anahataenergy.com

Thursday, February 7, 2008

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed concern about crises in Chad, Kenya, and the Sudan. The U.N. chief is recently back from Africa where he attended the African Union summit in Ethiopia and met with leaders in Kenya.

On rebel efforts to overthrow the government in Chad in recent days, the secretary-general welcomed an African Union initiative to have the leaders of Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo mediate the crisis. He says the United Nations will do its utmost to help resolve the crisis, urging the Security Council to act swiftly to help bring an end to the violence.

“It has devastating consequences not only for the people of Chad and Darfurian refugees seeking shelter there, but also for Darfur itself,” said Ban.

Mr. Ban told reporters the situation in the neighboring Darfur region of Sudan is no less troubling. He says the deployment of the AU-U.N. peacekeeping force, known as UNAMID, must be sped up and urged member states to properly equip the troops.

“UNAMID still lacks required aviation and ground transportation – chiefly helicopters. Additional troops will not make up for this shortfall,” said Ban. “Those countries that called for intervention in Darfur are under special obligation to deliver on their promises.”

While at the AU summit, Mr. Ban says he discussed some of the outstanding issues affecting the deployment with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, and he expects the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to be signed this week. But Mr. Ban remained vague on whether some of the agreement’s sticking points – such as night flights, land agreements, and advance notice of U.N. movements – had been settled.

On Kenya, Mr. Ban says he has been deeply engaged in the post-election crisis and told political leaders during his visit there that they bear particular responsibility for the future of Kenya.

“I stressed to all the Kenyan leaders the need to stop the unacceptable violence and killings, and to resolve their differences through dialogue and democratic process. I also appealed to all the political leaders to think beyond their individual interests or party lines and to look to the future of Kenya as one country,” he said.

Mr. Ban also met in Nairobi with his U.N. predecessor, Kofi Annan, who is leading the panel of eminent Africans trying to mediate the crisis, and said they discussed his roadmap for the talks.

Security of U.N. personnel in Africa and elsewhere has been high on the secretary-general’s agenda, especially in the wake of the December bombing in Algeria that killed 17 staff members. Mr. Ban announced that he is naming diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi to chair an independent panel on safety and security of U.N. personnel and premises. Brahimi is an Algerian, but Mr. Ban says he has no concerns about his fairness or objectivity in heading up the panel.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Peter Oborne, former chief political commentator at British broadsheet newspaper the Daily Telegraph, has alleged the paper suppressed and under-reported stories involving banking giant HSBC so as to avoid a loss of advertising revenue. In a public resignation from the paper published on the openDemocracy website on Tuesday, the veteran journalist and columnist alleges the division between advertising and editorial had not been kept watertight and that editors were committing a form of “fraud” on readers of the newspaper.

In Oborne’s article, he details how he submitted a story to the Telegraph regarding HSBC closing a number of prominent British Muslims’s accounts — despite assurances to the contrary, the story was not published by the paper. This led to Oborne investigating other coverage of HSBC in the newspaper. He cites the example of a story written by the Telegraph banking correspondent Harry Wilson on problems with HSBC’s accounts, which Oborne claims was quietly removed from the Telegraph website. Oborne says the failure of the Telegraph to cover HSBC is also present in the relative coverage given in November 2014 after the bank had to allocate a fund of £1 billion to compensate customers, as well as an investigation into manipulation of the currency market: Oborne argues these developments were given considerable coverage in competing newspapers including the Guardian, Times, and Mail but the Telegraph covered them only briefly several pages into the business section.

Oborne’s article alleges a number of other examples of suppression — calling the coverage of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong “bizarre”, and noting that the paper under-reported news of false accounting at Tesco but gave significant prominence to stories about the company without a critical edge.

Following Oborne’s article, a spokesman for the Telegraph responded: “Like any other business, we never comment on individual commercial relationships, but our policy is absolutely clear. We aim to provide all our commercial partners with a range of advertising solutions, but the distinction between advertising and our award-winning editorial operation has always been fundamental to our business. We utterly refute any allegation to the contrary. It is a matter of huge regret that Peter Oborne, for nearly five years a contributor to the Telegraph, should have launched such an astonishing and unfounded attack, full of inaccuracy and innuendo, on his own paper.”

Media commentator Roy Greenslade, writing for the Guardian, described Oborne’s allegations against the Telegraph as “dynamite” and said they go “to the heart of a paper’s credibility”. The Barclay brothers, owners of the Telegraph, “are being held to account”, according to Greenslade, and Oborne “has shone a light on a dark reality”.

Friday, June 6, 2014

The Conservative Party has won the Newark, England by-election but with a reduced majority. Voters gave 45.03% of the vote to Robert Jenrick, while the UK Independence Party candidate Roger Helmer came second with 25.91% of the vote. The turnout was 38,707, 52.67% of the electorate of 73,486.

The by-election was called following the resignation of Patrick Mercer after it was revealed he was paid to lobby and ask questions in Parliament on behalf of the country of Fiji in an investigation by the BBC Panorama programme.

Jenrick is a 32-year-old who works as managing director of Christie’s auction house. After the election result was announced, he said: “I want to thank the prime minister for his personal support to my campaign and I want to thank the government for its commitment to re-building Britain. I hope now that I can repay the faith and trust that the people of Newark have put in me as your new member of parliament — and in the months and years to come I can build a reputation as a strong and effective MP.”

UKIP’s candidate, Roger Helmer, attracted controversy during the election campaign due to past public statements about the acceptability of homosexuality. In remarks to The Sun newspaper, he compared considering homosexuality “distasteful if not viscerally repugnant” to tea preferences. He explained: “Different people may have different tastes. You may tell me that you don’t like Earl Grey tea. That may be a minority view but you are entitled not to like it if you don’t like it.” Helmer later stated the manner in which his comments were reported showed “the mainstream media are engaged in a feeding frenzy against UKIP, and are prepared to twist the facts to suit their agenda”.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage said the party had run a “stunning campaign”: “We’ve been up against probably the biggest ever Conservative machine, defending about their 40th safest seat in the country. If the indications are right, we’ll be celebrating a massive advance for our party.”

The Liberal Democrat candidate, David Watts, said coming in sixth place “wasn’t a good result, but smaller parties often get squeezed in by-elections and that’s what’s happened to us here”. He said the independent campaign by Paul Baggaley had got a lot of support, and “a lot of our voters had transferred to vote against UKIP to make sure UKIP didn’t get elected”.

Grant Shapps from the Conservative Party said the surge of support for UKIP after the European elections was now “going backwards”, while Nigel Farage said Conservative MPs in more marginal seats would be filled with “sheer horror” at UKIP’s success.