NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Bush administration helps the cause of Islamic terrorism by failing to engage in serious dialogue with the international community, author Salman Rushdie said on Tuesday.

Rushdie — infamous for living for years under threat of death after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 pronouncement that his novel “The Satanic Verses” was blasphemous — said he believes U.S. isolationism has turned not just its enemies against America, but its allies too.

“What I think plays into Islamic terrorism is … the curious ability of the current administration to unite people against it,” Rushdie told Reuters in an interview.

Rushdie said he found it striking how the “colossal sympathy” the world felt for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been squandered so quickly.

“It seems really remarkable that the moment you leave America … you find not just America’s natural enemies, but America’s natural allies talking in language more critical than I, in my life, have ever heard about the United States,” he said.

The novelist, born in India and raised in Britain, attributed the shift in sentiment toward the United States to the Bush administration’s “unilateralist policies” and its “unwillingness to engage with the rest of the world in a serious way.”

“This go-it-alone attitude gets people’s backs up,” he said of President Bush’s foreign policy.

LACK OF LISTENING
As president of the PEN American Center, a writers group, Rushdie helped organize an international literary festival this week in New York — an event he hopes will help restore global dialogue.

“There seems to have been a breach in our ability to listen to each other,” he said.

“It’s really important at this particular moment in the history of the world that ordinary American people should get as broad a sense of how the world is thinking.”

Such dialogue, he said, is “crucial, especially if at the political level there is a relative uninterest in maintaining that global dialogue.”

The PEN World Voices festival, from April 16-22, is set to bring more than 100 international authors to New York to participate in more than 40 events, including readings and discussions on topics from politics and literature to erotica.

The event is the first international gathering organized by PEN since 1986, when Norman Mailer headed the group.

Rushdie, who wrote an op-ed in March syndicated by The New York Times calling for less religion in politics, took Bush to task on that issue too.

“It worries me more when religious discourse becomes the language of politics,” he said. “I think it is happening a lot more here than it used to.”

Rushdie said his latest novel, “Shalimar the Clown,” will be published in September.

“I decided to murder an American ambassador,” he said of its plot, in which a U.S. envoy to India is killed after he retires to America. “It seems to be a political murder, but actually it turns out to be completely personal.”
reuters.myway.com

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – Mekbeb Abebe Welde is the spitting image of Ethiopia’s fallen emperor, Haile Selassie. Mr. Abebe has the same pointy chin, down-turned nose and slight build. When he picks up a cup of macchiato and puts it to his lips, as he did in a local cafe the other day, he does so ever so gracefully, more like a prince than a cabdriver.

But Mr. Abebe, 33, is a cabdriver. He lives a humble life in Ethiopia’s crowded capital, scrounging to survive as so many others here do.

Still, Mr. Abebe’s friends call him “Prince” and bow down when they see him, deference that stems from more than his resemblance to the emperor. Some here think Mr. Abebe really is a son born out of wedlock to the ruler, who claimed blood ties to the biblical King Solomon.

The monarchy was wiped out in this country in 1975, after the emperor died at age 83, but everyone knows the emperor’s official kin. Mr. Abebe, on the other hand, exists in a netherworld, gossiped about, pointed at and subjected at times to angry diatribes about the emperor’s misrule but not accepted by the emperor’s acknowledged flesh and blood.

Mr. Abebe has petitioned the royal family to recognize him, to no avail. No one seems interested in his offer to undergo a DNA test.

Even if he were welcomed into the family, he would not necessarily win great treasure. The emperor’s relatives live well, but most of their vast holdings were long ago seized by the state. He might enjoy prestige among devotees of the emperor, but he would have to suffer scorn from the emperor’s many detractors. Mr. Abebe says it is acceptance by blood relations that motivates him, not treasure or acclaim.

Still, it would not be so bad to be able to travel the world, as the emperor’s acknowledged relatives do. Mr. Abebe could perhaps go off to some “big name” university to get an education. He might get a big gated home to replace his modest dwelling. As the emperor’s son, he could walk into the Sheraton Addis, where the cost of a glass of orange juice exceeds many Ethiopians’ daily wage, and afford to quench his thirst.

It is family lore more than anything else that Mr. Abebe offers as evidence of his blood ties. His mother, Almaz Tadesse Goshu, was one of the emperor’s many servants. They supposedly had a liaison late in the emperor’s tenure, long after his wife had died.

Mr. Abebe says his mother’s husband divorced her when he learned the child she was carrying was the emperor’s. She died when Mekbeb was 7; he was taken in by a general who had been close to the emperor.
Full Article: nytimes.com

ULM, GERMANY — Khaled el-Masri says his strange and violent trip into the void began with a bus ride on New Year’s Eve 2003.

When he returned to this city five months later, his friends didn’t believe the odyssey he recounted. Masri said he was kidnapped in Macedonia, beaten by masked men, blindfolded, injected with drugs and flown to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned and interrogated by U.S. intelligence agents. He said he was finally dumped in the mountains of Albania.

“One person told me not to tell this story because it’s so unreal, no one would listen,” said Masri, a German citizen who was born in Lebanon.

A Munich prosecutor has launched an investigation and is intent on questioning U.S. officials about the unemployed car salesman’s claim that he was wrongly targeted as an Islamic militant. Masri’s story, if true, would offer a rare firsthand look at one man’s disappearance into a hidden dimension of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. authorities have used overseas detention centers and jails to hold or interrogate suspected terrorists, such as at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many of the estimated 9,000 prisoners in U.S. military custody were captured in Iraq, but others, like Masri, were allegedly picked up in another country and delivered to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan or elsewhere for months of confinement.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment on Masri’s case, but White House, Justice Department and CIA officials have long argued that U.S. laws authorize such covert operations. They say U.S. officials have been given assurances in every case that no one is tortured.
Full Article: commondreams.org

WASHINGTON — The chief executives of major U.S. corporations enjoyed double-digit pay raises last year, adding to a record of ”jaw-dropping” compensation largely undisturbed by recent years’ falling profits and share prices and a wave of scandals involving management chicanery, the country’s leading labor federation said in a new survey.

Chief executive officers (CEOs) were being enriched at the expense of working families’ retirement savings, the AFL-CIO said in its Executive Pay Watch study, released Monday as a Web site. The latest annual update aimed to rally support for labor and other investors who plan to force some 140 companies to confront pay issues at annual shareholders’ meetings in coming months.

”We have seen a tremendous amount of interest among workers in holding CEOs and their boards accountable,” said Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the 13-million-member labor federation. ”They are rightfully outraged when they learn about jaw-dropping executive compensation packages. It’s time to put the brakes on runaway CEO pay.”

An analysis of securities filings showed that CEO salaries rose 12 percent in 2004 compared with average raises of 3.6 percent for rank-and-file workers, further widening the world’s largest gaps between executive and labor pay.
Full Article: commondreams.org

Reports that two elderly women were killed during a protest against factory pollution have sparked a bloody riot by thousands of villagers in eastern China.

Several dozen police officers were injured, five seriously, during the clashes in Huankantou village, Zhejiang province, on Sunday. It was the latest of several recent violent demonstrations, of a kind that poses an increasingly serious threat to China’s stability.

The two protesters were said to have been killed when officials tried to disperse 200 elderly women who had kept a two-week vigil outside a chemical factory that they blamed for ruined crops and deformities in new-born babies.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Gordon Brown’s year-long anti-poverty crusade is in jeopardy this week, as the US prepares to block his plans for a sale of International Monetary Fund gold reserves to raise cash for debt relief.

Striking a deal to sell or revalue some of the IMF’s $9 billion of gold reserves in Washington, at the spring gathering of the IMF and World Bank, was meant to be the first victory in Brown’s campaign to increase spending on aid, and offer debt relief to the poorest countries. But the Treasury is playing down prospects for a deal, and it is thought Brown could even give Washington a miss this week, to concentrate on the election campaign.

‘Clearly, the US is the blockage on this,’ said Jonathan Glennie, senior policy adviser at Christian Aid. But he accused the Chancellor of overplaying the chance of a debt deal in February, after he chaired a fractious meeting of G7 finance ministers.

An IMF feasibility study, commissioned by G7 finance ministers, has given the thumbs-up to gold sales. But the US Treasury has been urged to oppose the idea by gold-mining firms who fear that a sell-off could depress global prices for the metal.

Henry Northover, policy analyst at Cafod, said the US preferred its own debt relief plans, under which poor countries’ debts would be written off against aid flows. ‘I think there is little appetite for the gold plan in the US. They feel they’ve done enough.’
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Somehow I feel this manuevering has nothing at all to do with ‘aid.’

An orange sun set over the city, casting just enough light to finish the kickabout, when the players heard the unmistakable sound of rockets whooshing overhead.

Seconds later the missiles slammed into Abu Ghraib, the jail adjoining their football pitch. Explosions resounded across the complex and more rockets were launched. The Americans fired back.

The 25 children and seven adults sprinted to a wall enclosing the school grounds and huddled together, waiting for the storm to pass. But the attack intensified and bullets peppered closer so the group scrambled into a communal toilet. They cowered in darkness as hits on their shelter showered dust and masonry fragments. Some of the children started to sob, vomit and soil themselves.

‘We put our hands in the children’s mouths to stop them crying. It was the most difficult time of my life,’ said Abu Mohammad, 38.

For 12 hours the group crouched in the three-square-metres space, murmuring prayers as car bombs detonated outside, until dawn broke and they emerged, waving a white T-shirt, to a scene of devastation.

Last Saturday’s attack on Abu Ghraib drew worldwide headlines as one of the boldest insurgent operations in Iraq, which wounded 44 US troops and underlined the vulnerabilities of the occupation two years after the invasion.

Thousands of Shias loyal to the militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr gathered in Baghdad yesterday, the anniversary of the city’s fall and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, to demand an American withdrawal. It is a wish even closer to the heart of Arab Sunnis, who form the insurgency’s backbone. The attack on Abu Ghraib, a symbolic target since last year’s inmate abuse scandal, underlined a shift from hit-and-run ambushes to large-scale assaults.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – The South African party that introduced apartheid and enforced racial segregation for 50 years has voted itself out of existence after a series of stinging electoral defeats.

The federal council of the New National Party (NNP), renamed from the National Party in 1997, voted Saturday for a motion to disband the party by a margin of 88 in favor and two against. Three people abstained.

“The forerunner to the NNP, the National Party, brought development to a section of South Africa but also brought suffering through a system grounded on injustice,” former leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk said in a speech.

“No party… could hope to successfully atone and move ahead in the same vehicle,” said van Schalkwyk, environmental affairs and tourism minister in President Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet.

He addressed NNP members who joined the African National Congress (ANC) when the two parties merged last year.

But former president F.W. de Klerk said the NNP’s demise undermined effective opposition to the ANC.

“The dissolution of the National Party creates a void in the party political scene in South Africa,” he told the BBC.

“We need a fairly young person without any political baggage to stand up and be counted and say ‘we are going to fill this void’,” said de Klerk, who led talks to dismantle white rule and then turned his back on the NNP after last year’s merger.
Full Article: nytimes.com

The corporate interests the NNP represented are certainly not going to go away. Maybe they figured they didn’t need the party anymore.

DAKAR, Senegal — This week a cardinal from Nigeria, Francis Arinze, edged ahead of an Italian, Dionigi Tettamanzi, at Paddypower.com, an Irish wagering Web site taking bets on who will be the next pope, with 11-4 odds on the Nigerian and 7-2 on the Italian.

While Irish odds makers may not be the best guide to the intentions of the 117 Roman Catholic cardinals who will begin the ancient, mystical and extremely secret task of electing the next pope on April 18, they may be onto something.

Much has been made of the fact that two-thirds of Catholics now live in the southern hemisphere, and the church’s traditional stronghold in Europe, which has produced more than a millennium of popes, is withering away at an alarming rate. These trends have led many to conclude that the next pope is likely to be from the developing world, most likely Latin America – as though the papacy were a tribal chieftaincy naturally shifting to the clan in ascendancy.

But that pointedly secular view misses a deeper spiritual argument for why the next pope might, and perhaps should, emerge from Africa. In some fundamental ways, the spirit of the Roman Catholic church in Africa is closest to the kind of Catholicism Pope John Paul II worked to engender across the globe.
Full Article: nytimes.com

I’m sure that was the plan…

NEW DELHI, April 9 – Wen Jiabao, prime minister of China, began a four-day visit to India on Saturday just as the two countries – a third of humanity – are coming into their own at the same moment, with the potential for a dynamic shift in the world’s politics and economy.

The impact on the global balance of power, the competition for resources and the health of the planet is causing many analysts and political leaders to sit up and take notice.

“Both countries have waited 3,000 years for this moment,” said Gurcharan Das, the former chief executive of Procter & Gamble India and now an author.

Onetime rivals who went to war in 1962, India and China today find their economies growing at a remarkable clip. Both have a giant appetite for energy. Both are hungry for new markets. And both, it seems, are now gingerly testing the possibilities of doing business together.

It is not an accident that Mr. Wen began his visit not here in the capital but in Bangalore, the southern high-tech hub whose phenomenal rise China has eyed.

Trade is booming between them, especially as seen from the Indian side: after the United States, China is now its second largest trade partner, and it is growing by a giant 30 percent each year to an estimated $14 billion this year.

For the United States and the rest of the world, the effects of the sudden awakening of the Asian giants could be profound. In the years ahead, it may mean more downward pressure on wages, the outsourcing of more jobs, greater competition for investment and higher prices for scarce resources.
Full Article: nytimes.com