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WTO meet unites Third World
Strike over civilian killings paralyses Kathmandu
Protesters target US, Korean consulates
Bush relents on amendment against torture
Longer conception needed for male child: study
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WTO meet unites Third World
Hong Kong, December 16 The alliance, considered to be the mother of all groupings and representing over two-thirds of the WTO membership, was announced at a press conference here. It was supported by a large number of NGO representatives led by Oxfam which has collected 18 million signatures seeking justice for farmers and industrial workers of developing countries. With barely two more days left for the ministerial meeting, ministers and officials are struggling through day and night to hammer out a difficult consensus on agriculture, the stickiest of all issues and non-agriculture market access (NAMA), the handle being used by the EU to extract a price for the deal. The end-date for the removal of the export subsidy has emerged as the most difficult area for the negotiators to deal with. While the US has agreed on 2010, the EU insists upon the US, Canada and Australia to come out clean on the Food Aid programme which is considered to be a facade for the farm subsidy. For the first time in the WTO, a ministerial meeting was held between all the developing country groups comprising G-20, the G-33, the ACP, the LDCs, the African Group and the Small Economies decided to better coordinate their efforts in order to develop a common approach to issues of common interest, a joint statement said. Besides Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath, group coordinators from G-20, G-33, the ACP, the African Group and the Small Economies, jointly announced the formation of the grouping against the rich nations. Zambia Trade Minister and the co-ordinator of the LDCs, Dipak Patel, said the poor countries were not interested in post-dated cheques. “We want to know how and when”, he said. He emerged as one of the key figures at the conference with his no-nonsense plainspeak. “At no point, there would be a compromise. We are going to stick to our demand for the duty free quota free (DFQF) for the LDCs”, he said.
— UNI |
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Strike over civilian killings paralyses Kathmandu
Kathamandu, December 16 Anger remained high in the city following the incident around midnight on Wednesday when a soldier fired on a crowd of villagers who had gathered at a temple to mark the full moon. The soldier, who had an argument with the villagers, also died in the shootout in the tourist town of Nagarkot, near Kathmandu, but the circumstances of his death were not clear. “King Gyanendra must take the moral responsibility for the killing,” Ram Chandra Poudel, general secretary of the Nepali Congress party said, adding that the monarch was also the country’s defence minister. The Nepali Congress is a constituent of an alliance of seven parties campaigning for the restoration of democracy after King Gyanendra fired the multi-party government in February and seized full control of the impoverished nation. The king justified his move as vital to crush a deadly Maoist insurgency. Today’s strike was called by the alliance to grieve for the victims of the shooting. Witnesses said some children carrying school bags were returning home from bus stands as schools did not send buses to pick them up fearing attacks from political activists. The government has ordered an inquiry into the killings.
— Reuters |
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Protesters target US, Korean consulates
Hong Kong, December 16 More than 100 farmers, workers and unionists sprayed ‘’Down, down WTO’’ in red across the US Consulate emblem and ‘’No Bush’’ in black, while throwing eggs at the building and waving banners. Several shaved their heads while other protesters beat drums, shouting that the United States had forced South Korea to buy its farm products and threatened their livelihoods. Not far away, nearly 100 protesters stormed the building housing the South Korean consulate after rallying outside. Many of the Korean protesters are farmers bitterly opposed up to the opening of their country’s rice market to foreign imports. An estimated 10,000 anti-globalisation protesters have converged on Hong Kong for a meeting this week of world trade ministers, including some 2,000 South Koreans, who have a reputation as the most militant anti-globalisation group in Asia. Korean protesters clashed with police on the first two days of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) conference as they tried to get to the site of the meeting, but were driven back by officers wielding pepper spray and batons. So far, however, there has been none of the intense violence that marred that last two big WTO conferences, in Cancun and Seattle. A South Korean farmer stabbed himself to death in the Mexican town of Cancun during a WTO meeting in 2003.
— Reuters |
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Bush relents on amendment against torture
Washington, December 16 With Republican Senator John McCain at his side—the author of the amendment which demanded that specific language be included in the books against torture and degrading treatment of prisoners in US custody, President George W Bush stressed that his goal was to make clear to the world that this government does not torture. “We adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad,” he said.
— PTI |
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Longer conception needed for male child: study
London, December 16 Scientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studied data on 5,283 women who had babies between July 2001-2003, found that the probability of having a boy was 58 per cent if it took longer than 12 months to get pregnant. The findings did not apply to women having fertility treatment. “Taking longer to reach lasting pregnancy increases the chances of having male offspring,’’ said Luc Smits, of the Department of Epidemiology at the university, in a report in The British Medical Journal.
— Reuters |
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