blessed britons

* Nine British citizens were released in 2004 and were not charged with any crime despite being held at Guantanamo for over four years.

* Two of the British residents being held at Guantanamo have not seen their youngest children.

* Eight British residents are still being held at Guantanamo and the British Government is refusing to take action to secure their release.

— From the National Guantanamo Coalition

mad world

Take sub-Saharan Africa. Since the late 1970s, major aid institutions... have called most of the shots in African economic policy and public investment. In no other region has the aid system held such commanding political and financial positions for so long...

Now according to World Bank researchers, the number of Africans living in extreme income poverty ($1 per day or less) in the two decades after 1981 nearly doubled from 164 to 316 million, or from 42 to 47 percent of the sub-Saharan population. Just above them, another 30 percent in 2001 occupied the $1 to $2 per day stratum at the edge of wretchedness. Yet even that grim total estimate of 77 percent is probably too optimistic; experts have disputed World Bank data as seriously understating poverty's true scope and depth.

— David Sogge

west papua

Act of Free Choice

Submitted by antarchi on November 19, 2007 - 00:42.

For nearly 40 years, a succession of Generals in Jakarta, from Suharto to Yudhoyono, together with their fellow conspirators in London, Washington, Canberra and the Hague, have told a very big lie; that the people of West Papua chose feely to join Indonesia in the 1969 “Act of Free Choice”...

The Indonesian, British, American, Australian and Dutch governments all know the truth; In 1969 Suharto’s henchmen put their rifles to the heads of 1,026 West Papuan elders and threatened to blow their brains out if they voted for independence. They all know the truth that if the West Papuan people had been given a genuine one person – one vote referendum they would have voted overwhelmingly for independence. And they also all know the truth that the only way Indonesia can hold on to West Papua now is by repressing peaceful Papuan dissenters like Filep Karma & Yusak Pakage, jailed for 15 & 10 years for peacefully raising the West Papuan flag.

— Richard Samuelson

, in "Indonesia's territorial integrity"...it's just a bloody map

antarchi's quotes