US officials have been working flat out for the past month to secure Robben Island for Barack and Michelle Obama on Sunday.
Fields were cleared for five helicopters to land, US security personnel installed new telephone lines and the museum’s VW sedan emblem was covered for the visit.
Robben Island Museum tourism manager Thulani Mabaso, a former political prisoner, said he didn’t know how many US security officials had been deployed.
On Thursday, he helped two men in civilian clothes with American accents board the ferry to the island.
Helicopters, believed to be part of a security detail that included three CH-46 Sea Knights and two SH-60 Seahawks, landed at the Union Buildings in an exercise in preparation for the official visit of Obama.
The two men didn’t talk to each other or other passengers on the way to the island. They were more concerned about a trolley loaded with five black plastic containers they brought with them.
Mabaso later mentioned to the Cape Times that the men were working for the US government. “The Americans are creating their own communication line between the island and Cape Town,” he said.
Obama’s administration has organised for five helicopters to land on the day, while two will circle the island. Obama will travel in a Volkswagen sedan vehicle, owned by the museum, but Mabaso said they were ordered to cover the car’s emblem. The other officials would travel in mini-buses that also belonged to the museum.
“When president (Bill) Clinton came here the Americans wanted to bring their own two buses, but when they airlifted it with a helicopter from Cape Town the one chain broke and the bus fell in the ocean.”
Mabaso said the SANDF had offered to bring a fire engine and medical equipment to the island. Only 27 of the 280 museum staff would be on the island when the Obamas visited. “We are here to support, but the US handles all the security,” said Mabaso.
The Washington Post reported the US is to use its own aircraft carrier, complete with medical trauma centre, stationed offshore on the Obama visit.
Military cargo planes will bring 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines, to the country. cobus.coetzee@inl.co.za
Obama fully supported protests to overthrow the relatively friendly Egyptian Government of Mubarak. U.S. support paved way for an Islamist takeover by the oppressive and violent Muslim Brotherhood.
Now those suffering the most under this brutal Islamist rule want to protest, and the Obama Administration is trying to prevent it.
As Egyptians of all factions prepare to demonstrate in mass against the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi’s rule on June 30, the latter has been trying to reduce their numbers, which some predict will be in the millions and eclipse the Tahrir protests that earlier ousted Mubarak. Among other influential Egyptians, Morsi recently called on Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II to urge his flock, Egypt’s millions of Christians, not to join the June 30 protests.While that may be expected, more troubling is that the U.S. ambassador to Egypt is also trying to prevent Egyptians from protesting—including the Copts. The June 18th edition of Sadi al-Balad reports that lawyer Ramses Naggar, the Coptic Church’s legal counsel, said that during [Anne W.] Patterson’s June 17 meeting with Pope Tawadros, she “asked him to urge the Copts not to participate” in the demonstrations against Morsi and the Brotherhood. […]
So why is the Obama administration now asking Christians not to oppose their rulers–in this case, Islamists–who have daily proven themselves corrupt and worse, to the point that millions of Egyptians, most of them Muslims, are trying to oust them?
What’s worse is that the human rights abuses Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been suffering under Muslim Brotherhood rule are significantly worse than the human rights abuses that the average Egyptian suffered under Mubarak–making the Copts’ right to protest even more legitimate, and, if anything, more worthy of U.S support.
Among other things, under Morsi’s rule, the persecution of Copts has practically been legalized, as unprecedented numbers of Christians–men, women, and children–have been arrested, often receiving more than double the maximum prison sentence, under the accusation that they “blasphemed” Islam and/or its prophet. It was also under Morsi’s reign that another unprecedented scandal occurred: the St. Mark Cathedral–holiest site of Coptic Christianity and headquarters to the Pope Tawadros himself–was besieged in broad daylight by Islamic rioters. When security came, they too joined in the attack on the cathedral. And the targeting of Christian children–for abduction, ransom, rape, and/or forced conversion—has also reached unprecedented levels under Morsi.
Obama called Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, a “personal hero” during a visit to Senegal this week at the start of his three-country whistle-stop tour through Africa.
US officials says they will comply with the Mandela family’s wishes with regard to Obama visiting the ailing 94-year-old icon or meeting his relatives.
“If and when he passes from this place, one thing I think we’ll all know is that his legacy is one that will linger on throughout the ages,” said Obama, who is due to land in the evening.
Makaziwe Mandela, the former president’s eldest daughter, told SABC television that her father was “waning” but is still responding to his children’s voice and touch.
“When you touch him he still responds, and for us as his progeny as long as tata (father) is still responding when we talk to him and touch him, I think that gives us hope,” she said.
South Africans have been laying wreaths of flowers outside the Pretoria clinic where Mandela is hospitalized and also near his home in Johannesburg.
Candles burned late into the night as people, often emotional, held vigils at the gate to the Pretoria clinic.
Mandela family members have thanked the public repeatedly for their prayers and well-wishes, saying it is giving them strength during a difficult time.
Mandela was hospitalized on June 8 for a recurring lung infection. His situation turned critical on Sunday. He has been hospitalized several times in recent years.
President Jacob Zuma on Thursday said Mandela’s condition was “critical but is now stable.”
A steady stream of family members and relatives have visited Mandela in hospital this week. – SAPA
ident Barack Obama, the Senate on Thursday passed comprehensive immigration reform that would put 11 million undocumented people on a path to earning citizenship.
Chants of “Yes we did!” erupted from the public galleries after senators voted 68-32 to approve the landmark legislation, which pours unprecedented resources into border security, revamps legal immigration and requires a 13-year wait before those without papers can apply to become US citizens.
Fourteen Republicans joined a unanimous Democratic side in what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid deemed a historic vote.
As Vice President Joe Biden presided over the chamber, Reid took the rare move of calling on members to cast votes from their Senate desks.
“We’ve taken giant steps forward towards solving our immigration problem today,” an elated Senator Chuck Schumer, one of the four Democrats who crafted the bill with four Republicans in the so-called “Gang of 8,” told reporters.
The measure now faces a rocky road in the Republican-led House of Representatives, but Schumer and Republican Gang of 8 Senator John McCain made a direct appeal to their colleagues on the other side of the US Capitol: work with us to achieve the most important immigration reform in a quarter century.
“To our friends in the House, we ask for your consideration, and we stand ready to sit down and negotiate with you,” McCain said.
“We may have different views on different aspects of this issue but we should all of us here have the same goal, and that is to take 11 million people out of the shadows, secure our borders, and make sure this is a nation of opportunity and freedom.”
Obama welcomed the Senate vote and urged the House to follow suit.
“Today, with a strong bipartisan vote, the United States Senate delivered for the American people, bringing us a critical step closer to fixing our broken immigration system once and for all,” Obama said.
But the president warned the bill’s supporters to “keep a watchful eye” on efforts to scupper reform, saying “now is the time when opponents will try their hardest to pull this bipartisan effort apart.”
The bill’s authors spent months crafting the 1,000-plus-page document, which pours $46 billion into border security and other efforts, including electronic employment verification and a modernized entry-exit system.
It requires immigrants to pass background checks, pay fees, fines and back taxes, learn English, gain employment, and as Reid said, “stay out of trouble.”
The bill was debated for three weeks on the Senate floor and dozens of amendments were added as Republicans squared off against one another over the merits of the legislation.
Obama hopes to sign immigration reform into law this year, but several House Republicans have said the bill will be dead in the water without significant changes, particularly on border security.
“The House is not going to take up and vote on whatever the Senate passes,” Republican House Speaker John Boehner told reporters.
“We’re going to do our own bill, through regular order, and it’ll be legislation that reflects the will of our majority and the will of the American people.”
Opponents have said the bill is too costly, or argue that loopholes will prevent authorities from gaining full operational control of the border before the citizenship process begins.
“The one thing people are going to be very unhappy with is if they vote for this bill, we document all of these undocumented workers, but then we get 10 million more come into the country,” Senator Rand Paul told AFP.
Shortly before the vote, Senator Marco Rubio, perhaps the legislation’s most forceful advocate and a potential 2016 presidential candidate, made the closing arguments.
Rubio cited his own parents’ flight from Cuba to Florida as reflective of a journey millions of immigrants have taken to a new life in a country whose work ethic, rule of law and opportunity quickly changes them for the better.
“Because well before they became citizens, in their hearts they had already become Americans,” Rubio said.
Mexico welcomed passage of the bill, with the foreign ministry saying in a statement that it had the potential to improve the lives of millions of Mexicans living in the United States.
Earlier this week however Foreign Minister Jose Antonio Meade criticized provisions that would tighten security along the US-Mexico border.
Building more “walls” would not solve the immigration issue, he argued. – AFP
US President Barack Obama flies to South Africa Friday hoping to pay homage to the legacy of his critically ill hero Nelson Mandela, who is fighting for his life in hospital.
Mandela’s ill health means the two men, who shattered racial boundaries on either side of the Atlantic, are not expected to have a long-anticipated meeting for the cameras.
Still, reflections on Mandela’s extraordinary journey from prisoner to president are likely to permeate Obama’s three-day stay.
Mandela, who turns 95 next month, was rushed to hospital three weeks ago with a recurrent lung disease and has since appeared close to death.
On the eve of the visit, South Africa’s first black president was said to be in a critical condition, but had stabilised since a scare forced his successor Jacob Zuma to cancel a trip to neighbouring Mozambique.
“He is much better today,” said Zuma after seeing Mandela on Thursday for the second time in less than 24 hours.
Yet South Africans, including Mandela’s family, remain braced for the worst.
“I won’t lie. It doesn’t look good,” daughter Makaziwe Mandela said. But “if we speak to him he responds and tries to open his eyes — he’s still there.”
“Anything is imminent, but I want to emphasise again that it is only God who knows when the time to go is,” she told local radio.
Meanwhile Obama, the United States’s first black president, led a chorus of support for the man he dubbed a “hero for the world.”
Mandela’s plight has lent a deeply poignant tone to the visit, around which Obama has built a three-nation Africa tour, and his plans could yet be upended by sudden developments in the ex-president’s condition.
“The president will be speaking to the legacy of Nelson Mandela and that will be a significant part of our time in South Africa,” said deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes.
“The president will treasure any opportunity he has to celebrate that legacy.”
The White House says it is in the hands of the Mandela family and the South African authorities on any aspect of the visit.
“We will obviously be very deferential to the developments that take place and the wishes of the family and the South African government,” Rhodes said.
A visit by Obama to Mandela’s former jail cell on Robben Island, off Cape Town on Sunday would now take on extra “profundity”, he added.
Speaking in Senegal on the first leg of his long-awaited African trip, Obama described Mandela as “a personal hero.”
“I think he is a hero for the world, and if and when he passes from this place, one thing I think we all know is that his legacy is one that will linger on throughout the ages.”
The US president recalled how Mandela had inspired him to take up political activity, when he campaigned for the anti-apartheid movement as a student in the late 1970s.
South Africans have also been marking the life of a man who led their country out of centuries of white rule.
Outside Mandela’s hospital a wall of messages and flowers has become the focal point for a nation saying a long goodbye to one of the greatest figures of the 20th century.
“There is no sadness here. There is celebration. He is a giant,” said Nomhlahla Donry, 57, whose husband served time with the revered leader.
Mandela has been hospitalised four times since December, mostly for a stubborn lung infection.
The man once branded a terrorist by the United States and Britain walked free from prison near Cape Town in 1990.
He went on to negotiate an end to white minority rule and won South Africa’s first fully democratic elections in 1994.
He forged a path of racial reconciliation during his single term as president, before taking up a new role as a roving elder statesman and leading AIDS campaigner.
He stepped back from public life in 2004 and has not been seen in public since the football World Cup finals in South Africa in 2010.
But Mandela still draws vast global interest, interest which now appears to be wearing on his family.
Mandela’s oldest daughter Makaziwe on Thursday slammed the “crass” media frenzy around her critically ill father, likening the press to vultures.
“They violate all boundaries,” she said accusing the foreign press of “a racist element” by crossing cultural boundaries.
“It’s like truly vultures waiting when a lion has devoured a buffalo, waiting there you know for the last carcasses.”
With his health now fading, Mandela’s supporters are starting to show signs of resignation — while preparing to celebrate his legacy.
In the rural village of Qunu where he grew up amid cattle and mud-walled huts, 93-year-old Keqane Keledwane said she was not ready to say goodbye to her neighbour.
“I want him to get well. I don’t want to be the only one left behind,” said Keledwane, who lives across the road from Mandela’s house. “I wish him a long life, my old friend.” – AFP
President Barack Obama on Thursday praised the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage as a “victory for American democracy” but clashed with his African host over gay rights in a sign of how far the movement has to go internationally.
Obama said recognition of gay unions in the United States should cross state lines and that equal rights should be recognized universally. It was his first chance to expand on his thoughts about the ruling, which was issued Wednesday as he flew to Senegal, one of many African countries that outlaw homosexuality.
Senegalese President Macky Sall rebuffed Obama’s call for Africans to give gays equal rights under the law.
“We are still not ready to decriminalize homosexuality,” Sall said, while insisting that the country is “very tolerant” and needs more time to digest the issue without pressure. “This does not mean we are homophobic.”
Obama said gay rights didn’t come up in their private meeting at the presidential palace, a mansion that looks somewhat similar to the White House. But Obama said he wants to send a message to Africans that while he respects differing personal and religious views on the matter, it’s important to have nondiscrimination under the law.
“People should be treated equally, and that’s a principle that I think applies universally,” he said.
A report released Monday by Amnesty International says 38 African countries criminalize homosexuality. In four of those – Mauritania, northern Nigeria, southern Somalia and Sudan – the punishment is death. These laws appear to have broad public support. A June 4 Pew Research Center survey found at least nine of 10 respondents in Senegal, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Nigeria believe homosexuality should not be accepted by society.
“Senegal is one of the most stable democracies in Africa and one of the strongest partners that we have in the region,” Obama said. “It’s moving in the right direction with reforms to deepen democratic institutions.”
But such people-powered democratic transitions are not always the story of the African experience. Fighting and human rights abuses limited Obama’s options for stops in his first major tour of sub-Saharan Africa since he took office more than four years ago. Obama is avoiding his father’s homeland, Kenya, whose president has been charged with war crimes, and Nigeria, the country with the continent’s most dominant economy. Nigeria is enveloped in a bloody struggle and military crackdown. – AP
The Israeli branch of McDonald’s says it won’t open a restaurant in a Jewish settlement to protest Israel settlement policy.
Irina Shalmor, spokeswoman for McDonald’s Israel, said the owners of a planned mall in the Ariel settlement asked McDonald’s to open a branch there about six months ago. The chain refused because it is the policy of McDonald’s Israel’s owner to stay out of the occupied territories.
The decision was not coordinated with McDonald’s headquarters in the U.S., she said.
Israeli lawmakers have protested the decision, reported in local media Thursday. One says she’ll boycott the chain.
Tzahi Nehimias, co-owner of the mall, says Burger King and an Israeli burger chain both offered to open branches at the mall.
America’s first black president Barack Obama will acknowledge the historic stain of slavery and honour Senegal’s democratic resilience in an unstable region Thursday, at the start of an African tour.
Obama stepped off Air Force One into the African night late Wednesday in Dakar to launch a three-nation trip designed to fulfil neglected expectations for his presidency on a continent where he has deep ancestral roots.
But his itinerary, which also takes in South Africa and Tanzania, threatens to be disrupted as life apparently ebbs from Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon who is gravely ill in a Pretoria hospital.
Should Mandela die before Obama lands in South Africa on Friday, aides may be forced to tear up plans to visit Johannesburg and Cape Town. As it stands, the ex-South African president’s plight is already overshadowing Obama’s trip.
On Thursday, Obama will begin his day with talks and a press conference with Senegal President Macky Sall. Then he will discuss the importance of the rule of law at Senegal’s Supreme Court.
A ‘full circle’ moment then beckons as Obama, the son of a Kenyan, and his wife Michelle, the descendent of slaves, will pay a visit to Goree Island, a memorial to Africans swept up in the Atlantic slave trade.
Obama will journey by ferry to the island’s Slave House museum, off the Senegal coast, which epitomises a dark period of American and African history resonating on both sides of the Atlantic to this day.
“There’s this link between Obama, an American originating from Africa through his father, and his wife, an African-American originating from Africa through her ancestors,” said House of Slaves curator Eloi Coly.
“I think with all these ingredients gathered together, this visit by the Obamas should be very special.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the visit would be an important moment for Obama.
“A visit like this by an American President, any American President, is powerful,” he told reporters.
“I think that will be the case when President Obama visits and I’m sure particularly so, given that he is African American.”
US officials are keen to highlight democracy, in Muslim majority Senegal, on the first leg of a visit focusing on francophone west Africa, the tip of the continent in South Africa, and the democratic west in Tanzania.
Obama will also likely bring up the situation in neighbouring Mali, before a UN peacekeeping force starts operations in a country where Islamists and radicals have exploited a power vacuum.
The US president’s arrival in Africa came at a delicate time as the world prepared to say a farewell to Mandela.
Napilisi Mandela, an elder in Mandela’s clan, told AFP that the former South African president was on life support, and South African President Jacob Zuma called off a scheduled trip to Mozambique.
Obama and Mandela met in 2005, when the former South African president was in Washington, and Obama was a newly elected senator, and the two have spoken several times since by telephone.
But the long awaited prospect of a public appearance between the first black presidents of South Africa and the United States is now impossible.
Obama claims a spiritual connection to Africa, but a crush of international crises in his first term thwarted his hopes to travel extensively in the continent. He did manage a short trip to Ghana in 2009.
His tour is designed to highlight Africa’s emerging economic potential and growing middle class, as well as youth and health programs, and to emphasise US engagement in a region benefiting from a wave of Chinese investment.
“We are not too late,” said Carney, pointing out that although Obama had been kept away, Vice President Joe Biden visited Africa in the first term, and there were also wide ranging diplomatic efforts by the administration on the continent.
But there has been disappointment in Africa, after Obama’s 2008 election caused euphoria and an expectation that he would put Africa policy at the top of his agenda.
There is one glaring missing stop on Obama’s itinerary: Kenya.
Officials said that the indictment of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, over previous election violence, made it politically impossible for Obama to stop by on this tour. – AFP
While raising money for Bill Clinton (who signed the Defense of Marriage Act) in 1992, Rahm Emanuel proclaimed “Gays are the next Jews of fundraising.”
I’m not 100 percent sure what he meant by that, but Democrats have certainly grabbed onto gay issues as a fundraising lever. Democrats today are using the gay marriage ruling as a way to raise money, Paul Bedard writes.
Obama’s core network of fundraisers included many gay men and women who were also gay-marriage activists. I wrote on this after Obama spurred a fundraising boom by announcing his support for gay marriage.
“About 20 percent of Obama’s bundlers — volunteer fundraisers — are gay, according to media reports, with many of them being gay rights activists. For example, Sally Susman has raised at least $500,000 for Obama’s re-election.
Millionaire banking mogul Eugene Sepulveda is another gay half-million-dollar Obama bundler. Rufus Gifford is the finance director for Obama’s re-election campaign, and Andrew Tobias is treasurer of the Democratic National Committee — and both are gay.” – The Washington Examiner
The US Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a central portion of a federal law that restricted the definition of marriage to opposite-sex couples in a major victory for the gay rights movement.
The ruling, on a 5-4 vote, means that legally married gay men and women are entitled to claim the same federal benefits that are available to opposite-sex married couples.
It sidestepped a broad ruling that would affect the whole country, however, by saying it could not decide a closely watched case on the constitutionality of a California law that restricts marriage to opposite-sex couples.
By finding that supporters of the ban on gay marriage did not have standing to defend the law, the court effectively gave the green light for at least some gay weddings to proceed in California because a federal judge’s original ruling that struck down the law, known as Proposition 8, will remain intact.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that the Defence of Marriage Act violated the US constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
“The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity,” he wrote.
Justice Kennedy, often the court’s swing vote in close decisions, also said the law imposed “a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the states”.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia both wrote dissenting opinions.
In his dissent, Justice Roberts wrote that the court in the coming Proposition 8 case would not reach the issue of constitutionality of state laws that limited the definition of marriage.
By striking down section 3 of the law, the court clears the way to more than 1,100 federal benefits, rights and burdens linked to marriage status.
As a result of Wednesday’s ruling, Edith Windsor of New York, who was married to a woman and sued the government to get the federal estate tax deduction available to heterosexuals when their spouses die, will be able to claim a $363,000 tax refund. – Reuters
Mr Obama is arriving in Africa this time with a few tricks up his sleeve. He will announce the creation of a new fund, Power Africa, to support the development of electricity infrastructure with a mix of state and private investment as well as initiatives to promote trade. His trip coincides with talks in Addis Ababa on renewing the Clinton era African Growth and Opportunity Act, which gave thousands of African products duty-free access to the US.
Nearly 600 million Africans face energy poverty, the inability to cook with modern cooking fuels and a lack of minimum lighting for productive activities at sunset. This energy gap impacts a variety of health, education and economic outcomes: Vaccines cannot be properly refrigerated, girls are pulled out of school to collect firewood, and small businesses cannot expand because of energy limitations.
As the Obama team considers a policy legacy for Africa during its second term starting in 2013, advisors believe a strong U.S. commitment to close the energy poverty gap in Africa can benefit the global economy.
With strategic interventions, the U.S. could address this energy poverty gap while at the same time create markets and increase investments for American businesses. If the White House leverages private investment by rationalizing U.S. government tools, such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and engages proactively with African environmental powers, the U.S. could make a significant contribution to accomplishing this achievable goal.
For the past couple of decades, U.S. companies have piled into Asia to reach new consumers. Now companies such as General Electric Co., General Motors Co. and Procter & Gamble Co. are expanding in the long-neglected frontier market of Africa.
GE on Friday signed an agreement to build a 400-megawatt gas-fired power plant in Tanzania. The East African country, where U.S. President Barack Obama plans to visit next week, is one of many on the continent that is seeking more electricity to meet growing demand from businesses and consumers.
Meanwhile, P&G is investing more than $150 million in its South African factories to expand the supply of its diapers and other products in southern and eastern Africa. And GM in October plans to start selling newly licensed Isuzu trucks in Kenya, Nigeria and Angola.
Until recently, most U.S. companies concentrated investment in the continent’s biggest economies, such as South Africa and Nigeria, or those with mineral wealth, like Angola. But as they seek new consumers, U.S. companies are branching out across the continent.
“People are finding that there are opportunities beyond the biggest markets in Africa, and part of it is because year-after-year growth in Africa has been stronger than on almost any other continent,” says Clay Lowery, a vice president at Rock Creek Global Advisors, an economic-policy consulting firm in Washington.
By 2018, five of the world’s fastest-growing economies will be in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the International Monetary Fund. U.S. companies invested $48.5 billion in Africa in the decade through 2011, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, more than companies from any other nation did. But China and India are catching up, pumping billions of dollars into Africa in each of the past few years.
President Obama’s visit to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania beginning Wednesday is expected to bolster efforts to burrow into the continent’s smaller, more fragmented markets.
U.S. officials for years have urged American corporations to pursue opportunities in Africa to keep pace with the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian companies already here. On a trip to Senegal last August, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton touted U.S. businesses’ “sustainable partnerships in Africa that add value rather than extract it,” a thinly veiled reference to Chinese companies, which largely are focused on resource-related investments to support China’s economy.
U.S. corporations aren’t strangers to Africa. Companies including Coca-Cola Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. have long invested on the continent and have been expanding. Since 2000, the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act has boosted African manufacturers, allowing them to export clothing to the U.S. duty free.
But many U.S. companies are only now waking up to Africa’s new consumer class, a byproduct of steady growth and more stable governments.
Stronger commercial relationships, some analysts say, could strengthen diplomatic ties with many African countries, as happened in China, India and elsewhere in Asia.
“We were never focused on Africa in any way,” says Witney Schneidman, a former U.S. diplomat and now a senior adviser for Africa for law firm Covington & Burling LLP. “Are corporates the agents of change?”
Africa is far from being the next Asia, however. The continent has a sixth of the world’s population but fuels less than 3% of the global economy. Africa also received less than 3% of global foreign direct investment in 2011, according to the U.N.
But the continent is growing fast from its low base. The IMF projects that sub-Saharan Africa’s economy will expand 5.6% this year, compared with 3.6% world-wide. The African Development Bank estimates that the continent’s emerging middle class may already be 300 million strong. – FT/WSJ/Brookings
Advance orders for Paula Deen’s new cookbook have surged since the Food Network and Smithfield Foods axed her for using a racial slur.
Orders for “Paula Deen’s New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up” surged on Amazon by nearly 1,300% in the last 24 hours.
The cookbook was ranked 115th on Tuesday, compared to a ranking of 1,592nd on Monday
“Paula Deen’s New Testament” is not available until October. Deen’s agent did not immediately return a message from CNNMoney about the book sales.
Scripps Networks Interactive’s Food Network announced June 21 that it would not renew Deen’s contract after reports emerged that she admitted, during a court deposition in May, using racial slurs.
“Yes, of course,” said Deen, when asked by a lawyer if she had ever used the “N word.”
Deen’s television contract expires at the end of June.
Pork producer and former Deen sponsor Smithfield Foods cut its ties on Monday. – CNNMoney
The hopeful story President Barack Obama wants to tell about Africa is represented in the first stop of his weeklong trip to re-engage the continent, in a country where democracy recently overcame an impending electoral crisis.
During his visit to Senegal on Thursday, Obama also will reflect on the ties many African-Americans share with the continent as he takes a tour of Goree Island, Africa’s westernmost point. By some accounts, millions of Africans were shipped off into slavery across the Atlantic Ocean through the island’s “Door of No Return.”
It’s the first of two island visits Obama planned to highlight racial atrocities of the past. The second was scheduled for Sunday at South Africa’s Robben Island, where anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years.
But Mandela’s condition could affect Obama’s plans. The former South African president is gravely ill, and Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes said it would be left to the Mandela family to decide whether he is up for a visit from Obama this weekend.
Mandela’s legacy hangs over the entire trip, with Senegal among many African countries that have benefited from his example of a peaceful transition to power. “So much of the democratic progress that we see across the continent I think can be tied in some way to the inspiration that Nelson Mandela set,” Rhodes said.
Obama’s focus in Senegal will be on the modern-day achievements of the former French colony after half a century of independence. He planned to meet with Senegalese President Macky Sall, who ousted an incumbent president who attempted to change the constitution to make it easier for him to be re-elected and pave the way for his son to succeed him. The power grab sparked protests, fueled by hip-hop music and social media, that led to Sall’s election.
But such people-powered democratic transitions are not always the story of the African experience. Fighting and human rights abuses limited Obama’s options for stops in his first major tour of sub-Saharan Africa since he took office more than four years ago. Obama is avoiding his father’s homeland, Kenya, whose president has been charged with war crimes, and Nigeria, the country with the continent’s most dominant economy. Nigeria is enveloped in an Islamist insurgency and military crackdown.
Obama’s itinerary in Senegal was designed to send a message, purposefully delivered in a French-speaking, Muslim-majority nation, to other Africans in countries that have not made the strides toward democracy that Senegal has. Obama plans to meet with civil society leaders at the Goree Institute and visit the Supreme Court to speak about the importance of an independent judiciary and the rule of law in Africa’s development.
“It’s not enough to have elections, it’s not enough to have democratically elected leaders,” Rhodes said. “You need to have independent judiciaries. You need to have confidence in the rule of law. You need to have efforts to combat corruption. Because, frankly, not only is that good for democracy and respect for human rights, but it’s critical to Africa’s economic growth, because where you have clear rules of the road and efforts to combat corruption, businesses will invest, and jobs will be created and growth will take off. And that’s what we want to see.” – AP
US ambassador Susan Rice left the United Nations on Tuesday slamming the Security Council’s failure to act over the worsening Syria conflict as a “moral and strategic disgrace.”
But while Rice criticized Russia and China for their veto of resolutions on the Syria war, she said it was not inevitable that relations with Russia would continue to sour.
Rice, who moves to become President Barack Obama’s national security advisor, said: “The repeated failure of the Security Council to unify on the crucial issue of Syria I think is a stain on this body and something that I will forever regret.”
“The council’s inaction on Syria is a moral and strategic disgrace that history will judge harshly,” Rice told reporters after making her farewells to other UN envoys after four and a half years as US ambassador.
Russia and China have three times used their vetoes as permanent members of the Security Council to block western-proposed resolutions that would have increased pressure on President Bashar al-Assad.
Rice stressed that there were no sanctions or threats of force in the proposed resolutions which she called “very mild.”
“Yet we have been paralyzed, and I don’t know how in any circumstance one could ascribe that to a failure of US policy or US leadership, when the vast majority of the council was ready and willing to move ahead.”
Russia and China accused the United States, France and Britain of only seeking regime change in Syria, where the United Nations says more than 93,000 people have been killed in the past 27 months.
Rice said tougher sanctions against Iran and North Korea had been a Security Council success and showed it was possible to work with Russia, which could become a key dossier in her new White House job.
At Rice’s final closed consultations, Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin read out a mock council statement which “expressed relief” at Rice’s departure, according to diplomats at the meeting.
Russia is a “complex” relationship, Rice acknowledged to reporters after the good natured farewell from her rival envoy.
“While there are certainly important points of divergence, and there have been points of friction and there undoubtedly will be in the future, I am not prepared to predict that that is inevitable,” she said.
“On issues as important as Iran and North Korea, and many others, we have been able to find common ground and effect outcomes that have been beneficial,” Rice said.
Samantha Power, a White House advisor, has been named as the new UN ambassador and is awaiting Congress confirmation. – AFP
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