge to the region’s long-term aim of evolving into a European Union-style community where goods and services are freely traded across the region by 2015, they said. At meetings to begin Sunday night, the ministers were to discuss “the growing challenge posed by rising oil and food prices, which pose a serious challenge to our people’s welfare as well as our countries’ continued economic development,” according to a draft joint communique obtained by Agence France Presse.

Guinea-Bissau and the Cashew Nut
It’s not even native to Africa (it is from the Amazon), but the Cashew Nut is the mainstay of the economy of the small West African country of Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest countries in the world. In one survey by the United Nations, Guinea-Bissau ranks as the third poorest. World News Net looks at Guinea-Bissau and the cocktail nut.

Bali Bombers Lose Their Final Appeal
Three men convicted over the 2002 Bali bombing have no more legal avenues to appeal against their executions, the Denpasar District Court confirmed today. More from the Courier Mail of Australia.

After the Swap
After swap, Israel fears Hezbollah will escalate tensions in north. Haaretz looks at how Israel now views Hezbollah.

Has The US Stopped Arms Sales to Taiwan?
If so, it is a huge mistake. The top US military commander in Asia acknowledged Wednesday that US arms sales to Taiwan had been frozen, amid warming ties between Beijing and Taipei and concerns expressed by China.

“There have been no significant arms sales from the United States to Taiwan in relatively recent times,” said Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of the Hawaii-based US Pacific Command.

Keating told a forum of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation he was aware of a freeze on US arms sales to Taiwan, saying it was “administration policy.”

The report from Agence France Presse.

UK Natural Gas Prices Could Rise 70%
The UK Guardian reports that natural gas prices are set to soar in the UK and then remain high for the foreseeable future, a report has revealed. The independent report commissioned by Centrica, which owns British Gas, warns that prices could increase by 70%. Jake Ulrich, managing director of Centrica Energy, admitted that gas price rises were likely to lead to a “potentially significant” rise in the number of people in fuel poverty. He also predicted that people would have to change their habits to deal with higher prices.

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Here is the Thursday, July 17th, 2008 edition of interesting reads from around the world.

Bush Claims Executive Privilege in Plame Case
President George W. Bush invoked executive privilege to avoid turning over records of an FBI interview of Vice President Dick Cheney and other documents subpoenaed by Congress in the CIA leak investigation. So much for that bravado that he would spare no effort in determing the source of the leak. More from the Washington Post.

Petrodollars and Geo-Politics
The Los Angeles Times examines how nations with vast oil wealth are gaining clout. It is actually the largest transfer of wealth in human history. Here’s the LA Times synopsis:

Some autocratic governments are challenging U.S. policies and silencing domestic dissent. But their increased spending raises the risk of inflation, which could erode popular support.

UK Unemployment Rate Rises Sharply
Unemployment last month rose at its fastest rate since the depths of the early 1990s recession, as the turmoil in the housing and financial markets continued to take its toll on the UK economy. The number of people claiming unemployment benefit rose for the fifth month in a row, the Office for National Statistics said. The rise - of 15,500 to 840,100 - is the biggest since December 1992. The jobless rate remained at a low 2.6%. The broader labour force survey measure rose 12,000 between March and May to 1.62 million. That was the third rise in a row although the unemployment rate stayed at 5.2%. Complete details from the UK Guardian.

China Economic News
China’s economy grew at a slower pace in the second quarter under the weight of slower exports and a drive by the central bank to tighten credit, but inflationary pressures remained uncomfortably high, the government said Thursday. Annual gross domestic product growth slowed to 10.1 percent in the second quarter from 10.6 percent in the first three months of the year and 11.9 percent in all of 2007, the National Bureau of Statistics said. While consumer inflation slowed to 7.1 percent in June from 7.7 percent in May, pipeline price pressures grew. More from the International Herald Tribune.

The Impact of High Energy Prices on Asia
The Asia Times looks at how Asian economies and Asian consumers are coping with the rise in energy prices.

When it comes to energy conservation, Japan provides a glaring counterpoint to the United States. Consider what has happened in both countries since the first oil shock of the mid-1970s when prices quadrupled.

That price hike initially led to a drive for fuel efficiency in the US, Western Europe and Japan. It also gave a boost to the idea of developing renewable sources of energy. Ever since, Japan has followed a consistent, long-range policy of reduction in petroleum usage, while the US first wavered and then fell back dramatically.

Under the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the US modestly improved the fuel efficiency of its vehicles, as stipulated by a federal law. Carter also announced a $100 million federal research and development program focused on solar power and symbolically had a solar water heater installed on the White House roof.

During the subsequent presidency of Ronald Reagan, when oil prices fell sharply, energy efficiency and conservation policies went with them, as did the idea of developing renewable sources of energy. This was dramatized when Reagan ordered the removal of that solar panel from the White House.

In the private sector, utilities promptly slashed by half their investments in energy efficiency. President George H W Bush, an oil man, followed Reagan’s lead. And his son, George W (along with Vice President Dick Cheney, former chief executive of energy services giant Halliburton) has done absolutely nothing to wean Americans away from their much talked about “addiction to oil”.

Even now, instead of urging Americans to cut oil usage (and putting a little legislative heft behind those urgings), politicians of both parties are blaming soaring gas and diesel prices on “speculators”, conveniently ignoring how thin a line divides “speculators” from “investors”.

In Japan, on the other hand, the government and private companies have stayed on course since the first oil shock. Despite the doubling of Japan’s gross domestic product during the 1970s and 1980s, its annual overall levels of energy consumption have remained unchanged. Today, Japan uses only half as much energy for every dollar’s worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States. In addition, national and local authorities have continually enforced strict energy-conservation standards for new buildings.

It is, again, Japan that has made significant progress when it comes to renewable sources of energy. By 2006, for instance, it was responsible for producing almost half of total global solar power, well ahead of the US, even though it was an American, Russell Ohl, who invented the silicon solar cell, the building block of solar photovoltaic panels, which convert sunshine into electricity.

Belgium: The World’s Most Successful Failed State
Leave it to Der Spiegel to come up with the clever headline. In this report, the German news magazine ponders:

Chaos has returned to Belgium’s capital: The government has collapsed, the prime minister has offered his resignation. German newspapers on Wednesday wonder if the linguistically divided country will ever get its act together.

I adore Belgium and I have one very good Belgian friend from Oostende. No doubt, Belgian beer and chocolates are the world’s best. Most European countries have a linguistic divide, the problem in Belgium is that the divide is also a significant cultural and economic one. I have been briefly to Wallonie but I am always more drawn to Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp and, above all, Brugge. It will be interesting to see how the Belgians resolve this divide.

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Al Jazeera’s Inside Story asks if the Union for the Mediterranean will work and if Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, is the right man to spearhead the ambitious project. The following videos are interviews with a panel of experts that includes Ignasi Guardans Cambó, Saad Djebbar and Isabel Schäfer. Ignasi Guardans Cambó is a Catalan politician and Member of the European Parliament with the CiU (CDC), Member of the Bureau of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and is vice-chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade. Maître Saad Djebbar is Deputy Director of the CNAS. He is a well-known lawyer and political analyst and an associate fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House. He appears regularly in the Arab and British media as a commentator on North African affairs. Isabel Schäfer is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

President Sarkozy has spearheaded this effort and the inaugural session was held in Paris. All 27 European Union members and 16 non-EU countries including representatives from the Palestinian Authority from the Mediterranean attended the meeting. Only Libya did not attend.

Broadly speaking, the new Union of Mediterranean is aimed at fostering North-South cooperation across the Mediterranean on subjects such as immigration, the environment and terrorism. So far, the meeting seems to be a coming out party for Syria. Syria’s Assad and Israel’s Olmert sat in the same room, marking the first time a Syrian President had ever been in the same room with an Israeli Prime Minister. The event was carefully choreographed so that the two would not cross path though. Sryrian President Bashar al-Assad said it could take between six months to two years to reach a peace agreement with Israel if the two sides, who have held indirect negotiations, agreed to face-to-face talks. In addition, Syrian diplomatic recognition of Lebanon was assured. Syria and Germany signed a repatriation agreement.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My posts, my views.

Via the BBC,

“Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns.”

The report in question was drafted by the coalition Rights and Resources Initiative focused on global forest policy. They advocate sustainable management of forestry as well as respects for the people living in and from the forests in their rights not to be forcibly displaced by logging companies who deprive them of their livelihood. As stated in the BBC,

““Arguably, we are on the verge of a last great global land grab,” said RRI’s Andy White, co-author of the major report, Seeing People through the Trees.

“It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone.”

Rising demand for food, biofuels and wood for paper, building and industry means that 515 million hectares of extra land will be needed for growing crops and trees by 2030, RRI calculates.

But only 200 million hectares will be available without dipping into tropical forests.”

Well, for logging companies and well as the biofuel and ranging sector, there is no problem: let’s just tap into these tropical forests. But this would make climate change worse since deforestation already accounts for 20% of carbon emissions. But the need for both fuel and food has triggered land speculation and whatever the global financial markets want, they usually get. It is a very unequal battle between Big Money and the rights of indigenous people to land.

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Indigenous people in Perú began a 72 hour national strike on Monday against a proposed law by the government of Alan Garcia that strikes at indigenous title to the land in the Amazon Basin. The Peruvian government wants to open up these lands to natural gas development. The strike ended yesterday with the worst disturbances in the regional capital of Madre de Dios in southeastern Perú where the state house was burned. Elsewhere around the country, there were numerous road blocks and protests. A total of 216 people were arrested and 21 policemen were injured. These strikes have been gaining force since late last year when the law was first proposed.

The above video is from Candamo National Park in Perú’s Amazon Basin. I once went on a Smithsonian expedition to the Manu National Park which is one of the world’s Living Edens. These areas are incredibly fragile. That trip to Manu ranks as one of the best I have ever taken.

In September 2007 a proposed bill was to be deliberated by the Peruvian Congress to reduce the size of a key National Park by 200,000 hectacres. Candamo is a megadiverse site and cannot be allowed to be the target of gas companies, as its natural resources are far more valuable in the long term. For more information, please visit Macaw Monitoring International or Salvemos Candamo. Since then, a local and international outcry has seen the halting of the movement of this bill through congress, and most recently, a denial of its existence. This site contains information on the background of this attempt to desecrate one of Peru’s most sacred natural resources.

More about the Ley de la Selva in Perú below the fold.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Via Le Monde, everybody hates tax havens but they do not exist at the margins of the global financial system. If anything, they are an integral part of it and every year, billions of dollars land there. They are an integral part of the infrastructure of international finances.

What circulates through tax havens? Clean and dirty money (proceeds from illegal activities that end up there for purposes of money-laundering), tax-evasion money. Tax havens were allowed to prosper by all the economic powers, but now, they are worried because they have realized that these havens make funding terrorism easier and more discreet. In the past months, we also discovered that these place facilitate tax fraud on a grand scale, as the case of Liechtenstein where more than a thousand Western people deposited their funds. So, it is not really a surprise that this topic has come up at the G8 meeting.
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Here is the Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 edition of interesting reads from around the world.

Iraq Calls For US Pullout Timetable
Iraq’s prime minister has for the first time publicly called for a US troop withdrawal timetable. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday that a military agreement the two countries are negotiating should include provisions for the withdrawal of American troops. More from Al Jazeera. It should be interesting to see how this plays in the US Presidential election.

G-8 Agrees Climate Change Deal to Halve Emissions
Leaders of G-8 agree to adopt goal of at least halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. 2050? And they are calling this a breakthrough. I shudder to think what their definition of failure is. The UK Guardian has all the bloody details.
Meanwhile, African leaders have pressed the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations to control oil and food prices. This story from Al Jazeera. And a video report on the summit from the Associated Press:

India Won’t Accept Carbon Emissions Targets
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said emphatically that India would not accept any targets that may be set by international bodies reducing its carbon emissions. Full details in The Hindu. Prime Minister Singh is to meet with US President Bush and other G-8 leaders tomorrow. On the table for US-India talks is the US-India Nuclear Agreement. More this story also from The Hindu.

India Suspends Maize Exports Until October 15, 2008
The Indian Government has already banned exports of wheat, non-basmati rice, edible oil and pulses. This just further puts pressure on global food markets but India is thinking of its own food security. To me, this reads as a repeat of the 1930s when countries acted to protect their own interests and thereby exacerbated the Stock Market Crash of October 1929 and turned it into a world-wide depression that lasted over a decade. India is the sixth largest supplier of corn in the world so its retreat from the global markets is not insignificant. Couple this with the mess in Argentina and we have a real crisis on our hands. This follows a very worrisome report out of China earlier this week that China faces a grain shortage. All About Feed has the details on this story.

China faces serious challenges in ensuring it will have enough grain to feed its population in the decades to come, according to Premier Wen Jiabao.

Industrialisation, urbanisation and a growing population are boosting grain demand while “shrinking arable land, water shortage and climate change is an increasing constraint on output,” Wen told a cabinet meeting.

“The long-term demand and supply will be balanced but tight and ensuring grain security faces serious challenges,” he said.

The meeting approved a mid- and long-term grain security plan that aims to keep the nation’s annual grain output above 500 million tonnes by 2010 and increase production to more than 540 million tonnes a year by 2020.

Litvinenko Murder Intrigue Resurfaces
The murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko was carried out with the backing of the Russian state, Whitehall sources have told the BBC.

Sondhi Limthongkul’s Corporatist Vision for Thailand
With Thailand now of its second month of intense political protests, opposition leader Sondhi Limthongkul is proposing reforms that to me sound rather corporatist. Sondhi Limthongkul, the core leader of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, has called for a “New Politics.”

The New Politics turns out to be a startlingly reactionary proposal to move Thailand’s parliamentary system towards a form of appointed corporatism, or what might be called a selectoral democracy. Thirty percent of MPs would come from elections, perhaps one per province, and the rest of MPS would derive from various occupations and associations. Sondhi says the proportion is not fixed, it’s up for debate.

The rationale for wanting to dismantle Thailand’s electoral system is evident: pro-Thaksin forces keep winning elections. And as Thaksin is said to represent everything bad about Thai politics, he can not be allowed to wield power directly or indirectly. Thus, for Sondhi, and it would seem the PAD leadership as whole, there is now a need to bring about a revolution in political representation.

The full story in the Asia Sentinel.

Taiwan Exports Rise to Record Levels
Taiwan’s exports in June rose 21.3% from a year earlier to a record high of US$24.35 billion on rising demand from parts of Asia and Europe, the government said July 7. The June figure compared with a 20.5% rise to $23.60 billion recorded in May. More from Industry Week.

11 Bodies Found in Tijuana Over 3 Days
As a Colombian, I have seen this all before and it is worrisome that it is happening now in Mexico. What we have endured in Colombia is not something that I would wish on anyone. It is thus that I say with alarm that Mexico’s drug wars require serious attention. We will see bombings. Drug mafias will stop at nothing and only a strong response from the state and civil society can stop them. They will infiltrate politics. They can buy anything and anyone. Act now.

Police discovered the tortured and burned bodies of six men in an empty lot Monday morning, ending a period of relative calm in this border city beset by drug war violence.

Eleven bodies have been discovered since Saturday in violence believed to be drug-related, including the corpse of a woman found in a barrel, state and federal authorities said.

The weekend tally pushed the city’s death toll this year to more than 260, compared with about 152 homicides at this time last year, and underscored authorities’ difficulties curbing organized crime.

The full story from the Los Angeles Times. A 71% rise in drug-related homocides in Tijuana is not something to be taken lightly.

Syria To Restore Diplomatic Ties with France
Syria’s top diplomat in London says Damascus will soon send a new ambassador to Paris and end a freeze on diplomatic ties. Sami Khiyami says a new representative will likely be sent to France in the very near future. Syria has not had an ambassador in Paris since 2006. The report is from Haaretz.

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The Aspen Institute, founded in 1950, is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue. President Clinton was the featured speaker at its annual Aspen Ideas Festival conference this past week. Here are some highlights of his comments:

Here is my profile of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf about whom President Clinton speaks in the above segment.

“It’s a simple little thing that philanthropists should be doing anywhere: Change the business model,” the former president said while discussing a market-based solution for distributing affordable HIV/AIDS drugs in the developing world. Clinton explained how, by changing the system of drug production and sales, his Clinton Foundation was able to cut their costs drastically while still allowing manufacturers to turn a profit.

He took a similar tack on addressing starvation in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions facing food shortages. Clinton said America needs to “get the show on the road” by aiding farmers and developing native agriculture in ailing nations, rather than simply dumping American foodstuffs on them.

“It’s crazy for us to keep using the old way of delivering food aid,” he said, explaining how Canada now devotes half of its outgoing aid to cash for farmers. Even the current suffering in Zimbabwe, he argued, could be alleviated by implementing a system that effectively tapped into its natural resources for food production. “This was a nation that could have been Africa’s bread basket,” he said.

I also agree with President Clinton’s comments from the second clip on how the nature of food chain is about to change dramatically. Local produce is the future. He is just super smart. A policy wonk. That’s not Barack Obama in the least.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

In the past months, I have blogged rather extensively on the food crisis and the relationship to the growth of biofuels (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). In the context of the G8 meeting, the correlation between biofuel growth, poverty and hunger / food scarcity is again at the forefront of the discussions. As Ashley Seager puts it in the Guardian,

“The G8’s push for greater biofuel use has been a significant factor in driving 760 million people into food insecurity and putting them at risk of hunger in the past two years, ActionAid says today.

Released before next week’s G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, the charity’s report, Cereal Offenders, says the 82% rise in food commodity prices since 2006 has directly pushed 260 million people into risk of hunger as a result of the rich world’s drive for biofuels.”
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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

This is something Muhammad Yunus warned about in his latest book: the Corporate Social Responsibility is often just a disguise for profit-making activity, which he opposes. Yunus is in favor of full social entrepreneurship: no profits involved. Take the case of Ethos, the bottled water, which the New Internationalist calls “bullshit in a bottle” (I agree). What is Ethos?

“In what is quite possibly the last word in cynical advertising, Starbucks and PepsiCo have teamed up with Matt Damon (the Hollywood star who drives a Toyoto Prius to save money, not to be part of an ‘environmental trend’, so he says) to distribute a brand of ‘charitable’ bottled water called Ethos.”

What’s wrong with that? First, it is environmentally bad: we need to reduce the amount of bottled water we use in our countries. We have perfectly good tap water (it is even sometimes bottled and sold to us as bottled water). And if it has a little taste, get a Brita filter, ok? Our societies invested a lot of money so we could turn on the tap and get clean water, which went a long way to improve our health and living conditions.

And of course, plastic bottles are, well, plastic… petroleum products. We should reduce our use of those, as much as possible. We should Think Outside the Bottle.

And of course, we should also be careful with our consumption of water. Here is a map of water use, from the great Worldmapper website.

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