The ‘Other’, Older Palestinian Coup D’etat

Global Intelligence News

By Nicola Nasser*

Failing to substantiate for the President of the autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, a credible “legal” basis to extend his term from the Basic Law, which is the constitutional terms of reference that govern the rotation of power and the renewal of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the PA, Abbas in his capacity as the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) convened the rubber stamping Fatah –dominated Central Council (CC) of the PLO in the West Bank city of Ramallah to elect him also President of the State of Palestine on November 23.

The move could have been the last “constitutional” resort to extend his term as PA president before it expires on January 9 next year in order to secure himself as the supreme “legitimate” authority on Palestinian decision –making in the context of the “make – or – break” bloody wrangling with the rival Hamas on the leadership of the Palestinian national movement.
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Popularity: 44% [?]

RIGHTS-HUNGARY: Activists Seek to Reverse Draconian Law

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Zoltán Dujisin

BUDAPEST, Dec 1 (IPS) – A Hungarian rights organisation is seeking to return the country to the days when all life prisoners had a right to a review of their sentences, giving hope to eight who have been sentenced to imprisonment until they die.

In 2001, Hungary passed a special law for the gravest of crimes. This removed for these the right of conditional release after 30 years in jail. Judges were allowed to send these convicted killers to prison for the rest of their natural lives.

The prime minister at the time was Viktor Orban, a conservative populist who advocated tougher sentencing policies. In 2002, as outgoing prime minister, he called on Europe to consider the reintroduction of the death penalty following a meeting with relatives of the eight victims who died in a violent bank robbery.
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Popularity: 22% [?]

NICARAGUA-RUSSIA: Ortega Embraces Kremlin

Global Intelligence News / IPS

José Adán Silva

MANAGUA, Nov 25 (IPS) – The government of Nicaragua is seeking Russia’s support in a strategy that some analysts view as risky for the future diplomatic relations of this Central American nation.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has reestablished friendly relations and economic ties with the Kremlin, after over 16 years of a virtual freeze.

Nicaragua was the second country, after Russia, to recognise last August the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway provinces of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August precipitated the greatest crisis between the West and Moscow since the end of the Cold War, which stretched from the mid-1940s, shortly after World War II, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
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Popularity: 32% [?]

ECONOMY: Don’t Bank On Them

Global Intel Net / IPS

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Nov 18 (IPS) – Public confidence in Belgian banks has eroded considerably over the past few months. A series of multi-billion euro rescue plans, reports of lavish executive bonuses and investigations into whether shareholders were misled about solvency levels have fuelled fears that the savings of the hard-pressed ordinary citizen are anything but safe.

Less noticed, though arguably more disturbing, are revelations that the country’s banks invest in projects that damage the environment and abuse elementary human rights.

By visiting the ‘Bank Secrets’ website (www.bankgeheimen.be), savers can monitor what is done with the money they lodge in their accounts. It says that there is a ”very high” chance that Fortis, Citibank and ING invest in harmful projects, and a ”high” risk that Dexia and KBC do.

Netwerk Vlaanderen, the Flemish human rights organisation which set up the website, has used four main criteria to assess projects that banks finance: if they involve the manufacture of weapons; if they respect the employment standards recommended by the International Labour Organisation; if they are ecologically destructive and; if they involve cooperation with repressive regimes.
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Popularity: 23% [?]

EU-RUSSIA: Arms Overshadow Talks

Global intel Net / IPS

Analysis by David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Nov 15 (IPS) – Brinkmanship over weapons overshadowed a summit between the European Union and Russia held in the French city Nice Nov. 14.

Although the EU had agreed earlier in the week to resume talks on deepening its relationship with Moscow that had been suspended in protest at Russia’s military incursions into Georgia during August, the summit took place in an atmosphere of tension.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy who hosted the event voiced his unease with a recent threat by his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev to station Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian territory that borders the EU countries Poland and Lithuania.

”We really must move forward to remove sources of friction,” Sarkozy said, adding that no deployment of the missiles should take place before discussions on the challenges for European security take place. Such talks — facilitated by the continent-wide Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe — are planned for next year.
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Popularity: 22% [?]

BALKANS: Organised Crime Knows No Boundaries

Global Intel News / IPS

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Nov 14 (IPS) – Inter-ethnic hatred has remained alive among many Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs through the years since the wars of the disintegration of former Yugoslavia. But the ‘brotherhood’ imposed by communist rulers to keep people together remains alive in organised crime that knows no boundaries, or religious and ethnic divisions.

This was evident again in the killing last month of Ivo Pukanic (47), owner of the weekly Nacional. His paper ran a campaign to expose organised crime in the region.

Two weeks before Pukanic was killed, a young female lawyer Ivana Hodak died in a mafia-style ambush. She and her father, also a lawyer, were involved in one of the most spectacular cases against war-time generals-turned businessmen, who were accused of abusing state funds for private purposes at the time of Croatia’s war of independence in the 1990s.

Investigation of the latest killing, the first violent death of a journalist in Croatia since its independence war of the 1990s, has exposed a close-knit network of Bosniak, Croat, Montenegrin and Serb criminals who conspired in the act.
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Popularity: 27% [?]

VENEZUELA-RUSSIA: Business Deals Consolidate Alliance

Global Intel Net / IPS

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 13 (IPS) – ”Tovariches! Comrades! Today I feel I must say to you: let us work to find gas and oil under these waters!” said Alexander Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian firm Gazprom, when drills on the Escorpión Vigilante marine platform finally perforated the Venezuelan sea bed.

It was Nov. 7, the anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and Medvedev and the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Igor Sechin, were accompanying their host, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, at the inauguration of operations by UrdanetaGazprom, a partnership with Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA to explore for gas in the northwestern Gulf of Venezuela.

Moments earlier, perched on the scaffolding of bars and walkways on the Escorpión Vigilante, a platform rented from the United States, Chávez saluted the ”strategic alliance between two energy giants,” his own country and Russia, ”the homeland of Lenin.”
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Popularity: 29% [?]

EUROPE: New Push to Send Troops to Congo

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS
Thursday, November 06, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Nov 6 (IPS) – Troops from the European Union should be deployed in eastern Congo in order to protect civilians, human rights activists say.

Fighting between the Congolese army and forces controlled by Laurent Nkunda is to be one of the main topics discussed by the EU’s foreign ministers when they gather in Brussels Nov. 10.

So far no clear consensus has emerged among the Union’s 27 countries about how the humanitarian crisis in the central African country should be addressed. Belgium, the country’s former colonial overlord, and France, the holder of the bloc’s rotating presidency, are in favour of sending EU troops to the region. But Germany and Britain are more wary of doing so.

Comprising 17,000 soldiers, the United Nations force in Congo (MONUC) is the largest peacekeeping force anywhere in the world. Yet with Congo boasting a surface area equivalent to all of Western Europe, the force has proven unable to quell the unrest.
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Popularity: 18% [?]

POLITICS-US: Europe Too Looks for a New Way Forward

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS
Wednesday, November 05, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Nov 5 (IPS) – If ‘change’ and ‘hope’ were the watchwords of Barack Obama’s election campaign, they were echoed strongly on the other side of the Atlantic, where his victory was swiftly applauded by Europe’s political leaders.

Whereas George W. Bush proved to be a divisive figure for the European Union — particularly with the invasion of Iraq — Obama’s apparent preference for cooperation and dialogue over conflict have won him plenty of admirers.

Expectations are running high that he will waste no time in grappling with the world’s most pressing problems such as climate change. His long-term commitment to an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of this century and shorter-term pledge to be represented at the international negotiations on global warming in Poznan, Poland later this year, have been noted by ecologists and policy-makers alike.

Such commitments were in stark contrast to the policy of the Bush administration, which refused to ratify the main international agreement on global warming, the Kyoto Protocol.
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Popularity: 16% [?]

PORTUGAL: “Angolagate” Bribes in Local Banks

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS
Tuesday, November 04, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

By Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Nov 3 (IPS) – Portuguese banks that received transfers of money to Angolan politicians implicated in illegal arms sales have kept mum after the Lisbon paper Público reported their involvement.

The Banco de Portugal, the country’s central bank, has remained silent, and the banks mentioned by the newspaper declined to comment in response to queries from IPS Monday, invoking the law on bank secrecy.

Público Journalist Ana Dias Cordeiro, an expert on African affairs, reported on Oct. 31 that “more than 21 million dollars received by high-level officials of the regime in Luanda as a result of the illicit sales of arms from Russia to Angola passed through Portuguese banks.”

The information on which the article was based is contained in a list of bank transfers that form part of the evidence in the trial over the scandal dubbed “Angolagate”.
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Popularity: 17% [?]

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