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KHMER ROUGE TRIALS:

The Washington Post has a good article on how victims of the Khmer Rouge are losing hope that justice may still come to pass.

Rather than providing a promised airing of truth, the proceedings have become mired in a debate over legal standards that has delayed indictments and pushed back the start of the trials by months. Some observers now fear the dispute could derail the trials altogether.

Is this just another case of a UN project that hasn't a chance of accomplishing anything? Read the piece for more.

THE UN and other groups:

While bird flu is moving around the planet, possibly mutating into something that will end up killing millions of humans, the Tamiflu stockpiles in countries like Cambodia are reaching expiry dates.

Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines will be the first on the front lines to see their stocks of Tamiflu medicine expire by year's end. Countries worldwide have been racing to stockpile the antiviral, which experts hope might help fight a pandemic flu, but no one knows for sure whether it will actually work.

... "If the threat lingers for many years, what happens then?" asked Megge Miller, an epidemiologist at the World Health Organization in Cambodia. "It's just like throwing money into a black hole."

Yikes! Any thoughts there may have been some faulty planning going on in high places?

The World Food Program is has seen Spain step up after announcing three weeks ago that it was suspending food aid to Cambodia due to lack of funds.

Half a million euros will help some of the 650,000 school children, 70,000 HIV/AIDS sufferers and 18,000 TB patients that have been doing without.

USAID has cut funding for the anti-human trafficking organizations.

The USAID will now focus less directly on combating human trafficking and more on government issues, anti-corruption, and strengthening the rule of law, the paper quoted U.S. Embassy spokesman Jeff Daigle as saying.

The decision was made in Washington, and was related to "budget constraints", Daigle said, adding that the funding cut does not indicate the USAID is unhappy with the way its funds have been used.

"The root causes of (human trafficking) are poverty and poverty is linked directly to poor governance," he wrote in a recent e- mail.

"The USAID programs focusing on anti-corruption and more engagement with the judiciary will address these governance problems, and thus, to some extent, trafficking issues," he said.

The USAID has no plans to directly fund the Cambodian government to combat trafficking, he added.

And this fits with continuing the suspension on adoption by Americans ... how?

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