News headlines in March 2009, page 7

A newly-formed and still obscure neo-conservative foreign policy organisation is giving some observers flashbacks to the 1990s, when its predecessor staked out the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy that came to fruition under the George W. Bush administration.

With less than a month to go to the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, social organisations complain that governments have not fulfilled commitments assumed at earlier editions of the summit, on questions like access to information, freedom of expression, decentralisation and participation by civil society.

The U.S. government has failed to uphold international human rights standards in its detention of immigrants and asylum seekers, Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) said in a report released Wednesday.

Haile Gerima's film 'Teza' may only have come to the world's attention when it won Africa’s highest prize in Ouagadougou on Mar. 7, but it has been a sensation in his native Ethiopia since it premiered in Addis Ababa at the start of the year.

In December of 1773, colonists in Boston - then a town in the British colony of Massachusetts - protested against the British government after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain.

In the wake of the British government’s decision to partially suspend the constitution of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI), politicians in this and other British Overseas Territories are worried that London has embarked on a process of 're-colonisation'.

With a sentence set to be handed down shortly in the trial of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) for two notorious massacres of civilians – known as the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta killings – the prosecutor in the case, Avelino Guillén, said the defendant’s guilt has been amply proven.

The Barack Obama administration announced this week that it will boost already massive foreign aid to its southern neighbour in a bid to help Mexico fight cartels smuggling drugs into the U.S., as well as sending a series of high-level U.S. officials to Mexico to consult with their counterparts.

Despite President Barack Obama’s statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina Feb. 27 that he had 'chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months,' a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic U.S. Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label.

Contrary to the views of the likely incoming right-wing government of Israel, most U.S. Jews favour peace negotiations with a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas, according to a new poll released here Tuesday by the year-old, pro-peace Jewish lobby group, J Street.