Free Republic

U.S. Speaks of N.Korea Aid After Nuclear Accord SEOUL (Reuters) - The top U.S. envoy for Asia said Monday that Washington was willing to consider helping communist North Korea resolve its energy crisis if the current standoff over its nuclear plans could be resolved. Although Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly was restating a previous offer, he appeared to strike a concessionary tone by at least holding out the prospect of help down the line if Pyongyang meets Washington's unflinching demand that it unconditionally scrap its suspected weapons program. "We are of course willing to talk to North Korea about...

US policy on aid is 'wicked' - Meacher By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 01 December 2002 Forcing starving countries to accept genetically modified (GM) food in aid is "wicked", Michael Meacher, the environment minister, said late last week. He called for "anger to be harnessed" against the policy, which is being vigorously pushed by the United States government. Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and other southern African countries have refused to accept GM food from the US even though some 12 million people in the region are threatened with famine. The US , for its part, refused to supply the non-GM grain...

Threats won't buy aid, Bush warns N Korea By David Rennie (Filed: 14/12/2002) President George W Bush yesterday warned that North Korea should not expect its latest nuclear threats to be followed by concessions from the West - a pattern he dismissed as "business as usual". The Bush administration struggled to keep a lid on the latest crisis to be triggered by North Korea - the most secretive and probably best-armed member of the "axis of evil" - and urged the Stalinist regime to back down from a high-stakes threat to remove international seals and monitoring equipment from a cache...

TOKYO: Japan said Thursday it might consider freezing economic aid to Yemen to protest North Korea's shipment of Scud missiles to the Middle Eastern country. "As a matter of course, our country for its part believes that such things as weapons of mass destruction, which could become the cause of conflicts, should not proliferate," top government spokesman Yasuo Fukuda said. Fukuda told reporters the Japanese foreign ministry was preparing to convey to the Yemeni government "what may be something close to a protest" over the missile shipment. "I don't know what it contains or how it will be expressed," Fukuda...

GRAIN sent from the European Union to feed the hungry in Russia was diverted into vodka production in a multi-million-pound fraud, a Brussels audit has revealed. The study of a £264m programme to distribute some of the EU’s food mountains among Russia’s needy also found that 600 truckloads of refrigerated beef had “disappeared” after leaving cold stores in St Petersburg. The conclusions have raised fears that millions of pounds may have ended up in the pockets of mafia bosses. A dossier drawn up by accountancy firm HLB International coincides with the annual report of the EU Court of Auditors, which...

Friday, 15 November, 2002, 10:10 GMTNo more oil aid for N Korea The US had called for the halting of the fuel aid South Korea has pressed North Korea to scrap its suspected nuclear programme, welcoming a decision by the US and its allies to stop deliveries of oil to its impoverished neighbour. I hope this message will be heard by North Korea South Korean official Diplomats from South Korea, the US, the European Union and Japan agreed that a 42,000 tonne shipment of fuel, currently on its way to North Korea, should be the last. The US had called...

As we reported back in 1999 (issue #134), the political quote of the decade comes from former economics professor turned politician, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R. TX): "I have identified three groups of people who have the privilege of taking and spending other people's money. They are children, thieves and politicians, and they all need more adult supervision." Four and a half years later, nothing has changed. "Public relations charades like 'Reinventing Government' cannot change the way Washington works," said Dick Armey (who, incidentally, has a Ph.D. in economics). And Armey was absolutely correct. Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" program...

An evaluation of lending programmes has concluded that many countries have become stubbornly reliant on aid from international lending bodies. No kidding? Did they only just notice that they've been dumping cash on the likes of Ethiopia for years? - Ivan The report, produced by the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), also found that prolonged use of IMF initiatives has expanded considerably over the past two decades. It beats working, apparently - Ivan "Prolonged use is a large, growing and persisting issue," said David Goldsbrough, IEO deputy director. Oh be honest. There are a lot...

<p>Washington, Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- The White House has asked Congress to approve a $3.8 billion long-term loan to Poland to buy 48 Lockheed Martin Corp. F-16 fighter jets, weapons and logistics support.</p> <p>Lockheed is competing against France's Dassault Aviation SA and Saab AB, the Swedish maker of Gripen fighters with partner BAE Systems Plc, for the contract, which is worth an estimated $3.5 billion.</p>

You can keep your aid, Nujoma tells West TANGENI AMUPADHI PRESIDENT Sam Nujoma returned from the UN Earth Summit yesterday evening boasting "I told them off" and that Africa no longer needs aid from Western nations. Nujoma was speaking to Prime Minister Theo-Ben Gurirab and Foreign Affairs Minister Hidipo Hamutenya, in the presence of journalists, at Windhoek's Eros airport after flying in from the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg South Africa. The strident tone was set at the Summit earlier in the day, when he launched a stinging attack on British Prime Minister Tony Blair, charging that he...

A senior American official has accused European countries of not providing their share of food aid to Afghanistan. The State Department official in charge of refugee affairs, Gene Dewey, said European governments have provided some humanitarian aid to Afghanistan through non-governmental organisations, but the amount was insufficient. Mr Dewey warned that food shortages could force large numbers of resettled Afghans to return to Pakistan. A European Union spokesman, Wilfried Schneider, rejected the allegations, calling them unfair.

Temperature rises at Earth Summit The political temperature is rising at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg as the United States and Europe take opposite approaches on empowering the Third World and the health of Planet Earth. Pressure is mounting on Washington to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming, with the United States -- the world's greatest greenhouse-gas polluter -- coming under friendly fire from allies. The world's most wretchedly poor countries -- in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean -- meanwhile believe that a fraction of the billion dollars a day shelled out to already rich...

CRAWFORD, Texas: US President George W Bush telephoned Czech President Vaclav Havel on Saturday to offer sympathy for deaths and damage from massive flooding there and offer more US aid, the White House said. "President Bush called President Havel to convey the American people's deepest sympathies for the recent loss of life and damage from the flooding," said Bush spokeswoman Claire Buchan. Bush told Havel that US ambassador Craig Stapleton had cut short his vacation and was returning to Prague on Saturday to help oversee US assistance there, which thus far had consisted of some financial assistance as well as...

The events of September 11, 2001 have led, among many other things, to the revival of an old debate about the relationship between poverty and political extremism. To get at the root of apocalyptic terrorism, many new initiatives to reduce global poverty have been proposed. British International Development Secretary Clare Short advocates a massive international effort to stop poor countries from becoming breeding grounds for terrorism: "The conditions which bred their bitterness and hatred", she has said, "are linked to poverty and injustice." Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has called for a fifty-year Marshall Plan that would disperse...

WASHINGTON, July 22 — In a rebuff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the Bush administration said today that it would not contribute to a United Nations agency that it contends provides aid to Chinese government agencies that force women to have abortions. At his Senate confirmation hearings last year, Secretary Powell praised the agency, the United Nations Population Fund, for its "invaluable work." A State Department fact-finding mission in May found no evidence that the program "knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization." But the administration reversed course and...

NADI, Fiji (AP) — The European Union has excluded Cuba from a multibillion-dollar pool of aid because of its poor human rights record and lack of democracy, a spokesman for a group of former European colonies said Friday. Cuba is a new member of the African Caribbean Pacific group, or ACP, which is holding a leaders' summit at a palm-fringed island resort near the Fijian town of Nadi. The 63 national delegations are trying to forge a single negotiating position ahead of trade talks with Brussels in September. Central to the talks is a 25-year pact signed by the EU...

NADI, Fiji - The European Union wants a group of poor nations to agree to a common position on negotiating free trade deals with Brussels, an EU official said Monday. But observers said the unwieldy nature of the 78-nation grouping of African, Caribbean and Pacific island nations makes any unified position from the summit unlikely. The third African Caribbean Pacific summit was to start Tuesday at a palm-fringed resort in Fiji's palm-fringed city of Nadi, as the member states prepare to negotiate free trade agreements with the EU in September. According to the African Caribbean Pacific or ACP secretariat, about...

Students Allegedly Shared Needle to Draw Blood Samples in Junior High Science Class The Associated PressPublished: Jul 10, 2002 NEW BEDFORD, Mass. (AP) - Two dozen junior high school students apparently shared a needle provided by their diabetic teacher to draw blood samples during a science class last year, school officials said. In a May 2001 class at Keith Junior High School, teacher Kevin D. Cadieux loaded a new needle into his lancet and asked for volunteers to have their blood drawn for a microscope slide, school committee attorney Walter R. Smith told the Standard-Times. About 24 seventh graders used...

Special Report: Billions in WTC Aid Tangled in Red Tape Sunday July 07 07:20 AM EDT By GREG GITTRICH Only a few months ago, White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels accused New York lawmakers of playing a "money-grubbing game" when they fussed that $20 billion in federal aid wasn't coming fast enough. His words didn't go over very well. He apologized, and a few weeks later the city got the money President Bush promised — and a little more. Now, nearly 10 months after a pair of hijacked passenger jets exploded into the twin towers, the real money grubbing is...

KANANASKIS, Alberta (AP) - World leaders, wrapping up a summit rocked by a new U.S. corporate bookkeeping scandal and dissension over President Bush's Mideast policy, turned their attention to Africa and a far-reaching program to provide billions of dollars of assistance to the world's poorest continent. Bush, who has lobbied the other leaders to support his new Middle East peace proposal and its demand that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat be ousted, was to discuss the issue during a meeting Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Earlier this week, Putin said bluntly that it would be ``dangerous and mistaken'' to remove...