Stephen Who? at the UN

Last year, Stephen Harper snubbed the UN and went to Tim Horton's instead.

This year, the UN snubbed Stephen Harper and went to Tim Horton's instead.

h/t impolitical
 

Saddam's WMD Found - in NYC

Is America safer, as Bush says? You decide.

Exhibit A: Chemical weapon scare causes U.N. evacuation

UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- A U.N. office was evacuated after workers found vials that may have contained the poison gas phosgene Thursday.

U.N. archivists unexpectedly turned up samples of material from an Iraqi chemical weapons plant in weapons inspectors' files dating back to the 1990s, but the substance is not believed to pose any immediate danger, U.N. officials said Thursday.

The material was taken from al-Muthanna chemical weapons plant north of Baghdad. The samples are sealed and have been there since 1996, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.

Whoops.

Exhibit B: Audit finds U.S. nuclear weapons parts misplaced

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some facilities that handle the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile misplaced classified bomb components under their care, according to an Energy Department audit.

The department's Inspector General also found there was confusion at the facilities over who was responsible for keeping track of weapons parts and recommended changes in how to better safeguard the parts.

John Broehm, a spokesman for the department's National Nuclear Security Administration that oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, said his agency disagreed with the recommendations.

He said the parts, which he declined to identify, were later found.

Right. What's the point of agreeing with recommendations to tighten things up? Heckuva job there, Mr Broehm. It's not like they've had that many security concerns there, after all.

Exhibit C: Meanwhile, these actual acts of domestic terrorism are getting very little press, FBI Investigates String of Store Threats. If this was happening in my country, I think I'd like to know about it.

NEWPORT, R.I. (AP) -- Large grocery and discount stores across the country have been targeted by a caller who threatens to blow up shoppers and workers with a bomb if employees fail to wire money to an account overseas, authorities said.

Frightened workers have wired thousands of dollars - and in one case took off their clothes - to placate a caller who said he was watching them but may have been thousands of miles away. The FBI and police said Wednesday they are investigating similar bomb threats at more than 15 stores in at least 11 states - all in the past week.

"At this point, there's enough similarities that we think it's potentially one person or one group," FBI spokesman Rich Kolko said from Washington.

No one has been arrested, no bombs have been found, and no one has been hurt, though the calls have triggered store evacuations and prompted lengthy sweeps by police and bomb squads.
[...]
Separately, the FBI is looking into bomb threats on college campuses, including two in Ohio - the University of Akron and Kenyon College. No explosive devices have been found. Law enforcement officials said there was no evidence at this time linking the college bomb threats with those at grocery and discount stores.

Kenyon, in Gambier in central Ohio, received six separate bomb threats in a general admissions e-mail account between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Wednesday, college spokesman Shawn Presley said. Local and federal authorities determined the threats to be a hoax and the school was not evacuated as officials swept buildings searching for the bomb, he said.

Of course, the lesson in all of this is obviously that Iran should be your number one security concern because Bush says so. Just ignore all of the rest of this trivial stuff. Nothing to see there, folks.

Oh, and speaking of Iran: Iran atom work at slow pace and not significant: IAEA.

Priorities people. Priorities.
 

Random News & Views Roundup

- The US house of representatives has been busy passing resolutions about other countries' behaviour this week. On Tuesday, it approved a resolution calling for Japan to apologize for its use of female sex slaves during WW2. And on Monday, it unanimously passed another resolution demanding that Canada end the seal hunt. Apparently this hectic agenda - wagging their collective fingers at other countries - is the reason Pelosi has determined that the Democrats are just too darn busy to take care of urgent American business like impeaching Gonzales, Cheney and Bush and ending the Iraq war.

- The UN security council has decided to send 26,000 African peacekeeping troops to Darfur.

The Bush administration welcomed the council's decision to adopt the resolution, but it declined to co-sponsor the resolution on the grounds that it was not tough enough, a U.S. official said. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called for an expedited transition from the African Union to the United Nations.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Ban in recent days to press him to take over the mission by October [instead of December]. Ban refused on the grounds that his military planners would not be ready.

And we all know what a fine military planner Condi is. If Bush wanted "tough", he could have addressed the crisis in Darfur years ago. All hat, no cowboy - as usual.

- Uri Avnery: A Warning to Tony Blair

As an expert on the global economy, with a worldwide perspective, Wolfensohn could also point out that the importance of the U.S. in the world economy is gradually declining, with new giants like China and India rising.

We, the Israelis, like to think that we are the center of the world. Wolfensohn, a person with a worldwide outreach, sticks a pin into this egocentric balloon. Already now, he says, only the West considers the Israeli-Palestinian issue so important. Most of the world is indifferent. "I have visited more than 140 countries: you are not such a big deal there."

Even this limited interest will also evaporate. Wolfensohn rubs salt into the wound: "A moment will come when the Israelis and the Palestinians will be compelled to understand that they are a secondary performance. … The Israelis and the Palestinians must get rid of the idea that they are a Broadway performance. They are only a play in the Village. Off-off-off-off-off Broadway." Knowing that this is the worst one can tell an Israeli, he adds: "I hope that I am not getting into trouble by saying this, but, what the hell, that's what I believe, and I am already 73 years old."

I do believe him – and I, what the hell, am already 83.

- Chris Floyd: Why the Bush Administration Buries Accounts of Extremist Recantations; Good News is No News.

Last week, the Guardian's Ian Black reported on "a remarkable recantation" by one of the founding figures of the modern jihadist movement, Sayid Imam al-Sharif. A former comrade-in-arms of Ayman al-Zawahiri -- al Qaeda's own Dick Cheney, the "deputy" who actually runs the gang -- Sharif was the mastermind behind the Islamists' first great "spectacular": the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Now Sharif, imprisoned in Egypt, is finishing a new book "that undermines the Muslim theological basis for violent jihad" and is already creating fissures throughout the Islamist movement, the Guardian reports.
[...]
The fact that some major figures in one of these factions are now renouncing the use of "killing operations" to advance their odious ideas is surely a welcome development. If it saves only one innocent life from destruction, that is cause enough for rejoicing.

Yet this process -- which began in some quarters years before 9/11, and now involves hundreds of jihadist leaders and activists -- is being ignored by the very people who, ostensibly, have the greatest reason to trumpet it. But of course, such a development is actually bad news for the fanatical militarists of the Bushist faction. They ignore, reject or twist anything that undercuts their cartoonish myth of a vast, monolithic "Islamofascism" bent on world conquest at any cost -- and capable of carrying it out, unless stopped by multitrillion-dollar American war machine ranging over every continent.

- Via Dahr Jamail's Dispatches: Ali al-Fadhily's A Little Easier to Occupy from the Air

BAGHDAD, Jul 31 (IPS) - Many Iraqis believe the dramatic escalation in U.S. military use of air power is a sign of defeat for the occupation forces on the ground.

U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first six months of this year as over the first half of 2006, according to official information.

They dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq in the first half of 2007, compared to 86 in the first half of 2006. This is also three times more than in the second half of 2006, according to Air Force data.

The Air Force has also been expanding its air bases in Iraq and adding entire squadrons. It is now preparing to use a new robotic fighter known as the Reaper. The Reaper is a hunter-killer drone that can be operated by remote control from thousands of miles away.

"We find it strange that the big strategists of the U.S. military have actually failed in finding solutions on the ground and are now back to air raids that kill more civilians than militants," former Iraqi army brigadier-general Ahmed Issa told IPS.

That's the same strategy they're using in Afghanistan and look how well that's turned out.
 

Severe Neglect: Women's Rights in Canada

Following on the heels of International Women's Day on Thursday (which I wrote about here - read the accompanying comments as well), I found 3 news stories today that illustrate just how much still needs to be done for women in Canada.

The first:

GENEVA (Reuters) - Canada needs to improve social services for its aboriginal population, particularly native women who face persistent and marked inequalities, a United Nations panel said on Friday.

The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found there was a "lack of substantial progress" in addressing discrimination against native communities within the officially multicultural country.
[...]
Stressing that native women make up "a disproportionate number of victims of violent death, rape and domestic violence," it recommended Ottawa improve services, including shelters and counseling, for victims of gender-based violence.

And, here's the predictable response from the Conservative government which, btw, scrapped the Kelowna Accord:

"For 13 years the Liberals paid lip service to aboriginals ... this (report reflects) an accumulation of years and years of blatant disregard for aboriginal issues," said Deirdra McCracken, a spokeswoman for Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice.

There is no doubt that previous governments - Conservative and Liberal - severely neglected the plight of aboriginal people in our country however, the Liberals under Paul Martin had finally pledged to commit to change and were supported in Kelowna by First Nations leaders when the Kelowna accord was agreed to. The tories threw that away and decided to come up with their own plan. Where is it?

Secondly:

The Alberta Council of Women's Shelters says more and more abused women are being turned away in the province, a trend being called the dark side of the economic boom.

According to the council, more than 13,000 women and children used shelters in 2006, but another 14,000 had to be turned away because the shelters were full — a 16 per cent increase over the year before.

Meanwhile, Alberta's shelters received nearly 100,000 crisis calls in 2006, a nearly 50 per cent increase over the last two years.
[...]
Also, Alberta has one of the lowest rates of social assistance in Canada, putting abused women at a further disadvantage, she said.

This really isn't new at all. Alberta has always had a lack of shelter spaces for abused women. The Klein government admitted last year that it had made no plans for dealing with another oil boom. As a result, the new (Conservative) Stelmach government is responsible for playing catch up and, trust me, the situation for women here isn't going to change any time soon because the tory governments here have always had only one priority: making money. Spending money on social programs doesn't fit with that agenda.

Thanks to oil revenues, Alberta has a $7 billion surplus. The last I heard a single person on social assistance was alloted $401/month to live on. Rental housing is extremely expensive and the social services infrastructure has always been lacking. Those who can't "make it" in the boom are simply tossed aside. It's survival of the richest - always has been here and always will be.

Thirdly, and directly related to the first two stories:

OTTAWA–Politicians and advocacy groups lined up on International Women's Day to blast Conservative cabinet minister Bev Oda for cuts and mandate changes at Status of Women Canada.

Oda's constituency office in Bowmanville was occupied for several hours yesterday by members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada protesting the moves.

A day earlier, Oda had announced a $5 million increase in grants the agency distributes for women's projects. The money amounts to a redirection of a $5 million cut to Status of Women's administrative budget last September, resulting in the closing of 12 of 16 regional offices on April 1.

The government has also changed the criteria for what projects receive funding. Advocacy and research projects will no longer be eligible for grants, in favour of groups providing direct services to women.

And perhaps most controversially, the word equality has been removed from literature related to the agency.
[...]
Paulette Senior, chief executive officer of YWCA Canada, said her organization has been doing both service delivery and research/advocacy work for decades. She pointed to the organization's major study on women's shelters, conducted with the help of Status of Women funding, as an example of how research can help make services more effective.

The third phase of that study, on how to implement the findings, will likely not be funded under the new guidelines.

"All these things are inextricably linked," Senior said in an interview. "How do we know the services we're providing are effective if we don't do any research?"

Exactly. Women in need are being undermined by the very federal minister charged with looking after our interests. There is nothing more illustrative of that fact than the scrubbing of the word "equality" from the government's website - as if the idea of equality is nothing but a quaint relic from the past that has no relevance to the situations women find themselves in today in this country. Of all of the proverbial slaps in the face to women in this country, that one stung and bled while women were sent the message that the abuse of our rights will continue under this tory regime. Why is the equality of women such a threat to these Conservatives? Perhaps the answer is to be found in their very moniker: conservative.

There is no doubt that societal and governmental policy changes take time. There is absolutely no excuse however for the fact that women's rights have not progressed more swiftly in our country. We are a wealthy country with progressive social values overall - no matter how much the regressive conservatives among us would prefer to reverse that fact - yet we cannot even provide the most basic security, prosperity and equality rights to over half of our population. And I don't even need to mention how that impacts the children of this country as well. That's been well-documented.

Why are we stil being held back from achieving our full potential in society? And why are so many people - male and female - afraid to allow that to happen?

And last, but certainly not least, what can we do about it?