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A new report from the United Nations Development Programme has demanded a big increase in spending to provide clean water. The UNDP wants another $4bn (£2bn) a year spent, and says that water has not received the attention it deserves. Water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea kill far more people than HIV/Aids and malaria combined, it said. And the difference is particularly stark for children: water-borne diseases kill five times as many children as HIV/Aids. The report says that water is a key part of human development - and warns that, in particular, sub-Saharan Africa is lagging behind the rest of...

Former South African President Nelson Mandela says poverty is equivalent to slavery and apartheid, and must be eliminated with the support of the world's richest nations. Mr. Mandela is in Britain at the government's invitation as part of Prime Minister Tony Blair's drive to push for poverty alleviation in developing countries, especially Africa. The former South African president spoke to several thousand people at a midday rally in London's Trafalgar Square, where he said poverty is a violation of fundamental human rights. "Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural," he said. "It is man-made and it can be overcome...

South Africa sent its deputy foreign minister to back the Palestinian case at the world court, arguing that the security fence was a bid to annex territory in the West Bank. "It is not a security wall. It is a wall to enforce the occupation," lawmaker Aziz Pahad told the Court. Pahad asked the Court to rule that the security fence violated international law. In 1971, the World Court ruled that apartheid South Africa's occupation of Namibia was illegal. Pahad said that the 1971 ruling, which led to international sanctions against the National Party-led Apartheid government, contributed to the downfall...

The Israeli far Left would not opt out on any notorious analogy in its relentless attempt to disfigure the face of Israel. The more radical Left would go as far as equating the defense policy of Israel to the Nazi brutality and reviling Jewish settlers as Nazis under Israeli mantle. The more moderate circles of the far Left, who still refrain from slipping to such lows as to foul the debate with bloodcurdling analogies between Israel and Nazism, content themselves for the time being with a vile campaign to establish Israel´s international image as an apartheid state. At any rate,...

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella arm of the organized Jewish community in the United States, has scheduled a debate on the subject of Israel´s settlement policies for their annual conference, which is slated for February 23rd in Baltimore. JCPA had received a volume of material culled from organizations that have made the case to the American government and the Jewish community in the US that the Jewish communities Israel established beyond the1948/1967 armistice lines has been some kind of criminal act, and that these Jewish communities somehow stand as an obstacle to peace. It would surprise most...

Outside some Berkeley coffee house or an anti-American United Nations development summit, there aren't too many places in this world where Robert Mugabe can count on a warm welcome. But one, apparently, is New York's City Hall. Yesterday the president of Zimbabwe was feted at a reception there sponsored by councilman Charles Barron and the City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus. "I'm honored to host him," Mr. Barron told us by phone yesterday. The councilman went on to say that he intended to go to Zimbabwe on a fact-finding trip to see for himself if all the accusations against...

The Times had to make a decision. The story could not be ignored, but how should it be played? President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who has impoverished his country, while suspending the rule of law and doing his best to incur a famine, was cheered last week by members of the New York City Council. A dozen or so Council members, mostly black or Latino, attended a reception for the old tyrant at City Hall. If the Times had put that on page one, it might have been seen as an expression of disapproval, and opened the exquisitely sensitive Times...

A truly civilized, wealth-respecting world would observe capital flight and brain drains, recoil in horror and stop penalizing success. It would cut tax rates and regulation and cease calling wealth-makers as criminals who deserve a noose – or deportation. But this is not the response we’re seeing today. Instead there are calls for ever-greater tax burdens, ever-more regulation and ever-less financial privacy. Indeed, as we noted at the outset of our report, there also have been calls for an “International Tax Organization” (ITO) that would impose taxes globally. The ITO would be modeled on the World Trade Organization (WTO) which,...

Rich countries face "a moment of truth" over their plan to halve global poverty, which is endangered by turmoil in global stock markets and the threat of war against Iraq, the World Bank warned yesterday. James Wolfensohn, the Bank's president, said the west must "put its money where its mouth is" and stump up the cash to meet the agreed target of halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015. "The time has come to move from words to action to implement this new deal between rich countries and poor countries," he said....

Only the United Nations, we're told, has the vision and the moral authority to be the keepers of justice in the world. Well, as they say, actions speak louder than words. The UN's bureaucrats spend a huge amount of time wringing their hands over the United States' lack of cooperation with their schemes for global governance. They insist that global governance through the UN is vital to assure the complete well being of citizens in every nation. Consider, though, the on-going tragedy in Zimbabwe. For several years that nation's president, Robert Mugabe, has been systematically "cleansing" white people from its...

It was trade and transnational corporations versus the environment at the recent Rio Plus Ten World Summit on Sustainable Development here, and the green groups, complain their supporters, came out on the short end of the stick. When the world gathered in Johannesburg a few weeks ago for the conference, the world's major environmentalist groups and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) believed they would make major gains in their respective agendas. However, now that the dust has settled, it would appear that the world's most powerful corporations have cemented their agenda of promoting trade, while the concerns of environmentalists – both radical...

The recent Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development was yet another grotesque ploy to subvert economic liberties in favor of coercive social planning, to surrender without reward the fruits of producers' minds through creation of bogus "rights" that non-producers supposedly possess to their work. Throughout this gathering, two conspicuous forces maintained intense activities. Although at first glance more radical than the "mainstream environmentalists" at the summit, their ideologies and consequent deeds are however precisely what the regulator mentality upholds and renders possible. U.S. President George W. Bush had refused to attend this abominable session, but leaders of certain nations, considering themselves...

The Congressmen of the Progressive Caucus maintain a fig leaf of deniability regarding their Socialist orientation. Rather than calling themselves socialists, with all that label implies, members of the caucus along with their affiliates, the Democratic Socialists of America and the Institute of Policy Studies, prefer to hide behind euphemisms like "progressive" or nonpartisan think tank. The fraud is furthered by the strange silence of both political parties and the mainstream media. The DSA is the American branch of the Socialist International, an organization that spearheads open socialist parties in countries with totalitarian traditions. The logo of both the DSA...

The good news from the United Nations Sustainable Development summit is that the radical environmentalists did not hijack the proceedings. Thousands of Green activists from non-government organizations (NGOs), mainly from the "rich" Northern tier states (North America-Europe-Northeast Asia), descended on Johannesburg, South Africa. They were intent on convincing the world's poor that it was better to live in a hovel than in the decadent suburbs of Europe or America. They held rallies, presented papers and talked endlessly to the media. It was their grandstanding that gave casual observers the false impression that the Greens were a power. Yet, the conference...

Is it just me or is there something ironic about a summit on sustainable development that features the leading environmental groups of the world emitting 290,000 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Even more interesting is the fact the regional government of Johannesburg set a plan whereby the delegates could donate money to clean the environmental mess they created and only one seventh of the amount needed was donated. I have my doubts about a conference that gives Robert Mugabe a warm reception, ignoring that his regime recently killed 186 political opponents, continues to confiscate lands of white farmers...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - French President Jacques Chirac will urge world leaders to launch talks on a new international tax to fight world poverty, sources with him at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg say. The sources said Chirac rejected the existing "Tobin Tax" proposal to raise levies purely on foreign exchange transactions but would call in a speech to the summit for discussion on a wider tax on wealth generated by globalisation. "It could be a tax on airplane tickets, on carbon dioxide, on health products sold in industrialised countries, and indeed on international financial transactions," one source said. "The idea...

By the lights of a globe-trotting do-goodnik, South Africa is an ideal place for a conference: As an African country, the choice of locale bespeaks solidarity with the world's poorest continent -- yet its major cities are full of the plush hotels and decent restaurants NGO types secretly cherish. Unfortunately, there's something about the country that invites snafus. We do not predict a happy ending for this week's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Things started going downhill two years ago at the 13th World AIDS Conference. Invoking his privilege as national host, South African President Thabo Mbeki told...