The BBC Panorama program came out yesterday with news that UN peacekeepers in the DR Congo provided arms to militia groups and smuggled gold and ivory.

The 18-month investigation found that:

Pakistani peacekeepers in the eastern town of Mongbwalu were involved in the illegal trade in gold with the FNI militia, providing them with weapons to guard the perimeter of the mines

Indian peacekeepers operating around the town of Goma had direct dealings with the militia responsible for the Rwandan genocide, now living in eastern DR Congo.

The Indians traded gold, bought drugs from the militias and flew a UN helicopter into the Virunga National Park, where they exchanged ammunition for ivory

However, Alan Doss, Special Representative to the Secretary-General of the UN, defends the credibility of the UN:

Mr Doss acknowledged that some United Nations personnel had behaved inappropriately, but said this should not mean the countries that sent them were culpable.

“I think it would be very unfair to smear whole countries and their contingents for irresponsible behaviour and sometimes illegal behaviour, I have to say, by a group of individuals or a few individuals,” he said.

Keep an eye for the back and forth between the UN and the BBC.

In other news, a Chinese factory has been found to be producing Tibetan flags. They’ve been ordered to stop immediately, but some flags have already shipped.

Capital doesn’t seem to have any masters, does it?

As always, Open Left does the numbers:

PPP: Obama 49%–46% Clinton, 4/20
Rasmussen: Clinton 49%–44% Obama, 4/20
Survey USA: Clinton 50%–44% Obama, 4/20
Zogby: Clinton 48%–42% Obama, 4/20
Quinnipiac: Clinton 51%–44% Obama, 4/20
Strategic Vision: Clinton 48%–41% Obama, 4/20
Suffolk: Clinton 52%–42% Obama, 4/20

And here are the averages:

Simple mean: Clinton 49.4%–43.7% Obama
Non-PPP mean: Clinton 49.7%–42.8% Obama
Pollster.com regression line: Clinton 49.0%–43.0% Obama

Chris Bowers then asks the oh-so-important question: When Will It End?

While we’re doing the numbers, Obama is rolling in the C.R.E.A.M. with $42 million on hand, while Clinton wallows in $10.3 million in debt and a paltry $9 million on hand. Even Old Man McCain’s got you beat, Hills.

Finally, Mike Connery talks about the importance of non-college youth in tomorrow’s primary and organizing issues the Democratic campaigns have faced post-Super Tuesday (mainly, SPRING BREAK!!! WOO!!!)

(with apologizes to Common)

Echoing the concerns of the World Bank and IMF, the UN issued a warning about the impending food crisis. Moreover, the UN food envoy, Jean Ziegler, called the growing food prices “silent mass murder” (h/t The Agonist, and issued a stern warning about the instability resulting from the price rise:

Ziegler said he was bound to highlight the “madness” of people who think that hunger is down to fate.

“Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time — just as (Karl) Marx thought. It is rather that a murder is behind every victim. This is silent mass murder,” he said in an interview.

[snip]

Ziegler said he believed that one day starving people could rise up against their persecutors. “It’s just as possible as the French Revolution was,” he said.

Resulting from the sharp spike in food costs, governments and companies are now looking more seriously to biotech grains to feed their countries and produce their products. What is most striking is the consideration by regions usually adverse to biotech engineered foods:

Even in Europe, where opposition to what the Europeans call Frankenfoods has been fiercest, some prominent government officials and business executives are calling for faster approvals of imports of genetically modified crops. They are responding in part to complaints from livestock producers, who say they might suffer a critical shortage of feed if imports are not accelerated.

Is biotech an answer to the food crisis? What can done to lower food costs and prevent more instability?

A study by the RAND Corporation has found that over 300,000 troops suffer mental health problems. According to the study:

Billed as the first large-scale nongovernmental survey of its kind, the study found that stress disorder and depression afflict 18.5 percent of the more than 1.5 million U.S. forces who have deployed to the two war zones.

This level of stress is also having a severe economic impact:

AND, a private research organization, estimated that stress and depression among returning soldiers cost $6.2 billion in the two years following deployment, mainly due to lost productivity, medical costs and a higher risk of suicide.

British PM Gordon Brown snubs Bush as he goes to meet up with all three presidential contenders before sitting down with Mr. 28%. Their relationship hasn’t had the “chumminess” of the Bush-Blair lovefest.

Clinton’s campaign is set to feel some backlash after her comments at a 1995 meeting at Camp David, debating whether Bill Clinton ought to cater to southern working class whites:

“Screw ‘em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”

The quote’s been verified by three sources present at the time. I’m still wondering why actively hating on working class Americans isn’t stirring the pot compared to Obama saying something effectively true about them.

Zimbabwe’s high court has turned down the MDC’s request to have the results of the presidential election last month immediately released. Al Jazeera reports “[i]t took no more than two minutes for the high court judge to deliver his judgment.”

There has been no immediate explanation for the ruling, as it is still being typed up. More news forthcoming, of course.

In other news on the African continent, Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki has officially named opposition leader Raila Odinga to the post of prime minister after months of political violence. The cabinet is going to be split 50-50 between Kibaki’s and Odinga’s parties, but there is still disagreement about the most effective size of cabinet:

Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner, said that the country could be managed more effectively by fewer ministers.

“The international community has no business giving money, giving advances to a government that uses that money not to develop, but rather to sustain an extravagant lifestyle,” she said.

But Topi Lyambali, editor of the Kenyan London News, told Al Jazeera that a large cabinet was arguably necessary to promote stability.

“What many observers have been pointing out is that you cannot put a value to peace. Whatever it costs, the Kenyans have to get it,” he said.

What’s on your mind this morning?

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are due to testify this week, and not many are expecting anything short of a “stay the course”, Bush-apologizing type of message. While there will be many other factors at play during the hearing, like all three of the presidential candidates being in attendance, there is some kind of analysis one can intuit from behind the façade.

For one, Steve Coll of the New Yorker points out criticism from leading Pentagon officials(h/t NPR News Blog), namely General Richard A. Cody in last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing:

The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply, and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies. . . . Soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed. . . . Overall, our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it. If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.

Coll points out that in a normal situation, “when an active four-star general implies in public that the Army is under such strain that it might flounder if an unexpected war broke out, or might require a draft to muster adequate troop levels, he could expect to provoke concern and comment from, say, the President of the United States.” But Bush rested all ability and direction upon the head of Petraeus. This kind of distance in opinion within the Pentagon reveals how much is going on beyond the show that Petraeus puts on every so often.

What is going on in Iraq now is a bloody stalemate, with no conclusive evidence that the surge has done anything positive at all. Coll uses a literary reference to capture the despair:

A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”)

What other insights can we draw that the Petraeus/Crocker Television hour(s) won’t tell us?

The Contentious French have their go at the Beijing Olympics, protesting at several sites along the route that the Olympic torch took through Paris. It certainly isn’t the first time there’s been a protest or boycott of the games.

A court in Zimbabwe has said that it will rule to force the release of the results of the recent Presidential election, in which opposition leaders claimed they have won. The ruling will come down tomorrow.

Iranian Labor Leader, Mahmoud Salehi, was released Sunday after serving a year-long prison term for union-organizing activities. Salehi, who was supposed to be released on March 23, had been on a hunger strike after Iranian authorities refused to release him, accusing him of “communicating with those outside prison for the purposes of issuing messages of solidarity.”

Willow Bay talks about civility in the blogosphere over at HuffPo:

With a click of the “Post Comment” button, Netizens can quickly bring down the level of dialogue. Bloggers lob zingers, commenters trade barbs, and bullies target kids in the cyber schoolyard. Mudslinging–a time-honored political tradition–thrives on the Web. And trafficking in the bilious and the vituperative has become big business. In an era in which making noise is essential to standing out and breaking through the clutter, naughty will, by definition, win out over nice.

Although she later acknowledges that the whole Web isn’t like this, that “For every foul-mouthed rant, there are thousands of message boards where collaboration is the order of the day.” Arianna Huffington herself wrote that it’s hard work to make the conversation civil.

The NY Post reports (I hate to be citing the NY Post, but h/t to HuffPo for it) that the little girl who greet Hillary Clinton during her 1996 trip to Bosnia is insulted at Clinton’s claim that she had to evade sniper fire. The girl, now 20 year-old Emina Bicakcic, a doctoral student, even had time to read a poem to her, the first words of which were ironically “Peace has come.”

What’s on your mind around this time o’night?

In Baghdad, the curfew has been partially lifted after al-Maliki’s government came to an uneasy agreement with Muqtada al-Sadr and his al-Mahdi army.

al-Sadr has proclaimed

“We have decided to withdraw from the streets of Basra and all other provinces,” al-Sadr said in a statement released on Sunday.

“We want the Iraqi people to stop this bloodshed and maintain Iraq’s independence and stability.”

al-Maliki responded in kind, calling al-Sadr’s statement a “step in the right direction.” Hopefully there’s more negotiations within the country instead of the U.S.’s “shoot first, ask later” policy.

In Zimbabwe, the country is still tense after preliminary results show Mugabe’s party and the opposition MDC are neck-in-neck. There have been some initial victory celebrations as the MDC claims it won the Presidential race, but it seems still too close to tell.

Treasury Secretary Paulson has unveiled an overhaul of financial regulation. However, although it’s touted as the “broadest overhaul of Wall Street regulation since the Great Depression”, the NYTimes reports

The administration’s proposal will do almost nothing to regulate the alphabet soup of sophisticated financial products that have fueled the current financial crisis. And it will not rein in practices that have been linked to the mortgage crisis, like packaging risky loans into securities carrying the highest ratings.

It also isn’t going to become law anytime soon, but is just a proposal that may or may not be taken up some time this year. In the next Congress. Frickin’ sweet.

The last of Bush’s Texas cronies has left the Cabinet today, giving us a full BINGO on Jason’s scoreboard.

The issue of health care comes to a head in California this week with two issues being raised by the California Nurses Association.

The first is regarding the denying of treatment to cancer patients:

The latest in a series of patients not taking it anymore will be tomorrow in Orange County, LA. We expect friends and family of Nick Colombo, and local nurses, and healthcare activists to muster at least 100 or 200 people to occupy the offices of PacifCare–enough that the insurer will have to take notice.

Colombo is a 17-year-old cancer patient denied a treatment–said to cost either $30,000 or $100,000–by PacifiCare, which was just fined $3.5 million for wrongly denying the claims of 133,000 people. (You know an insurance company is bad when a Republican Insurance commissioner fines them.)

nycene is following this story in detail over at DailyKos.

Secondly, starting last Friday, the California Nurses Association has announced a 10-day strike of 8 hospitals operated by Sutter Health in the Bay Area. Some 4,000 RNs are protesting problems with “patient care, medical redlining, and healthcare for nurses.”

This isn’t the first strike against Sutter Health: earlier last year nurses struck to enforce compliance with California’s nurse-to-patient ratios, which aids in nurses’ ability to adequately provide quality care for a smaller number of patients, instead of providing minimal care for a larger number of patients.

Not only are patients suffering in the American health care system, but so are nurses and laborers working in health care. Head over to nycene’s diary to see how you can help, and continue to discuss the relation of labor rights to health care and patient rights.