Ahmadinejad thanks Pope for condemning Koran burning

Ahmadinejad thanks Pope for condemning Koran burning

Ahmadinejad thanks Pope for condemning Koran burning

Posted: 07 Oct 2010 12:30 AM PDT

TEHRAN, Thursday 7 October 2010 (AFP) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written a letter to Pope Benedict XVI thanking him for condemning an American pastor's threat to burn the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

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Police give security handbook to Philippine journalists

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 03:25 PM PDT

MANILA: Police said today they would hand out security handbooks to journalists in the Philippines, which is described by press monitors as one of the most deadly environments for the media profession.

The 48-page booklet provides helpful tips on how members of the press can go about their work without being targeted for attack, national police chief Raul Bacalzo said.

"The intention is to provide media practitioners with the basic knowledge and practical skills in securing themselves and their family, determining possible threats and improving communications," Bacalzo said in a statement.

Last year alone, 38 journalists were killed in the Philippines, according to media watchdog the International Press Institute. Thirty-two of them were among 57 people killed in a massacre blamed on a political warlord in the southern Philippines.

Three journalists were killed in one week in June this year.

"The police can never secure every single citizen every minute of the day. But studies suggest that some of the deaths could have been prevented if a few basic precautions had been followed," Bacalzo said.

The handbook, which will be given to media organisations as well as police units, contains tips on threat detection and personal security, said chief police investigator Chief Superintendent Arturo Cacdac.

Police will also sponsor security-related training seminars for provincial journalists, national police spokesman Senior Superintendent Agrimero Cruz said.

A gun culture, a free-wheeling press and massive corruption are some of the factors that make the Southeast Asian nation dangerous for journalists.

Criminal gangs, politicians and other powerful interests typically murder journalists to silence them and intimidate other media workers.

- AFP

Quebec fights losing battle against natural gas

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 03:22 PM PDT

By Clement Sabourin

SAINT-HYACINTHE: Natural gas was only discovered beneath the shores of Canada's scenic Saint Lawrence seaway two years ago, but already locals fear a "gold rush" by energy companies thirsting to drill.

At a recent town hall meeting to unveil their natural gas development plans, industry representatives were heckled by an angry mob concerned mostly for the environment. "Your objective... is money," the crowd cried.

"Companies are doing like people did during the gold rush in the 1850s in California. They arrive and say 'We're home,'" said Gerard Montpetit.

He is one of the 600 residents of Saint Hyacinthe and surrounding communities, 50 kilometers (31 miles) east of Montreal, who attended the meeting meant to assuage fears.

For weeks, the elderly pensioner has travelled across the province to participate in debates on whether to allow the industry to dig wells in Canada's "Beautiful Province" in search of a wealth of natural gas believed hidden beneath the ground.

At the Saint Hyacinthe meeting, he was among the majority opposed to natural gas exploration in the province, railing against a campaign of "disinformation" directed at Quebecers.

The latest poll showed only 20% of Quebecers support developing the resource.

Environmental risks

Some are calling for the industry to be nationalised, while others want it stopped. Several denounced the secrecy surrounding the issue. And all point to the environmental risks, citing an example in the US state of Pennsylvania, where locals accused the natural gas industry of polluting ground water.

Barely two years ago, shale natural gas was discovered in the clay 2,000 metres (6,600 feet) beneath the shores of the Saint Lawrence seaway between Montreal and Quebec City.

This summer, many in the valley began to notice strange reddish flames in the sky above, coupled with loud detonations: natural gas exploration had begun pinpointing possible viable well locations. Gas extraction would soon follow.

More than 150 prospecting licences have been issued, including in the city of Montreal itself. Some 20 exploration wells have so far been dug within 100m (328 feet) of a school, behind a farm, even in a corn field.

According to the industry, the deposits will assure Quebec's energy independence for the next century, with six billion cubic metres of natural gas extracted annually.

"Over 10 years, this will represent two billion dollars of investment annually and 7,500 jobs," said Andre Caille, president of the Quebec Oil and Gas Association.

But instead of rejoicing in this prospective prosperity, most of the province's 7.9 million habitants appear worried about embarking on this path and where it will lead. Until now, Quebec has never produced any hydrocarbons.

"We have a beautiful province, let's not mess it up," Marc Beaule told the town hall meeting.

Strong support

Concerned about the wellbeing of her daughter whose school is a stone's throw from a natural gas well, Marie-Eve Mathieu said: "Democracy is being denied."

"I learned about the well only the day before yesterday. Nobody had bothered to point it out to us before," she said.

Despite fierce opposition, exploration drilling is likely to continue for the time being.

The Quebec government has ordered an investigation into possible environmental risks of natural gas extraction, but also expressed strong support for development of a local hydrocarbon industry.

Producers are just waiting for regulatory permission to get it off the ground.

Canbriam Energy chief executive Paul Myers said Quebec could see peak production in about 10 years. His company has already spent US$40 million to determine if the Quebec deposits hold sufficient quantities to be economically viable.

In his view, "shale gas is a clean energy and an alternative to most of the others hydrocarbons".

- AFP

Japan PM rival says to stay in ruling party

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:49 PM PDT

TOKYO, Oct 7 — Japanese powerbroker Ichiro Ozawa, facing charges over a funding scandal, said on Thursday he will stay in the country's ruling party, clouding government efforts to reach policy deals with opposition parties. "I will simply continue political activities so long as I am needed," Ozawa (picture) told reporters. Prime Minister Naoto ...


Death of matriarch lifts veil on Singapore's first family

Posted: 07 Oct 2010 12:02 AM PDT

SINGAPORE, Thursday 7 October 2010 (AFP) - Singaporeans got a rare glimpse into the private life of the country's most powerful family on Thursday following the funeral of elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew's wife.

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Does one become wiser as one gets older?

Posted: 07 Oct 2010 12:00 AM PDT

Is the 70-year-old Tun Lim Keng Yaik trying to follow the example of former Prime Minister Tun Mahathir Mohamd to prove that one becomes wiser as one gets older?

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Israel bombs Hamas base in Gaza, no one hurt

Posted: 07 Oct 2010 12:17 AM PDT

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli war planes bombed a Hamas Islamist training camp in the Gaza Strip before dawn on Thursday following a rocket launching from the enclave a day earlier, Israeli military sources and Hamas officials said.


Shipping emissions plan scuttled

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:43 PM PDT

Environmentalists at the UN climate talks in the Chinese city of Tianjin have criticised China and other big developing nations for blocking a plan to cut emissions from shipping.


S.Korea's Samsung Q3 forecast hit by Western demand

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:49 PM PDT

SEOUL, Thursday 7 October 2010 (AFP) - Samsung Electronics Thursday estimated its third-quarter operating profit at 4.8 trillion won (4.29 billion dollars), lower than expected amid concerns about slowing Western demand.

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Indonesian noodle giant sizzles on market debut

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:48 PM PDT

JAKARTA, Thursday 7 October 2010 (AFP) - Shares in Indonesian noodle maker Indofood Consumer Branded Products (ICBP) soared on its debut Thursday after last month's massively oversubscribed initial public offering, dealers said.

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Home ministry receives the most complaints

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:35 PM PDT

The Home Ministry received the highest number of complaints from the public over the first eight months this year as compared to other ministries, its Corporate Communications Division chief Jamilah Taib said today.

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Kedah govt urged to lodge report on irregularities in water issue

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:35 PM PDT

The Kedah Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has asked the state government or any quarters with information on the alleged irregularities concerning the water issue in Kedah to lodge a report.

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Rarefying dates in Morocco

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:27 PM PDT

(AFP) - The date harvest has begun once again in southern Morocco. It is a crop that has long formed a part of the country's history, but its place in Morocco's future could be in doubt. Following successive droughts coupled with increasing modernisation, the fruit -- which plays a crucial role in holding back the encroaching desert -- now finds itself fighting to survive. Copyright (AFP RELAXNEWS/ AFPTV), 2010.

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Japan PM rival Ozawa says to stay in ruling party

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:44 PM PDT

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese powerbroker Ichiro Ozawa, facing charges over a funding scandal, said on Thursday he will stay in the ruling party, clouding government efforts to reach policy deals with opposition parties in a divided parliament.


Poor healthcare may shorten American lives - study

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 11:44 PM PDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans die sooner than citizens of a dozen other developed nations and the usual suspects -- obesity, traffic accidents and a high murder rate -- are not to blame, researchers reported on Thursday.


South Lebanon eager to see Ahmadinejad at Israel's doorstep

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 03:08 PM PDT

By Rana Moussaoui

KFAR KILA: Residents of southern Lebanon are brimming with excitement ahead of a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is expected to tour the border area with his arch-enemy Israel in a message of defiance.

"I can't wait to see Ahmadinejad get close to the barbed wire and show the Israelis that he has them by the throat," said Abdullah, of the border village of Kfar Kila, who refused to give his real name.

"Can you imagine? He is going to stand barely a metre from Israel and that's so symbolic," added Abdullah, who runs a restaurant at Fatima Gate, just beyond the border fence between the two countries.

The Iranian leader's visit to Lebanon on Oct 13 and 14 is at the invitation of his counterpart Michel Sleiman.

The official first day of the trip, his first to Lebanon since he became president, is expected to proceed smoothly.

It is the unofficial part the following day, when Ahmadinejad is set to be taken on a tour of the south by the Shi'ite militant group Hezbollah -- considered a proxy of Iran -- that has prompted jitters.

Members of Lebanon's pro-Western parliamentary majority have labelled that a provocation. That is especially so as it comes at a time of high tension over unconfirmed reports that a UN-backed tribunal is set to charge Hezbollah members in connection with the 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the current prime minister's father.

Washington, which along with its allies is embroiled in a long-running dispute with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme, this week also expressed concern over Ahmadinejad's visit, and Israel likened it to "a big landowner coming to inspect his property".

Hero's welcome

Hezbollah, which is blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by the United States, has provided no details on the visit but preparations for a hero's welcome are going full throttle in areas controlled by the militant party.

A huge poster of Ahmadinejad along with a welcoming message in Arabic and Farsi has been plastered on a bridge along the highway leading to Beirut's international airport and his portraits can be seen in Hezbollah's stronghold in southern Beirut.

In the south, Ahmadinejad is expected to visit the village of Qana, which suffered deadly Israeli raids in 1996 and 2006, and Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah bastion and border village destroyed during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.

He is also due to inaugurate a tourist park named "Iran Garden" in the nearby village of Marun al-Ras, which was funded by Iran and includes a small reproduction of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque.

A visit to a war museum built by Hezbollah in the town of Mlita is also reportedly on the programme.

"We owe our survival to Iran," said Taleb, a resident of Bint Jbeil who owns an auto parts shop. "Ahmadinejad is a real man of faith."

The Islamic republic heavily financed the reconstruction of southern Lebanon after the 2006 war and more recently said it stood ready to offer military aid.

"Iran helped us more than the Lebanese state," said Khadijeh, 70, a resident of Qana who hoped to thank Ahmadinejad personally.

Abdullah for his part said nothing could stop the Iranian leader from visiting the volatile border region.

"No country can prevent him from coming here," he said. "He is the head of a nuclear power and Israel wouldn't dare do anything to harm him."

But not everyone in the region is jumping with joy at the Iranian leader's visit, especially in villages outside Hezbollah's influence, such as Marjayoun, which has a mix of Christian and Muslim residents.

"The situation is already tense in Lebanon and why raise that tension further?" asked Rami, a Christian shop owner.

Added Salwa, a 50-year-old baker: "This visit can provoke the Israelis and end up dangerous for us."

- AFP

Mexico's growing legion of narco orphans

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 02:40 PM PDT

By Catherine Bremer

SPECIAL REPORT CIUDAD JUAREZ (Mexico): A forlorn little figure, five-year-old Bryan perches at the door of Irma Casas' office at a women's shelter in this murderous border city. He has walked all the way here to tell her, again, that his mother is in a bad way, again.

At 23, Bryan's mother recently became a drug war widow for the second time when her narcotics smuggler husband was shot in the head by a teenage hitman who strolled up to their home as he was parking outside, with Bryan, his mother and baby sister in the car.

Bryan gabbles uncontrollably, Casas says, about how it was to see his stepfather's brains spill out of his head that day.

It was just one more killing in a brutal war between rival drug trafficking cartels and Mexican security forces that has killed nearly 30,000 people in under four years.

As far as Casas knows, nobody is tracking Bryan's attendance at school or providing therapy. The omens for his future aren't good.

"She is aware of the risks to her children but she's always lived in this world. She has no examples of other ways to live," Casas said as she recounted the story of Marisol, one of thousands of drug widows in Ciudad Juarez, which has jumped ahead of places like Baghdad and Caracas to become the world's murder capital.

Marisol was a pretty 17-year-old when Bryan's father, a big-league local drug lord, seduced her and took her off as a permanent mistress. He kept her shut up in one of his houses and took to beating her before he was shot dead by a hired gun from a rival gang. She married a lower-level trafficker and they had a baby girl. But since he was murdered she sits at home, depressed and bloated from drinking all day. To stop her infant daughter from screaming, she bottle-feeds her with beer.

Squashed into a two-room cinderblock house in a vast and soulless slum on the edge of Ciudad Juarez with her sister, also widowed, and her teenage kids, Marisol plans to prostitute herself to other drug smugglers in what could be the final straw for the future of her two young children.

Decapitated bodies. Murder victims hanging from bridges. Blood crusted on street curbs where an assassin has struck.

These are the gruesome images the world has come to associate with Mexico's drug war. But, out of view, the plight of so-called narco orphans like Bryan is just as haunting. It may also foretell more mayhem in the years to come.

With shoddy education standards and poor career prospects already holding back Mexico's youth, people like Casas worry about the impact on society of tens of thousands of kids growing up emotionally traumatised and with their prospects for building a better life for themselves in tatters.

"There is an enormous cost because these kids aren't children as they should be. They are future criminals. What other aspirations are they going to have? What kind of future awaits them?" Casas said over an uncomfortably early supper in a brightly lit mall in Ciudad Juarez, where these days people avoid side streets and don't stay out after dark.

Neither Mexico's government nor the various independent groups studying organised crime keep track of the number of narco orphans who have lost fathers, and sometimes mothers too, to the drug war.

Veteran human rights lawyer Gustavo de la Rosa, an investigator for the Chihuahua state human rights commission that covers Ciudad Juarez, analysed a pool of 5,000 drug war dead in the city, only separated from El Paso, Texas, by a wire fence and the dry river bed of the Rio Grande. Based on data showing Mexican men aged 18-35 have an average 1.7 kids, de la Rosa estimated they left 8,500 orphans behind.

Extend the math over a national level and Mexico, which considers a child to be orphaned even if its mother survives, could be looking at a total of 50,000 drug war orphans to date.

"It's like a war zone," de la Rosa said. "There is no programme, no interest from any organisation to look after the situation of orphans. These people are living on a knife edge but for the government it's as if the problem doesn't exist. It's left for the families to deal with."

Mexican hemorrhage

President Felipe Calderon launched his drug war upon taking office in December 2006 to take a tough stand against drug cartels whose power had grown steadily over decades of one-party rule.

Calderon says his offensive has weakened the cartels' operations, but it has backfired by setting off horrific levels of bloodshed and tainting Mexico's standing as a stable developing economy that is safe for foreign companies and tourists alike.

This year, drug gangs have taken their battle tactics to unprecedented new levels, setting off car bombs, murdering a spate of town mayors and threatening, abducting and killing journalists.

Calderon has admitted that the security risk in Mexico has reached a disturbing new level. His Attorney-General Arturo Chavez describes the drug violence as a "hemorrhage".

While government officials stress that Mexico's overall homicide levels are low, headlines about open-air shootouts and mutilated corpses dumped everywhere from the resort of Acapulco to cobblestone getaway towns near Mexico City are alarming foreigners and the US government.

Increasingly, the nation's plight is drawing parallels with Colombia, which is still scarred from its fight in the 1980s and early 90s with full-on narco terrorism.

National security spokesman Alejandro Poire told reporters in September that the government's goal has always been to make the country safer. "The battle without quarter undertaken by the federal government against criminal organisations is causing their visible deterioration," he said.

Most of Mexico's drug war victims are traffickers, hitmen and police, some of them targeted for being in the pay of rival smuggling gangs, and there is a tendency in official quarters to dismiss the dead as bad guys who had it coming.

Yet analysts and academics reckon several thousand of the victims were innocent cops or civilians caught up in the cross fire, and at least 1,000 were minors: either the offspring of traffickers or hitmen, or teenagers sucked into drug crime for want of better opportunities in a country which has a third of its employed workforce stuck in the gray economy.

The growing pool of drug war orphans is a stain on Mexico's social fabric. Too small to make a major dent in the country's future economic growth, they are easy to ignore, but these kids, largely abandoned by the authorities, will be tomorrow's criminals and long-term unemployed when they could have been pushing into Mexico's still-too-small middle class with blue-collar jobs or small businesses.

In Ciudad Juarez, a dismal mass of assembly plants and slum housing that counts 300 murders a month in a population of 1.5 million, many are left unsupervised, making them easy prey for recruiters for the city's several hundred criminal gangs, as their widowed mothers go out to work long factory shifts.

The street gangs are training camps for hired killers, now in strong demand by the drug cartels who are losing dozens of young men a day in slayings around the country. US author Charles Bowden, who has studied Ciudad Juarez closely, estimates half of the adolescents there are unemployed or cannot afford to go to school.

"There is an opportunity cost from these hundreds of thousands of youths in Mexico who are either orphaned or part of criminal gangs," said Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on armed conflict and Mexico's drug trade who increasingly talks about Mexico and Afghanistan in the same sentence.

"These are people who are growing up with high levels of deprivation, in dysfunctional families, with sexual abuse, and these risk factors should be addressed. There's no policy to address these issues and we are really concerned that at some point it will be too late to stop the social unrest to come."

Graves and fake flowers

Mexico is ranked 53rd out of 182 countries in a 2009 United Nations Human Development Index, below Cuba but well above Brazil and among the highest developing country scores.

The ranking masks the fact that a tiny elite in Mexico drips with wealth and business opportunities while almost half the country lives under the national poverty line. Corruption and organised crime have always exacerbated poverty levels in Mexico, which was under one party rule for seven decades until 2000.

Now more pervasive than ever, crime gangs hurt family businesses with extortion demands and kidnap ransoms. Society suffers as the government plows funds that could have gone into education into fighting crime gangs. The oil producing nation has spent several billion dollars so far on Calderon's army-led drug war.

Of those youths on the bottom rung of Mexico's economic ladder, too many are now dying in drug-plagued cities before they even have a chance to start a career, judging by the rows of graves of teenagers and youths in their early 20s in Ciudad Juarez's San Rafael cemetery.

Gaudy fake flowers and cheap wood crosses painted white mark the drug war graves of the last few years, including children as young as four. Flies buzz over mounds of fresh earth at the communal grave where unidentified bodies are buried.

"We have to review the way children are being affected by this drug war. There is impunity. The facts are not being investigated," said Juan Martin Perez, head of Mexico's Network for the Rights of Children, a non-governmental organisation.

The Mexican government does not keep a count of child deaths in drug violence but Perez's calculations from local media and official data show that 1,120 children have died in the three-and-a-half years of drug violence since Calderon took power.

"The worst thing is that there is no official response to try and prevent children dying, to stop them being used in organised crime. Practically nobody is talking about this," Perez said.

"Mexico is losing investment and tourism, but perhaps the most serious thing is that we are losing the lives of children. Not only the dead ones but all the others affected by this."

Junior hitmen

A top US trade partner and oil supplier with robust manufacturing and tourism industries, Mexico has been an emerging markets darling for years, even despite its 1994 "Tequila Crisis" currency collapse. While some foreign companies in Mexico tell pollsters they are growing more nervous about drug violence, foreign direct investment is steady and Mexico's peso currency and stock markets have yet to suffer from the rising insecurity.

Unlike in a fully fledged war zone where entire industries are stalled, a few tens of thousands of drug war dead cannot impact an economy that struggles to create enough jobs for its young population anyway -- as evidenced by the stream of Mexicans trying to cross the US border each day. Adding up lost hours of education and economic output from drug war victims, who mainly die in their prime, aged between 18 and 35, is an interesting exercise, but largely meaningless next to the large numbers of unemployed.

Indeed the up to US$40 billion (RM124 billion) of estimated drug smuggling revenues coming into Mexico each year -- three times as much as tourism generates -- keeps many rural communities afloat in swathes of drug cartel territory in northern Mexico as drug lords spread their cash around and pay locals to be lookouts.

"There is a lot of money flowing through Mexico as a result of the drug war. It stimulates local economies just as much as it provides opportunities for violence," notes Latin America geopolitical analyst Karen Hooper at global intelligence company Stratfor.

Unskilled youngsters in Ciudad Juarez can earn US$700 a month working as junior drug hitmen, three times what they'd earn in an assembly plant producing microwaves or car parts for the US market.

A longtime professional drug gang killer interviewed by Reuters earlier this year in a secure location in Ciudad Juarez rued how in the old days he was paid US$15,000 a pop, whereas nowadays, "they pay peanuts" and everybody is a cartel killer: drug addicts, teenagers and low-level cops.

All that said, Mexico's central bank governor Agustin Carstens, speaking in early 2009, and Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero, speaking in September this year, have both said drug cartel crime and violence could be shaving at least a percentage point off Mexico's gross domestic product. That is a notch of growth that would be welcome as the country battles to grow 5% this year after a 6.5% slump in 2009 during the global economic crisis.

As emerging market rivals such as China, India and Brazil overtake Mexico in investor portfolios with strong growth, well-run industries and better-educated workers, holding back the potential of tens of thousands of narco orphans is not going to help Mexico catch up.

Calderon has acknowledged that the drug war will last for several years yet, meaning the toll of dead and orphaned children is set to keep rising.

"If the same trend continues, we'll end this government with a death toll of 74,000, and they are killing younger people all the time," said Mexican political scientist and organised crime specialist Eduardo Guerrero. "The atmosphere of extreme violence brings problems in the long term. We shouldn't minimise the impact."

Originally concentrated along Mexico's border with the United States, the main market for marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine, the violence is now so widespread that a study of drug gang deaths during the first half of 2010 by the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute found only one of Mexico's 31 states registered zero killings.

Of the country's 31 states, plus a federal district containing the capital, 13 counted more than 100 drug killings over the period and seven counted more than 250 deaths, in a sweep of bloodshed that runs from Ciudad Juarez on the northern border down to the southern Pacific coast state of Guerrero.

For a long time, polls showed that Mexicans saw drug violence as much less of an issue than the economic slowdown, but surveys now indicate citizens are growing more worried as the violence spreads. More than half of Mexicans think drug cartels are winning the drug war and some respondents feel the army presence across the country is making things worse by sparking more turf wars.

'Everything happens'

Calderon came to power, in a whisker-thin election victory, on a platform of job creation. He has also pushed for better education on the heels of his predecessor, Vicente Fox, who launched an internationally lauded scheme of handing families cash in return for kids' school attendance.

The programme, called "Oportunidades", reaches 5.8 million families across Mexico and has been ramped up in Ciudad Juarez to help 26,000 families, up from 12,000 at the end of 2009.

Today Mexico spends 5.5% of GDP on education, only a little below Britain and France, according to the most recent CIA data. Although Mexicans are not big readers, preferring drama-packed TV soap operas, the country has an 86% literacy rate and the average Mexican completes 13 years in school -- well within the kind of goalposts favoured by the United Nations as a way for developing countries to progress.

In dysfunctional drug war cities like Ciudad Juarez, however, it is easier to skip school if your parents are missing, and social workers are deeply worried about the amount of children gawping at the aftermath of the daily drug killings.

"It's a woman. She died of a drug overdose," 11-year-old Oscar tells Reuters matter-of-factly as forensic experts pull a black plastic bag over a decomposing body on a patch of wasteland in a dilapidated red-light district. "Here everything happens," the kid says, shaking his head wearily.

The bloodiest flashpoint of Mexico's drug war, with a drug war death count of more than 6,600 since violence took off here in January 2008, Ciudad Juarez has become emblematic of all that is wrong in Mexico today. Shabby infrastructure, desolate streets and prison-like houses contrast with the shiny shopping malls of El Paso, tantalisingly visible through the fence that marks the world's only land border between a rich and a developing nation.

'Dead keep piling up'

Many middle-class Juarenses used to have border passes and day jobs in El Paso and gave their kids back in Mexico American-influenced names like Ashlemy, Aimee or Dayana. The violence has driven thousands fleeing over the border permanently, their homes now standing abandoned.

Where US tourists once crossed the border to enjoy cheap tequila, strip joints and burritos in venues made famous in the city's US Prohibition-era heyday, Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza has now warned that people in the city should stay indoors after dark.

Once feted for its US trade links and swathes of factories, Ciudad Juarez became tainted by a series of women's murders in the 1990s. Then, drug gang killings spurted in 2008 as Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, Mexico's top drug fugitive and head of the Sinaloa cartel from northwestern Mexico, sent in his hitmen to try to edge out the incumbent Juarez cartel run by rival drug lord Vicente Carrillo.

Now masked police pointing machine guns roar through the streets in trucks to reach the killings splashed in local papers under headlines like "Six killed in 20 minutes" and "Hitmen Hat-trick".

Shantytowns and trash-strewn wasteland ring the city where shootings now happen in broad daylight, in public parks and busy avenues. Bullets have even strayed into school playgrounds.

"The dead just keep piling up," said Ana, 33, whose husband was killed this year when masked gunmen burst into a funeral parlour during a wake and sprayed machine gun fire at mourners.

"The hitmen don't care if there are people around, they just do what they need to do. Many innocent people are dying."

Controlled by a handful of powerful families, Ciudad Juarez is a microcosm of the institutionalised corruption which helped the illegal drug trade flourish during 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Polls show that Mexicans, disillusioned with the ruling conservatives, could vote the PRI back into power in the 2012 presidential election.

- Reuters

China a different type of superpower

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 10:06 PM PDT

Given its rapid and successful development, there can be no doubt that China will become one of the dominant global powers of the 21st century. Indeed, despite the massive problems that the country is confronting, it could even emerge as the global power.

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Taiwan cracks down on high-end Chinese escort ring

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 09:55 PM PDT

TAIPEI, Thursday 7 October 2010 (AFP) - Taiwanese authorities said Thursday they have cracked down a high-end escort ring of Chinese women who counted the island's rich and powerful as their clients.

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7 October 2010

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 09:51 PM PDT


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