It ought to inspire shame throughout Europe that dozens of African immigrants spent an entire night in the open sea while Maltese and Libyan officials, aware of their plight, argued over whose responsibility they were.
It may not. Even the most powerful images of stranded or dead illegal migrants seem to have lost the power to shock.
People in the Canary Islands, or on Lampedusa, off Sicily, have become depressingly inured to the sight of the bloated corpses of sub-Saharan Africans washed up on their shores.
The consensus is that at least 6,000 have perished in the past few years, trying to cross the Mediterranean.
This is only the number of bodies reported found; it does not cover thousands more who have gone missing.
It would be convenient but pointless to blame Malta or Italy for this situation, however badly the Maltese have behaved over the latest case.
Europe as a whole has handled growing south-north migration in a feeble, cowardly manner, and the main strategy of each country has been to pass the buck to another.
Countries further north--the destination of most would-be migrants-- put pressure on “frontline“ Mediterranean states to tighten the flow, and then blame them for backsliding.
Remember the outcry against Spain when it granted an amnesty in 2005 to half a million illegal immigrants?
Mediteranean countries in turn put pressure on Mahgreb states to halt sub-Saharans and Eritreans in their tracks and prevent them from reaching their ports. What happens? Last Christmas, Morocco simply dumped 450 of them without water in the desert on the Algerian border near Oujda.
We need to stop passing the buck and admit that tightening the barriers round Fortress Europe is a hopeless and ineffective strategy. Soaring populations and global warming, leading to desertification, as well as the vast and growing discrepancies in incomes between those living north and south of the Straits of Gibraltar mean that the flow of migrants will increase.
We need to find more positive ways to address this challenge. The EU has a good idea to open job centres in North Africa, alerting local people to the--faint--possibility of entering Europe without the “help“ of traffickers.
Some Spanish charities are investing in job-creation in villages of Morocco, to persuade young men that they can build decent livelihoods at home.
These are small examples of imaginative thinking, but we need many more. What we must not do is continue to look away, hoping someone else will deal with this crisis. If we do, we must brace ourselves for yet more of these degrading and outrageous incidents.
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

It ought to inspire shame throughout Europe that dozens of African immigrants spent an entire night in the open sea while Maltese and Libyan officials, aware of their plight, argued over whose responsibility they were.
It may not. Even the most powerful images of stranded or dead illegal migrants seem to have lost the power to shock.
People in the Canary Islands, or on Lampedusa, off Sicily, have become depressingly inured to the sight of the bloated corpses of sub-Saharan Africans washed up on their shores.
The consensus is that at least 6,000 have perished in the past few years, trying to cross the Mediterranean.
This is only the number of bodies reported found; it does not cover thousands more who have gone missing.
It would be convenient but pointless to blame Malta or Italy for this situation, however badly the Maltese have behaved over the latest case.
Europe as a whole has handled growing south-north migration in a feeble, cowardly manner, and the main strategy of each country has been to pass the buck to another.
Countries further north--the destination of most would-be migrants-- put pressure on “frontline“ Mediterranean states to tighten the flow, and then blame them for backsliding.
Remember the outcry against Spain when it granted an amnesty in 2005 to half a million illegal immigrants?
Mediteranean countries in turn put pressure on Mahgreb states to halt sub-Saharans and Eritreans in their tracks and prevent them from reaching their ports. What happens? Last Christmas, Morocco simply dumped 450 of them without water in the desert on the Algerian border near Oujda.
We need to stop passing the buck and admit that tightening the barriers round Fortress Europe is a hopeless and ineffective strategy. Soaring populations and global warming, leading to desertification, as well as the vast and growing discrepancies in incomes between those living north and south of the Straits of Gibraltar mean that the flow of migrants will increase.
We need to find more positive ways to address this challenge. The EU has a good idea to open job centres in North Africa, alerting local people to the--faint--possibility of entering Europe without the “help“ of traffickers.
Some Spanish charities are investing in job-creation in villages of Morocco, to persuade young men that they can build decent livelihoods at home.
These are small examples of imaginative thinking, but we need many more. What we must not do is continue to look away, hoping someone else will deal with this crisis. If we do, we must brace ourselves for yet more of these degrading and outrageous incidents.
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

Bodies of dead Iraqis lay in a morgue of a local hospital in Baghdad's poor Sadr city neighborhood, March 26.

T he Democrats, fresh from selling out the soldiers and marines in Iraq by handing the mad George Bush $120 billion to continue funding his war, are claiming victory. Oh, they can’t hide the fact that they gave up on the war issue. But they’re quick to brag that they won a big one by cleverly including in the war funding supplemental bill a hike in the minimum wage, bringing the federal rate from the current $5.15/hour to $7.25.
But America’s long-suffering working poor better hold the champagne.
This bold stroke on their behalf by Congressional Democrats won’t happen right away. Although America’s lowest paid workers have been slaving away at $5.15 an hour since last September 1, they won’t get the first part of the new pay increase until the end of this summer, when it will go up a whopping 13 percent to $5.85 per hour (to put that in perspective, that’s $28/week more, less taxes, for someone working a 40-hour week).
They’ll have to wait until around this time next year before they get another boost to $6.55 an hour, and they won’t get that full $7.25 an hour that the Democrats are hooting about until 2009.
And remember, we’re talking about blood money here.
This was a raise paid for in the blood of American servicepeople, and the blood of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, many of them innocent children.
Besides, that whole raise of 40 percent over two years will actually look a whole lot less by the time they get it, thanks to the actions of Bush and the Democratic Congress.
Figure that the Iraq War, which is costing the nation, at this point, over $300 billion a year in cold cash, and probably double that if you factor in the credit on the debt (the whole thing is being paid for on credit), is a major reason the dollar is sinking against major currencies.
That means higher prices for most imported goods, which means just about everything that working stiffs have to buy. It also means higher than necessary interest rates, because keeping interest rates high relative to other countries is the only way the U.S. has left to keep the dollar from crashing totally to the level of a third world currency.
Those higher interest rates mean higher mortgage costs and higher credit card interest payments to working people. And don’t forget gas prices.
The oil companies will tell you that the doubling of gas prices since Bush took office is all a matter of “market forces,“ but the truth is it’s mostly been the war and threats to Middle East supplies that have bid up the per-barrel price and allowed the gouging to happen.
So netting it all out, it’s likely that the higher minimum wage the Democrats just bought at the price of giving Bush his war money will simply vanish by the time people get it.
Besides, the federal minimum wage increase is much less of a deal than it might even appear, since many states have already raised the minimum wage for their workers.
In California, workers earn at least $7.50/hour, and that goes to $8.00/hour next January. In New York, the minimum wage is $7.15. It’s also $7.15/hour in Alaska, and will be on July 1 in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Illinois workers, currently earning $6.95/hour, will see their minimum go to $7.50 on July 1. Many other states have minimum wages close to or above $7.00/hour already.
Some deal those Democrats made with Bush!
Boy, they really stood tough with a president who was bargaining from a 28 percent approval rating in the polls.
Kind of makes you proud you voted them into control of Congress last November doesn’t it?
Spend it well!
Dave Lindorff
COUNTERPUNCH.COM

The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, told a seminar that concentration of power in one hand could be dangerous, adding that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely“. He advocated the separation of powers in the country with full autonomy granted to the judiciary so that it could function in complete freedom from the pressure of the executive.
Everything Mr Chaudhry said resonated with the audience of lawyers at the Supreme Court Bar Association auditorium in Islamabad because his words were all truisms, proved by state practice over centuries.
The only aspect of the gathering which was new was the political situation in Pakistan and the public response to the incumbency of President General Pervez Musharraf and a certain level of public disenchantment with the “politics“ of the Pakistan army.
But the fact is that Pakistan has always suffered from the failings of its power-hungry rulers; and civilian politicians, no less than generals, have never really accepted a separation of powers allowing independence of the judiciary.
Justice Chaudhry must be aware that the “movement“ that is carrying him forward includes all sorts of elements that are more often than not at odds with one another. There are parties that are not very clear about what they will do to society and the judiciary if they came to power after ousting President Musharraf and his government from power. Justice Chaudhry was initially supported by the PPP and must have noticed that some other parties were either absent or thin behind him. Barring the two mainstream parties the PMLN and the PPP, one conservative and the other liberal, no one is very clear about what kind of order they want in the country.
No significant analysis--even if beyond the grasp of the man in the street--is available in Pakistan about the problem of “absolute power“. Pakistan has suffered at the hands of “absolute“ rulers from both the Muslim League and the PPP.
Both parties have been guilty of manipulating the judiciary and not allowing the constitutional amendment that would put the method of induction of judges at the higher judiciary beyond the grasp of the elected government.
The politicians have insulted the judges after inducting them on the criterion of political advantage rather than merit. They have manifested a tendency to control all the institutions of the state and bend them to their whims.
Everyone today is convinced that the military in Pakistan is a spoiler and is much too empowered to allow fair civilian rule. Yet much of this historical empowerment has taken place with the consent of the politicians in power who then used the GHQ as the arbiter of their dangerous internecine conflicts.
In many cases, the political parties have been hijacked by military dictators and reshaped till they could only function in tandem with the generals. When a general amended the Constitution to weaken the prime minister, the politics of the country got divided over it. The country then actually permitted an anti-democratic “troika“ arrangement through democracy!
When the “troika“ was undone after 1997, it was not done for the sake of democracy but to once again allow the prime minister to become an “absolute“ ruler.
The judiciary had been brutalised by the ruling generals through the infamous provisional constitutional orders (PCOs). The elected government then physically attacked the Supreme Court and turned its face away from the new guidelines laid down for the induction of judges in the “Judges Case“ (1996) verdict of the Supreme Court.
The mainstream PMLN, while apologetic over what it did to the PPP opposition in the 1990s, has once again taken on board two retired adventurist generals in the hope of causing a rift within the army.
Is the army of Pakistan the “first cause“? Is anyone among the lawyers, who have made the current movement against dictatorship successful, prepared to examine why the army is supreme in Pakistan? Is anyone of them prepared to reconsider the nature of Pakistan’s “revisionist“ nationalism, in particular its national security and ideological aspects, in order to arrive at a “final“ solution to the collapse of institutions?
The message of Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry is extremely relevant to Pakistan, but it is a moot question whether the actual deconstruction of what he has said is possible among Pakistan’s latest intellectual agitators.
DAILYTIMES.COM.PK

Well before the count was over and haggling about a coalition had even started, Irish bookmakers were paying out to those who had bet on Bertie Ahern, the affable prime minister-as-everyman.
In what started as a very tight election, the Teflon Taoiseach has won a historic third term against the combined forces of his two main opposition parties. Now he has to craft a governing alliance and show that, after 10 years in power, he can manage the changes Ireland now faces.
The record of Mr Ahern’s Fianna Fail-led coalition is good. Once noted mainly for the export of people, Ireland has become one of Europe’s wealthiest countries.
It stands even taller after Mr Ahern’s canny contribution to peace and power-sharing in Northern Ireland. Revelations that he received loans from businessmen friends after his marriage broke up seem to have been passed over by the voters, who see him as shambolic but not really corrupt.
Mr Ahern’s main weakness was he had been in power too long. There was nothing ideological to separate Fianna Fail and its historic rival, Fine Gael, populist parties from two tribes of the malleable centre. As one of Mr Ahern’s predecessors put it when asked to define the difference between the two parties: “We’re in--they’re out.“
There was real division about the wholly inadequate public health service, but even that was more an argument about technique. Fianna Fail would liberate beds taken up by paying patients by allowing private hospitals on land owned by public hospitals (co-location, they call it). Fine Gael and Labour would build new public hospitals.
Ultimately, Mr Ahern won by persuading Irish voters his opponents are unproved, inexperienced and cannot add up. Now he has to prove he is worth keeping around.
First, he needs to secure a working coalition. His pro-market Progressive Democrat partners have been repudiated by voters anxious about inequality. Mr Ahern has rightly rejected coalition with Sinn FŽin, though more because they come from the same political gene pool than because they have yet to establish a record in constitutional politics.
His best bet would be to try for a coalition with Labour, prising them away from Fine Gael, or with the Greens.
Most of all, though, the ageing Celtic Tiger needs to spend wisely in areas such as infrastructure, research training and the modernisation of the civil service.
Mr Ahern has managed a boom. Now, he cannot waste any more opportunities to lay the foundations for Ireland’s future prosperity.
FT.COM

Over the next 20 years, 80 million jobs will be needed for the unemployed across the Middle East and North Africa. Masses of jobless young Arabs represent a tragic waste of human potential and threaten regional harmony and security.
For too long, government intervention has been seen as the solution. But meaningful employment can only come from real private sector growth. Is it not time to look to business leaders for the practical vision to tackle this crisis?
The recent Dead Sea meeting of the World Economic Forum focused on economic diversification, growth, and peace. There is widespread agreement on the vital role of business leaders in creating employment and new enterprise opportunities in their business activities.
They need to bring their entrepreneurial drive to the task of job creation--with targets based on the size of their work force.
There is talk of what should be done, and too little practical action building on existing good practices.
Bad news dominates media messages from this region. But there are positive examples of company initiatives that have been creating significant jobs in their value chains and business-focused community outreach.
The challenge is to scale up the good practices and inspire many more business leaders to collaborate.
With leadership, this could deliver a massive boost for sustainable job creation. Of course, alongside this, governments need to loosen up the economies to promote enterprise growth--particularly to help microbusinesses, which are so critical to the delivery of new jobs.
They need to refocus education so that teaching is better fitted to deliver skills employers need.
According to a prediction by the Arab Labor Organization, more than 32 million people will be looking for jobs in Arab states by 2010.
The UN and World Bank have forecast the jobs needed for the growing numbers of school leavers, alongside the unemployed in the MENA region as 80 million over 20 years! It’s a daunting challenge.
But there are many good examples of what can be done in a report published by the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) with the support of the Young Arab Leaders, Emirates Environmental Group, Young Entrepreneurs Association, the UN Development Program and a consortium of companies.
An analysis of success factors in over 20 private-sector led projects from Morocco and Lebanon to Saudi Arabia and Jordan shows that, with leadership vision, companies can achieve much to create jobs within their core business activities.
This not only helps their reputation as good corporate citizens: It also helps their business.
First, businesses can help by offering far more work experience and training to school leavers. This helps fit young people for work--a key problem in this region, where there is so often a mismatch between the skills delivered by education, and what employers seek.
Secondly, businesses can look around their activities to find ways to stimulate new jobs linked to their activities and distribution chains. Sekem Group in Egypt enabled 2,000 small farmers and their 6,000 dependents to find livelihoods in higher value agricultural production as well as education access.
Thirdly, business can collaborate through education and training partnerships to improve vocational training and linkages. INJAZ works across the region and has mobilized private sector mentoring for over 60,000 students. The Jordan Education Initiative, stimulated by the World Economic Forum, Cisco Systems and others, is delivering curriculum access and Information Technology to schools and over 50,000 students across the nation.
Finally, companies can mount outreach programs to offer skills to sustainable community programs that stimulate new enterprise. Some can train unemployed youngsters for areas of the economy where there are skills shortages--such as services, information technology and craft skills.
ARABNEWS.COM