Foreign Aid

WASHINGTON -- In a jab at congressional Republicans who have rejected increases in foreign aid, President Clinton chose the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to urge the United States yesterday to continue its leading role in international affairs."

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton vetoed another of the spending bills passed by Congress yesterday, but after speaking with the two top Republican leaders, he said he was ready to work around the clock to settle the standoff over the federal budget.There was little progress during the day as the two sides wrangled over a variety of issues having less to do with how much money the government will spend than with how it should be spent.Senior members of the House and Senate met yesterday evening with the White House budget director, Jack Lew, to try to reach an agreement on the spending bill for foreign aid, which has none of the money the president had sought for the Middle East peace process.

SOME DAY, foreign aid will come back in style. Washington will then donate funds to jump start the world's poorest economies, for the sake of helping them to self-sustaining growth. If the United States is still the richest country, it will give more than any other, at the same rate as smaller prosperous countries. In return, the United States will receive, if not always gratitude, tremendous influence in shaping its world.Meanwhile, foreign aid is out of style. Less than 1 percent of the budget President Clinton recommends would go for it, and Congress won't let him have that.

NEW YORK -- Saying economic empowerment is the next frontier of civil rights, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson urged African-Americans to build wealth, buy stock in corporations and own businesses."

WASHINGTON -- Fifty years after Americans helped rebuild a war-torn Europe with the most successful foreign assistance program in history, the United States has become the most tight-fisted aid donor in the industrialized world. It's dead last among modern nations in the portion of its wealth that goes to help poor countries.Italy is more generous; so is Spain. Canada gives nearly four times as great a share of its economic output to developing countries as the United States doles out, and tiny Denmark gives 10 times as much.

LONDON -- The use of aid as a political weapon goes in phases and fashions. Jimmy Carter as president wielded aid as a sword along with high-decibel rhetoric on human rights. The occasional spate of activity since then has been less spirited. Carteresque fervor now returns as Madeleine Albright's State Department charges at every windmill. It is a breath of fresh air after the politics of doldrums practiced by her predecessor, Warren Christopher. Cambodia is one target, Kenya another.And the usually stodgy, consensus-seeking, International Monetary Fund is also flexing its financial muscle.

TOKYO -- One of the great puzzles of Asia today is this:Is Kim Jong Il, who was named last week as the general secretary of North Korea's ruling Workers Party, presiding over widespread famine?It is a subject debated by Korea experts, but one thing that many agree on is that food stocks seem to have improved significantly in the past few months. There may be pockets of famine, but the harvest has begun and hundreds of thousands of tons of foreign aid have apparently alleviated the worst of the suffering -- for now.While the public perception of North Korea is still of starving children in orphanages, that is not the impression many visitors are coming away with.

WASHINGTON -- Outgoing Secretary of State Warren Christopher warned yesterday that U.S. aid to Israel and its peace partners inevitably will get squeezed if Congress continues slashing money for international programs elsewhere in the world.A day after Israel and the Palestinians reached a landmark agreement heralding further Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Christopher said that support for Israel couldn't escape the ax if the decadelong trend is not curtailed.Until now, Congress -- under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby in the United States -- has kept levels of aid to Israel and Egypt intact while sharply cutting funds for the developing world.

WASHINGTON - The Clinton administration announced a radical transformation yesterday in the way the United States will use its dwindling funds to help impoverished and developing countries overseas.Assailed by Congress for spending too much and by industrial allies for spending too little, the administration promised to cut its foreign aid missions abroad, concentrate on helping fewer countries and work more closely with private organizations engaged in the business of economic development.

FOREIGN AID has long been a favorite whipping boy for many conservatives and for critics of American involvement in global affairs. The objections are familiar: Why send money to other countries that we could easily spend on needs here at home? Why spend taxpayers' money to aid wasteful or corrupt governments? Why not rely on the free market to generate prosperity that will raise living standards for the very poor?In recent years, those attitudes have helped drive down the level of U.S. foreign assistance.

BANGKOK, Thailand - Foreign aid workers have begun reaching remote areas of Myanmar hardest hit by the May 2-3 cyclone, relief agencies said yesterday. These first admissions of foreign workers, issued over the past two days, breach the barrier erected by the government that had delayed delivery of supplies to more than a million people in the remote Irrawaddy River delta. The opening comes more than three weeks after the cyclone, which left 135,000 people dead or missing. The United Nations estimates that 1.5 million survivors deep in the Irrawaddy delta have not yet received any aid. The permissions follow an agreement announced Friday by Ban Ki Moon, the U.N. secretary-general, after a meeting in Myanmar with the leader of that nation's junta, Senior General Than Shwe.

KIEV, UKRAINE -- That four British diplomats allegedly were passing information from the British embassy in Moscow to MI6 headquarters in London is unrelated to the financial aid that their country gives to Russian non-governmental organizations. President Vladimir I. Putin is manipulating the recent revelation and galvanizing latent xenophobia in Russia to garner support against foreign technical assistance and aid, both of which he perceives as a threat to his power. It appears that the diplomats were using a device planted in a fake rock in a Moscow park to transmit the information.

THE OFFERS of disaster assistance coming from rich countries such as Japan, France and Germany are not surprising given the huge relief effort taking place in New Orleans and the breadth of the death and destruction left in Hurricane Katrina's wake. What is surprising, and somewhat hurtful to America's national pride and can-do culture, are the offers of help from poor countries usually on the receiving end of U.S. aid. The Dominican Republic, Romania, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Belarus, El Salvador, even Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and others have offered modest assistance.

WASHINGTON - The banner headline in Britain's News of the World read: "5 Billion People Can't Be Wrong!" Well, yes they can. There's no question that the best-selling British Sunday newspaper captured the post-Live 8 media spin. Now that several billion people have watched Live 8, the biggest event in the history of entertainment, the planet is allegedly mobilized to "Make Poverty History." But the conventional wisdom is wrong about public opinion and Live 8's politically fashionable organizers are wrong about the remedy for African poverty.

SEOUL, South Korea - In a disturbing sign that North Korea is further closing its doors to the outside world, the reclusive regime is trying to reduce the presence of foreign aid agencies in the country, diplomats and aid officials said. Although not rejecting humanitarian aid entirely, the North Korean government has told the United Nations that it wants to discontinue an annual fund-raising appeal that started in 1995 at the height of a famine that killed an estimated 2 million people.

IN THE aftermath of Hurricane Jeanne, the Haitian city of Gonaives is a mainstay of misery. Residents living on rooftops. The dead fouling fetid, flooded streets below. Gangs hijacking convoys of food and water. Police missing in action and international troops overwhelmed in their absence. And yet, the chaos cannot be blamed solely on Jeanne's battering winds and ravaging rains. The storm that led to more than 1,000 dead and another 1,000 missing compounded the devastation of years of economic, social and environmental neglect.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Five aid workers from the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders were shot to death yesterday in an ambush in northwest Afghanistan as they were returning to their regional office, officials said. The killings were another blow to the embattled aid workers in Afghanistan, who have seen 32 of their colleagues, and at least five other foreigners, killed since March 2003, often in attacks by Taliban and other militants intent on stalling aid and reconstruction efforts.

WASHINGTON - With countries from Bolivia to Bangladesh competing for a rich new flow of foreign aid from the United States, the Bush administration and Congress are moving ahead with a fundamental overhaul of programs to assist developing nations. The new approach - an experiment intended to create competition among applicants, who must demonstrate their worthiness to receive financing - has won support in Congress. But it has already drawn criticism from those who say that some recipients of aid under existing programs may be shortchanged.

WASHINGTON -- Rock star Bono and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's nine-day African poverty tour was like chicken soup for a bad cold: It made us feel good despite a lot of misery. Also, it probably won't do any harm, and it might even do some good. Among other good things, it gives a high profile and appealing face to a cause that Americans love to gripe about, foreign aid. To hear the angry voices squawking over talk radio, you might think half of the federal budget, at least, goes to foreign aid. In fact, our current foreign aid budget of about $10 billion amounts to less than one-half of 1 percent of the overall budget.

CHICAGO - Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, on a fact-finding tour of Africa, found himself under attack last week by his traveling companion, U2's Bono, for daring to question the need for large increases in foreign aid to poor countries. "You need big money for development," declared the Irish rock star. "If the secretary can't see that, we are going to have to get him a new pair of glasses and a new set of ears." There is a critical flaw in Mr. O'Neill's corrective: They aren't rose-colored.