US – Features

By Alex Lantier

(source: World Socialist WebSite)

The Contact Group, an assembly of foreign ministers from Western and Arab countries backing the Benghazi-based Libyan rebels of the Interim Transitional National Council (INC), met yesterday in Doha, Qatar. The meeting highlighted the INC’s role as a stooge of the imperialist powers, particularly the US, Britain and France, who are promoting it as their proxy force in a bitter civil war in Libya.

Qatar and Britain hosted the conference, with British Foreign Secretary William Hague issuing a statement in the early evening demanding that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi step down as Libyan head of state. Hague declared, “Gaddafi and his regime have lost all legitimacy and he must leave power.” The conference praised the continued bombing of Libya by NATO forces, declaring: “These have exerted significant pressure on Gaddafi, protected civilians, including Benghazi, from violent attack and averted a humanitarian disaster.”

The conference also agreed to fund the INC: “Participants agreed that a Temporary Financial Mechanism could provide a method for the INC and international community to manage revenue to assist with short-term financial requirements and structural needs in Libya.”

INC member Mahmoud Chammam called on the US government to “liberate the funds” of the Gaddafi regime—that is, an estimated $30 billion of Libyan oil earnings held by Western banks. Normally used to pay for Libyan social spending and public sector workers’ salaries, these funds would be stolen by the major banks to pay for INC weapons and supplies.

Read More »Contact group meeting in doha plans imperialist carve up of Libya

Regional leaders and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon are holding a crisis meeting aimed at ending the latest fighting in eastern Congo.

Seven African leaders are attending the African Union summit in Nairobi. Officials hope to get Congo and Rwanda to implement earlier commitments to end eastern Congo’s instability and disarm the numerous militia groups in the area.

The conflict in eastern Congo is fueled by festering ethnic hatred left over from the 1994 slaughter of a half-million Tutsis in Rwanda
and Congo’s civil wars.

Todays’ meeting follows a series of visits by high-level European Union and American officials to push for a diplomatic solution to the fighting that has displaced tens of thousands in the eastern Congo
region of North Kivu.

Sapa-AP

Read More »Un chief African leaders discuss congo crisis

For decades Zionist benefactors have played obsessively upon Holocaust guilt, and the security chestnut, to leech support for Israel’s cause.… Read More »Pro Isaraeli lobby group to be launched in sa parliament

Picture: (AFP Graphic)- HIV carriers, new infections and AIDS deaths in 2007. Leaders in the fight against AIDS pleaded over the weekend for the world to keep up its momentum against the disease and step up funding for HIV treatment and prevention.

By Richard Ingham

A global conference on AIDS was to get down to business today after hearing that victory against the disease lay beyond the farthest horizon and endangered lives could only be saved with inflows of money.
Funding, access to treatment, beefing up prevention against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and an array of social evils from stigma to violence against women are the headline issues at the six-day parlay.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in yesterdays opening ceremonies, urged wealthy donor countries to live up to UN and G8 commitments to achieve universal access to lifeline anti-HIV drugs by 2010.

Ban warned "As the fight against AIDS nears the end of its third decade, we are still facing a huge shortfall in resources".

The responses to HIV and AIDS require long-term and sustained financing. As more people go on treatment and live longer, budgets will have to increase considerably over the next few decades. In the most affected countries, donors will have to provide the majority of the funding.

More than 25 million people have died from AIDS since the disease first emerged in 1981, and 33 million people today are living with HIV.

Ninety percent of those infected live in poor countries. In the past two years, there has been a major boost in help for these people, but even now, only three million individuals, or less than a third of those in need, have access to precious antiretroviral drugs.

Margaret Chan, director general of the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO), warned that the war on AIDS would be protracted.

MRN-AFP

Read More »Aids will be long more funds needed conference told