Baithak World Apr 20:Defining Poverty, Pentagon Mfg. News, US -Pak, Amy Goodman, M J Akbar, B Wineapple, P Greenberg, J Ashbery, Innovation, Moderat

In Third World countries the word evokes images of emaciated bodies clothed in rags, living in squalor next to open sewers. In wealthy nations like Canada, poverty is more nuanced. We have food banks and homeless shelters. But we also have children who are unable to go on school trips because their families are struggling to pay rent. We have people who don't visit friends because they can't afford TTC fares. And others who don't have the right clothes to wear to a job interview. So what does it mean to be poor in Ontario today? Canada doesn't have an official poverty line. But the McGuinty government's promise to come up with a way to measure poverty and a strategy to reduce it has bureaucrats, politicians and poverty activists scrambling to come up with the right definition. Defining Poverty


In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

How the Pentagon Spread Its Message

Audio, video and documents that show how the military’s talking points were disseminated.

• Excerpts From Selected Documents

Dining with Donald H. Rumsfeld, second from left, during his final week as secretary of defense were the retired officers Donald W. Shepperd, left, Thomas G. McInerney and Steven J. Greer, right.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo. To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

Pakistan’s government has given the Central Intelligence Agency limited authority to kill Arab and other foreign operatives in the tribal areas, using remotely piloted Predator aircraft. But administration officials say the Pakistani government has put far greater restrictions on American operations against indigenous Pakistani militant groups, including one commanded by Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the legendary militant leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, as well as the network led by Baitullah Mehsud that is believed to have been behind the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. American intelligence officials say that the threat emanating from Pakistan’s tribal areas is growing, and that Pakistani networks there have taken on an increasingly important role as an ally of Al Qaeda in plotting attacks against American and other allied troops in Afghanistan, and in helping foreign operatives plan attacks on targets in the West. The officials said the American military’s proposals included options for limited cross-border artillery strikes into Pakistan, missile attacks by Predator aircraft or raids by small teams of C.I.A. paramilitary forces or Special Operations forces. - U.S. Commanders Seeking to Widen Pakistan Attacks

The rise in global food prices has sparked a number of protests in recent weeks, highlighting the worsening epidemic of global hunger. The World Bank estimates world food prices have risen 80 percent over the last three years and that at least thirty-three countries face social unrest as a result. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned the growing global food crisis has reached emergency proportions. In recent weeks, food riots have also erupted in Haiti, Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Protests have also flared in Morocco, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen. In most of West Africa, the price of food has risen by 50 percent -- in Sierra Leone, 300 percent. The World Food Program has issued a rare $500 million emergency appeal to deal with the growing crisis. Raj Patel is a writer, activist and former policy analyst with Food First, which is based in the Bay Area. He has worked for the World Bank, World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and he's also protested them on four continents. He has just come out with a new book called Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He recently joined me in San Francisco to talk about the book and the food-price crisis.

In a long-awaited ruling, last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Pennsylvania death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal a new trial. The 2-3 decision came down nearly ten months after oral arguments in which judges were presented with key pieces of evidence regarding the shocking misconduct in his original trial -- most important among them the systemic racism, from jury selection to sentencing (not to mention the judge’s overheard statement that he was "going to help'em fry the nigger.") The arguments took place almost a year ago -- last May -- in a packed courtroom. Many who attended the hearing on May 17th came away with the impression that Abu-Jamal had a good shot. The cautious optimism of his supporters was shared by his lawyer, Robert R. Bryan. The judges had asked many questions that suggested they were open to considering much of the evidence that has thus far been dismissed, like the prosecution's deliberate removal of African Americans from the jury pool. In Bryan's opinion, the judges had been largely convinced by the arguments. "If the federal court follows the U.S. Constitution and law, we will be granted an entirely new jury trial," he speculated. "However, if the judges are affected by politics, then the outcome will be against us."

"This Case is Not Over": Death Row Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal Still Fighting for his Life - By Liliana Segura


Dr Manmohan Singh's government is so dazzled by market forces that even now it is reluctant to ban futures trading in agricultural products. Let me quote an American columnist, William Pfaff. He was not writing in The Theory and Practice of Soviet Marxism but in the distinctly American International Herald Tribune [Speculators and soaring food prices, 17 April 2008]: "Speculative purchases have no other purpose that to make money for the speculators, who hold their contracts to drive up current prices with the intention not of selling the commodities on the real future market, but of unloading their holdings onto an artificially inflated market, at the expense of the ultimate consumer…It is astonishing in the present situation that the international financial institutions and government regulators have done little to control or banish this parasitical and antisocial practice. The myth of the benevolent and ultimately impartial market prevails against all contrary evidence." Dr Manmohan Singh has been kept out of the politics of power since he became Prime Minister, but the administration of power has been his responsibility. If he had spent even half the time examining the earth beneath his feet as he did staring transfixed at a nuclear deal with George Bush, he would have seen that angel of death known as inflation approaching many months ago. There was so much hope when Dr Singh became Prime Minister. He will now be remembered for a nuclear deal that was waylaid by allies, and an economic policy that was shredded by the arrogance of ministers and the complacency of servitors. Inflated Egos M J Akbar

Judged by the popular stereotype of writers — bitter, blocked, alcoholic and angry— Joyce Carol Oates does not measure up. The author of more than 50 works of fiction, an indefatigable reviewer, a creator of essays, plays, diaries and, under two pseudonyms, psychological thrillers, Oates not only defies such stereotypes, she disdains them, as she tacitly acknowledged when she hurled Freud’s ironic term of praise, “pathography,” against biographies of writers that revel in dysfunction. But dysfunction is the subject of her hilarious and harrowing new collection, “Wild Nights!” With a title borrowed from Emily Dickinson’s fiery poem of longing (“Wild Nights — Wild Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!”), these stories ingeniously imagine the last documented days (or nights) of Dickinson and four other writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. It’s a gem of a book — a pathography, in fact — about creativity and age and the complicated, anxiety-ridden relationship between the two. (“Mornings when work does not come are long mornings,” Oates’s Hemingway declares on the day of his death.) The Dying of the Light - Brenda Wineapple


Bear Stearns had just imploded when I found myself chatting with a surprisingly merry investment banker. While his clients panicked over their “risk exposure” in this time of $100 oil, evaporating credit markets and melting ice caps, he thought much could be gained. In fact, all the real titans he knew were doubling down. His clients faced a choice. Did they want to be dinosaurs or cockroaches? Did they want to do nothing while the world crumbled, or did they want to scuttle and flit, gobbling up the morsels of growth that bubble up even in bad times? For a certain brand of writer, a third possibility is eminently more appealing, one in which the ecological devastation of American-style capitalism sets off The Crisis that will at last devour titans, dinosaurs and cockroaches alike. While our immediate crises always have a way of looking like The Crisis, they have until now petered out. In light of the present crisis (as of now, still small “c”), however, two eco-millenarian novels — an old one called “Ecotopia,” by Ernest Callenbach, and a new one, WORLD MADE BY HAND (Atlantic Monthly, $24), by James Howard Kunstler — are worth a look, particularly if you are considering doubling down once more before the end times. Recipes for Disaster - Paul Greenberg

No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery. Yet he has never been easy to place. Each of his first 12 books, from “Some Trees” in 1956 to “A Wave” in 1984, was in some way different from what other poets were doing and from whatever Ashbery himself had just done. Critics celebrated him. But they all celebrated a different poet. Was he a romantic in the tradition of John Keats and Wallace Stevens, or an experimentalist like Gertrude Stein? A distinctively gay poet, or a writer who avoids autobiographical reference? A connoisseur of moods, or an abstract thinker concerned with identity and the nature of art?

Joe Ciardiello

Times Topics: John Ashbery

There was evidence for all these views (and others) in the first half of Ashbery’s career, put on view in his “Selected Poems” in 1985. Since that time Ashbery has published the massive book-length poem “Flow Chart” (1991), another book-length poem called “Girls on the Run” (1999) and many new volumes of shorter poems, each coming fast on the heels of the last and posing its particular challenges to the reader. Now “Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems” gives us a chance to stand back and see what Ashbery has been up to for the past 20 years. ‘But I Digress’ - Langdon Hammer

It is not just that, as an evangelical, he (Wright) believes forcefully in the authority of scripture and the historical truth of the Gos pels. Nor is it that, like most on that conservative wing of the Church, he is strongly opposed to gay priests. The Right Reverend Wright believes in the literal truth of the Resurrection. The day will come, he says, when Christ will come to join the heavens and the earth in a new creation and the dead will rise. All those who think of heaven as the endpoint are wrong, especially if they're thinking about "sitting on clouds playing harps". According to him, heaven is less a location, more a state: a kind of first-class transit lounge whereby our physical bodies sleep while the "real person" continues in the presence of Christ. What we will be waiting for is what he calls "life after life after death": the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement, when we will be not only physically re-embodied but transformed, on a new version of this earth with plenty of room for everyone. "It is actually what the New Testament is about," says Wright in his emollient, Radio 4-friendly tones as we sit in the spring sun outside his cottage in Alnmouth, Northumberland, a family refuge away from the grandeur of his official residence, Auckland Castle. "An awful lot of western Christians have just accepted that when they say 'the resurrection of the body' they think, 'You don't really mean body. That's just the way they put it in olden days.' They don't realise it is actually the key thing. We are talking about a good physical world which is to be remade, not a bad physical world which is going to be trashed in favour of a purely spiritual spheres. ''Jesus will appear again as judge of the world and the dead will be raised'' Sholto Byrnes

Suddenly, innovation has a bull's-eye on its back. As the recession debate shifts from "what if" to "how long," slashing research and development budgets just got a lot more tempting. That high-risk product in your pipeline? It's about to get much more scrutiny. And the "chief innovation officer" your CEO brought in last year to show his commitment to creativity? He'd better start proving his worth. Outside consultants are starting to pick up on the effects of such belt-tightening. "I'm seeing it in my business," says Jeneanne Rae, president of Alexandria (Va.)-based consulting firm Peer Insight. "There's this sense of which shoe's going to drop next." The World's Most Innovative Companies - Jena McGregor

A new think-tank designed to counter Islamic extremism says it has been the target of a hate campaign to strangle the initiative at birth. The Quilliam Foundation, which is backed by Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, Conservative MP Michael Gove, Jemima Khan and Muslim and non-Muslim scholars will be launched on Tuesday. Its co-director, Ed Husain, a former activist of the Islamist political group Hizb ut-Tahrir, said he and his colleagues have been the target of death-threats, intimidating calls and emails. Websites set up by opponents have carried photographs of its director engaged in what they deem to be 'un-Islamic' behaviour. Particular vitriol is reserved for Jemima Khan - the former wife of the Pakistan politician and former cricketer Imran Khan - who will be attending the launch. Muslim moderates 'face hate campaign' Who is this Ed Hussain? HERE

Paul Jay presents RealNews

In Sadr City's new wall, shadows of Gaza, Vietnam Aijaz Ahmad: Wall meant to partition Sadr City's residents is population control ahead of elections 12 min ago view bio: Aijaz Ahmad | context links | As violence continued in Baghdad's Sadr City district on Friday, attention turned to the wall US forces are building through the neighborhood--a wall that is reminiscent of the one Israel built around the Palestinian territories, as well as US military tactics used during the Vietnam War. The Real News analyst Aijaz Ahmad says that the ostensible purpose of the Iraqi government's wall--to keep insurgents under control--is only part of the story. Ahmad tells The Real News that it is meant to be a form of "population control" ahead of this year's elections, which the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a vocal opponent of the US occupation, is expected to sweep. The result of the decision to build the wall is the transformation of an entire Baghdad neighborhood into a virtual prison, Ahmad says.

Carter meets with Assad, Mashaal in Damascus Israeli deputy PM asked Carter to arrange a meeting with Hamas about prisoner exchange 24 hours ago view context links | Despite condemning former US president Jimmy Carter's meetings with Hamas officials this week, a high-ranking member of Israel's government asked Carter to arrange a meeting with Hamas to discuss a prisoner exchange. Both the US and Israeli governments have officially distanced themselves from Carter's visit.

Mugabe lashes out at "puppets" of Britain Adam Habib: Zimbabwe's president manipulating anti-colonial sentiment to stay in power 24 hours ago view bio: Professor Adam Habib | context links | Robert Mugabe, the embattled president of Zimbabwe, lashed out at his political opponents during celebrations of the country's independence anniversary on Friday. Mugabe told his audience that Britain is still trying to maintain control of its former colony, but is now using "money as a weapon" to achieve its goals. Adam Habib, a political analyst and professor at the University of Johannesburg, told The Real News Network that Mugabe is "able to manipulate" fresh memories of European colonialism "to suit his own purposes"--that is, to stay in power despite an apparent electoral defeat three weeks ago. Habib also said that neo-liberal economic policies, imposed on the country since the 1980s, have caused the polarization and impoverishment of Zimbabweans that Mugabe is now exploiting.

61 years of right-wing rule could end in Paraguay Party of former Catholic bishop could make Paraguay the next Latin country to vote in the left 2 days ago view context links | transcript | Paraguayan voters appear to be ready to end 61 years of right-wing rule in the Latin American country in a national election this Sunday. Fernando Lugo, a former bishop and head of the Patriotic Alliance for Change, is leading in the polls against the incumbent Colorado Party, which has ruled Paraguay without interruption since 1947.