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Updated Monday, 2 March, 2009
Important figures for Government policy and interest rates
It should become a little clearer this week whether the Federal Government's economic stimulus measures have done their job. The national accounts will be released on Wednesday. Overall it's going to be a big week for the economy. The Prime Minister will meet bank chiefs; and the Reserve Bank board meets to decide whether to again cut interest rates.
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Unions pressure Government on budget spending
The Productivity Commission will hand its final report on maternity leave to the Government today. The ACTU says the Government must include a scheme in this year's budget but Sharan Burrow has opened the door for the Government to phase in a paid maternity scheme.
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Britain's global new deal
British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown will put a six-point plan before the US Congress this week. Mr Brown calls this his global new deal designed to pull the world out of recession.
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Hospital superbug workings uncovered
Researchers at Melbourne's Monash University have unlocked the workings of a hospital superbug. A report in the science journal Nature identifies the toxic protein in the bacterium, Clostridium difficile which causes infectious diarrhoea, extended illness and death.
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Safety concerns for backyard fire bunkers
The Australian Institute of Architects has raised safety concerns about concrete water tanks and other converted structures that are being sold as backyard fire bunkers.
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Billions expected as Gaza rebuild begins
Six weeks after the ceasefire in Gaza, the world is preparing to open its coffers to rebuild the territory. Well over $2 billion is expected to be pledged. But unusually, finding the money is the easy part, spending it will prove far more difficult.
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No timetable for Afghanistan withdrawal
The US President Barack Obama says it's too early to set an exit date for troops in Afghanistan because the situation there has "deteriorated badly". Mr Obama is also worried about the security implications of changing the date of the Presidential elections in Afghanistan from August to April.
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Bangladesh calls for help to prosecute mutineers
Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is calling for help from the United Nations, the FBI and Scotland Yard to help find and prosecute the soldiers involved in a mutiny last week. South Asia correspondent Sally Sara reports the fight over pay and conditions has left piles of corpses.
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Tigers vulnerable after attacks
On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, there's growing conflict between people and tigers, as human economic activity eats into the tiger's habitat. Six people have been mauled to death in one area of the island within the last month.
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This:
Billions expected as Gaza rebuild begins
Six weeks after the ceasefire in Gaza, the world is preparing to open its coffers to rebuild the territory. Well over $2 billion is expected to be pledged. But unusually, finding the money is the easy part, spending it will prove far more difficult.
jarred. And thismorning I found this:
Now let's see. For the past 60 years any Arab who showed up at an UNRWA office was, without much investigation, put on the rolls, and these rolls turn out to grow and grow and grow. And in the first decade or so of UNRWA’s existence there were those who, in the refugee business, understood how grotesque was the deliberate attempt not to integrate these Arabs among "people just like them" (as Elfan Rees, Adviser on Refugees to the World Council of Churches, so famously wrote) but to deliberately keep them together, as "refugees," and what's more, on the permanent dole of UNRWA. Furthermore, and uniquely among all the groups claiming refugee status, the Arab "refugees" -- unlike, say, refugees from the Nazis or Communists -- could actually hand down, apparently through their genes, this "refugee" status, so that it remained forever.
Does this make sense? Stravinsky or Nabokov may have been refugees from Soviet Russia, but who would describe their children as "Russian refugees"? Is the grandson of Panofsky a "German Jewish refugee" because his grandfather was? And Richard Holbrooke's parents may have been refugees, one from the Nazis and one from the Communists, but is Holbrooke a "refugee," and will his children be "refugees"? Nor is this the only thing unique to the Arabs who left, beginning in the fall of 1947, convinced that they would, after hostilities not expected to last long, be returning triumphantly to seize the homes and other possessions of the defeated and presumably massacred Jews.
What conditions, if any, are attached to this aid which seems to be mostly misappropriated?
2 comments:
Can't claim that it's misappropriated. Eg, the US is providing $900M via the usual and fully approved budget / congressional mechanisms.
I believe one condition is that the funds will be managed by the the group in the West Bank, ie, not Hamas in Gaza. Although it's debatable if their leadership will ensure the money is managed and spent for maximum benefit of those in Gaza.
After more than a couple of hundred years the Aboriginals in Oz are still claiming to be "dispossessed" of their land and that Captain Cook arriving with the first fleet roooned, rooooned, roooooned, their lives.
How is this any different to Palestinians fleeing and having their land, their homes and businesses taken 60 years ago, and still carrying on like chooks about it?
I have a convict relative, she stole a handkerchief. Can't say I'm still suffering from her deportation and incarceration. That's just me though.
... because the 'Palestinians' were economic migrants into the land before the end of the Mandate. Their numbers were augmented by those who found life in the 'camps' better than returning to their homelands. And the system continues to be maintained by the West on behalf of the other Middle East countries whose sympathy for the putative refugees is expressed verbally only.
The benefices of the Arab nations is limited only by the generosity of the US, Canada, EU, and Australia.
Cheers
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