THE G-20 IN PITTSBURGH
by Tom Over 9-23-09
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On Tuesday, Sept 22, activists from Philadelphia, New York City, Pittsburgh and other cities held a mock funeral procession to demand better policies for addressing the AIDS pandemic, a day ahead of the arrival of delegates for the G-20.
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The approximately 50 participants in the New Orleans-style funeral march drew a mix of interest, irritation, and amusement from onlookers in the business district of downtown Pittsburgh.
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At the head of the funeral march where pallbearers carried a cardboard coffin, a man shouted into a microphone while someone else carried a portable amplifier, “when people with AIDS are under attack, what do we do ?” and marchers shouted in unison, “fight back!”
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Amidst the early afternoon bustle of an weekday, the demonstrators repeated this call-and-answer and similar chants as the funeral march made its way around the perimeter of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, the site of the G-20 Summit later this week.
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Erica Goldberg works with ACT UP Philadelphia. She said global health is not on the agenda of the G-20 Summit.
“One of the things that some of the G-20 nations have promised us is funding for the global fund to fight, TB, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. This is all really important, especially if we want to meet the United Nations’ Millennium goal of eradicating these diseases by 2015. As of right now, this won’t be met. We have to hold our leaders accountable. They are the ones making decisions for the poorer countries,” Goldberg said.
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She commented on the timing of the demonstration. “We wanted this to be the first thing they (the G-20 delegates) see. They’re coming here tomorrow. We’re holding them accountable. This needs to be on the agenda.”
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She said AIDS activists chose Sept 22, two days before the official start of the G-20 Summit, and one day before the arrival of the delegates, so as to not have to compete with other protests. Also, she said the AIDS activists figured there would be less of a chance of conflict with police if they staged their protest earlier in the week.
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“We hope that this will hit the papers tomorrow, that it’s the first thing they see when they walk in, that they have this on their conscience and know we’re not going away,” Goldberg said. She urges people to contact legislators about supporting the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
“President Obama, as much as I love him, went back on his promise to fulfill the funding,” Goldberg said.
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She commented on how drug companies factor into all of this. “ Medication does not need to be this expensive. They can definitely lower their prices. We have big drug interests lobbying to prevent AIDS medication from getting” to developing nations.
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Goldberg said debt cancellation for developing nations is a factor that comes into play.
“When you don’t cancel debts of nations and they have to pay back loans to the IMF and the World Bank, they won’t have the funds necessary for getting AIDS medication, or they might get the medication but can’t pay the health professional because of their debt.
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She said vested interested motivated by huge profits stand in the way of doing a better job of addressing tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. “We have the power, the ability, and the medication.”
World News
BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's expensive international tourism effort
to downplay its reputation as a sexual playground suffered a rude
setback after three British soccer players appeared in a published
video laughing and shouting racist and vulgar abuse during their
Bangkok orgy with three Thai women.
The government's costly Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT)
promotional organization earlier said it was "very proud" to work with
England's Leicester City team and club, before three of its players
appeared romping in a hotel bed with the trio of unidentified Thais.
Uncensored clips online display the young men merrily shouting insults
at the obedient women while ordering them to perform orally and as
lesbians while the naked group of six cavort.
"Licky, licky, you slit eye," one of the men says, convincing a young
woman to approach another female who is sprawled on the bed.
"Leicester City budding stars, including boss Nigel Pearson's son,
were filmed taking part in a vile orgy in which a local girl was
racially abused in Bangkok," reported Britain's Sunday Mirror
“Nope, nope, nope,” was Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott’s answer to the question whether his country will take in any of the nearly 8,000 Rohingya refugees stranded at sea.
Abbott’s logic is as pitiless as his decision to abandon the world’s most persecuted minority in their darkest hour. “Don’t think that getting on a leaky boat at the behest of a people smuggler is going to do you or your family any good,” he said.
But Abbott is hardly the main party in the ongoing suffering of Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic group living in Myanmar, or Burma. The whole Southeast Asian region is culpable. They have ignored the plight of the Rohingya for years. While tens of thousands of Rohingya are being ethnically cleansed, having their villages torched, forced into concentration camps and some into slavery, Burma is being celebrated by various western and Asian powers as a success story of a military junta-turned democracy.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- Armed kidnappers in Myanmar seized young girls
and other ethnic Rohingyas, brutalizing and imprisoning them on
overloaded boats to sell them to traffickers and corrupt officials in
Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, survivors said according to New
York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The forced victims were mingled among thousands of other stateless
Rohingya Muslims who voluntarily paid to escape racist oppression in
Buddhist-majority Myanmar, also known as Burma, HRW said in a May 27
report titled: "Accounts from Rohingya Boat People."
A dozen local men "dragged me to the boat, they had sticks and
threatened to beat me," said Yasmine, a 13-year-old girl from
southwest Myanmar, according to HRW.
"I screamed, I cried loudly. My parents were weeping, but they
couldn't do anything," she said.
"The [boat] doors were always locked. The smugglers put the food and
water through a small hole, we never saw them. We were only allowed to
go to the toilet once a day," Yasmine said.
Six men, "Buddhists from Bangladesh, they had knives and guns. They
A dozen years before his recent sentencing to a 42-month prison term based on a jury’s conclusion that he gave classified information to a New York Times journalist, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was in the midst of a protracted and fruitless effort to find someone in Congress willing to look into his accusations about racial discrimination at the agency.
ExposeFacts.org has obtained letters from Sterling to prominent members of Congress, beseeching them in 2003 and 2006 to hear him out about racial bias at the CIA. Sterling, who is expected to enter prison soon, provided the letters last week. They indicate that he believed the CIA was retaliating against him for daring to become the first-ever black case officer to sue the agency for racial discrimination.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- One year after destroying a popular elected
government in a bloodless coup, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha rules with
absolute power over a country suffering from newly discovered "death
camps" for Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants, a flat economy, and
diplomatic feuds with the U.S. and Europe.
Gen. Prayuth publicly shrugs off Washington's criticism of his May 22,
2014 coup and his junta's military trials and coercive "attitude
adjustment" confinement for civilian dissidents.
After ripping up Thailand's constitution, he orchestrated an interim
charter giving himself absolute power as prime minister "regardless of
the legislative, executive or judicial" branches, plus immunity from
prosecution.
Gen. Prayuth then empowered Thailand's U.S.-trained army to officially
function as police by seizing property and detaining suspects.
"Even though we didn't like the coup, we train Thailand's military so
that in the future when all this settles down, America will still have
good relations with Thailand," said one American who trains Thailand's
In November 1993, I was on a mission. At the age of 21, I wanted to change the world, starting with Birzeit University, the second largest Palestinian university in the West Bank, situated near Ramallah, in the heart of the occupied territories.
Back then I had made a name for myself with my nationalist poetry and my first poetry collection was published a year earlier in Gaza. It was called The Alphabets of Decision. Each assortment of verses started with a letter in the Arabic alphabet, going in order. “It was time for the poor and peasants of Palestine to articulate their political agenda, rejecting the entire culture of political defeat,” I wrote something to that effect in the introduction.
Birzeit was my platform and my audience quickly multiplied. My last performance was in front of a crowd of thousands, who cheered, chanted and, once I concluded my call for rebellion against Oslo’s “Gaza-Jericho First” agreement, and the assured defeat it heralded, we marched outside the campus, only to be greeted with Israeli army bullets and tear gas.
Nearly 50 years after Mormons opened small
churches here converting Buddhists, animists and other Thais, they
have now announced plans to construct their first big temple in
Thailand, enabling their families to be "sealed" together for
eternity, posthumous weddings for dead ancestors and other "highest
sacraments."
The Mormons' nearest Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)
is in Hong Kong, about 1,000 miles northeast of Bangkok.
Over the years, Mormons have converted more and more people in
Thailand, prompting LDS President Thomas S. Monson's announcement.
"The Bangkok Thailand Temple will be the first in this Asian nation,"
LDS said in a statement on April 5 from their Salt Lake City, Utah
headquarters.
"It may be some time before an exact location, construction schedule,
dates for groundbreaking, etc. are provided," LDS public affairs
officer Karlie Brand replied when asked for details.
"Some members speculate that the Church office building on New
Petchaburi Road in Bangkok, acquired by the Church in 2008, may be
BANGKOK, Thailand -- "As the insurgents entered his office, the
admiral placed his pistol against his right temple, and pulled the
trigger."
Hours earlier, then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk rejected Cambodia's
surrender and "states only that those still heading the government of
the republic must be condemned to death."
After 40 years, insider Chhang Song for the first time has publicly
described crucial details of his government's fate when America lost
its war and retreated, enabling Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge guerrillas to
seize control five days later on April 17, 1975.
Most testimonies about Cambodia at that time portray the nearly two
million people who perished during Pol Pot's 1975-79 ultra-Maoist
regime.
Other accounts trace Washington's role in Cambodia's destruction,
including a U.S. bombing strategy which slowly began in 1965 under
President Lyndon Johnson and escalated during President Richard
Nixon's massive assaults in 1973.
Chhang Song, born in 1939, was the last minister of information in the
Are you surprised that there has been little mobilization to help Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus, which is overrun by militants, and besieged by the Syrian army? Palestinians – and Syrians - there are killed in a myriad of ways, including starvation.
I am not surprised. Even before Palestinian refugees found themselves embroiled in Syria’s conflict, I appealed to all parties involved, including the Palestinian leaderships (alas, there are several) to spare the refugees the burden of war, and for Palestinians to set their differences aside to avoid a repeat of Lebanon, Kuwait and Iraq.