Nuggets by Category

A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries.

$10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.

Consultants are creaming off a staggering $20 billion from hard-won global aid budgets. The $20bn total is 40 per cent of the international communities' overseas development pot of $50bn - money that is meant to relieve poverty in developing countries.

The World Bank has confirmed the figure for the first time: ... it admitted that money spent on 'technical assistance' and consultants had increased by $2bn on last year's $18bn total.

For every $100 of crude taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remainder covers military and other government expenses - which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor. Thus, out of every $100 worth of oil torn from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water.

In a recent interview in Ha’aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet’s representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza into a vast prison...

Another recent interview in Ha’aretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even more revealing. Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior officers increasingly are themselves settlers) of working clandestinely to further the settlers’ interests. The IDF, Alon says, ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about the path the so-called security fence should follow, instead ‘setting a route that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon told Ha’aretz that when in 2005 politicians signed an agreement with the Palestinians to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the territories (part of the deal that Wolfensohn had worked on), the IDF eased them for settlers instead. For Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that is emptying Hebron of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while it co-operates openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution impossible.

The “security barrier”, as the ­Israeli’s term it, is designed to crush the human spirit as much as to enclose the Palestinians in ghettoes. Like a reptile, it transforms its shape and cuts across agricultural lands as a steel-and-wire barrier, with watchtowers, ditches, patrol roads and alarm systems. It will be 700km long and, at a height of 8m to 9m in places, dwarfs the Berlin Wall.

One internal audit of 25,000 employees in 128 Wal-Mart stores in the USA found 1,371 violations of child labour laws, including minors working too late, too many hours a day and during school hours. It also found 60,000 instances where workers were forced to work through breaks, and 16,000 where they worked through meal times. A 2002 lawsuit in Texas estimated that Wal-Mart short-changed its employees $150 million over four years in missed breaks.

According to the United Nations, around 4,500 Palestinian homes have been destroyed by the Israeli army since September 2000. The Israeli committee Against House Demolitions calculates that Israel has demolished some 12,000 Palestinian homes since 1967, whether in punitive or military actions or simply because the Israeli authorities decide they do not have the correct permits. Over 70,000 people have seen their homes destroyed in these operations, while many more have seen their farms, fruit trees and olive trees razed to the ground.

Discussion of slavery is dominated by the past, but today, according to the International Labour Organisation, at least 12.3 million people are enslaved worldwide. Human trafficking (just one form of slavery) is the most profitable black-market trade after drugs and guns, raking in an estimated $32bn each year.

13-year-old Iman al-Hams ... was machine-gunned by the unit's commander. She had 17 bullets in her body, and three in her head, a Palestinian doctor told the Guardian. Iman is one of 654 Palestinian children to have been killed in the occupied territories since September 2000. Several were killed as they sat at their desks in class. Three and a half thousand children have been wounded. Over 300 are in Israeli prisons.

Claudine told me that there were two primary objectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and other US companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone and Webster, and Brown and Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received these loans (after they had paid MAIN and the other US contractors, of course) so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favours, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.

Factories scramble to complete Wal-Mart orders on time, something that can only be achieved through excessive overtime.The result is that workers can be forced to work 18 to 20.5-hour all-night shifts stretching from 8am to 2am, 3am or even 4.30am the following day. As one Chinese labour official explains: 'Wal-Mart pressures the factory to cut its price, and the factory responds with longer hours or lower pay... and the workers have no options.'

Every day, 28,000 children die before reaching their fifth birthday. Nearly all these deaths occur in developing countries where mothers, children and newborns lack access to basic health-care services. It is especially tragic since most of these deaths could be prevented at a modest cost.