The coming days: The week ahead

In search of a resolution to the war in Georgia, and other news

• RUSSIA and Georgia have agreed to form humanitarian corridors to arrange for the evacuation of civilians caught up in fighting in South Ossetia. Amid ongoing uncertainty, Georiga now says that it has withdrawn troops from South Ossetia, where they had been battling Russian soldiers. The coming days will see whether the conflict is snuffed out quickly, or whether further escalation is likely.

• PARTIES that make up Pakistan's ruling coalition are set to launch impeachment proceedings against President Pervez Musharraf when parliament convenes on Monday August 11th. Mr Musharraf, who has presided over an economic meltdown and a growing Taliban insurgency in the north-west of the country, faces a vote of no confidence. The ruling coalition says that Mr Musharraf acted unconstitutionally by declaring a state of emergency last November and dismissing nearly 60 judges. But it is far from clear if his opponents can muster the two-thirds majority in the upper and lower houses needed to remove Mr Musharraf from office. ...

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Bolivia: Divided we rule

A boost for Bolivia's president as he wins a referendum on his rule, but divisions persist

CRIES of "Evo, brother, the people are with you!" resounded on Sunday August 10th in front of Bolivia's presidential palace. The revellers were celebrating victory by the country's socialist president, Evo Morales, in a referendum on whether he should remain in office. He not only survived but appears to have emerged with a stronger mandate, according to unofficial results (official ones are due at the end of the week). These suggest that Mr Morales secured over 60% support, more than the 54% he won in a presidential election in December 2005.

But his chief opponents, the governors of four eastern regions, also appear to have had their mandates confirmed by the recall referendum, with thumping majorities. The referendum has thus confirmed Bolivia's political divide between the impoverished, Amerindian, high plains in the west, which remains strongly loyal to Mr Morales, and the more prosperous, capitalist and gas-rich eastern lowlands, which backs the opposition. ...

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On the up

Interest rates go up in South Korea

South Korea's central bank, the Bank of Korea (BOK), raised its policy interest rate by 25 basis points on August 7th, following the lead of other Asian central banks that have begun tightening monetary policy in an effort to tame soaring inflation. The bank's decision is likely to have been a difficult one, however, given simultaneous fears of an economic slowdown.

The BOK raised its benchmark base rate from 5% to 5.25%. This was the bank's first rate hike in a year, and the accompanying monetary-policy statement indicated that the need to subdue inflation expectations was one of the main reasons for the hike. The bank's statement also acknowledged that the domestic economy was weakening. The fact that it went ahead with the rate hike anyway suggests that South Korean policymakers are very much in the same quasi-stagflationary boat as those in many other Asian economies, which have been forced to raise borrowing costs even as concerns about slower economic growth--and the impact of the US's economic and financial-sector woes on other countries--have intensified. ...

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Keep it tight

No need for a shift in monetary policy in China

There are few countries in the world where double-digit rates of GDP growth would qualify as a cause for concern. However, China has become so used to supercharged rates of expansion that, despite GDP growth of 10.1% in the second quarter, panic is spreading over the state of the economy. Amid press reports of slowing sales of cars and other key consumer goods, of soaring costs for labour, materials and power, and of problems in the export sector, the lobby pressing the government to relax monetary policy has gathered strength. When top officials conducted a tour of China's coastal regions in person to assess the state of events on the ground in July, there was a widespread expectation that this was a prelude to a formal change in government priorities.

On the face of it, expectations were justified when pronouncements at the end of July, following a key government economic policy meeting, appeared to shift the priority from controlling inflation back to maintaining steady and fast development. This was accompanied by an adjustment in the export VAT rebate regime, which reversed some of the steps taken last year by increasing the rebates available to garment and apparel producers from 11% to 13%. The People's Bank of China (the central bank) is also reported to have increased the annual loan quota for 2008 by around 5%, instructing banks that the new funds should be channelled towards small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and areas affected by the May earthquake in Sichuan. Some observers have also made much of the fact that the renminbi has actually fallen against the US dollar for much of the past month--weakening from around Rmb6.81:US$1 in mid-July to Rmb6.86:US$1 in early August. ...

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Ceding control

Nigeria hands territory to Cameroon

Nigeria has handed control of the Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon, theoretically ending a 15-year territorial dispute. However, Cameroon may struggle to assert its control over the region.

The handover of the potentially oil-rich Bakassi peninsula was completed on August 14th, in theory resolving a long-running territorial dispute. Nigeria and Cameroon nearly went to war over the area in 1994--when Cameroon first took its case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)--and in 1996. In 2002 the ICJ ruled in Cameroon's favour, and while Nigeria initially rejected the court ruling, it agreed in 2006 to hand over the territory. Nigerian security forces have subsequently been ceding control of parts of Bakassi, and the handover of remaining areas completes the process. ...

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You Belong to Us

In late 2007, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story for Time magazine calling for a massive national service program to be imposed on American young people. If you’d like to read it, knock yourself out. Someone probably needs to smash it, but the avalanche of propaganda and nationalism you’ll find there was too demoralizing for me to attempt it. The very idea that helping someone in your neighborhood should be called “service to the nation” should be spooky and Orwellian enough, but for many people I guess it isn’t.

One thing I couldn’t get out of my head, even though it’s not by any means the weirdest aspect of the program, is Stengel’s proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of National Service. I think it was this piece of advice that struck me the most: “And don’t appoint a gray bureaucrat to this job; make it someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Bloomberg, who would capture the imagination of the public.”

Translation: the American people, too stupid to engage in government-approved service projects without being prodded by their betters, need a crowd-pleasing Hollywood actor to rouse them to action. Bloomberg, possibly the dullest human being in public life, would be a better choice than Schwarzenegger from my point of view: the American people would barely be able to keep awake through one of his droning appeals.[...]

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U.S. intelligence has been meeting and advising the group that has been blamed for bombings in Iran

In another sign of growing tensions with the United States, Pakistan is threatening to turn over to Iran six members of a tribal militant group Iran claims are “spies” for the CIA.The group, Jundullah, operates in Baluchistan on both sides of the border between Iran and Pakistan and has carried out a number of violent [...]

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[Source: War On You

The Martial Law Act of 2006

The Martial Law Act of 2006
by James Bovard

Martial law is perhaps the ultimate stomping of freedom. And yet, on September 30, 2006, Congress passed a provision in a 591-page bill that will make it easy for President Bush t...

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[Source: ronpaulforum.info