UN health chief confident AIDS call will be heard

GENEVA, June 20: The United Nations top health official has said she was confident rich states would back a planned multi-billion dollar international fund to fight AIDS.

Even if final funding falls short of the annual 7-10 billion goal, the industrialised world has woken up to the havoc wrought by the killer disease in Africa and elsewhere and would act, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland said.

"I cannot be sure we will see all the money, but I think we will see billions (of dollars)," she told Reuters in an interview.

She said the fund proposal, launched by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan during an African summit earlier this year, showed a changing international approach to AIDS, which infects some 36 million people worldwide, mostly in Africa.

"Over the past 18 months there has been change of sentiment about the shared, global responsibility for a situation of this kind," she said.

Although the fund will be discussed during a June 25-27 special UN Assembly on AIDS in New York — itself a mark of the new determination — Brundtland said she did not expect a wave of financial commitments there.

Only the United States and France have announced contributions, while Microsoft founder Bill Gates has pledged 100 million dollars from his private foundation.

But countries most affected by the disease must do their part by dedicating available funds to health and education.

"Many countries have low health and education budgets but high military spending," she said without identifying any particular state.

"Those countries should shift to investing in their own people," Brundtland said.

Although there is still no firm agreement on how the planned fund should operate and who should run it, Brundtland said there was enough common ground to prevent this becoming an obstacle.

"There is consensus that it should be an international fund and not a United Nations fund, and that there should be involvement of both developed and developing countries on the (fund’s) board," she said.

She said it was important that aid from the fund be channelled through local health systems and to help create such structures, because the recipient state had to be "in the driving seat."

"It cannot be imposed from outside," Brundtland said.

Although international drugs companies have slashed prices for anti-AIDS drugs in recent months under pressure from the UN and international opinion, these prices could and should fall further, Brundtland said.

The former Norwegian Premier, who is a qualified doctor, said developing states could obtain medicines for only 10 percent of what they cost little over a year ago.

There was also a growing awareness from Non-Governmental Organisations and pressure groups that companies needed some protection for their drug patents in order to finance research.

"A year ago there was a bigger difference between the UN agencies, the NGOs and the drugs companies on this. There is now a greater realisation a balance needs to be struck," Brundtland said.

"But in AIDS we have not reached that balance yet. Prices should and will go down further," she said. (REUTERS)

Australia eases proposed internet gambling ban

CANBERRA, June 20: The Australian Government agreed to ease its proposed internet gambling ban to allow online sports betting and lotteries to continue, but said it would extend the ban to offshore operators.

The compromise won mixed reviews from ban opponents, including gaming companies, the racing industry and opposition politicians who had threatened to block the legislation in the senate, where the conservative Government has a minority.

The legislation is set for debate before the upper house senate this week, where it is expected to squeak through into law with the support of some members of the minor party Australian democrats.

Communications Minister Richard Alston said yesterday the fledgling online industry needed to be brought under control before it became a major social problem in australia — already one of the world’s leading problem gambling nations — but acknowledged the powerful Australian racing industry had raised valid concerns.

"In the case of the racing industry, the Government remains concerned about the impact of internet wagering, but recognises that this concern needs to be balanced against the impact of a ban on a bona fide and long established industry," he said.

Official reports show 80 percent of Australians already gamble at least once a year, 40 percent regularly. The nation of 19 million people is home to one in five of the world’s poker machines with 290,000 Australians classified as problem gamblers.

A Government spokesman said the conservative coalition agreed in a party room meeting on Tuesday to include four amendments to the proposed legislation, to exclude wagering on horse and greyhound racing, sports betting and lotteries from the ban.

The changes would, however, ban advertising of gaming services in order to limit access of both Australian and offshore gaming operators to the Australian market, and extend the offence of providing interactive gaming services to offshore operators.

Australian gaming companies, including media mogul Kerry Packer’s Publishing Broadcasting Ltd, which has an online gambling operation, have threatened to move their gaming operations offshore if the legislation is passed.

A PBL spokesman declined to say whether the company remained opposed to the ban.

It is unclear how the ban would be enforced on overseas operators, but alston said Australia would cooperate with any foreign Government which was also looking at such a ban.

"Insofar as people operating services to Australians from offshore, then we’ll have a ban on advertising and we’ll also make it an offence, so that if you set foot in Australia you will be liable to prosecution," Alston said.

The Australian Casino Association attacked the changes as unfair, saying online casino games were being discriminated against while lottos and sports wagering went on unchecked.

"Online gaming regulation, whether for wagering or casino style games, must be consistent," ACA Executive Director Chris Downy said in a statement.

But a spokeswoman for gaming, wagering and casino group Tabcorp Holdings Ltd, welcomed the compromise.

"Tabcorp is certainly very pleased that the Government has recognised that internet wagering is really just an extension of an existing product that has been in place for nearly forty years and that is telephone betting," she said.

Tabcorp shares rose five cents to a 9.37 in a flat market. (REUTERS)

No foreign capital will be allowed in print media: Swaraj

WASHINGTON, June 20: Foreign capital will not be allowed into the Indian print media, Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj has said.

Recalling the cabinet resolution of 1955 barring foreign media houses entering the Indian print media, she said "the resoluton has been honoured by successive Governments. In the future too, there would be no dilution though foreign capital is now allowed in TV software and film."

Exuding confidence over the future of the Indian film industry, Swaraj who is leading a 35-member FICCI delegation, pointed out that the turnover of the Indian entertainment sector was at present Rs 15,000 crores but had the potential to achieve the Rs 60,000 crores target by 2005.

Out of the total amount, about Rs 30,000-35,000 crores will come from films alone, she told a press conference yesterday.

"I think this visit will go a long way towards realising this potental," she said.

Asked about ensuring independence of the Prasar Bharati, she said the Government did not interfere in its working at all.

"It is autonomous," she said, adding a body which includes the Vice President and the Chairman of the Press Council will choose its members and as soon as their recommendations are submitted to the Government a board will be constituted.

The minister said it was the first time she was leading a delegation of the entertainment industry to the us, adding Jack Valenti, President of the Motion Picture Association of America and a Stern Critic of Pirating of American Films in India, had promised to help crack pirating of Indian films.

She said by giving films the status of industry, she had sought to release them from the clutches of underworld financiers and enable film makers to procure loans from regular banking sources. In fact the first such loan had now been given, she added.

The Indian delegation had also visited universal studios in Los Angeles and Sony Studios, she said, adding Sony had promised to set up a studio where old Indian films could be preserved. (PTI)

Actually, women hold up less than half the sky

BEIJING, June 20: Having women in power is not the sort of issue that dominates many meetings of the all-male, policy-making politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.

Yet as the party prepares for its crucial 16th congress next year when a new leadership team will be announced, Beijing is looking at ways to have more women into Government positions to address a serious gender imbalance.

At recent meetings of the powerful organisation department of the party, officials debated different promotion schemes aimed at giving women cadres at all levels of the leadership a leg up.

But a high-profile report on women leaders in China warns of the risks in implementing any of those schemes, not least because of a tendency to meet minimum required levels for women in leadership positions — and staying there.

"The Chinese Government has stipulated that there must be at least one woman in the leading body of each Government. In implementation of this stipulation, it has come to be there will be only one woman," says the report, prepared by the Beijing- based branch of the Women Mayors of China Association.

"As a result, there is usually only one woman in the leading body of a Government at different level across the country, putting women into an absolute minority," concludes the report, which brings into focus the work of women leaders as the Asia- Pacific summit of women mayors and councillors is held next week in Thailand.

In 1990, the latest year gender statistics are available, women cadres made up only 12 per cent of the Government leaders on prefecture, city and county levels.

Today China boasts of some 463 women mayors in its 668 established cities, but 90 per cent of them are deputies during

The early days of Communist Party rule, women held a variety of leadership roles, including that of Jiang Qing, wife of Chairman Mao Zedong.

More than 50 years after that women’s liberation, men and women’s equality in politics remains a far-off goal. China has laws that safeguard the interests and rights of women, but they are hard to realise in a legal culture centred around the will of men.

"There is not a single legal clause or a law-enforcing organ to take charge of enforcement of regulations on the political rights of women. As a result, equality between men and women tend to be a legal principle in a pigeonhole," says Song Naxian, former Vice Mayor of Lanzhou, capital Gansu province, one of five Chinese women nominated for their work in local Governments at the June 19-22 Asia-Pacific summit in Phitsanulok, Thailand.

As Mao’s egalitarian era ended in late 1970s, the economic reforms unleashed by the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping were both a political chance and an impediment for women.

Market reforms created opportunities only for women in the developed coastal areas, where foreign investment boomed and entrepreneurial incentives thrived. Women in poor, backward hinterland areas got little exposure to public affairs and rarely made it to local Governments.

Song, who headed the infrastructure and environmental development of Lanzhou city for seven years, is one example of how extraordinary a woman has to be to break the barriers in China’s backward inner provinces.

As an educated youth during the cultural revolution (1966-76), sent along with thousands of other university graduates in the countryside to study from the peasantry, song worked her way up in local Government.

She gained experience first as a technician and then as an engineer on nearly all major railway and roads projects in China’s western provinces.

When in 1993 she rose to become Lanzhou’s vice mayor, song was the only woman in a team of six mayors and vice mayors. "But I was not just the pretty vase of Lanzhou Government," "I had a profession, I had lots of experience and this gave me the power of opinion," she says.

Being in charge of infrastructure and environment, song had to deal with problems of land use and waste treatment which her male colleagues often could not resolve by themselves. "Even if they felt some contempt for me being a woman leader, they never had a chance to reveal it," song says. (IPS)

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