Embargo

Port-au-Prince, Haiti -- When the United Nations Security Council imposed a worldwide petroleum and arms embargo on Haiti's army-backed government last Wednesday, diplomats said the action was a giant step toward restoring democracy to the deeply troubled Caribbean nation.As soon as the embargo was announced, army commander Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras agreed to meet with ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The meeting is scheduled to take place today at United Nations headquarters in New York.

A Parkville man was federally indicted on charges that he conspired with a man in Iran to export manufactured industrial products from the U.S., state's attorney's office said Thursday. Authorities believe Ali Saboonchi, 32, ran the Ace Electric Company to obtain goods to send them to businesses run by Arash Rashti Mohammad, 31, in Tehran, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates since November 2009, the five-count indictment said. U.S. economic sanctions prohibit exporting to Iran.

LAST MONTH, Cuban President Fidel Castro celebrated the 42nd anniversary of his revolution. Through 10 U.S. presidents over 40 years, the United States has maintained a tight embargo on trade and travel with his country. It's time to reassess our objectives for this relationship and how to achieve them. If we want to move Cuba toward democratic capitalism, as opposed to getting revenge against Mr. Castro for his 1960s property expropriations, then our interests are better served by ending the embargo.

WASHINGTON -President Barack Obama is permitting unlimited travel and transfer of money by Cuban-Americans to their relatives in Cuba and sponsoring greater telecommunications with the island, while keeping a long-standing U.S. embargo against trade with Cuba in place. The State, Treasury and Commerce departments will lift "all restrictions" on the visits of family members to Cuba and remittances of money, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday. This "series of steps ... to reach out to the Cuban people" is intended to "help bridge the gap between divided Cuban families," Gibbs said, and in turn promote greater freedom and human rights in the communist nation.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Treasury is compiling and plans to publish a list of Iraqi-controlled businesses worldwide in an effort to block Iraq from trying to evade United Nations-imposed sanctions by diverting goods through third countries."

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- An oil embargo and other sanctions designed to help restore democracy to Haiti are killing as many as 1,000 children each month, according to a Harvard University study."

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The United States, responding swiftly to an appeal from the Organization of American States, has begun a full-scale economic embargo against Haiti in hope of reversing the military ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.Haitian business leaders, already beginning to panic, caucused around the clock yesterday. Several industrial groups appeared likely to agree to support Aristide's return under a number of restrictive conditions.The Bush administration also urged all non-essential U.S. government employees and dependents to leave Haiti, encouraged other Americans to do the same and began shutting down its large aid mission in the hemisphere's poorest nation.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration expects a further tightening of the 33-year-old U.S. economic embargo against Cuba as a result of the rightward tilt of the new Republican-led Congress, a top State Department official said yesterday."

A U.S. appellate court has reinstated charges against an Iranian-born man who is accuised of trying to ship two sophisticated gas chromatographs from a Columbia company to Iran in violation of a 1995 trade embargo.The unanimous opinion, issued Tuesday by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond, Va., found that U.S. District Judge William M. Nickerson erred when he dismissed the charges against businessman Mohammad Reza Ehsan of San Ramon, Calif., as overly vague.

William G. Bardel, a Lehman Brothers managing director with broad experience in Asia, uses the term "domino effect" to describe what would happen if -- or when -- the United States removes its 17-year-old trade embargo on Vietnam.It's an ironic use of the phrase, but it may be apt, according to the appraisals of observers who, like Mr. Bardel, are watching and waiting alongside market-hungry corporate executives for the lifting of the U.S. embargo on the populous southeast Asian nation."If the United States opens up, then we'll have a lot of follow-on consequences for the rest of the world," Mr. Bardel, who oversees Lehman's government advisory activities in the Far East, said in a recent interview.

JERUSALEM -- The rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah announced yesterday that they have agreed in principle to share power in hopes of easing months of deadly factional fighting and breaking a damaging international aid embargo. The tentative accord was announced in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where leaders of the two groups met for two days under the auspices of King Abdullah. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he was hopeful the agreement would quell the factional clashes that have left scores of Palestinians dead in the Gaza Strip.

For most ordinary mortals, the celebration of an 80th birthday would be little more than a sobering milestone. But for those following the remarkable life and seemingly endless rule of Fidel Castro, who becomes an octogenarian today, his descent into frail old age has significance far beyond the boundaries of his beloved Cuba. The recent news that an ailing Castro, the world's longest-serving dictator, had "temporarily" handed over the reins of power to his brother, Raul, sent reverberations through the Western hemisphere.

WASHINGTON - Yielding to pressure from President Bush and threats of retaliation from Congress, the European Union has put off plans to lift its arms embargo on China this spring and may not press the issue until next year, U.S. and European officials said yesterday. The officials said that in addition to U.S. pressure, European nations had been shaken by the recent adoption of legislation by the Chinese National People's Congress authorizing the use of force to stop Taiwan from seceding.

LONDON - The U.S. government seriously contemplated using military force to seize oil fields in the Middle East during the Arab oil embargo of 30 years ago, according to a declassified British government document made public yesterday. The top-secret document reveals that the U.S. government, under President Richard M. Nixon, was prepared to act more aggressively than previously thought if tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors continued to escalate after the October 1973 Middle East war or if the oil embargo did not abate.

MIAMI - Cuba's recent jailing of dozens of dissidents and the execution of three ferry hijackers have stalled what had been an increasingly popular drive in the U.S. Congress to ease trade and travel restrictions on the island nation. Many advocates of a relaxation of the 4-decade-old embargo, which they argued only increased hardships for ordinary Cubans while doing nothing to dislodge Fidel Castro, said support for change had been building. Conservative lawmakers from farming states were no longer willing to lose out on food sales, they said, while more libertarian-minded members saw the travel ban as an infringement on individual rights.

WASHINGTON -- Next to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro is not looking so bad these days. Not on Capitol Hill, anyway. Suddenly the loosening of Cuba travel and trade restrictions has real momentum among Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress, despite President Bush's expressed wishes to keep the bans in place. Travel and trade bans seem to be on their last legs, and as far as I am concerned the change is long overdue, not only for the good of Cuba but also for the good of us, her neighbors to the north.

BAGHDAD -- This is the arithmetic of postwar Iraq: On her monthly salary as a teacher, Sadia Sa'ad can buy three scrawny chickens. Or two boxes of tea. Or maybe eight small fish.She cannot do that and buy milk, or medicine, or fruits for her eight children. Seven-year-old Mohammed has not had new shoes in two years."What have these children done to deserve such a difficult life?" she asks plaintively.Iraq, under the squeeze of an embargo clamped on after the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, is now a country whose people are watching themselves become poor.

THE LONG AWAITED review of economic sanctions against Cuba, sought by Pope John Paul II, has not occurred. But Friday, President Clinton restored the relationship to what he found on taking office in 1993. The embargoes he repealed are those he instituted in 1994 in response to a forced exodus of boat people, and in 1996 when Cuba shot down two Florida-based civilian planes.Mr. Clinton did not relax these measures during the lifetime of Jorge Mas Canosa, the hard-nosed Floridian who took over U.S. policy on his homeland.

EVER SINCE the Greeks crossed the Aegean to lay siege to Troy, nation states have tried to win wars by surrounding their enemies and starving them out. As nations grew, so did the complexity of such tactics. Napoleon tried to blockade the continent of Europe. The Union tried the same against the Confederacy. What was once the military siege is now the economic embargo. It is employed by the United States most notably against Cuba and Iraq, but also against Iran, Libya and, in a limited way, other countries.

MIAMI - President Bush lashed out at Fidel Castro yesterday, saying he would not lift a trade embargo against Cuba without substantial reforms, and was greeted by roars of approval from thousands of Cuban-Americans during the speech in a state critical to the president's re-election campaign in 2004. "Nearly a half-century ago, Cuba's independence and the hopes for democracy were hijacked by a brutal dictator who cares everything for his own power and nada for the Cuban people," Bush said.