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Obama is ramping up his stimulus program this week even as his advisers are ramping down expectations about when the spending plan will affect a continuing rise in the nation’s unemployment.

Many of the stimulus plans that Obama announced Monday already were in the works, including hundreds of maintenance projects at military bases, about 1,600 state road and airport improvements, and federal money states budgeted for 135,000 teachers, principals and school support staff.

The administration had always viewed the summer as a peak for stimulus spending, as better weather permitted more public works construction and federal agencies had processed requests from states and others.

But Obama now promises an accelerated pace of federal spending over the next few months to boost the economy and produce jobs.

In contrast with civilian aerospace and airlines, the defence industry remains healthy.

“The global financial crisis has yet to have an impact on major arms companies’ revenues, profits and order backlogs,” Sipri said.

Peace-keeping operations – which also benefit defence firms – rose 11%.

Missions were launched in trouble spots such as Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Another record was set, with the total of international peace operation personnel reaching 187,586,” said Sipri, or Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Growth industry

As the world’s aerospace and defence industry prepares for next week’s Paris air show centenary, it seems much of the focus is set to shift away from troubled civilian aircraft makers, which are struggling with reduced orders from recession-hit airlines, towards the companies that make fighter jets and other military hardware.

In total, the 100 leading defence manufacturers sold arms worth $347bn during 2007, the most recent year for which reliable data are available.

Almost all the companies were American or European. Some 61% of the total was accounted for by 44 US companies, with 32 West European companies accounting for a further 31%. Other companies were Russian, Japanese, Israeli and Indian.

“Since 2002, the value of the top 100 arms sales has increased by 37% in real terms,” Sipri said. “The US presidency of George W Bush… was a period of continuity in the arms industry. This followed a period of consolidation in the 1990s and early 2000s.”

The US aerospace and defence giant Boeing remains the world’s largest, with arms sales of $30.5bn during 2007. The UK’s BAE Systems ranked a close second, with arms sales of $29.9bn, while Lockheed Martin was third with $29.4bn in sales.

The US remains the biggest spender, accounting for 58% of the total global spending increase during the decade, though China and Russia have reduced the gap.

It’s a terrible mistake to confuse the momentary solvency of the financial sector and the long-term health of our economy.

AMID THE media frenzy and speculation over the disappearance of Air France’s ill-fated Flight 447, the loss of two of the world’s most prominent figures in the war on the illegal arms trade and international drug trafficking has been virtually overlooked.

Pablo Dreyfus, a 39-year-old Argentine who was travelling with his wife Ana Carolina Rodrigues aboard the doomed flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, had worked tirelessly with the Brazilian authorities to stem the flow of arms and ammunition that for years has fuelled the bloody turf wars waged by drug gangs in Rio’s sprawling favelas.

Also travelling with Dreyfus on the doomed flight was his friend and colleague Ronald Dreyer, a Swiss diplomat and co-ordinator of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence who had worked with UN missions in El Salvador, Mozambique, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Angola. Both men were consultants at the Small Arms Survey, an independent think tank based at Geneva’s Graduate Institute of International Studies. The Survey said on its website that Dryer had helped mobilise the support of more than 100 countries to the cause of disarmament and development.
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Buenos Aires-born Dreyfus had been living in Rio since 2002, where he and his sociologist wife worked with the Brazilian NGO Viva Rio.

“Pablo will be remembered as a gentle and sensitive man with an upbeat sense of humour,” said the Small Arms Survey. “He displayed an intellectual curiosity and a determined work ethic that excited and enthused all who worked with him.”

According to the International Action Network on Small Arms Control (IANSA), Dreyfus’s work was instrumental in the introduction of landmark small arms legislation in Brazil in 2003. Under this legislation, an online link was created between army and police databases listing production, imports and exports of arms and ammunition in Brazil.

Dreyfus was an advocate of the stringent labelling of ammunition by weapons firms, arguing that by clearly identifying ammunition not only by its producer but also its purchaser, the likelihood of weapons being sourced by criminals from corrupt police or armed forces personnel is greatly reduced.

Though a Brazilian referendum on the right to bear arms was rejected in 2005, Viva Rio says the campaign should be considered a success because half a million weapons were voluntarily handed in to the authorities. Anti-gun activists put the referendum defeat down to fears criminals would circumvent the law and continue to gain access to small arms the usual way – through Paraguay and other bordering countries. This was not an irrational fear: until 2004, when Paraguay bowed to Brazilian pressure, even foreign tourists were allowed to purchase small arms simply by presenting a photocopy of their identity card. Dreyfus knew that many of the weapons from the so-called tri-border area between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina were reaching Rio drug gangs.

When unidentified gunmen made off with a stash of hand grenades from an Argentine military garrison in 2006, Dreyfus deplored what he said was lax security at military depots across the world. “If a supermarket can keep control of the amount of peas it has in stock, surely a military organisation could and should be able to do the same with equal if not greater efficiency with its weapons,” he said. “The key words are logisitics, control, security.”

When Rio agents smashed a cell of drug traffickers who had sourced their weapons from the tri-border area, Dreyfus noted its leaders were prominent businessmen living in apartments in the plush Rio suburbs of Ipanema and São Corrado, “not in the favelas”.

In a recent report posted on the Brazilian website Comunidade Segura (Safe Community), Dreyfus noted that the Brazilian arms firm CBC (Companhia Brasileira de Cartuchos) had become one of the world’s biggest ammunition producers by purchasing Germany’s Metallwerk Elisenhutte Nassau (MEN) in 2007, and Sellier & Bellot (S&B) of the Czech Republic in March. This would not be particularly noteworthy but for the fact that CBC’s exports had tapered off in recent years due to legislation restricting exports to Paraguay, arms that often found their way back into Brazil and on to the Rio drug gangs – the “boomerang effect”, as Dreyfus called it. “The commercial export of weapons and ammunition from Brazil to the bordering countries stopped in 2001,” wrote Dreyfus. “CBC lost commercial markets in Latin America, but Brazil won in public security.”

However, manufacturers from other countries had moved in to fill the void, and before its purchase by CBC, S&B was already “one of the marks most currently apprehended” by Brazilian police. Dreyfus said that, in view of the fact the Czech Republic was bound by the EU Code of Conduct on weapons exports – which states that EU countries must “evaluate the existence of the risk that the armament can be diverted to undesirable final destinations”, CBC should “consider the risk that some of these exports end up, via diversions, feeding violence in Brazil”.

Though his focus was on Latin America, Dreyfus also advised the government of Mozambique and at the time of his death was preparing to do the same for the government of Angola, where stockpiles of weapons left over from the civil war continue to pose a security problem.

Rotavirus causes more than 500,000 diarrhoeal deaths and two million hospitalisations a year among children.

Over 85% of deaths occur in developing countries in Africa and Asia.

The economy shrank by 5.4% on an annualised basis during the quarter after the economy shrank by 3.7% in the last quarter of 2008.

Despite being the worst result for 18 years, it was better than expected.

Canada has been hard hit by the global slowdown, with both its exports and imports falling.

“Lower spending in Canada and the United States, particularly business investment in plant and equipment, led to a sharp decline in Canada’s exports and imports,” said Statistics Canada, which issued the latest economic data.

Analysts had predicted a 6.6% drop in economic output.

“The only good news is that it will probably be the worst quarter in the cycle,” said Don Drummond, chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank.

Shares in Swedbank, the biggest lender to Latvia, dived 15.9%, to 38 Swedish Kronor ($4.92) after the Latvian government failed to sell any of its government debt securities on Wednesday. Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken–better known as SEB–fell 11.0%, to 30 Swedish kronor ($3.88). The Swedish kronor meanwhile fell to 10.91 against the euro, from 10.71.

The failed auction has raised fears that Latvia may have to devalue its currency. That could have a major impact on Scandinavian lenders who had flooded the Latvian market with euro-dominated loans that let borrowers take advantage of better interest rates. A devaluation of the kroon essentially makes it harder for them to repay their debts, sending the number of bad loans higher.

The Pirate Party won 7.1 percent of votes, taking one of Sweden’s 18 seats in the European parliament, with ballots in 5,659 constituencies out of 5,664 counted.

“Privacy issues and civil liberties are important to people and they demonstrated that clearly when they voted today,” one of the party’s candidates, Anna Troberg, told Swedish television on Sunday.

The party was founded in January 2006 and quickly attracted members angered by controversial laws adopted in Sweden that criminalised filesharing and authorised monitoring of emails.

Its membership shot up after a Stockholm court on April 17 sentenced four Swedes to a year in jail for running one of the world’s biggest filesharing sites, The Pirate Bay.

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s conservative Moderates won 18.8 percent of votes and four seats, close to its score in the European election in 2004 but down sharply from the 26.1 percent it won in Sweden’s 2006 general election.

Coming little more than a year ahead of Sweden’s next general election in September 2010, political analyst Mats Knutson called the result a “formidable cold shower” for Reinfeldt, speaking on public television SVT.

The opposition Social Democrats, traditionally Sweden’s biggest party, won 24.6 percent, also close to their result in 2004 and maintaining their five seats in the EU parliament.

The Greens scored a strong rise in support, and were credited with 10.8 percent of votes compared to 6.0 percent in 2004 and doubled their seats to two.

The formerly communist Left party saw its support drop from 12.8 percent in 2004 to 5.6 percent and one seat, a drop of one.

The far-right Sweden Democrats, which are not represented in Sweden’s parliament, meanwhile tripled their score but not enough to win a seat in parliament.

Their support rose from 1.1 percent in 2004 — and 2.9 percent in the 2006 general election — to 3.3 percent.