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The flip side to Bill Gates' charity billions. Last year, Bill Gates reminisced in the Huffington Post about his first trip to Africa in 1993. ‘I saw that many of the world’s lifesaving, life-enhancing discoveries were not available in Africa,’ he said. ‘That was deeply upsetting… I became convinced that if science and technology were better applied to the challenges of Africa, the tremendous potential of the continent would be unleashed and people could be healthier and fulfil their promise.’ Having spent 18 years making as much money as possible with Microsoft (the computer software company he co-founded in 1975), in 1994 Gates started giving it away. Philanthropic funds are common among the super-rich in the US; they enable tax avoidance provided five per cent of net investment assets are given away annually. Bill Gates Photo of Bill Gates: World Economic Forum Under a CC Licence Targeting global health and US education, Gates’ giving rapidly ballooned into the billions.

The Foundation’s achievements are undoubtedly impressive. ‘I was the fall guy’: Julian Assange in his own words. Is the digital activist world robust enough to survive legislation attacks by the world’s superpowers? The legislative attacks are not the big problem, either for the internet or for the communications revolution – which has given us such ability to understand the world by learning through the experiences of other people. Rather, the problem is the huge expansion by state intelligence agencies, which are now monitoring nearly every border and nearly every internet traffic flow. For example, companies around the world are selling equipment to states for $10 million per year, to record every single telephone call, email and SMS going in and out of a country. Billions of hours of telephone calls – and not to just look at them and then perhaps discard them, but to record that information permanently. There is very little that any individual can do to protect themselves from bulk surveillance now What can we do about it?

The answer is: very little. So, are we all doomed? Why outlawing squatting will be way too expensive. A new study shows that government moves to make squatting a criminal offence could cost the UK taxpayer a whopping £790 million. More than 720,000 properties across the UK lie empty. As regular readers of the New Internationalist blog will know, proposals are currently before the House of Lords which will see people who use empty residential buildings for shelter facing up to a year in prison or a £5000 ($7800) fine. In response, Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes (SQUASH) released a report ‘Can We Afford to Criminalise Squatting?’

On Friday, which is backed by a range of academics and legal practitioners. In other words, the costs of criminalising squatting will obliterate any savings made by a bill that has savaged Legal Aid for the poorest to make savings of just £350 million ($548 million). The government has not done its maths. We think it’s about time the government does a proper assessment before they push through this law. Legislation should be based on facts. US drones invade Iraqi skies. When is a US troop pullout not a pullout? Asks Felicity Arbuthnot. First the world was sold imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, with General Colin Powell asserting at the United Nations in February 2003: ‘My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.’ Now it seems the world is sold a withdrawal from Iraq which was not quite what it seemed, as presented by the Panetta-Obama-fest in the Baghdad, Fort Bragg speeches of just six weeks ago.

At Fort Bragg: ‘The war in Iraq will soon belong to history,‘ said the President. Well, not quite. In an interesting sleight of hand, the State Department, rather than the Pentagon, is operating a fleet of surveillance drones over Iraq, in ‘the latest example of the State Department’s efforts to take over the functions in Iraq that the military used to perform.’1. UN ‘travesty’: resolutions of mass destruction (Part 1) It has been said that compassion is ‘the only beauty that truly pleases’.1 While beauty ordinarily provokes the fiery itch of desire or the sullen shadow of envy, compassion is cooling, blissful, inspiring awe and wonder. It implies an ability to stand outside our own needs as observers, to perceive the suffering of others as of equal or greater importance.

But like all forms of beauty, compassion can be faked, exploited. On 4 February, Western politicians and journalists responded with outrage to the Russian and Chinese vetoing of a UN security council resolution calling for Syrian president Bashar Assad to step down as part of a ‘political transition’. UK foreign secretary, William Hague, said: ‘More than 2,000 people have died since Russia and China vetoed the last draft resolution in October 2011. How many more need to die before Russia and China allow the UN security council to act? The corporate media took the same view. ‘When it began, the death toll was 1,000 to 2,000. Killing Gaddafi: the death of legal justice. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. - Ephesians: 6:12.

What a decade it has been for assassinations, liquidations, exterminations - for state terrorism led by the Land of the Free. Summary executions include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. On 5 February 2003, General Colin Powell stated that he headed a deadly terrorist network within Iraq – just six weeks before the US headed a deadly terrorist network, in an illegal invasion, which entirely destroyed Iraq. On 7 June 2006, at Hibhib, near Baquba, al-Zarqawi was killed by two five-hundred-pound bombs, dropped by US Air Force F-16 jets, killing five others including his wife and child. President Saddam Hussein and some of his sovereign government were subject to a kangaroo court, laughable had it not shamed and disgraced the word ‘legal’ at every level.

Sewer rhetoric There may be worse to come. Rebellious media: history gives us hope. I was recently invited to be a speaker at the upcoming Rebellious Media Conference in London – a celebration of the role of alternative media in bringing about social change. With all of the tickets sold and Noam Chomsky delivering the keynote, it looks likely to be significant.

Chomsky is known for showing how the current structure of the media business can serve to squeeze out radical viewpoints. But this is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, throughout history élites have consistently sought to stifle those media sources that challenge them. One of my favourites is a story set in the early 19th century, when taxes on newspapers were levied in such a way as to put radical media outside the purchasing power of ordinary working people. Photo: Spartacus Educational The by-lines of the first few issues of The Poor Man’s Guardian reveal the contortions to which the editors went to test the law. The final death knell for The Poor Man’s Guardian rang in 1835 when the presses were seized. Somaliland: an oasis of success. Charles Anderson and Glen Johnson visit a region that, despite a lack of international recognition, is holding its own.

A former liberation soldier who is now a guard for tourists. Photo by Charles Anderson. The guard spoke out of the place where his front tooth used to be. He sat in the passenger seat of an aged Toyota station wagon with a muddied rifle leaning against his knee. A former liberation soldier, he clapped his hands to the blaring sound of Somali rap music as we sped through the desert east of Hargeisa, the administrative hub of Somaliland: a place that no longer exists. He turned around to face us and pointed out the window. ’Tank, tank,’ he said. In a place like this, the natural reaction would be to panic. Official maps lump Somaliland in with the other regions comprising Somalia.

While central and south Somalia and the neighbouring Puntland fell into the chaos of piracy, clan-warfare and Islamic militancy, Somaliland embarked on a steady course of state-building. Let’s end corruption – starting with Wall Street. As the #OccupyWallStreet protests continue to grow, Mark Engler agrees that the bankers must be held to account for their ill-gotten gains. It’s a favourite conservative ploy in the development debate: blame poverty on corruption. When explaining why countries in the Global South face stark levels of inequality and deprivation, you just say it’s due to a common penchant for bribery and fraud. You treat it as a cultural deficiency.

Following this approach, institutions such as the World Bank trumpet their work in ‘good governance’ and anti-corruption. No need to examine the disastrous results of neoliberal policies such as privatization, deregulation and austerity. Nor do élites in wealthy countries have to acknowledge how foreign corporations have propagated kickbacks and cronyism. Since 2008, not a single senior executive in the US banking industry has faced jail time for fuelling one of the largest financial crises in history. Are religious schools bad for society?

Every month we invite two experts to debate, and then invite you to join the conversation online. The best comments will be printed in the next magazine. Andrew Religious schools select pupils on the basis of their parents’ religion, which entrenches religious (and in some cases ethno-religious) divisions in society, as well as perpetuating socio-economic inequality. This is bad for social cohesion. Religious schools are also permitted to select their staff – both teaching and non-teaching – on grounds of their religion, which is unfair on potential applicants and also hampers the efficiency of the school as a school. Headteacher posts in religious schools are three times more likely to have to be re-advertised than those in community schools. Schools should be places where minds are opened and children encounter ideas they may never come across in the home or elsewhere, so I also think that the fact that religious schools are permitted to give religious instruction is bad for society.