Chrenkoff

Western companies welcomed in Cuba as heroes a decade ago for bucking the U.S. embargo are packing up and leaving as the Communist government rolls back market reforms and squeezes out intermediaries.

Embittered by the change in attitude, small and medium-sized foreign businesses complained this week that they no longer feel welcome and worried they would not recover money owed to them by Cuban partners.

President Fidel Castro's government, bolstered by growing economic ties to Venezuela and China, is cutting back the autonomy granted to state-run companies to do business in the 1990s and restoring central control over trade and finance.

"I don't think they ever wanted us here," said the manager of a major European company that is pulling out after 10 years.

"They always tried to get the most money, machinery and knowledge they could out of us while giving little in return. They owe us millions, but we are leaving mainly because of their attitude, the way they treated us," he said.

Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called on Iraqis to emulate the European Union and reject federalism, which he said would divide the country. Speaking on behalf of Sadr, Sheikh Salah al-Ubaidi told Muslim faithful in Kufa, south of Baghdad, that in Europe: "You can find a unified constitution under way, a unified currency and a united continental market despite the fact that they are different nations."

An Iraqi youth reads a book with a Japanese Defense Force soldier during a ceremony to open a new primary school in the southern town of Samawa June 3, 2005. The Japanese Defense Force military contingent is supplying humanitarian assistance to Iraq, working on projects that include building new schools and repairing damaged infrastructure.

The Iraqi government says insurgent violence has killed 12,000 civilians in the past 18 months. Iraq's Interior Ministry reported the first official toll on Thursday. Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said the figures show more than 20 people per day died in bombings and other attacks.

Sunni Group Calls for End to Iraq Attacks

An influential Sunni association called for an end to a weeklong counterinsurgency offensive in Baghdad, saying it overwhemingly [sic] targets members of their religious minority and has led to the detention of hundreds of people.

"The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centers, allow us and others to visit them... Transparency is the best antidote to misinformation and incorrect facts."

"What we wanted to do was to send a strong message that ... this sort of network of detention centers that has been created as part of this war on terrorism is actually undermining human rights in a dramatic way which can only evoke some of the worst features of human rights scandals of the past."

Mark Felt's admission that he was Watergate's Deep Throat has solved one of the world's great mysteries, hitherto known only to a handful of people. But there are plenty of other secrets out there.

Slow economic growth in the Netherlands is seen as a key reason for the massive rejection of the European Union constitution, with "no" voters listing gripes such as the high value of the euro, the cost of EU membership and possible job losses to immigrant labour.

Last year the Dutch centre-right government, led by the Christian Democrat prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, announced extremely unpopular austerity measures to raise tax revenues and cut spending to improve public finances. At a time when the Dutch are asked to tighten their belts, the fact that the country has gone from being a net receiver from its membership in the EU to becoming the biggest net contributor is not sitting well with many voters...

Some 62 per cent of "no" voters named the high Dutch contribution to the EU budget as a reason to reject the treaty, according to a poll conducted Wednesday.

Will countries like Poland - who have already gone through the pain of opening up their economies and are now reaping the benefit - side with Old Europe when Tony Blair uses the British presidency of the EU starting next month to urge some serious and long-overdue economic reform?

In its short lifespan, blogging has largely been a freewheeling exercise in online self-expression. Now it is also becoming a corporate job.

A small but growing number of businesses are hiring people to write blogs, otherwise known as Web logs, or frequently updated online journals. Companies are looking for candidates who can write in a conversational style about timely topics that would appeal to customers, clients and potential recruits.

Last year, Christine Halvorson was hired as chief blogger at Stonyfield Farm Inc., a Londonderry, N.H., organic yogurt company owned by Groupe Danone. She applied for the job after responding to an ad posted at Monster.com. A former freelance writer and Web content editor, Ms. Halvorson now writes four blogs for Stonyfield, including a blog about the company, the Daily Scoop, and Creating Healthy Kids, about healthy foods in schools. Her job entails researching, linking to news and providing personal insight.

"It's wonderful to write every day," Ms. Halvorson says. "The only challenge is keeping up with this rapidly changing blogging technology, like audio and video blogging," she adds. She earns an annual salary in the mid-$40,000s, she says.

Are you a witness to major, or lesser known, news events? Have you seen an incident, or an event we missed, that you would like to tell us about?

If so, here is your opportunity. The BBC News website would like to receive your stories and perspectives from around the world.

If you have any pictures or video to accompany your text we would also like to receive them. Consider this your chance to report on events in your area that you think the world should know about.

Iraqi FM concerned over U.S. presence in Iraq

Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said he is concerned the United States may withdraw its forces from Iraq before local army and police are ready to secure their country.

Officials see terror threat from Iraq vets

Two former senior Bush administration counter-terrorism officials say the danger posed to the U.S. homeland by graduates of the Islamic insurgency in Iraq is so severe that the measures needed to counter it will affect Americans' quality of life.

Twenty years after the original Live Aid concert, Bob Geldof yesterday unveiled a lineup of classic acts and recent chart stars to perform in five global follow-up concerts that threaten to dwarf the original.

He said that in less than four weeks he had persuaded a host of big names, from the old guard who appeared at the original concert, such as Paul McCartney, U2 and Madonna, to the likes of Coldplay, 50 Cent and Robbie Williams, who were still at school in 1985, to participate in Live 8.

Unveiling the lineup of artists who will play a series of five huge free concerts in London, Paris, Rome, Philadelphia and Berlin on July 2, a week before the G8 summit begins in Gleneagles, Geldof said: "It's not going to be gloomy and doomy. We don't want people's money. We want them."

Geldof said he hoped that the involvement of the biggest artists on the world stage, also including Sting, REM, Stevie Wonder and Jay Z, would "create domestic political heat" in each of the G8 countries, aimed at forcing world leaders to drop third-world debt, reform trade laws and double aid to the region.

When Michael Buerk's first report on the Ethiopian famine was transmitted on BBC News on 23 October 1984, the idea immediately took hold that this was a natural disaster - 'a biblical famine', in Buerk's words - which would be alleviated by massive food aid. There was a severe drought in the region, but the creation of famine was a military tactic of the Dergue government of Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu. For journalists like Buerk and activists like Geldof, the wars in Ethiopia were an inconvenience which were complicating relief efforts. Yet the wars were the principal cause of the tragedy.

When I spoke to Michael Buerk in the late 1990s, he still held the view that the wars had 'complicated matters', but he did agree that self-censorship had played a role in his own and others' reportage at the time: 'You've got ... to make the decision, is this side story of any real significance? And also, at the back of your mind, is: if I overemphasise a negative angle to this, I am going to be responsible for ...inhibiting people from coughing up their money.'

In the time of Band Aid, 'negative angles' were out. It would have been negative, although true, to have emphasised that Mengistu was one of the most vicious African dictators of the previous quarter century, that he was fighting three wars at the time (two in the north, in Tigray and Eritrea, and one in the Oromo lands of the south), and that his troops were committing atrocities in the region where the famine was unfolding. It would have been distinctly negative to have reported that the dictator was using food as a weapon of war - bombing crops and markets while setting up roadblocks to prevent the movement of food. The methods used by Mengistu's armies were bound to create famine, and they did.

Journalists and aid workers were not the only ones wary of confusing viewers at home with 'negative angles'. While it was Band Aid and, later, Live Aid that caught the imagination of the world, they funded only a small proportion of the aid effort: 90 per cent or more of the aid came from Western donor governments. As the governments would only deal with a recipient government, not with rebel movements, most of the aid - again, roughly 90 per cent - was channelled through Mengistu's hands. In a grotesque irony, we found ourselves supporting the very government that was causing the famine we were supposed to be alleviating. This was certainly a 'negative angle', and therefore, unsurprisingly, it received hardly any attention at all.

Dear Mr. Geldof, I hate to break it to you, but the people (teenagers) who attend your free concert will be there to see whomever shows up. They will not attend the show as a sign of solidarity to end world hunger. They will not leave the show and change their consumption habits either. In fact, 24 hours after the concert, I bet 99% of them won't remember any of the overtly political messages blurted from the stage. All the pontificating that will go on between acts and between songs will go in one ear and out the other. Oh, you'll hear cheers and applause alright - but don't make more out of it than it is. Crowds like these will cheer the breaking of wind.

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende has made a final appeal to voters on, urging them not to reject the European Union constitution saying the charter would not cause the country to lose influence in the 25-member bloc.

Polling... found out that the no-vote is strongest among the free-market Liberal Party (the VVD, the Dutch right) and the hard-line socialist SP. The supporters of the centrist Christian-Democrats are generally in favor while the Labour Party is split. All these results really point to one thing and that is the desire of a majority of outspoken Dutch voters (from both the left and the right) to have something that has been absent from Dutch politics for years: a debate about Europe.

Japan claims it needs to harpoon the whales and dissect them to determine migration patterns as well as gain data on their feeding and breeding habits. It insists that subsequently serving the whalemeat at restaurants and for school lunches is merely the best way to dispose of the carcases.

While scientific hunts are permitted under the IWC's regulations, the sale of about 2,000 tons of meat a year earns more than £28 million. The profits are put back into the whaling fleet.

"Dutch aid workers arrested in Darfur over rape claims"

Police in Sudan arrested a national head of the aid agency Médecins sans Frontières over a report issued about the widespread rape of women by soldiers and militiamen in Darfur.

Paul Foreman, a Briton who heads the Dutch branch of the organisation, was taken for questioning by security forces in Khartoum yesterday.

Mohamed Farid, Sudan’s Attorney-General, said he had opened a criminal case against Médecins sans Frontières Holland for publishing the report in March, which detailed hundreds of rapes over a recent 4½-month period.

Mr Farid said that MSF had failed to consult the Government-run Humanitarian Aid Commission before publishing the information and, despite repeated requests, had refused to supply medical evidence to back up its claims.

“If they don’t give us the medical documents, we will send them to the criminal court accused of publishing a false report which harms the general peace,” Mr Farid told Reuters.

Six people were burnt alive when a mob protesting a suicide bombing of a mosque torched an outlet of an American fast food chain in Karachi, police said on Tuesday.

Police and firemen recovered the bodies of six Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) employees after an angry mob set the restaurant on fire late on Monday following a suicide attack on a Shiite Muslim mosque that left five people dead.

Germany's opposition chiefs selected Christian Democrat leader Angela Merkel on Monday to challenge Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder at an early election that might make her the country's first woman leader.

Merkel, 50, would also be the first chancellor from former communist East Germany if she wins the election, expected this year rather than next after Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD) suffered a heavy loss at a regional poll last week.

Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) holds a commanding lead in opinion polls and her own personal popularity has overtaken Schroeder's for the first time, according to opinion polls issued at the weekend.

"We are no longer in control, we are no longer in charge. The moment it [Europe] is no longer as French, it appears Anglo-Saxon in its economic context and they [the French] don't like that. The French are equating Europeanisation with globalisation and delocalisation [outsourcing of jobs]. For those who vote no, Europe is no longer the pursuit of France through other means."

Yesterday, an Iraqi electricity ministry official confirmed that the great Shiite reference Ayatollah Ali Al Sestani has issued a religious decree of cutting down the electricity consumption, maintaining the generation networks and transporting power at a time that both Iran and Turkey have promised of increasing the electricity exports to Iraq.

The Arab League is ready to send experts to help the Iraqis draft a new constitution, the league's secretary general said Saturday.

Shiite legislators have decided not to push for a greater role for Islam in the new Iraqi constitution out of concern that the contentious issue will inflame religious sentiments and deepen sectarian tensions.

Instead, the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition that won the most seats in January’s elections, will advocate retaining the moderate language of Iraq’s temporary constitution that was drawn up under the auspices of the American occupation authority.

Humam Hamoudi, the Shiite cleric who heads the 55-member constitutional committee that will draft the new document, said that any attempt to debate the issue of Islamic law could ignite a firestorm of competing sectarian demands and that the brief references to Islam in three paragraphs of the temporary constitution should be left untouched.

"These paragraphs represent the middle ground between the secularists and those who want Islamic government, and I think the wisest course of action is to keep them as they are," he said in an interview at his Baghdad home. "Opening up the subject for discussion would provoke religious sentiments in the street."

France overwhelmingly rejected the European Union constitution on Sunday, pitching the EU into crisis and dealing a potentially fatal blow to a charter designed to make the enlarged bloc run smoothly... Chirac swiftly conceded defeat in a televised address to the nation as the "No" camp celebrated a crushing victory with about 55 percent of votes to 45 percent.

"If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said No, would have to ask themselves the question again," "President" Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

Got that? You have the right to vote, but only if you give the answer your rulers want you to give. But don't worry, if you don't, we'll treat you like a particularly backward nursery school and keep asking the question until you get the answer right. Even America's bossiest nanny-state Democrats don't usually express their contempt for the will of the people quite so crudely.

Leaders of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in Nablus have denied that the group was using minors for launching attacks on the IDF. But several sources in the city, including the boy's family and PA security officials, insist that the group was behind the botched attack.

They said members of the group in Balta refugee camp, which is also in the Nablus area, had recruited Mohammed after persuading him that he would be rewarded in heaven for killing Jews. They also promised to support his family after he becomes a shahid (martyr).

The boy's grandmother, Aziza, said the family was very angry with those who sent Mohammed to attack the soldiers. "They have no fear of God," she said. "They let us suffer because of our children, they don't respect God; they don't have a conscience. I hope that God will punish them because they are sending children this age, God will punish them. I'm suffering pain every day, crying every night before going to sleep. God knows how many tears there are on my pillow every night."

Insurgents in Iraq attached explosives to a dog and tried to blow up a military convoy near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk.

The canine bomb went off but the only casualty was the unfortunate animal, said police. The militants wrapped an explosive belt around the dog and detonated it as the convoy passed through Dakuk, 25 miles south of Kirkuk, said the town's police chief, Col Mohammed Barzaji.