Property issues and external relations the focus of latest UN-backed talks on Cyprus

Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders have discussed property rights and external relations during the latest two days of United Nations-backed talks aimed at reunifying the Mediterranean island.

Faith healing on the US taxpayer

Clauses that could force insurers to pay for religious and spiritual healing have slipped into reform bills currently making their way through Congress

Senior UN official on two-day visit to reinforce peace-building in Sierra Leone

A senior United Nations official is on a two-day visit to Sierra Leone for wide-ranging talks on the situation in a country that was the first to be put on the agenda of the new UN Peacebuilding Commission, set up three years ago to prevent conflict-plagued States from relapsing into bloodshed.

Foreclosure Crisis Has Hit the Black Community Hardest

Thursday, October 22, 2009
12:07 Mecca time, 09:07 GMT

‘You roll over, the banks cash in’

By Danny Schechter, author of The Crime Of Our Time

The foreclosure crisis has hit black communities hardest, says Danny Schechter

On February 1, 1960, four students sat down at a lunch counter at the former Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Four students. Just four.

They were protesting racial segregation; they were denied service, harassed and arrested. Greensboro was and still is a backwater, yet their courage and commitment sparked and helped drive a national movement thatwould, within a few years, transform this country.

Martin Luther King may have had the dream but they had a scheme - a way of getting attention, a way of showing that if you want to make change, you have to be willing to act.

Few us remember their names. I knew one, Joseph McNeil, because he went to my high school in the Bronx before heading to AT&T, a traditionally black college, later famous as the school at which Jesse Jackson played football.

Today, there is a marker down the street from where the Woolworth’s once stood - at least there was when I was last there in the 1980s.

Woolworths was for decades one of the best-known brands in America.

The chain went from fame to infamy to out of business. Lunch counters were soon out and so was Woolworths, despite its skycraper in downtown Manhattan.

It would later be bought up, broken and sold off by an avaricious private equity firm which, in a mad search for profits, drove the company under.

Some stores survived in the UK and Australia but not in the USA. There used to be one across the street from where I live. It is now a GAP.

Sound familiar?

Formal segregation may be gone, even if an interracial couple could not get a marriage licence recently in Louisiana, but class separation and inequality in America has deepened sharply.

Rising unemployment

The middle class that the Greensboro four hoped to join as college graduates is only a memory for many.

Black communities across this country have been savaged by the foreclosure crisis. Black unemployment is twice that of whites, a figure that in real terms stands at 20 per cent or more. That means 40 per cent for minorities.

“Downward mobility is now a mass phenomenon. If you don’t believe me, look at your bank statement. Check out the added charges, look at your credit card”

Millions of families are going backwards to homelessness and insecurity. Downward mobility is now a mass phenomenon. If you don’t believe me, look at your bank statement. Check out the added charges, look at your credit card.

These large banks are run by the miscreants FDR called “banksters”. They are reporting super profits and giving out obscene bonuses. Their lobbyists are blocking new regulations and eroding old ones while presiding over the largest transfer of wealth in history from the working poor to the flamboyant superrich.

Racialisation has been displaced by financialisation. Now the “action” in the Tar Heel State is down the road in Charlotte, where the Bank of America is based.

But can we still bank on banks like the Bank Of America? (You may not recall but the first bank to go in the great Depression was called the Bank of the United States.)

Banks R’Us. Today, there are bank branches in almost every neighbourhood - except the poorest ones where pay-day lenders reign with their usury on their mind and in their interest rates.

When it comes to credit, the poor pay more - and the banks know it and profit from it. There are also mortgage brokers galore in every community.

Fraud is their middle name. I am not the only one saying this. The FBI denounces it as an “epidemic”. There are arrests every week.

Civic engagement

The many financial institutions and sleazy lenders are there to do business but they could also become convenient targets for civic engagement.

Can they be challenged? So far, very few have been. While the banks are agressively lobbying; citizens groups are passively sending e-mails. Never before have so many allowed so few to dominate this discourse.

The banks are clearly winning over the regulators and critics. Even Barney Frank’s committee has capitulated.

“You don’t have to call them sit-ins, just polite but firm and “protracted” conversations with the banksters”

Nevertheless, protests against the big banks are beginning. There will be one at the end of October at the American Bankers’ Association convention in Chicago.

But you don’t have to go to Sweet Home Chicago to find targets of outrage, or even trek down to Wall Street. You know where. Your bank!

True, many branches are just made up of ATM machines who want your money but do not want to hear from you. But the bigger branches are not far away. They advertise. They are everywhere, doing business as usual - except lending to people who need it most.

Your money in; their profits out.

This could change or at least become more challenging. Think of the Greensboro four, just a few people who made enough noise to get things going.

Today, you don’t have to call them sit-ins, just polite but firm and “protracted” conversations with the banksters.

If a million people called their 800 numbers at once, what would happen? Why not informational picketing to advise consumers about how they are getting ripped off with high rates and excessive fees?

Economic democracy?

Why not bring the pain of excessive debt and dispossession to the people who are causing it and profiting from it? Student loan victims, are you listening?

What if families who can’t afford day care turned their favorite branches into day care centres? What if their profits and bonuses were posted neatly on their windows? What if… you fill in the blank.

Lets say, concerned folks assembled at key bank branches during the noon hour - Mondays at Chase, Tuesdays at BOA, Wednesdays at Wells Fargo, Thursdays at Wachovia etc - and then spent dress down Fridays at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley?

I am sure the bankers will welcome the opportunity for dialogue with their enraged critics and customers. This can only work if it is done regularly, week after week.

“Where are the activists blocking foreclosures or rallying at unemployment offices for extended benefits? Where is the push back against the health insurers? Why are you asleep?”

One shots won’t work. They may make protesters feel good but that’s all they will accomplish.

You will be surprised because the acts of a few can inspire action by the many. Think of Brian Haw, camped out in front of the UK parliament building every day since the Iraq War started in 2003. He knows we are in a marathon, not a sprint.

You get where I am going? I am not sure where Fred Douglass banked back in the days when companies like Lehman Brothers - before its fall - were financing the slave trade, but his mantra that without struggle, nothing changes still survives.

Nothing will change without making them uncomfortable. Anger, if not deployed like an unguided missle, has its uses.

The banksters are terrified of what they call “economic populism”. I prefer to call it economic democracy. Even Barack Obama understood that years ago, when he worked as a community organiser. I am not sure if he still does.

No one’s going to win a Nobel Prize in Economic Fairness for this type of non-violent activity, but it will bring this issue out of the back pages of the business section where it is safely buried and into the front lobes of people’s minds.

Where are the activists blocking foreclosures or rallying at unemployment offices for extended benefits? Where is the push back against the health insurers? Why are you asleep?

It’s so simple. The Greensboro four understood it decades ago. If you don’t stand up, you might as well lay down.

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. His new film and book, The Crime of Our Time, examines the financial crisis as a crime.

The opinions expressed in this artical are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Did Megan Williams Lie About Racist Attack in West Virginia?

US woman ‘lied about race attack’

A woman in the US who said she was kidnapped, raped and tortured in a racially-motivated attack in 2007, has now said she fabricated her story.

Seven people pleaded guilty to the attack on Megan Williams, now aged 22. Six are serving prison sentences.

But Ms Williams’ lawyer now says she invented the story to get revenge on her boyfriend for hitting her.

Prosecutors have questioned the move, saying the alleged culprits were found guilty on the basis of evidence.

In September 2007, police following an anonymous call found Ms Williams, who is black, in a backwoods caravan in Big Creek, Logan County, in the state of West Virginia.

She told police officers she had been held there for days, beaten, stabbed, sexually assaulted and burned. She said she had been forced to eat rat droppings and drink from a toilet, and that her attackers had used racist insults.

At a press conference on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio, where Ms Williams now lives, her lawyer Byron Potts said she was “recanting her entire story”.

“She says it did not happen. She fabricated it,” he told reporters.

“She wanted to get back at a boyfriend. He was mad at her.”

He said the bruises on Ms Williams’ face were indeed made when she was hit by her then-boyfriend, Bobby Brewster, but all the other injuries were self-inflicted, including razor cuts.

Brewster, was among the seven people, all of whom were white, who pleaded guilty to charges including kidnapping, sexual assault, malicious wounding and giving false information to police.

He received a lengthy jail term - as did his mother, Frankie Brewster, two other men and another mother and daughter pair.

A seventh man received a suspended sentence.

Recant ‘absurd’

Ms Williams did not appear at the press conference herself, but Mr Potts said she had told him she wanted to “right the wrong that was perpetrated on these six individuals”.

“She just wants to turn her life around. She’s trying to, she can’t continue to live this lie,” he said.

Mr Potts said his client had received threatening phone calls in recent days and was “scared”.

But Brian Abraham, the prosecutor on the original case, said Ms William’s recanting was “absurd”.

He told reporters that investigators had decided early on Ms Williams could not be relied on to give an accurate testimony, but that the convictions were based on “pretty overwhelming” physical evidence.

“All of them have been in jail without filing appeals,” CNN quoted him as saying.

The case was greeted with outrage when it emerged in 2007, and civil rights campaigner Rev Al Sharpton, who supported Ms Williams’ cause at the time, said investigators should closely re-examine the details.

“If the prosecution depended on something Ms Williams said that she is now saying is false, the prosecutor needs to reopen that case,” the New York Times quoted him as saying.

In an interview for Cleveland newspaper the Call and Post in January, Ms Williams suggested she had been persuaded by her mother, who died in June, to exaggerate her story.

Officials have not said what their next step will be and whether they will file charges against Ms Williams if her story is found to be false.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8320309.stm
Published: 2009/10/22 14:28:51 GMT

China Economic Growth Accelerates

China economic growth accelerates

China has said it is on track to hit its growth target of 8% this year, after the economy grew 8.9% from a year ago in the third quarter.

The figure is up from the 7.9% rate seen in the previous quarter and is the country’s fastest GDP growth since the third quarter of last year.

Separate reports show that industrial production and retail sales also accelerated in September.

The economy grew by 7.7% in the nine months to September.

Retail sales growth was 15.1% in the first three quarters of the year, the National Statistics Bureau said.

China’s car market has become the world’s largest, with sales up 34% to 9.66 million vehicles in the first nine months of the year.

Government investment

At the end of 2008 the Chinese government announced a 4 trillion yuan ($586bn; £354bn) stimulus plan involving increased spending on infrastructure, such as rail and roads, to boost the domestic economy as exports slumped.

Latest figures show that investment, accounting for nearly 88% of GDP growth earlier this year, is playing a vital role in China’s growth.

Investment in factories, construction and other fixed assets rose by one-third in the first nine months of the year to a record 15.5tn yuan.

But factory owners say that in many cases, while the volume of goods they are producing has risen, the prices customers are prepared to pay for them are lower than before the financial crisis.

Unemployment is still high in many areas, and some factory workers are reported to be working shorter hours and earning less.

The next challenge for policy makers is to begin to withdraw elements of the stimulus plan, and to reduce the huge outflows of credit the country’s state owned banks have issued, without damaging economic recovery.

As the stimulus is withdrawn, the hope is that demand from the private sector, from consumer spending and eventually from renewed demand for China’s exports, will keep the country’s growth rate stable.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/8319706.stm
Published: 2009/10/22 11:00:05 GMT

UN Mission in Sudan mourns murder of deputy force commander

The United Nations today strongly condemned “the barbaric killing” of the Deputy Force Commander of the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), Pakistani Brigadier General Ahmed Muinuddin, who was shot to death today while on leave in his homeland.

Rape Used As Weapon in DRC War

Thursday, October 22, 2009
17:30 Mecca time, 14:30 GMT

Rape used as weapon in DR Congo war

The Democratic Republic of Congo is grappling with rampant rape, which has become an every day practice and is used as a weapon of war, the UN has said.

It said almost 5,400 cases of rape against women were reported in the South Kivu province during the first six months of the year.

Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said South Kivu, near Rwanda, was an increasingly dangerous place for civilians, especially for women.

“Night-time attacks against civilians by unidentified armed elements, and rape against women, remain widespread,” Byrs said.

About 90 per cent of the rapes are allegedly committed by armed groups or regular forces.

Nabwemba Natabaro, a woman in South Kivu, told Al Jazeera that she had been held in the bush for two months and repeatedly gang raped, after being abducted from her village.

“My family thought I had been killed and lost all hope of ever seeing me. Then I managed to escape. I was very sick,” she said.

Her family brought her to a hospital where she was diagnosed with HIV.

‘Tortured by attackers’

Rossette Kavira, a gynaecologist at a hospital in the town of Goma, said: “There isn’t a single day that we don’t get raped women coming to the hospital. This explains how widespread the problem is.

“Almost all victims require surgery due to bleeding or wounds inflicted through torture by their attackers.”

Due to the huge numbers of rape victims, some women have to wait for months for reconstructive surgery.

Dede Amanor-Wilks, Action Aid’s director for West and Central Africa, said many rape cases go unreported.

“Currently the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] is thought to have the highest incident of rape in the world, but statistics that come to surface are only a fraction probably of the rapes that actually occur,” she told Al Jazeera.

“Different statistics are coming up in different parts of the eastern DRC all the time. One commonly used statistic is that there are about 400 rapes a day.”

Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow, reporting from Goma, said there were growing fears that the use of rape was turning into a norm in the DR Congo conflict.

“Rape has been used by all armed groups as a weapon that is more readily available than bullets and bombs.

“In many cases the social stigma associated with rape leaves the survivors shunned by husbands, parents and their communities,” he said.

The fighting in the eastern DRC between UN-backed Congolese government forces and Rwandan Hutu rebels have worsened in recent months.

The country hosts one of the biggest UN aid operations. Hundreds of thousands of people in the east of the country have been driven from their homes due to fighting, many of whom need protection from violent attacks.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Africa has full partner in UN in fight against forced displacement - Ban

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today pledged full United Nations support to help Africa address the needs of some 14 million refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) driven from their homes by fighting and prevent the conflicts that caused their plight.

The Lucrative Business of Obama-bashing

05:20 October 22nd, 2009

The lucrative business of Obama-bashing

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, a prominent radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, told his conservative listeners that a major American publication had asked him to write 400 words on his hopes for the Obama presidency.

“I…don’t need 400 words,” he said, “I need four: I hope he fails.”

The remark set the tone for a steady stream of unbridled and often bizarre criticism from Limbaugh and like-minded radio and TV commentators, several of them working for Fox News, the network owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Obama responded four days after his inauguration, telling a group of Republican congressmen they needed to break away from a mindset of confrontation.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

What followed should have helped the new administration to reflect on the wisdom of singling out a media critic. But it didn’t. Limbaugh promptly portrayed himself as a man of such pivotal importance that the president of the world’s only superpower needed to pay personal attention to his tartly-worded opinion.

The controversy over his ill wishes for the president caused, as he put, his ratings to go “through the roof,” a reassuring development for a man who makes $38 million a year under an eight-year contract that runs through 2016. The score of that early skirmish: Limbaugh 1, Obama 0.

The White House is now engaged (as in war, not diplomacy) with an even bigger target, Fox News, to the evident delight of Murdoch. “There were some strong remarks coming out of the White House about one or two of the commentators on Fox News,” he told the annual shareholders’ meeting of News Corp, the media conglomerate that includes Fox. “And all I can tell you is that it has tremendously increased their ratings.”

His cheerful observation came a few days after the administration switched from occasional counter-attacks to full-scale offensive. Anita Dunn, the White House Communications director, fired the first rocket in mid-October by saying Fox News was not a legitimate news organisation but operated as a research and communications arm of the Republican Party.

The president himself stayed out of the fray this time but two of his closest aides, Senior Advisor David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel followed up with similar comments on television news shows. Axelrod went as far as to urge other news organisations not to treat Fox News as a legitimate news outfit. Fox denies its news coverage is slanted and says critics fail to understand the difference between reporters and commentators.

SHOCK VALUE AND SHOW BUSINESS

Past performance is no guarantee of future results but it is probably a safe bet that the controversy will be good for the Fox bottom line - and that the commentators with the most provocative attacks on Obama will benefit most, a pattern reflected by the network’s third quarter results.

They showed Fox News as the dominant cable news organisation. It drew an average 2.25 million prime time viewers (a 2 percent increase over the previous year) - more than twice the combined number of its nearest competitors, CNN and MSNBC, both of which suffered considerable audience declines.

The shows by Fox’s top conservative commentators all showed steep increases, but none more than Glenn Beck (up almost 90 percent), who said of Obama on a Fox show in July: “This president has exposed himself as a guy, over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture.”

Commentators aiming for shock value are not in the business of context, such as pointing out, for example, that Obama’s mother was white and that he had close and cordial relations with his white grandparents. Obama was visibly shaken when his white grandmother, Madelyn Dunham died, a day before he was elected president.

Beck’s “hatred for white people” remark prompted several advertisers to abandon his show but that didn’t hurt the bottom line. A Fox spokeswoman said at the time that offended advertisers had shifted to other Fox programmes so there was no revenue lost.

Which raises the question why Fox News, which effectively functions as the voice of the opposition, has been more of a commercial success than its competitors which feature liberal, pro-Obama commentators and give a platform to people who want the president to succeed?

After all, he won the elections with the votes of Americans who bought into his reform agenda. And according to a Washington Post/ABC poll to mark his ninth month into the presidency, his job approval rating stands at 57 percent and only 20 percent of the country now consider themselves Republican, the lowest percentage in 26 years.

Even on the most hotly disputed aspect of Obama’s health care plan, the public option seen as socialism by conservative commentators, a majority of Americans are coming out in support of the president, according to that poll.

So why is the White House acting as if right-wing critics pose a mortal danger? Thin-skinned sensitivity to criticism? John Batchelor, a conservative radio show host, has a different suggestion: ignorance.

“The White House war on Fox,” he wrote on the website The Daily Beast, “shows its ignorance of the network’s true purpose: show business. And Team Obama is giving Murdoch just what he wants.”