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PANI Organizes a
March for Friday
Il Patronato de
la Infancia, PANI - the Child Welfare Agency - is
organizing a march on downtown San José for Friday.
The plan is to leave at 8am from the Museo de Los
Niños. The rest of the route has not been planned
out as yet.
According to la Ministra de la Niñez (Minister for
the Childhood), Rosalia Gil, she hopes that many
institutions and people will participate that want
to unite with this cause.
The manifestation is to be in memory of all lost and
assassinate children in the country. The only
requirement to participate is to dress in white.
Casa Alianza (Covenant House) is also planning a
campaign to collect One Million signatures and to
present them to the government in an effort get just
legislation that protects children.
Salary Raise for
Public Employees Not What Expected
This week it will be published in the
"official" newspaper La Gaceta to come
into effect, all public employee salaries will raise
by 3.5%.
This is a semi-annual adjustment to public employee
salaries.
Union leaders are not happy with the amount. A
spokesperson for Asociación Nacional de Empleados
Públicos (ANEP) - one of the many public employee
unions - says that the government is looking for a
confrontation.
Union leaders are to meet tomorrow to discuss
possible work stop action to manifest their
displeasures with the government.
Norway Heads
Quality of Life Index
Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Australia and the
Netherlands ranked as the best countries in which to
live in the 2003 U.N. Human Development report on
Tuesday.
The United States
ranked seventh and Canada was eighth in the report
that seeks to go beyond per-capita income and
include such factors as educational levels, health
care and life expectancy in measuring a nation's
well-being.
The report also gives a separate index for women's
participation in political and economic fields, with
surprising results. It says women fare better in
Botswana, Costa Rica and Namibia than in Greece,
Italy and Japan.
Canada, which had been in first place in the overall
index of 175 countries for seven years until 2001,
conducted its own poll, apparently timed to the U.N.
report. Last year, Canada slipped to third place.
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Al-Qaeda said to have trained 70,000 to 120,000 terrorists
A US congressional probe into the Sept. 11 attacks has concluded that the al-Qaeda has trained between 70,000 to 120,000 terrorists and a significant number of them were placed inside the United States, a Democrat lawmaker said Sunday.
Senator Bob Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Democratic presidential candidate, said the Bush administration has approved the estimate on the number of trained al-Qaeda terrorists even though the fully classified report is still under review at the FBI and CIA.
"We have to assume that as those people were placed around the world, some of them were placed inside the United States; some of them are in the United States today," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Graham said by launching war against Iraq, the Bush administration had taken focus off of "the major threat" to the lives of Americans in terms of foreign forces.
"We have lost focus. We allowed the al-Qaeda to regroup and regenerated. They've conducted a series of very sophisticated operations - thus far none of them in the United States. But sevenAmericans were killed in Saudi Arabia," Graham said, referring to the bombings on three Saudi housing compounds on May 12.
The senator declined to give the estimated number of the al-Qaeda operatives hiding in the United States, only saying "it is asignificant number."
The US House of Representatives and Senate intelligence panels,after months of investigation, wrapped up a report on the Sept. 11attacks on Dec. 20. Graham, who has criticized the Bush administration repeatedly for delaying release of the report, saidhe hoped the final report would be released before the end of thismonth.
British navy may be forced to accept smaller warships
British Royal Navy was told it may have to accept warships smaller than agreed earlier this year because there is a big gap in funds and the contractor BAE Systems would be unable to build the warships it desired with the original budget, the Financial Times reported on Monday.
The Royal Navy has been told there are no extra funds available,the newspaper reported. So planners have to consider designing smaller and less sophisticated ship.
British defense giant BAE Systems told the Ministry of Defense that its two new aircraft carriers, budgeted at 2.8 billion poundsor 4.5 billion US dollars in January, will now cost 4 billion pounds or 6.42 billion US dollars.
Originally the plan was for the warships to carry 48 aircraft, and smaller ships could carry only 20.
Earlier this year, the government was forced to pay 700 millionpounds or 1.155 billion US dollars to bail the company out after cost overran on the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft.
BAE won the lead role on the aircraft carrier contract after a battle with French contractor Thales.
Center-left world leaders meet to rethink "third way"
Fourteen center-left world leaders started their summit on Sunday in London, where they are expected to carve out a future path for center-left politics and find common ground among them in a bid to overhaul the "third way" thinking in a changing time.
The Progressive Governance Summit comes at a time when center-left government leaders are having a difficult time soothing a public, which is unhappy with domestic economic distress and foreign policy disputes.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is battling to carry out labor market reforms and cut the jobless rate. Sweden is facing a difficult euro referendum. And British Prime Minister Tony Blair is suffering from midterm blues due to troubled public service reforms and his deeply-hurt credibility over the Iraq war.
Meanwhile, center-left heads of state or government from Africa, Latin America and East Europe are focusing on the benefit of economic growth to social justice in the third world and the role of rich countries in a global anti-poverty agenda.
With topics ranging from public service reforms to trade development, the summit "aims to spread the advantage of opportunity, responsibility, community, an enabling state and responsive government to citizens around the world," a British Foreign Office spokeswoman told
Xinhua.
The summit, held in Surrey, south of London, is the fifth in a series that kicked off in Washington in 1999. The others took place in Florence, Berlin and Stockholm. The meeting will concludeon Monday.
The "third way," a brand invented by Blair and former US President Bill Clinton in 1997, aims to find middle ground betweenthe far right and the far left so as to combine greater economic prosperity with enhanced social justice in an era of rapid globalization.
The "third way" has suffered a series of election setbacks in recent years, highlighted by the Democratic Party's defeat in the latest presidential election in the United States. The French socialists have also lost power, as have the Italian and Portuguese social democrats.
Prior to the center-left leaders' summit, Blair hosted a widely-attended warming-up conference of the Network for Progressive Governance. However, the concerns and calls voiced at the three-day conference varied greatly.
Blair told the conference that he would not back away from radical public service reforms which are key to the Labor Party winning the center ground and a third term in power.
Blair said the Labor would insist on "modernization and reform,whereas our true mission is precisely to fight on that center ground."
"New Labor was successful because we fought for and won the center ground. We must never give it up," he said.
Meanwhile, Blair warned the center-left government leaders against anti-globalization in economic policy-making and anti-Americanism in foreign policy, rejecting both as blind alleys.
Blair also tried to use this opportunity to boost a new unity of center-left wings despite their bitter division over Iraq.
However, Laurent Fabius, a former French prime minister, made Blair wince when he said: "The conflict in Iraq showed what Europecan achieve when it is divided -- nothing."
At the conference, South African President Thabo Mbeki demandedthat "rich countries must pay" the developing world so as to make a successful global anti-poverty agenda possible.
People in developing countries do not have clean water "becausethey don't have the money for clean water," Mbeki told some 500 politicians and experts from more than 30 countries attending the conference. "Somebody has to pay. Rich countries must pay."
Mbeki lamented the lack of vigor from rich countries in fighting global poverty, saying: "The rich countries, because theyare rich, do not have that same impulse as I have."
Meanwhile, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva calledfor "a new world order that is both fairer and more democratic," asking the rich countries to set up a multilateral fund to supportthe construction of infrastructure in developing countries.
Silva said his ruling Brazilian Workers Party "is now putting in place a project that combines economic growth with income redistribution, deepens political democracy and asserts the sovereignty of our country in the world."
Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla, who won the elections in June with promises of a larger and more generous welfare state, said at the conference that he was now staking his future on his reform plan seeking spending cuts and tax hikes.
The Czech Republic, burdened with heavy transition costs for its once planned economy and huge budget deficits, would have to wait for a couple of years to get its public services expanded dramatically, Spidla said.
Heads of government from Canada, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, Romania Ethiopia, Hungary and Poland also attended the summit.
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