Jack's Newswatch

Born and raised in Zambia but educated at Oxford and Harvard, Dambisa Moyo was an uncommon face as a black woman in the world of high finance. Now with the publication of her book Dead Aid, she has become an uncommon voice, a strong and eloquent advocate of stopping financial aid to Africa as the best way to help the troubled continent. It is an idea contradicting rock star campaigners, Western politicians and grassroots wisdom all at once. As she makes her way to Canada for a highly anticipated debate on Monday with Stephen Lewis and others at the Munk Debate on Foreign Aid, she spoke with the National Post about her ideas and the hazards of opposing the aid orthodoxy.

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Q What’s so bad about rich nations sharing their wealth with poor nations to help them cope with their struggles?

A No country on Earth has ever achieved long-term growth and reduced poverty in a meaningful way by relying on aid. It’s just never happened. So we’re pushing a strategy that has no evidence of working anywhere on Earth. And we have years of evidence that the aid strategy doesn’t work.

It boils down to incentive. We have to ask ourselves: Are African governments incentivized to do what governments all around the world are expected to do, that is, deliver public goods: education, health care, infrastructure and security? Unfortunately an aid system has allowed African governments to abdicate their responsibilities…. So until African governments live or die based on job creation and providing goods to Africans and not rely just on getting aid money, we will continue to see a situation where the private sector has not developed and Africans do not have job opportunities. The billion dollars that go from government to government … can make African governments lazy with respect to doing what they are supposed to be doing. It also fuels corruption, can fuel civil wars, inflation, the debt burden, and so on.

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Updates:

5:25 am EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — Africa’s ‘dead aid’

Popularity: 25% [?]

Perhaps it’s a sign of the tough economic times. As the ranks of the jobless continue to swell in Canada, politicians have taken to bickering over just what to do with them. Over the past month, the Liberals have made no secret they see employment insurance (EI) reform as a viable trigger for bringing down the government. “I just know in my guts as I go across the country,” Ignatieff told reporters at the party’s convention in early May, “that we have an EI system that is not purpose-built for the most serious economic crisis since 1945. And we have to fix it and we have to fix it now. We’re in a crisis situation.”

Fixing it, according to Ignatieff, means lowering the eligibility requirements to 360 hours, or nine 40-hour weeks, for everyone. In most circumstances under the current system, laid-off (or otherwise unemployed through no fault of their own) workers need to have worked between 420 and 700 hours in the previous year, depending on where in the country they live. (Under certain conditions, up to 910 hours may be needed to qualify.) That’s because EI requirements are based on a byzantine system of 58 “economic regions,” each differentiated by their unemployment rates. Regions with high unemployment, like the Gaspé and Northern Manitoba, have the lowest barriers to EI, while places like Ottawa and Saskatoon, where unemployment hovers in the low single-digits, require substantially more hours worked. (In other words, the system works unlike any other insurance plan: the more likely you are to make a claim, the easier it is to make it.)

The Liberals acknowledge that lowering EI eligibility requirements means throwing more money at the unemployed. They peg the total cost of the change at around $1.5 billion. But for supporters of the move, the extra money would work to stimulate the economy in much the same way all that infrastructure spending was supposed to—only quicker. “EI is a very direct and immediate form of stimulus,” says Jim Stanford, an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers. “The money goes right into the pockets of the people who need it the most and the economic evidence is clear that they spend it right away.”

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Popularity: 25% [?]

Great Britain is currently suffering through one of the most deplorable scandals in its long history of democracy. Several House of Commons members have been helping themselves from government coffers. Perhaps its time for a systemic shake-up.

In Westminster there are no names: members of the British parliament refer to even their most bitter enemies as “honorable members.” That they are men and women of honor is taken for granted. After all, this is the “Mother of Parliaments,” a name Westminster awarded to itself more than 150 years ago, the cue for younger, lesser democracies to look to London to see how politics should be done.

Well, a word of advice for those nations who once gazed in democratic admiration at Britain: you might want to look away now.

Every day of the last fortnight has brought fresh revelations exposing the greed, deceit and downright dishonor festering in Britain’s House of Commons. Leaked publication of the expenses claims filed by Members of Parliament, or MP’s, has been, by turns, comic — including the news that one landed aristocrat of the Conservative party had claimed £2,000 (€2,290, $3,230) of taxpayers’ money to maintain the moat around his country estate, while another sought £1,645 (€1,884, $2,656) for a floating “duck island” in his garden pond, lest the birds fall prey to foxes — and truly shocking. Even those who follow politics professionally, like I do, have discovered the extent to which our elected representatives have had their snouts in the public trough.

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Related:

MPs’ expenses

6:56 am EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — Mortgage claim MP David Chaytor to stand down at next election

6:57 am EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — Shamed MEPs take share of £20m ‘farewell’ payout

7:08 am EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — Anarchists attempt to arrest wayward MPs

1:02 pm EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — Jacqui Smith to ‘resign’ as Home Secretary

1:05 pm EDT, June 2md, 2009 — Tom Watson to resign from Government

1:08 pm EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — Beverley Hughes to stand down as MP at general election

1:09 pm EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — David Chaytor to stand down

1:15 pm EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — David Cameron calls for referendum on EU constitution

Popularity: 24% [?]

A “twisted sense of values” led an Ottawa man to murder his sister and the man she loved, the judge in an honour killing trial said Saturday.

“You put your own self-esteem over those of your own sister and the young man she had chosen to become her life partner,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Douglas Rutherford told an expressionless Hasibullah Sadiqi. “And consigning them to partnership in death has shocked and bewildered every community in the nation’s capital. The forfeiture of your liberty for the rest of your life seems only just.”

Minutes earlier, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on two counts of first-degree murder against 23-year-old Sadiqi, who gunned down his 20-year-old sister, Khatera, and her fiancé, Feroz Mangal, 23, in the early hours of Sept. 19, 2006 while the couple was sitting in her parked car.

Prosecutor Mark Moors said Sadiqi was motivated by a “perverted notion of honour and respect … for the sole purpose of restoring the family’s reputation and respect in the Afghan community.”

Sadiqi, who had pleaded not guilty, will spend the next 25 years in jail.

Moors told the court that Sadiqi murdered the couple because Khatera moved in with Mangal’s family before the wedding and because she refused to have her estranged father involved in her wedding plans.

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Popularity: 21% [?]

In the fields around this giant chemicals factory in Gujarat, the barren soil smells of paint stripper and the water from the well makes you gag. So why has it been given tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer-funded UN ‘green reward points’, which are traded hungrily on the financial markets at huge profit?

The farmers, faces wizened and browned from hours in the harsh Gujarati sun, lower a bucket into a well. It’s a solid-brick cylinder 100ft deep. The sun is high in the sky, beating down on the scorched earth. In the baked fields, maize and cotton have been planted. But none of the crops look very healthy. Leaves are wilted and tinged brown. Nothing has been watered for months.

Radha, a tough, sinewy widow and the only female farmer here, says that the well, which draws from deep groundwater, used to adequately supply the village and surrounding farms.

‘We have plenty of water – but water is the problem,’ she says.

As the bucket returns to the top, we can make out a white, almost oily-looking film on the surface of the liquid, which has formed little snowflake shapes.

She scoops up some water and asks us to smell it. It has an odour so acrid it catches in the back of our throats, making us cough.

‘We can’t irrigate our crops with it,’ she says. ‘It’s the water of death. It kills most crops we put it on.’

‘Gone bad,’ says the man who brought up the pail.

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Popularity: 22% [?]

The greatest test of whether the election of President Barack Obama will really repair the strains in Canada-U.S. relations gets under way this month when the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, comes to visit. The transformation of land border security over the last eight years came to symbolize the tense relations between Ottawa and the Bush administration. The almost 9,000 km of friendly frontier, and gateway to $1.6 billion in trade per day, turned into another front in the war on terror, patrolled by now-armed guards and unmanned drones, riddled with new regulations that business complains tie up trade, and as of June 1, a passport requirement for the first time. From the Canadian point of view, it was the work largely of an overzealous American administration and Congress taking a series of unilateral actions. “The previous attitude was that any additional step that could be taken should be taken without regard for trade,” Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan told Maclean’s. Like many Canadians, he hopes that will change under Obama. “Now we want to focus on security that is actually effective, and addresses real security threats—counterterrorism, the drug trade, organized crime, immigration issues—and we want to find ways to improve the flow of goods across the border.”

But from the U.S. point of view, the last eight years looked rather different. The world changed on 9/11, and Americans and Canadians reacted with what Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official who worked on border issues under George W. Bush, diplomatically refers to as “a different sense of urgency.” He suspects Ottawa and Washington will find it just as difficult to resolve their differences under Obama as they did under Bush. “One of the things I’ve learned is that there is this myth that Canadians and Americans are a lot alike in how they view things like trade and terrorism,” Rosenzweig said in an interview. “And they simply are not.” Where Canadians saw U.S. unilateralism, Americans saw Canadian complacency. On both sides, there was an erosion of trust. Can it be rebuilt? “My advice to Secretary Napolitano,” says Rosenzweig, “would be to explore how much of our inability to achieve common objectives with Canada was the product of political issues relating to the Bush administration—and how much of it was fundamental.”

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Popularity: 22% [?]

FERGUS, Ont. — As the search for the remains of Victoria (Tori) Stafford continued, her father has been told to brace himself for the possibility that the body of his eight-year-old daughter may never be found.

Police delivered the grim prospect to Rodney Stafford as investigators concentrated their search for Tori in Fergus, Ont., and at a landfill site in the area. Police also returned to Guelph Lake Friday to continue searching for Tori’s remains.

The search for the little girl’s body began May 20, after two suspects were arrested and charged.

Investigators were back inside the home of Terri-Lynne McClintic, 18, on Friday, one day after her charge was upgraded to first-degree murder. She previously had been charged with abduction and accessory after the fact to murder.

Her co-accused, Michael Rafferty, 28, also faces one count of first-degree murder.

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Updates:

9:05 am EDT, June 1st, 2009 — Parents of Tori Stafford plan memorial service

5:04 am EDT, June 2nd, 2009 — Search stalls as jail visits continue

Popularity: 25% [?]

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il usually plays the part of a pudgy demigod — mysterious, aloof, slightly bored and comfortably overweight. For decades he has been a fat man in a country regularly visited by famine.

But this week, as North Korea solemnly celebrated its second nuclear test amid a chorus of international indignation, official photographs of Kim Jong Il showed a different dictator — gaunt, sickly, drawn and obviously weak.

The “Dear Leader,” whose birth was supposedly announced by a bright star and a double rainbow with a swallow descending from heaven to herald the birth of “a general who will rule the world,” may now be announcing his own pending death with threats of a nuclear holocaust.

North Korea’s 68-year-old leader was reported to have suffered a stroke last August and since September he has been the subject of regular reports that he was seriously ill or already dead. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 22% [?]

As the 65th anniversary of D-Day approaches, the rivalries between the US and British commanders that almost scuppered the invasion.

The invasion of France in 1944 has always been seen as one of the greatest triumphs of meticulous planning and allied co-operation. Before D-Day and during the Battle for Normandy, Allied commanders posed, smiling together for photographs to emphasise their unity. Yet this was often a sham. General Dwight Eisenhower had a thankless task, getting rivals to work together. Perhaps the heaviest cross he had to bear was that of General Montgomery, but the first task was to bring the “bomber barons” into line.

The Allied pre-invasion plan was to cut off Normandy and Brittany by smashing rail communications and destroying all the bridges along the river Seine to the east and the Loire to the south. But “Transportation”, as the operation became known, proved very hard to launch because of personal and inter-service rivalries.

Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, was its main proponent. In February, Air Marshal Harris of Bomber Command, and General Spaatz of the US Eighth Air Force, received warning that preparations for Overlord would require their heavy squadrons to be diverted from the strategic offensive against Germany. Harris, who believed obsessively that his bomber force was on the point of bringing Germany to its knees, objected strenuously. He wanted his aircraft to continue smashing German cities to rubble. There should be only “minimum diversions” from the task of “reducing the enemy’s material power to resist invasion”, he wrote to his direct superior, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff.

Above all, Harris fiercely resisted the idea that he should be told what to bomb. Spaatz also showed great reluctance to change targets. He wanted to continue attacking oil refineries and German fighter production. Their objections were over-ruled by Eisenhower at a major meeting on March 25, but they still tried to get their own way.

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Popularity: 22% [?]

The U.S. Army is set to start testing a computerized, high-tech projectile launcher that can take out bad guys hiding around corners and in caves or trenches, even if they’re out of the soldier’s line of sight.

Some experts call it the “Judge Dredd” gun, after the Sylvester Stallone movie. The Pentagon calls it the XM-25 Individual Air Burst Weapon, which uses a laser rangefinder to precisely measure the distance to a target, then primes a fuse on a timed grenade so that the projectile explodes exactly where it should.

“The way a soldier operates this is you basically find your target, then laze to it, which gives the range, then you get an adjusted aim point, adjust fire and pull the trigger,” deputy program manager Richard Audette told Army News Service. “Say you’ve lazed out to 543 meters … when you pull the trigger it arms the round and fires it 543 meters plus or minus a one-, two- or three-meter increment, then it explodes over the target.”

A squad trying to neutralize an enemy fighter wouldn’t have to wait until he showed himself — instead, they could just aim to a spot near him, then use the XM-25 to have a grenade explode directly there.

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Popularity: 36% [?]