World news roundup: Irian Jaya, Syria, Canada

Irian Jaya, or West Papua, per Counterpunch, continues to descend further in its own, Tolstoyean-specific, misery and hell. For the unfamiliar, the western half of the island of the New Guinea was, during Dutch colonial rule, administered separately from the Dutch East Indies. And, it held on to it after Indonesian independence in 1949, leading to the West New Guinea dispute in the early 1960s. Sukarno turned up the heat on the Dutch, pushed the US, and got Soviet weapons for a possible invasion. The Dutch turned the territory over to the UN. It almost immediately handed it to Indonesia, with Sukarno promising some degree of autonomy. Six years later, under Suharto, a rigged plebiscite fully annexed it to Indonesia.

Also per Counterpunch, with or without Irian Jaya/West Papua, but very much with it, it's a product of the Cold War. JFK leaned on the Dutch precisely because Sukarno cozied up to the USSR. In 1975, Ford ignored Indonesia's overrunning East Timor, abandoned to its fate by Portugal after the Salazar dictatorship was overthrown in Lisbon, because of fears/claims/worries East Timor would go Commie.

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Another good piece from Counterpunch here is about the "forgotten Palestinians." These are the ones who are refugees in Syria, and have become entangled in Syrian civil war issues of the past decade-plus. Richard Falk notes the Assad government viewed them suspiciously after the start of the civil war, for a variety of reasons. Falk adds that the anti-anti-Assad angle of the "hard left," as he calls it, and if we're talking people like Aaron Maté, pseudoleftists is more what I call them, increases the problem.

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Pretty Boy Trudeau is in serious trouble in the Great White North. As things stand now, he and his Liberals are going to get barbecued in the next Canadian federal election; fortunately, it's 18 months away. The Walrus has a longform, including longform fact-checking, about Trudeau's past promises vs performance and many other things, with segments from a longform interview sliced in between.

Near the end of the piece, Canadian housing prices (which are a LOT worse than most US big cities in Canada's main metro areas) get discussion. If Pretty Boy can't "get" this issue, he's sunk. 

After that, the Walrus piece notes that Trudeau will almost certainly go negative and heavily so to try to win.

Of further note, per Wiki? Almost all the Commons incumbents who are not running again are Liberals.

Two questions on my mind are:

A. Can the LDP get enough of their shit together to pass the Liberals, and, somewhat related

B. Could we see a coalition if the two block the Conservatives from a majority, but finish second and third, in whichever order?  

I assume if that happens, even if the LDP remains in No. 3, that the price of coalition is the Liberals turf Trudeau as party leader.

I don’t blame Indonesia on this

Indonesia and the U.S. were still unable to renew an agreement over allowing a U.S. Navy medical lab to operate in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital.

The hang-up? U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt says Jakarta won’t give the lab H5N1, or bird flu, virus samples, or to give them to the rest of the world. (Yes, for once, this is not an anti-U.S. thing!)

But, the holdup isn’t as simple as Leavitt puts it. As the story notes:

Indonesia fears pharmaceutical company may use samples of Indonesian virus to make a highly profitable vaccine that might not even be available to Indonesians.

Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of a national commission dealing with avian flu, said in March that Indonesia would only send virus samples on a case-by-case basis until a new virus-sharing mechanism currently being drawn up by the World Health Organization took effect.

Hey, that fear in the first paragraph is no idle one. Developing nations have seen Big Pharma practice “nature piracy” for decades. If the U.S. Navy won’t provide the Indonesian government with ironclad-enough assurances against that, well, then it will just have to wait.

And, Leavitt admits that is a holdup:

“(Indonesian health minister Siti Fadillah Supari’s) main point is that what she wants should not be considered ‘royalties’ or ‘compensation,’” Leavitt said. “What she says she wants is for the contributing countries to be eligible for some share of the value commercial companies create out of the influenza samples they provide.”

And, the shame here isn’t just on the U.S. on the other side of the table, either. After all, a number of members of Big Pharma are headquartered in European Union countries.