Radio Havana Cuba-13 February 2002 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Radio Havana Cuba - News Update - 13 Febuary 2002 . *ARGENTINA SHOULD FOLLOW CUBA'S EXAMPLE REGARDING HUMAN RIGHTS *CUBAN AND U.S. PROFESSORS EXCHANGE VIEWS AT SEMINAR IN MATANZAS *CHINA EXPRESSES INTEREST IN INCREASING INVESTMENTS IN CUBA *PABLO MILANES OFFERS SPECIAL VALENTINE'S DAY CONCERT IN MEXICO *US NGO DEMANDS FINANCIAL COMPENSATION FOR AFGHAN CIVILIAN VICTIMS *AFGHAN NGO BEGINS COUNTING USA'S CIVILIAN VICTIMS *POWELL SAYS EUROPE SHOULD RESPECT WASHINGTON'S "PRINCIPLED LEADERSHIP" *CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATORS FEAR YEARS-LONG ENRON SCANDAL PROBE *1968 MASSACRE OF STUDENTS COMES BACK TO HAUNT MEXICO *US EPA COMES UNDER FIRE FOR MISLEADING PUBLIC ON WTC ATTACK POLLUTION *Viewpoint: GOLD FOR TRINKETS: BUSINESS AS USUAL . *ARGENTINA SHOULD FOLLOW CUBA'S EXAMPLE REGARDING HUMAN RIGHTS Buenos Aires, February 13 (RHC)--Argentina should follow Cuba's example regarding respect for human rights, according to a commentary published by the Noticias Varias News Agency. The commentary notes that the ones who use Argentina's foreign policy for maneuvers against Cuba are the same ones who have supported the recipes of the International Monetary Fund -- interfering in the internal affairs of Argentina and subjecting the country to economic disaster and bankruptcy. The editorial, entitled "Voting Against Cuba: Another National Disgrace," refers to the overtures toward the United States by Argentina's Foreign Ministry, which recently issued statements in favor of Washington's annual anti-Cuba resolution at the upcoming session of the UN Human Rights Commission. The Noticias Varias News Agency pointed out that the current foreign minister of Argentina, Carlos Ruckauf, has "fascist tendencies" -- recalling that he personally signed death warrants against Leftist and progressive activists during the military dictatorship of the 1970s. "If Argentina condemns anyone, it would certainly not be Cuba -- an example of international solidarity and what it means to be a free and independent nation." The commentary adds that it is immoral to condemn a revolutionary people who have established a political, economic and educational system that is truly independent, despite Washington's constant attacks. *CUBAN AND U.S. PROFESSORS EXCHANGE VIEWS AT SEMINAR IN MATANZAS Matanzas, February 13 (RHC)--The 9th Scientific Seminar on Education is underway at the Canimao Hotel in Matanzas with the participation of 50 professors from Cuba and a similar number of educators from the United States. Dr. Lidia Turner, President of the Cuban Pedagogical Association, and Dr. Sheryl Lujens from the University of Arizona addressed the delegates at the opening session Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, delegates met in special work commissions to discuss various issues regarding educational quality. The educational seminar runs through Friday, the 15th, and will end with a plenary session. *CHINA EXPRESSES INTEREST IN INCREASING INVESTMENTS IN CUBA Cienfuegos, February 13 (RHC)--China's Ambassador to Havana, Wang Zhiguan, says the island continues to be one of Beijing's most important Latin American trading partners. Following an exchange with area businesspeople in central Cienfuegos, Ambassador Zhiguan said that Cuba is the Caribbean country that receives the most credit from China. He pointed out that several joint projects were implemented last year with Havana in the field of communications. The Chinese official also mentioned Beijing's investments in Cuba's agricultural sector, particularly in the cultivation of rice, as well as in the area of tourism. Ambassador Zhiguan noted that during his tour of Cienfuegos, he saw areas with a high potential for bilateral cooperation. He added that in order to study potential joint ventures, a high-level Chinese delegation would soon visit the island. *PABLO MILANES OFFERS SPECIAL VALENTINE'S DAY CONCERT IN MEXICO Mexico City, February 13 (RHC)--One of Cuba's most popular singers and composers, Pablo Milanes, will offer a special Valentine's Day concert tomorrow at the National Auditorium of Mexico City. According to reports from the Mexican capital, Pablo Milanes will perform together with Mexican singer Eugenia Leon. During a joint news conference on Tuesday, the two singers said they would entertain their audience with songs by Silvio Rodriguez, Joan Manuel Serrat and Mercedes Sosa. Referring to the special Valentine's Day Concert, Pablo Milanes told reporters that he firmly believes in love -- which he divided into three facets: a woman's love, a mother's love for her children and the love of humanity. Following their concert in the Mexican capital on Thursday, Pablo Milanes and Eugenia Leon will take their show on the road to other cities, offering a total of nine concerts in northern and central Mexico. *US NGO DEMANDS FINANCIAL COMPENSATION FOR AFGHAN CIVILIAN VICTIMS Kabul, February 13 (RHC) -- In Afghanistan, a US non-governmental organization has called on Washington to provide financial compensation for the civilian victims of US bombing raids over the country. As media outlets around the world increasingly report on growing cases of erred bombs killing innocent Afghan villagers, the NGO Global Exchange said Washington should earmark 20 million dollars to an initial assistance fund for the victims' family members. Global Exchange program coordinator Marla Ruzicka stated Wednesday at a press conference in Kabul said that the US government has a moral responsibility taking into account that each day of bombing raids cost the US army 30 million dollars. Ruzicka said her organization has already contacted 12 Afghan families who lost innocent loved ones in the bombing raids, and more are expected to be found. Some of the victims' family members participated in the press conference, including a 30-year-old woman who lost her 6 children and husband when a bomb fell on their home. Leading US news dailies, including "The Washington Post" and "The New York Times," again focused Wednesday on another story of bombardment horror that took place in October in southern Afghanistan. 27 frightened villagers, most of them young children, were blown to bits by US bombs as they huddled in a trailer fleeing a bombing raid on a nearby town. Witnesses are reported to have said that the explosion scattered arms, hands and feet of children across the road, and that thirty minutes later, as rescuers struggled to carry the last of the injured and dead into a nearby house, two rockets slammed into the room where most had been taken. The Post reported that interviews with a dozen villagers in the farming hamlet just outside the provincial capital of Tarin Kot paint a consistent picture of 30 chaotic minutes that night when US airplanes hit their targets with extraordinary precision, killing 21 members of two families - 17 of them infants and other children - but hitting no Taliban or Al Qaida fighters. *AFGHAN NGO BEGINS COUNTING USA'S CIVILIAN VICTIMS Kabul, February 13 (RHC)--In related news, an Afghan non-governmental organization has reportedly begun the task of assessing how many civilians were killed, injured or lost property in the US bombing campaign. The BBC's Afghanistan correspondent Kate Clark has reported that in two provinces alone one of the country's oldest aid organizations, Aria, has documented 69 civilian deaths - all of whom were killed since the rout of the Taliban from Kabul in November. Aria has conducted face-to-face interviews and taken photographs of families who fell victim to the American bombing since mid-November. A total of 13 Afghan provinces were bombed, while some places are still restricted or are still being bombed. The BBC correspondent said that she has stood watching American B-52 planes bomb civilian targets in Afghanistan, ringing the Pentagon from a satellite telephone to ask why they were bombing people's homes only to hang up in frustration when she was told that the US Central Command is not allowed to give out operational information. But now, she wrote, the pressure is increasing on the Pentagon to provide some answers. *POWELL SAYS EUROPE SHOULD RESPECT WASHINGTON'S "PRINCIPLED LEADERSHIP" Washington, February 13 (RHC) -- Amid Europe's scathing and unprecedented criticism of US foreign policy, Secretary of State Colin Powell Tuesday called on Washington's transatlantic allies to respect what he called the US's "principled leadership" - even, he added, if they sometimes disagree with it. Denying widespread charges of unilateralism and bellicosity within the George W. Bush administration, Powell claimed that Washington has demonstrated its anxiousness to reach out to the world. Concerns among European leaders have been high since Bush's state of the union speech last month in which he referred to an "axis of evil" encompassing Iraq, Iran and North Korea. A number of European leaders have warned Bush in recent weeks of a growing discomfort with US policy. French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine called Washington's unilateralism "a threat to the world," asserting that military might alone can't resolve the problem of terrorism, and strongly criticizing the US government's blind support of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policy of pure repression in occupied Palestinian territories. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher said this week that "alliance partners are not satellites." But the most scathing criticism came last weekend when European Union commissioner in charge of Europe's international relations, Chris Patten, accused the Bush administration of harboring a "dangerous, absolutist and simplistic" stance towards the rest of the world. *CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATORS FEAR YEARS-LONG ENRON SCANDAL PROBE Washington, February 13 (RHC)--US congressional investigators have predicted that the unraveling of the Enron scandal will now take several years after the firm's former chairman, Kenneth Lay, refused to testify. The British news daily "The Guardian" reported Wednesday that the vast number of investigators working on the case have nowhere to go except towards reform of company law and/or a long slog of evidence-gathering to tie Enron corporate executives to specific crimes. The article quoted one congressional source who reportedly said the task is absolutely gargantuan, noting that all of Enron's 2,832 offshore subsidiaries will presumably need to be studied. And, though computer experts have asserted that the data from Enron's shredded financial documents is not gone for good, investigators may find themselves deluged with millions of documents and looking for a needle in a haystack. According to Dave Stenhouse, director of a firm in Seattle that specializes in gathering electronic evidence, when PC users delete a file they are not permanently destroying the data - and that data can be recovered. According to experts, the cybersleuths investigating files from Enron and the Arthur Andersen accounting firm aren't likely to have trouble doing so, but the volume of material to sift through will be enormous. *1968 MASSACRE OF STUDENTS COMES BACK TO HAUNT MEXICO Mexico City, February 13 (RHC)--The 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of protesting students in Mexico is coming back to haunt the nation with increasing force. The Mexican news daily "El Universal" published Monday and Tuesday a series of photos never before revealed providing what is being called chilling new images of young students murdered with bayonets and their skulls crushed. Citing documents declassified in the United States, the news daily reported that there were at least 200 victims, and not the official version of 30. Local human rights groups believe that as many as between 4 and 500 students were killed. On Monday, "El Universal" reported that the evening after the massacre security and intelligence agents confiscated the photos taken by newspapers in Mexico City to prevent them from being published. Constituting one of the human rights cases that President Vicente Fox promised to address, last month - in an unprecedented move - Mexico's Supreme Court ordered the federal district attorney's office to open an investigation into the massacre. Luis Echeverria, then-interior minister and later president of Mexico, is being pointed out as one of the officials responsible. Fox has promised to set up a truth commission on the Tlatelolco massacre, while Mexican human rights activists argue that there is no statute of limitations on the 1968 repression, since it involved crimes against humanity. *US EPA COMES UNDER FIRE FOR MISLEADING PUBLIC ON WTC ATTACK POLLUTION New York, February 13 (RHC) -- The US's Environmental Protection Agency is coming under heavy fire for having misled the public concerning the pollution fall-out of the World Trade Center attacks. Testifying at a Senate subcommittee hearing on air quality, New York democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler charged that the EPA did not take into account the potential for cancer-causing asbestos and other toxins from burning trade center debris to reach high concentrations in nearby apartments and offices. He said New York officials now know enough to be alarmed and outraged at the federal government's response to the environmental impact of September 11. Nadler's testimony is being called the harshest attack so far in a controversy that has gathered momentum in recent weeks. University of California scientists have asserted that the September 11 attacks exposed New Yorkers downwind to the most hazardous plumes of extremely fine chemical and metal particles that experts have ever seen. University of California at Davis researcher Thomas Cahill said the unprecedented pollution was far worse than that from the Kuwait oil field fires set by Iraq during the Gulf War. He said the particles aren't soluble, and once they lodge in peoples' lungs they stay there. The expert added that for weeks, even as the flames eased and the core of the towers cooled below 1,200 degrees, the steel was still glowing red at 800 degrees in November and clouds of particles were still rising. *Viewpoint: GOLD FOR TRINKETS: BUSINESS AS USUAL Development of the planet's impoverished nations - which incorporate the vast majority of humankind - has for some time been given lip service by the world's powers that frequently operate within racist and class boundaries. The upcoming World Conference on Development Financing, which is due to begin in Monterrey, Mexico on the 16th March, is an example. To all intents and purposes the conference is dead in the water before it even begins, due in most part to the attitude of Washington. The US United Nations ambassador, the sadly notorious John Negroponte, has announced that the problem of development is that of internal investment by poor nations which must improve their domestic productivity rather than relying on foreign aid. Negroponte added that the Bush administration was not at this time willing to discuss any further relief to the Third World than the US is already providing. With the mentality of a pirate, the United States is ignoring the key issue: that the riches of the rich were made off the resources of the poor. For decades the First World has plundered the raw materials of the Third World to rapidly enrich itself. In other words poverty does not exist because of geographic, genetic or social conditions, but because of an unjust worldwide economic order that exchanges gold for trinkets, and promotes the rape of Third World economies by multi-national corporations. Thus, the presentation on Monterrey given here in Havana at the International Economists Forum on Globalization and Problems of Development by the director of the UN Development Program is replete with omissions and totally lacking in concrete proposals. What is most obviously missing from the Monterrey conference agenda is the total absence of the fundamental issues that result from affluent nations siphoning off the riches of the poor. How will it be possible to discuss development when such huge differences in interest and aspirations exist? Are the industrialized nations prepared to remove the enormously inequitable structural adjustment programs that send poor nations into a spiral of even deeper poverty? Are they willing to address the enormous disparities in income that an unrestricted global market has produced? Subjects like foreign debt, fair trade, the protection of national resources et al. are strictly off the agenda for Monterrey, as is discussion on the impact of global free trade that led Argentina down such a disastrous path. The mindset that sees foreign aid packages as generous and sometime-misplaced charity is one that takes no account of the past - of the profiteering and depredation that invariably makes up the colonial history of the world's poorest nations. Only major catastrophes seem to seriously loosen the purse strings of rich nations nowadays, and of course the occasional windfall of an underdeveloped nation's public utilities that "need" to be privatized. No, it is far from charity. It is a matter of simple justice - and one that can save other nations from Argentina's fate. (c) 2002 Radio Habana Cuba, NY Transfer News. 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