Sunday, June 16, 2013

Sunday Round-Up - June 16, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at the government's prosecution of Bradley Manning, Obama's meeting with Chinese President Xi, and the progress towards reaching the UN's Millennium Development Goals.  Sources are TomDispatch (recent winner of Utne Reader's 2013 media award for best political coverage), Xinhuanet, and Le Monde Diplomatique.

The Prosecution of Bradley Manning

In a June 11 post on TomDispatch , human-rights lawyer Chase Madar takes on the "dystopian secrecy" of the post 9/11 era in the government's prosecution of Bradley Manning.  Manning, the Wikileaks source within the US Army, potentially faces decades of jail time if convicted. Speaking of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Madar writes: "Both wars of occupation were ghastly strategic choices that have killed hundreds of thousands, wounded many more, sent millions into exile, and destabilized what Washington, in good times, used to call 'the arc of instability.' Why have our strategic choices been so disastrous? In large part because they have been militantly clueless. Starved of important information, both the media and public opinion were putty in the hands [of] the Bush administration and its neocon followers as they dreamt up and then put into action their geopolitical fantasies." Transparency in foreign relations is a good thing, argues Madar, and "what gets people killed, no matter how much our pols and pundits strain to deny it, aren’t InfoSec breaches or media leaks, but foolish and clueless strategic choices."  Madar contrasts the military's flexibility on rape and sexual assault and on the killing of foreign civilians with the strictness that they use in dealing with declassifying so-called classified information. He concludes that "the young private’s act of civil defiance was in fact a first step in reversing the pathologies that have made our foreign policy a string of self-inflicted homicidal disasters."

US - China Cooperation

On June 13, Xinhuanet reported on comments from a senior Chinese lawmaker on the recently concluded meeting between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.   Referring to the historic summit as an important moment for China and the United States, Fu Ying, chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the 12th National People's Congress, spoke to the Washington-based think tank Brookings Institute. "One of the most important messages coming out of this summit is their commitment to working together to build a new model of relationship for the two countries to head for partnership, not for conflict as some had feared," she said. "We hope it will lead to many years of working together with excellent results coming on the way." The Xinhuanet article concludes: "During the summit at Annenberg estate, both Xi and Obama reaffirmed their commitment to seeking to build a new type of great-power relationship that features win-win cooperation based on mutual respect and benefit, so as to avoid the repetition of the zero-sum game usually seen in history between a resident power and an emerging one."
 
Millennium Development Goals

In a supplement to its June issue, Le Monde Diplomatique reported on the mixed results towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2000. The eight goals to be achieved by 2015 are "to (i) eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, (ii) achieve universal primary education, (iii) promote gender equality and empower women, (iv) reduce child mortality, (v) improve maternal health, (vi) combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, (vii) ensure environmental sustainability and (viii) develop a global partnership for development." The intent is to reach specific targets by following an action plan and measuring progress. Progress towards the goals is measured relative to 1990. The article by Philippe Rekacewicz notes that "India and China have made considerable headway [towards reaching the goals], while sub-Saharan Africa has stagnated or regressed."

Rekacewicz then reviews the three health goals in some detail. Goal 4 is "to reduce child mortality by two thirds. According to figures published by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), it fell by a third between 1990 and 2010, which is not fast enough....Only around 10 out of the 70 countries concerned are likely to achieve the two-thirds reduction by 2015. " Goal 5 (maternal health - reducing maternal mortality by 75%) has shown very slow progress: "In 2010 some 287,000 women died in childbirth (85% of them in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia), compared with 550,000 in 1990." Goal 6 ("combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases") has three separate targets:

  • Check the spread of HIV/AIDS. The rate of increase has slowed but as of 2010 the number of people living with the virus was still rising.
  • Provide access to antiretroviral treatments to all who need them by 2010. In 2010 6.5 million people received treatment compared to a worldwide total of over 30 million. But, Rekacewicz notes, "On the positive side, since 2005 the wider availability of treatment has significantly reduced mortality."
  • Combat the great endemic diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis. Progress is being made on malaria - "World Health Organisation (WHO) figures show that the number of declared cases of malaria fell by 50% between 2000 and 2010 in 40 of the 100 countries where the disease is found." But the long-range outlook for malaria is somewhat pessimistic due to a lack of sufficient funding and "the emergence of drug-resistant strains in a growing number of Southeast Asian and sub-Saharan African countries". On a more confident note, the spread of tuberculosis "could be halted by 2015, in line with the development goal."

With less than three years to go before the 2015 deadline, many of the targets will not be achieved. The UN is trying to launch "accelerated action programmes" but, the article concludes, "if the institutions and states which pledged special contributions do not keep their promises, these efforts will come to nothing."

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