WORLD

12 MILLION PEOPLE IN SLAVERY

SCOTSMAN - At least 12 million people, most of them children, are
trapped in slavery, a human rights activist said. Children are ensnared
in pornography and prostitution and exploited as cheap labor and child
soldiers. "They are more vulnerable, cheaper to hire and less likely to
demand higher wages or better working conditions," Sarah Williams, of
Anti-Slavery International, said of the 8.4 million children who are
slaves. . . Hundreds of thousands of people in Burma have been forced to
work as farm labourers, army porters or construction workers for little
or no pay. Women are trafficked from Albania and Moldova and forced into
prostitution in France, Italy and Britain. Men are trafficked in Mexico
to work on US farms. The child sold as a camel jockey, the woman forced
into prostitution, the migrant worker whose passport is confiscated by
his gang master boss - all in effect are slaves, she said. She was
speaking at a London seminar reviewing how Britain plans to mark the
bicentenary next year of the abolition of its slave trade.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1535672006

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HANS BLIX CALLS U.S. INVASION 'PURE FAILURE'

AP - Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix described the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq as a "pure failure" that had left the country worse off
than under the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein. In unusually harsh
comments to Danish newspaper Politiken, the diplomatic Swede said the
U.S. government had ended up in a situation in which neither staying nor
leaving Iraq were good options. . "Saddam would still have been sitting
in office. OK, that is negative and it would not have been joyful for
the Iraqi people. But what we have gotten is undoubtedly worse," he was
quoted as saying.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1025-01.htm

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