Serbia’s match with Albania was abandoned after a drone carrying a political message sparked clashes | Oct 14, 2014

Serbia-Albania was abandoned after a drone carrying a political message sparked clashes.

The match was already hotly-contested before the flag incident saw the match postponed.

Serbia’s match with Albania was abandoned after a drone carrying a political message sparked clashes involving players and fans on the Partizan Stadium pitch.

The Euro 2016 qualifier, refereed by English official Martin Atkinson, was suspended in the 41st minute at 0-0.

Trouble flared when an Albanian flag and message flew above the pitch and was caught by a Serbia player.

Albania players tried to take it before several fans broke onto the pitch.

Atkinson led the players off the field and, after a delay of around 30 minutes, Uefa confirmed the match had been abandoned.

Albanian fans had been banned from attending the qualifier between the two Balkan rival nations.

Serbia and Albania have a history of turbulent relations, predominantly in relation to the former Serbian province of Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008.

It has been recognised by the United States and major European Union countries, but Serbia refuses to do so, as do most ethnic Serbs inside Kosovo.

“It is a regretful situation on which we will report; the referee, myself and the security adviser. The circumstances were such that we couldn’t continue the match,” Uefa match delegate Harry Been said.

“You all saw what happened and I cannot comment on who is to blame or what to blame. I will submit a report with my colleagues to Uefa and Uefa will decide what will happen further.”

Serbian national broadcaster RTS reported that Olsi Rama, the brother of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, was arrested in the stadium’s VIP box for instigating the drone stunt, but this could not be confirmed.

Serbian B92 Television journalist Milos Saranovic, who was at the match, told BBC Sport: “The whole atmosphere before the game was that Serbia and Albania was more politically sensitive than any other game.

“I cannot remember for years so many police at the stadium. Everything looked like a situation that is not normal.
“One small stupid situation made an explosion – that is the shortest way to describe the incident of the night.

“The players have usually been able to keep the atmosphere on the pitch normal. The game was normal for 40 minutes with no small accident on the pitch but when that flag appeared, the heat was going up.”

Albania had been looking for their second win in Group I, having started the day top with four points.

Denmark, in second place before Tuesday’s games, lost to Portugal, with Cristiano Ronaldo scoring a last-minute goal in a 1-0 win.

In other matches, Switzerland beat San Marino 4-0 in Group E – England’s group – while Gibraltar lost 3-0 to Georgia in Group D.

In that section’s other games, Scotland drew 2-2 in Poland while the Republic of Ireland drew 1-1 in Germany.

Northern Ireland recorded their third win in as many games to beat Greece 2-0 and top Group F with nine points.

Finally, in Group F, Hungary edged Faroe Islands 1-0 and Romania won 2-0 in Finland.

BBC Match Report

Stefan Mitrovic pulled down the flag, which sparked the trouble.

A skirmish between Serbian and Albanian players broke out on the pitch

The flag is flown above the pitch by a drone with the message ‘autochthonous’, meaning indigenous

Mitrovic tugs at the strings holding the now-grounded flag to the drone flying above

Tension boiled over as fans and officials spilled onto the pitch after the flag was pulled down

Fans and players clashed on the pitch as tensions reached fever pitch in Belgrade.

The players brawl while a chair is launched towards them by another pitch invader.

Albanian players try to take cover as they flee to the tunnel – chair can be seen being thrown about

Serbian riot police try to contain the home supporters after fighting broke out in the pitch.

Serbia fans burn a NATO flag during the Group I qualifying game at the Partizan Stadium.

Good Morning, Mr Mandela by Zelda la Grange – review | An intriguing, bitter chronicle of the decline of the ‘world’s most famous man’ | By Mark Gevisser | October 9, 2014

Nelson Mandela with Zelda La Grange after casting his vote in South Africa’s 2004 general election.

Nelson Mandela was a master of the art of political gesture, particularly when it came to racial reconciliation in South Africa. He wore the Springbok captain’s jersey at the Rugby World Cup in 1995, he invited his former oppressors to tea, and he made a point of selecting a young Afrikaner as his personal secretary. Her name was Zelda la Grange: she was 23 when he discovered her working as a junior typist in his presidential office, and she would become his manager, his gatekeeper, his confidante and the person to whom he was perhaps closest, after his wife Graça Machel.

He brought her into the inner chambers of South Africa’s new power elite, on to the glittering stage of his global travels, and into the sphere of his own fractious family. The consequences were not always happy, not least for La Grange herself, who uses this memoir to settle some scores, to tell her side of the story, and – most poignantly – to begin the process of finding herself now that she has been severed from the relationship that defined her: “I gave him my youth, and perhaps my future too,” she writes, stating repeatedly that her commitment to him made it impossible for her to sustain any other relationship: “I couldn’t be with a man for 20 minutes without Madiba calling on me to do something.”

She understands Mandela, quite simply, as her saviour, and the book feels truest at the beginning, as we witness the awakening of a dull, unconscious racist into a passionate New South African. She wins Mandela over, it seems, with her tears when he addresses her in Afrikaans on their first meeting: they are the tears of shame, and more white South Africans should shed them.

She describes him as a beloved grandfather, but there is an undeniably romantic charge to the relationship: they were in many ways a couple, one governed by rigid gender roles. It was, she writes, a “co-dependency” – “my need to please fitted with his need for absolute loyalty” – and it worked while he ran the show. But as he declined into a lengthy dotage, in a way that has never really been admitted before now, the partnership fell apart. By charting this disintegration, Good Morning, Mr Mandela does not deliver on the chipper, redemptive promise of its title and opening pages, but in fact offers something more valuable, if more distressing: a chronicle of the decline of “the world’s most famous man”, as the author herself calls him, and thus a reassertion of his mortality.

La Grange is neither a native English speaker nor a writer. Her memoir’s artlessness is sometimes its charm, sometimes its impediment: it can be repetitive and self-exculpatory, and overly stuffed with the celebrity-filled logs of interminable world travel. These accounts nonetheless serve unwitting historical purpose in the way they reveal not only their author’s ingenuousness, but an aspect of Mandela’s own character: how besotted he was with wealth, glamour and particularly royalty. Pages fly past in the company of Naomi Campbell, Prince Albert of Monaco, Bono and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and gaudy South African tycoons such as Douw Steyn and Sol Kerzner. These, it appears, are Mandela’s inner circle, along with some more impressive candidates such as Bill Clinton and Morgan Freeman. La Grange’s sole criterion for judging all the above, including Muammar Gaddafi (whom she likes), is whether they treat Mandela well. Here she replicates her boss’s own moral blind spot: people were good if they were good to him – which meant supporting his exemplary legacy foundations, certainly, but also hosting him and keeping his grandchildren in bling.

Mandela was a man of probity and did not die wealthy. But, in the manner of a patriarch, he was more than willing to use his name to leverage favours. La Grange betrays both herself and her boss – but does history the service of humanising him – when she tells the story of how the Pondo king demanded Mandela find bursaries for his daughters in the United States. He makes the call, the princesses get their educations, and La Grange’s only judgment is that these women have “made us all proud”.

Elsewhere, she grapples with the continued anger of black youth. South Africa has changed, she insists: she is the “living proof”. Such solipsism, the product of having been Mandela’s poster-girl for transformation, contradicts her own acute and empathetic observations, elsewhere in the book, of the poverty that still bedevils black South Africans.

There should be no question about La Grange’s commitment and efficiency. But her book demonstrates that she had neither the wisdom nor the authority to manage Mandela once he was no longer able to manage himself. As she puts it: “The older he became and the less able to express his own wishes, the more people were going to move in and get him to do what they wanted.” La Grange believes she might have prevented this, had she been allowed. But although she had come to consider herself part of the Mandela family, she was ejected in the end, having to sneak in through back doors to say her goodbyes to the dying man and – outrageously – denied accreditation to attend his burial. In this she was, as in all things, the creation of her maker: he used her to create the barrier he needed from his grasping progeny, and so they dispensed with her as soon as his dotage meant she lost his protection.

Mandela’s favourite lines of poetry were from William Henley’s “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.” Little wonder that his was not a gentle decline: he was often angry and distressed, and always wanted to be elsewhere. The account of this is heartbreaking. He carried, obsessively, an empty wallet with nothing but Machel’s business card inside it. La Grange accompanied him to at least 20 bookshops to buy the same Collins dictionary, just because he wanted to get out; but because he was not just any old senile shopper his surprise visits would inevitably cause a mayhem that deepened his confusion, and he would have to be whisked away.

To make matters worse, terrible feuds broke out within his large and complicated family, and La Grange claims that his discomfort was exacerbated by this. She offers strong descriptions of the way Machel – whom she champions – was mistreated by Mandela’s children, but her loyalty to Mandela’s legacy prevents her from giving details that might help us make better sense of what is already in the public domain: that two daughters tried unsuccessfully to replace his appointed trustees with themselves; that a grandson dug up the bones of Mandela’s dead children and removed them to his own piece of land, thus precipitating an ugly court battle as Mandela lay dying himself.

Still, even without the detail, the portrait painted here is a devastating and undignified one, as family and friends, courtiers and comrades, struggle to manage the impossible situation of an immortal’s impending death while trying to get a bit of the action too. The book ends, as it must, with Mandela’s funeral, about which La Grange is excoriating: why, when it had been anticipated for so long, was it so badly managed?

The answer is one that La Grange, by now unmoored and embittered, cannot fully comprehend, because she is so invested: there were too many competing interests around Mandela, and without his own commanding presence to orchestrate them, things fell apart. As they do with the death of a patriarch.

Photograph: Jon Hrusa/EPA Jon Hrusa/EPA

via Guardian

• Mark Gevisser’s latest book is Dispatcher: Lost and Found in Johannesburg (Granta). To order Good Morning, Mr Mandela for £15 (RRP £20), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

ANC Gauteng: Rebels with a cause, playing the waiting game | RANJENI MUNUSAMY | SOUTH AFRICA | OCT 3, 2014

Newly elected Gauteng premier David Makhura. Photo: Picture: Werner Beukes/SAPA

Two years ago, as the ANC was preparing for its 53rd national conference in Mangaung, the ANC in Gauteng were seen as the playmakers. These were the guys riding against the wind, agitating for a shakeup in the ANC leadership and wanting a new party leader. They were at the forefront of the Forces of Change campaign. They failed, horribly, leaving the provincial leadership on the back foot. This weekend they start the comeback at the Gauteng provincial ANC conference. But will the Gauteng ANC again set their sights on a national overhaul at the next national conference or just insulate themselves against the raging storms in the ruling party? By RANJENI MUNUSAMY.

It was a poignant moment. The results of the election of the ANC national executive committee (NEC) was being announced in the giant hothouse on the grounds of the University of the Free State in the blistering December heat. Cheers were going up all over the marquee as names of the 80-member NEC were being announced.

The Gauteng ANC leadership sat stunned as the names reeled out, with not even the provincial chairperson Paul Mashatile making the cut. As the ANC’s 53rd national conference was drawing to a close, it was apparent that those that led the campaign to have President Jacob Zuma replaced as the party leader were being severely punished.

It was a setback that would prove to be difficult to recover from. Gauteng dynamics were further complicated by the fact that there were two centres of power: Nomvula Mokonyane as Premier and the provincial ANC led by Mashatile and provincial secretary David Makhura.

Mashatile and Makhura know their province well and were alive to the fact that the corruption scandals and poor image of the national leadership would have an impact on the 2014 election campaign. They attempted to box cleverly – wanting to strategically deploy national leaders who would appeal to rather than further aggravate their middle-class constituencies. They were overruled by the Luthuli House barons, who saw this as an affront to Zuma.

The 2014 election results, particularly in Gauteng, were a huge wake-up call for ANC. Support for the ANC slid by 11 percentage points to 53.59%, with the metros taking a beating. Rather than acknowledge that the Gauteng leadership had been right to worry about the impact of scandals at national level as well as the electronic tolling on the Gauteng freeway system, there were attempts to blame the provincial ANC for the poor election performance. There was even talk that the Gauteng ANC should be disbanded. But that would not have been easy to justify as the ANC dropped support in all provinces except KwaZulu-Natal.

Had Luthuli House attempted to disband the Gauteng leadership, the backlash would have been severe. There would in all likelihood have been a messy rear-guard action against the national leadership. Any semblance of unity would have been shattered and the organisation would have been destined for a hell run on the way to the 2016 local government elections.

The strength of the provincial leadership is visible in how they resisted attempts by Luthuli House to impose a conforming candidate as the provincial premier. After putting up Mokonyane as the Luthuli House conduit for five years, the province buckled down firmly behind Makhura. Mashatile seemingly paid the price for his province playing hardball, losing his Cabinet position and taking a salary cut to become an ordinary MP.

The province is now on the comeback trail, with Makhura charting the course through his leadership of the provincial government. The province’s leaders are aware that their political future is dependent on how they rebuild their support in the province – both the Democratic Alliance and Economic Freedom Fighters have chipped into their constituencies – and regain lost ground. They need to reclaim their lobbying power for the next ANC national conference, and the way to do so is to improve the party’s showing in the 2016 local government elections.

With the support of the provincial ANC, Makhura has embarked on a process to tap into the discontent in Gauteng. The panel he set up to assess the impact of e-tolling might not be able to pressure national government into scrapping the system but it is telling the citizens of the province that its leaders are willing to listen to them. A large portion of the public rage around e-tolls has been over the sheer arrogance of national government and the South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) in managing the project.

In the run up to this weekend’s provincial conference, the ANC’s Gauteng leaders are being extremely forthright about their problems so that they play with an open deck. Mashatile has admitted that they lost ground in the middle class due to corruption, inefficiency in government and e-tolls.

“There is a perception that the ANC government is soft on corruption, that we allow public representatives to do wrong things, we don’t act, we allow officials to mess up administration and that resources for ordinary people are diverted to corrupt activities,” Mashatile told the SABC.

After Mokonyane’s defeat at the last provincial conference, nobody has been willing to risk humiliation by taking on Mashatile for the position of provincial chairperson. Makhura is having to surrender his post as provincial secretary due to his position in government, and is set to be elected as Mashatile’s deputy. Former Health MEC Hope Papo is tipped to replace Makhura as provincial secretary, with former deputy health minister Gwen Ramokgopa as his deputy. Gauteng legislature speaker Ntombi Mekgwe is likely to be elected treasurer.

The question though is whether this team will be formidable enough to salvage the province’s standing and influence. So far KwaZulu-Natal remain the province with the highest membership and lobbying power. They are likely to be the kingmakers in the next ANC conference but also keep the ring of steel around Zuma. The president remains untouchable as long as his home province is able to squash any attempt from within the ANC to lobby for an early exit from office. Dissent has been killed off in other provinces such as Limpopo and the North West and the NEC is devoid of any form of resistance.

The Gauteng leadership is unlikely to go kamikaze once again to take on Zuma, considering how the last attempt panned out. This time they are in an even weaker position because no other province is showing any willingness to swim against the tide and challenge the status quo. The province’s leaders have already indicated that they will throw their weight behind Cyril Ramaphosa for the position of ANC president at the next conference.

But KwaZulu-Natal still holds all the cards, with the numbers overwhelmingly in their favour. Although they drew Ramaphosa onto the Zuma ticket at Mangaung on the understanding that they would back his candidacy for president in 2017, it is looking increasingly doubtful that KwaZulu-Natal would do so. KwaZulu-Natal now has three contenders for the post – African Union Commission Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, national treasurer Zweli Mkhize and Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe. Lobbyists in the province consider any of these three as a safer bet to maintain the power networks rather than risking an outsider like Ramaphosa, whose intentions and leadership style remain unknown.

The Gauteng leadership needs to stabilise the province and win back support they lost amongst the middle class and township dwellers. This will not be easy, with corruption scandals still dominating the national agenda and the EFF working hard to tap further into their base. It will therefore be a fine balancing act for the Gauteng ANC to insulate themselves from the national scandals, try to excel in the performance and image of the provincial government and still not be seen as dissenting from the national leadership.

Their survival strategy is dependent on them not agitating Luthuli House too much and working quietly behind the scenes. Do not expect the new Gauteng leadership to be the voices of reason or change agents, at least not any time soon. They have to set in place a three-year timeline and not make sudden moves prematurely that will cause the guillotine from Luthuli House to fall.

So for anyone hoping that the campaign for leadership change is being consummated this weekend, do not hold your breath. The Zuma-Mantashe juggernaut is still very much large and in charge. The provincial conference in Gauteng this weekend is simply making up the opening credits for the next ANC blockbuster. But it is by no means insignificant.

Watch this space. DM

Kissinger’s lessons for today’s policymakers | Vartan Oskanian | Oct 1, 2014

Henry Kissinger’s prescription for global woes remains the same – more realism, less idealism.

As US President Barack Obama was outlining his strategy to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), I was finishing reading Henry Kissinger’s new book “World Order”.     

It’s a Kissinger book. It’s insightful and to the point. He takes a grand view of how we got here. He is dispassionate about understanding and explaining the foreign policy decisions that have been taken and that continue to miss the mark of the all-important equilibrium among great powers. This has been the focus of his writings and speeches for four decades, beginning with his first book, “A World Restored”, describing such efforts in the 19th century.

The bear knows seven songs and they are all about honey – I don’t know if that’s an Armenian saying or a Russian one, but it’s true for Kissinger as well. All of his songs are about understanding Europe’s path to a balance of power and the ways to apply the lessons of those experiences to contemporary conflicts. It is remarkable how consistent he has remained over the decades.

Kissinger’s fascination with this period lies in his hope to find insights on the exercise of power by statesmen such as Castlereagh and Metternich for the development of an international structure that contributed to peace in the century between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of World War I.

Fundamental problem

“The most fundamental problem of politics,” wrote Kissinger, “is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness”.

This is how Kissinger summed up the essence of the “idealism versus realism” debate in his earliest work – his dissertation.

Obama is an idealist, a righteous man. Kissinger is not wicked, but a realist par excellence. His early academic convictions and on-the-job experience as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon and later secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford, makes him the quintessential realist and the exemplary practitioner of balance of power plays in our time.

At 91, his “World Order” may be his last appeal for pragmatism and realism in the face of an increasingly interdependent world with a disintegrating world order.

Today, that realism is more than necessary in the Middle East where the nation-state system is shattered by those who, under the guise of religion, wish to take and wield power in ways that are incongruous with a 21st century world. This dangerous chaos is at least partly the outcome of strategically uncertain, albeit morally laudable, US policy in the larger Middle East.

Kissinger looks at the world, in whole or in parts, from the perspective of a desirable balance of power and the US role in securing it. This policy tool provides the anchor for his realism and allows him to see world events not purely from the point of view of ideology, but rather from a more pragmatic, result-driven perspective.

When in 1973 it became clear that the Vietnam War is not winnable, Kissinger looked for a graceful way out. He forged a detente with the Soviet Union and an opening to China, and then played off both to create a triangular balance of power that preserved US influence after its retreat from Vietnam.

More recently, when the US Senate ratified NATO’s expansion to Eastern Europe in May 1998, Kissinger knowingly wrote: “Russia is bound to have a special concern for security around its vast periphery and the West needs to be careful not to extend its integrated military system too close to Russia’s borders.”

And at the infancy of the Syrian conflict three years ago, when Obama rushed to declare that Bashar al-Assad must go, Kissinger was quick to call the pronouncement premature and a mistake for not knowing who will fill the vacuum created by Assad’s departure.

Obama lacks this mastery. Obama’s equivalent move to Kissinger’s Vietnam balance of power play could be the triangulation between Shia Iran, the Sunni-dominant Gulf region and, Syria and Iraq. This requires a transcending of previously drawn lines and an ability to artfully skew the line between ideology and values.

Broad reconciliation

First, a broader region-wide process of Sunni-Shia reconciliation must begin and it must involve Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. For the common good, this requires understanding and compromise from all involved on issues from territorial disputes, nuclear proliferation and support to different group on both sides of the Sunni-Shia divide.

Second, the West and Iran must redouble their efforts to overcome the last hurdles to reach a sustainable deal on Iran’s nuclear issue. Iran has consistently said that it wants to develop uranium enrichment technology for industrial use. Everyone agrees that Iran has the right to do so. The Iranians have also said that they will continue to honour their commitments and open their doors to observation as members of the non-proliferation community. The West must be more respectful of Iran’s current industrial aims if it wants Iranian cooperation. That cooperation is critical not just to eliminate ISIL’s threat, but for crucial longer term peace and stability in the region.

Third, just as an inclusive government in Baghdad is necessary so is a stable government in Damascus. The United States must recognise that its half-hearted support of the moderate opposition has been a failure and has made things worse for everyone, except ISIL. To train and arm the illusive Syrian moderate opposition to fight ISIL in Syria is too little and is a recipe for prolonging the Syrian civil war by continuing to breed extremist groups. The Syrian conflict and its possible resolution need to be framed differently and need to transcend Assad’s person.

An opening to China, too, seemed unreal. But it happened and it worked. It was not a policy driven by morals, yet did no evil, was pragmatic and despite the earlier policy errors, brought stability to an unstable part of the world.

via Aljazeera

Vartan Oskanian is a member of Armenia’s National Assembly, a former foreign minister and the founder of Yerevan’s Civilitas Foundation.

Eric Holder’s Legacy | By THE EDITORIAL BOARD | SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

Attorney General Eric Holder, fought back tears on Thursday at the White house.

By any measure, the nearly-six-year tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has been one of the most consequential in United States history. His decision to resign, which he announced on Thursday, was long anticipated; he has said he will stay on through his successor’s confirmation. It is hard to imagine that anyone who could make it through the current Senate would have an impact comparable to Mr. Holder’s.

As the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Holder broke ground the moment he took office. In a position that rarely rewards boldness — and in the face of a frequently hostile Congress — Mr. Holder has continued to stake out strong and laudable legal positions on many of the most contested issues of our time. But his record is marred by the role the Justice Department played in matters of secrecy and national security under his leadership.

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: In 2011, Mr. Holder announced that the Justice Department would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage under federal law as between a man and a woman. The law was unconstitutional, he said. It was a critical moment that foreshadowed both President Obama’s own “evolution” on same-sex marriage the following year and the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling invalidating an important part of the law. Since the court’s decision, nearly two dozen federal courts have struck down state bans on same-sex marriage throughout the country, and the Supreme Court has been asked again to rule on whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage — a question it dodged in 2013.

VOTING RIGHTS: Mr. Holder successfully fought discriminatory voting restrictions around the country before the 2012 elections. When the Supreme Court gutted the core of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, he was quick to find new ways to challenge discriminatory laws. Shortly after the ruling, the Justice Department joined lawsuits challenging new restrictions like strict voter-ID requirements and cutbacks to voting hours in North Carolina and Texas. In both states, Republican-controlled legislatures imposed rules that most heavily burden poorer and minority voters, who tend to vote Democratic.

“The history of this nation has always been to try to expand the franchise,” Mr. Holder told The New Yorker in February. “We’ve always found ways in which we’ve made the voting process more inclusive. What these folks are intending to do, or certainly the impact of what they’re going to do, is to turn their backs on that history.”

CRIMINAL JUSTICE: From early in the Obama administration’s first term, Mr. Holder made broad criminal-justice reform a central goal of his tenure. “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason,” he said in a landmark speech last year. He often spoke about the issue in starkly moral terms, no more so than when discussing race. The disproportionately harsh treatment of blacks throughout the criminal justice system, he said, “isn’t just unacceptable; it is shameful.”

Among other things, Mr. Holder strongly supported a 2010 law that eliminated the difference in sentences for crimes involving crack versus powder cocaine. Last year, he ordered federal prosecutors to be more lenient toward low-level drug offenders, and he supported legislation that would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for many drug crimes. He has investigated police departments for excessive force — including in Ferguson, Mo. — and fought for more financing for indigent defense services.

In February, he called for the repeal of “profoundly outdated” felon disenfranchisement laws, which, in some states, prevent as many as one in five African-Americans from voting. And, in April, he directed prosecutors to seek out thousands of prisoners to be considered for early release from overlong drug sentences.

•

While much of Mr. Holder’s legacy rightly will be defined by the improvements he made in areas of civil rights and criminal justice reform, it will also be defined by deeply harmful actions — and failures to act — involving issues of national importance.

Under Mr. Holder, the Justice Department approved the targeted killing of civilians, including Americans, without judicial review, and the Obama administration fought for years to keep the justifications for such efforts secret. In the zeal to stop leaks of government information, Mr. Holder brought more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than during all previous presidencies combined. In tracking the sources of leaks, prosecutors seized phone and email records of journalists who were doing their jobs.

Even as the Justice Department devoted so much misguided energy to preventing leaks, it neglected to prosecute some of the most glaring cases of wrongdoing. Driven by Mr. Obama’s desire to “look forward,” Mr. Holder used claims of government secrecy and immunity to toss out lawsuits seeking accountability for torture and other criminal abuses committed in the war on terror.

On the financial front, he did not prosecute a single prominent banker or firm in connection with the subprime mortgage crisis that nearly destroyed the economy. These are not accomplishments to be proud of.

Of course, Mr. Holder has always served at the pleasure of the president, who has his own policy priorities and political survival to consider. At his best, Mr. Holder stepped up and said things that Mr. Obama could not or would not say. And in wielding the muscle of his office, in a job of exasperating complications and irreconcilable conflicts, Mr. Holder has worked to increase justice for many of America’s most dispossessed or forgotten citizens.

New York Times

Africa’s economy | Poverty is at the heart of Africa’s problems | BBC New

Most of Sub-Saharan Africa is in the World Bank’s lowest income category of less than $765 GNI

Poverty

Poverty is at the heart of Africa’s problems. This is an overview of some of the economic challenges facing the continent.

Most of Sub-Saharan Africa is in the World Bank’s lowest income category of less than $765 Gross National Income (GNI) per person per year. Ethiopia and Burundi are the worst off with just $90 GNI per person.

Even middle income countries like Gabon and Botswana have sizeable sections of the population living in poverty.

North Africa generally fares better than Sub-Saharan Africa. Here, the economies are more stable, trade and tourism are relatively high and Aids is less prevalent.

Development campaigners have argued that the rules on debt, aid and trade need reforming to help lift more African nations out of poverty.

Debt

The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC) was set up in 1996 to reduce the debt of the poorest countries.

Poor countries are eligible for the scheme if they face unsustainable debt that cannot be reduced by traditional methods. They also have to agree to follow certain policies of good governance as defined by the World Bank and the IMF.

Once these are established the country is at “decision point” and the amount of debt relief is established.

Critics of the scheme say the parameters are too strict and more countries should be eligible for HIPC debt relief.

This map shows how much “decision point” HIPC countries spend on repaying debts and interest.

Fourteen African HIPC countries will have their debts totally written off under a new plan drawn up by the G8 finance ministers.

Aid

Africa receives about a third of the total aid given by governments around the world, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Much of this has conditions attached, meaning governments must implement certain policies to receive the aid or must spend the money on goods and services from the donor country.

The World Bank, which is reviewing its conditionality policies, argues that aid is far more effective, and less vulnerable to corruption, when coupled with improved governance.

There was a sharp drop in rich countries’ relative spending on aid in the late 1990s.

The Make Poverty History campaign urged the G8 to raise an extra $50bn more in aid per year and to enforce earlier pledges for developed countries to give 0.7% of their annual GDP in aid.

Trade

Africa is rich in natural resources such as minerals, timber and oil, but trade with the rest of the world is often difficult.

Factors include poor infrastructure, government instability, corruption and the impact of Aids on the population of working age.

Poorer countries and agencies such as Oxfam also argue that international trade rules are unfair and favour the developed world.

They say rich countries “dump” subsidised products on developing nations by undercutting local producers.

And they accuse the World Trade Organisation (WTO) of forcing developing nations to open their markets to the rest of the World but failing to lower rich countries’ tariff barriers in return.

But the WTO says that low income countries receive special treatment, including exemption from some regulations that apply to richer nations.

via BBC News

This map shows how much “decision point” HIPC countries spend on repaying debts and interest.

Africa receives about a third of the total aid given by governments around the world.

Africa is rich in natural resources such as minerals, timber and oil

Menzi Kulati

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