Agloco Indonesia

HUE, Vietnam (AP) — A high-profile dissident Catholic priest denounced Vietnam’s Communist Party in a startling display of defiance as he went on trial Friday on charges of disseminating materials intended to undermine the country’s government.

Father Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly was led into the Thua Thien Hue Provincial People’s Court in central Vietnam in handcuffs along with four alleged accomplices, but he refused to stand and identify himself before the chief judge, Bui Quoc Hiep.

“Down with the Communist Party of Vietnam!” Ly shouted, in a striking outburst in a country where dissent is harshly punished. A police officer then covered Ly’s mouth as he continued shouting, and removed him to a nearby room where the proceedings were broadcast on a loudspeaker.

Ly, 60, who has been jailed for his pro-democracy activities before, is accused of producing anti-government documents and communicating with anti-communist groups overseas. He could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted in the verdict, expected later Friday.

Authorities say Ly is one of the founders of the “Vietnam Progression Party” and was plotting to merge with overseas democracy activists to form a new political umbrella group called “Lac Hong.”

Authorities allowed limited press coverage of the trial, a highly unusual move in a country where judicial proceedings against political defendants are typically conducted behind closed doors.

Photographers were told they would have access to the courtroom during the reading of the verdict, and reporters and foreign diplomats were able to watch the proceedings on a closed-circuit television in a separate room of the courthouse.

The sound was cut briefly after Ly started shouting.

Last month, authorities moved Ly from his home in the central city of Hue, where he was under virtual house arrest, and took him to a smaller parish outside the city.

They seized hundreds of documents, six computers and 136 mobile phone cards, and much of that evidence was on display at the front of the courtroom on Friday.

Ly, 60, has spent more than a decade in prison for his political activism and is one of the best-known members of Vietnam’s small dissident community. In 2001, after he openly called for linking U.S. trade with Vietnam to Hanoi’s human rights record, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Western governments and international human rights groups protested, and Ly was released early in a 2005 prison amnesty.

Charged as accomplices in the case are two men, Nguyen Phong, 32, and Nguyen Binh Thanh, 51 — both of Hue — and two women, Le Thi Le Hang, 44, of Hue, and Hoang Thi Anh Dao, 21, of Gialai Province.

Ly’s four co-defendants stood and identified themselves at the start of proceedings Friday, while he defiantly remained seated on a chair.

Ly’s arrest comes as Vietnamese authorities have been cracking down on dissidents. On March 6, they arrested Hanoi human rights lawyers Nguyen Van Dai and Le Thi Cong Nhan, accusing them of violating a prohibition on distributing information deemed harmful to the state.

The day-to-day freedoms of ordinary Vietnamese have increased greatly in the last 20 years, as the country has opened its economy and increased contact with other countries.

But the Communist Party still does not allow challenges to its single-party rule, and it is especially vigilant about efforts by Vietnamese dissidents to join forces with overseas pro-democracy groups.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (Reuters) — Zimbabwe’s ruling party on Friday adopted a motion to hold elections in 2008 and endorsed President Robert Mugabe as its presidential candidate, allowing him to stand for another term as leader of the crumbling country.

“The resolution was accepted by the central committee … and so both the presidential and parliamentary elections will now be held in 2008,” Nathan Shamuyarira, national ZANU-PF spokesman said after the meeting.

“The candidate of the party will be the President (Mugabe) himself. He was endorsed by the central committee at the meeting today,” said Shamuyarira, adding the presidential term will be cut to five years from the current six.

Mugabe has faced international condemnation over a brutal crackdown on opponents this month, which left opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai injured and hospitalized after police stopped a banned prayer rally to protest against a deepening economic crisis.

Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told journalists at the same briefing the central committee had also decided that if a presidential vacancy occurred in between elections an acting president would be chosen by parliament to complete the term.

Chinamasa said local government polls would also be held in 2008 and the parliamentary lower house of assembly would be expanded from the current 150 members to 210. Parties would fill the upper house — Senate — with representatives on the basis of their proportional vote in parliament.

The Senate would be expanded from 66 to 84 members.

Critics say Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s sole ruler since independence from Britain in 1980, has plunged the country into crisis through his policies, including the seizure of white-owned farms to give to landless blacks.

But Mugabe earlier told the central committee to resist “the machinations of the West”, which he has blamed for an outbreak of violence following the police crackdown on the opposition.

“Our organs … have to adopt a high sense of vigilancy and militancy,” he said, one day after winning regional backing for his crackdown despite calls for tough action from the West.

Mugabe, 83, has accused the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) of mounting a “terrorist” campaign to remove him from office and defended violent police sweeps this month which saw dozens of MDC activists arrested.

On Thursday, a special crisis summit of Southern African leaders publicly expressed solidarity with Mugabe, while calling for renewed political dialogue and an end to Western sanctions against his government. (Watch the surprising result as African leaders meet on Zimbabwe )

The veteran leader had sought to win ZANU-PF backing to extend his rule over Zimbabwe, which now faces its worst crisis in history with inflation running at more than 1,700 percent, soaring joblessness, and regular food and fuel shortages.

Mugabe had suggested extending his term by two years to 2010 but ran into resistance in his party. He then proposed running for president again when his current six-year term ends in 2008 — outflanking opponents who planned to oppose the 2010 option.

Mugabe’s candidacy had already won backing from the party’s key women and youth leagues, whose members make up a sizeable number of the 245-member central committee.

Analysts had seen little opposition to Mugabe, saying his nomination was a formality because the ZANU-PF constitution stipulates that the party president, elected at a congress every five years, automatically becomes the presidential candidate.

Mugabe was elected at the party’s last congress in 2004 and has not faced an election since then.

He said his fellow African leaders understood that his government was under attack by the West as revenge for his policy of seizing white-owned farms to give to landless blacks.

“We are a family. Our detractors have been shamed,” he said, accusing some major television news networks of demonizing his government and laughing off British and U.S. suggestions that he might be on the way out.

Mugabe said he had told SADC leaders that Tsvangirai deserved beating by police earlier this month in an incident which drew outrage, including from some Western countries which threatened stiffer action against the veteran leader.

By Chitra Ragavan
Posted 3/21/07

President Bush’s assertion of executive privilege in the U.S. attorney firings has a lot in common with Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

The president said yesterday unequivocally that while he is willing to provide Congress with documents and behind-closed-doors conversations with his top political and legal advisers over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, having them testify under oath in public could compromise his right to obtain “candid advice” for the sake of a “partisan fishing expedition.” The response from Democrats was immediate: “I don’t accept his offer,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The showdown may seem more like a political nightmare than a children’s fairy tale about a little girl getting lost in the woods, where she finds a cottage belonging to three bears of varying proportions and helps herself to their food and beds. But legal scholars say that in invoking executive privilege, the president has just embarked on a long constitutionally orchestrated dance of accommodation, just as Goldilocks did, to find a compromise that’s neither too big nor too small but just right.

In other words, the Founding Fathers visualized precisely what in modern times might seem like either showboating by a Congress eager for that attention-getting image of senior White House officials grilled under oath in the klieg lights or grandstanding by a president under fire. Under the principle of separation of powers, the president has a right to withhold “confidential executive deliberations” and provide only what is legitimately needed with minimum intrusion on that executive privilege.

“It’s really required by court decisions in this area,” says former National Security Council lawyer Bryan Cunningham, “that you take these baby steps–that even if you ultimately wind up allowing greater access than had been allowed before, you only do that after you’ve exhausted all your other options.”

But that dance of accommodation can be hard to choreograph because, as the hungry and sleepy Goldilocks found on that warm pleasant day in that far-off country, size is entirely relative to who you are. Until now, the Bush administration has aggressively provided as little information as possible to Congress in part because of the strongly held views of Vice President Cheney’s former legal adviser and now chief of staff, David Addington, who has in the past played a central role in triggering or prolonging past political logjams of this nature.

That’s most likely one reason why White House Counsel Fred Fielding had to tell Congress last week that he needed more time to reach a decision on whether to provide sworn testimony of Bush’s top political and legal advisers. He would have had to fight for a middle ground as to what to hold and what to fold that would be acceptable to the administration’s top legal brains.

Every compromise extracts a price– usually it’s a measure of self-perceived pride and dignity. But what is gained is something that you otherwise would not have at all. And that applies to the executive privilege dance as well. Giving up as little as possible at first and then giving a little more, and more, and more, can be extraordinarily politically damaging, says Cunningham, but in the long run protects fundamental constitutional principles. Those who have had knock-down, drag-out fights with this administration over its invoking of executive privilege, say that Bush’s lawyers have been willing to pay that steep price tag in order to prevent legal precedents that could be damaging to future presidencies.

Mr Brown cut 2p off the basic tax rate, but he also axed the 10p starter rate, and changed the National Insurance limits, leaving some people worse off.

The Tories said lower earners would pay more income tax, while the Lib Dems say “the poor are subsidising the rich”.

But Mr Brown said the reforms had simplified the system and were “in the best interests of the country”.
He told BBC Breakfast the average family would be £5 a week better off as a result of the income tax changes.
He denied lower paid workers would be worse off: “For people who are lower earners the tax credit wipes out the income tax liability and that’s why lower income workers are better off now as a result of what we have done as a government.”

Asked about allegations by ex-colleague Lord Turnbull that he has “Stalinist” tendencies, Mr Brown said some civil servants had been upset by “difficult decisions” he had made, such as keeping Britain out of the euro.

“If you take difficult decisions and you are prepared to see them through, you are not going to please everybody all the time,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today.

But he said he did not “hold grudges against people” and simply wanted to “get on with the job”.

On Wednesday, in his eleventh Budget, Mr Brown announced the basic income tax rate would be cut to 20p, its lowest rate for 75 years, from April 2008.

The Budget is expected to be Mr Brown’s last as chancellor, as he is the favourite to succeed Tony Blair as prime minister within the next few months.

It was seen by some as a set-piece statement, setting the stage for his anticipated takeover at Downing Street.

‘Not fairer’

But Shadow Chancellor George Osborne described it as a “con trick”, hitting low earners.

“Their income tax bill went up yesterday and I don’t think listening to that Budget they would have thought that,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

He challenged Mr Brown to admit his Budget will leave 3.5 million families worse off.

“There are winners but there are also millions of losers. There are 3.5 million families that are worse off,” he said.

Lib Dem Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said: “An awful lot of people are not going to come out of this much better, it’s not necessarily any fairer.”

He said low paid workers would be hit “quite badly”, particularly if they were single, and tax credits were not the answer as they were a “means-tested benefit” which was “complicated” and often did not work.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said millions of people would benefit - including those earning between £18,500 and £39,000 a year - amounting to about 40% of households.

But the IFS said about 2m people on lower wages - such as single people with no children earning between £12,000 and £18,500 would lose out, as they would be harder hit by the abolition of the 10p starting rate.

SNP leader Alex Salmond said: “I think the disappointing thing is, if he was going for a huge reduction in tax, then he should have gone for council tax which is the one that’s so unfair and oppressing so many people across the country.”

Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price said the chancellor had done nothing to help poor families in Wales.