Statistics about attacks on journalists can be taken as an index of prevalent barbarity and callousness. Even if the findings of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) were to be taken at face value only, the world is becoming a barbarous place. The number of individuals killed last year because of their work as journalists was 34. They either died in the line of duty on assignment or were deliberately targeted for assassination because of their reporting or their affiliation with a news organisation. The previous year the toll had been 24. This year's figures do not include 18 others, the motives for whose murders were unclear, but "there is reason to suspect that it was related to the journalist's profession.

The rise in killings of journalists can be directly linked to the rise in civil conflicts. The CPJ says "the armed factions fighting them often see journalists as witnesses to be eliminated". The maximum number of journalists to have been eliminated for witnessing atrocities in conflict situations was in Sierra Leone. Most of murdered died at the hands of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels who entered the capital town of Freetown in January 1999 with target lists of journalists whose work was deemed anti-RUF. Many were killed in front of family members. The RUF could hide the truth about their brutal deeds only in the absence of news reports, or rather journalists. There have been others too to have died in conflict situations. Two died in East Timor, Indonesia, two others in Sri Lanka and five in Yugoslavia.

Not all trends are as disturbing as the one that shows the rise in killings. In 1997, 129 journalists were jailed and 118 the next year. The number dipped in 1999 - the figure of 87 certainly shows trends have improved, but things still remain bad enough for journalists. China remains Number One as the world's leading jailer of journalists - 19. Turkey followed close on its heels with 18. Here again things were marginally better - this country had imprisoned as many as 27 journalists the previous year. If only the better could be good enough. One reason for the incarcerations is that many countries still maintain criminal penalties for libel. The CPJ feels criminal libel statues remain the most worrisome threat to independent journalism.

The list this time is bound to rake up controversies. The 16 employees of Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS) killed in April 1999 when North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombers raided the RTS headquarters in Belgrade have not been listed as being journalists to have died in the line of duty. The CPJ believes the role played by the RTS during the ethnic cleansing campaign in the Balkans falls outside its definition of journalism. This might be construed as an inherent contradiction, since the CPJ "defends all journalists, regardless of the views they express, and we have an extremely broad definition of who is a journalist". The CPJ, however, had condemned the attack.

The CPJ thoroughly investigates each report of a journalist killed in order to determine whether the journalist was killed because of his or her profession. Journalists caught in the crossfire while covering combat are included along with journalists specifically targeted for assassination. The CPJ's criteria define journalists as people who cover news or comment on public affairs, in print, in photographs, on radio, on television, or online. Reporters, writers, editors, publishers, and directors of news organisations are all counted. It, however, does not classify a case as confirmed until it is sure that the death was related to the victim's journalistic work.

The total number of journalists to have been killed in the line of duty in the past 10 years stands at 458. The most dangerous place for journalists have been Algeria (59), Colombia (36), Russia (34), Tajikistan (29), Croatia (26), India (22), Bosnia-Herzegovina (21), Turkey (19), Rwanda (17), the Philippines (15), Sierra Leone (12), Peru (12), and Mexico (10). The list of ten worst enemies of the Press for 1999 is headed by the three perpetuals - President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, President Jiang Zemin of China and President Fidel Castro of Cuba. The others are President Laurent-Desire Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine, President Zine Abdine Ben ali of Tunisia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, President Alberto Fujimori of Peru and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.<

Minority groups in the United States are increasing both in population as well as political influence. Given this backdrop, it is becoming as increasingly important to realise the role they are playing in defining and shaping up American politics. The last three decades of the twentieth century particularly have seen dramatic strides in the impact that minorities have played in US politics. The compilation of Jeffrey Schultz, Kerry Haynie, Anne McCulloch and Andrew Aoki now becomes the only one-stop resource available that focuses exclusively on the expanding role of minorities in US politics. This is the third and final work to be brought out in the American Political Landscape series. The previous two tomes in the series were 'Encyclopedia of Women in American Politics' and 'Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics'. Both were published last year.

The 'Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics' (EMAP for short, and for the sake of convenience hereafter) provides information about important people, issues, cases, achievements, struggles and events pertaining to the history of minorities in American politics. The 2,000-plus cross-referenced entries in this two-volume compilation have been classified into four sections and rearranged in an A-Z format. The first volume is about African and Asian Americans while the second covers Native and Hispanic Americans. The civil rights movements of all these groups have become stronger in recent times and both political participation as well as political office-holding of members of these communities have increased manifold. Readers can research the political history and growing influence of a single minority as well as compare and contrast the political struggles and achievements of each group. Given the structure of the work, the inclusion in each volume of a comprehensive index which covers both volumes makes browsing easier.

The longer entries dwell at length on some of the key issues that face minorities in contemporary US politics. These entries on affirmative action, immigration, bilingual education, and political participation among others are meant to put things in context. The EMAP claims to give "accurate information in manageable doses". Each entry includes a bibliography that can serve as the next step for further research by the readers and researchers. Each section also carries reprints of selected important documents and speeches. A directory of organisations that are directly or indirectly involved in politics is provided for each group. This apart, one general appendix for the entire encyclopaedia is a four-column timeline of minorities in American politics. Starting with the adoption of the American Constitution and running to the present day, the timeline draws attention to the diverse history of the United States in a comparative context.

Jeffrey D. Schultz, president of Jeffrey D. Schultz & co, is adjunct fellow at the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs and has taught political science and history at a number of colleges, including Colorado College and Ashland University. Kerry L. Haynie is an assistant professor in the department of political science and a senior research associate at the Eagelton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Anne Merline McCulloch is the dean of the Evening College and external programmes at Columbia College in Columbia. Andrew L. Aoki is chairman of the department of political science at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.

The work is the collaborative effort of more than 100 scholars. Among those who have contributed their views on the current issues and political outlook for each section include Raymond Winbush, director, Race Relations Institute at Fisk University (African-American section); Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian-American Studies Center, UCLA (Asian-American section); John A. Garcia, professor of political science, University of Arizona (Latino section); and Peter d'Errico, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Native American Section).

Health systems deserve to be accorded topmost priority in efforts to improve health or ensure that resources are wisely used. Since health systems provide the critical interface between life-saving, life-enhancing interventions and the people who need them; if health systems in a particular country are inherently weak, the power of these interventions is proportionately weakened, at times even lost. The annual report of the World Health Organization (WHO) this time features the first ever analysis of the increasingly important influence of health systems in the daily lives of people worldwide. The report sheds new light on what makes health systems behave in certain ways, and hopes to influence policymakers to weigh the many complex issues involved, examine their options, and make wise choices.

The report presents an index of national health systems' performance in trying to achieve the three overall goals of good health, responsiveness to the expectations of the population, and fairness of financial contribution, by virtue of an assessment system based on five indicators: overall level of population health; health inequalities (or disparities) within the population; overall level of health system responsiveness (a combination of patient satisfaction and how well the system acts); distribution of responsiveness within the population (how well people of varying economic status find that they are served by the health system); and the distribution of the health system's financial burden within the population (who pays the costs).

The report finds that among the 191 member states, France provides the best overall health care followed among major countries by Italy, Spain, Oman, Austria and Japan. The U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance, the report finds. The United Kingdom, which spends just six percent of GDP on health services, ranks 18th. Several small countries - San Marino, Andorra, Malta and Singapore are rated close behind second- placed Italy.

There are a number of reasons why health systems come a cropper in many countries. Many of these are common to most. Firstly, health ministries of many countries focus on the public sector and adopt a could-not-care-less attitude towards the usually larger private sector health care. The public sector, in many cases, ends up subsidising unofficial private practice since a substantial number of physicians employed in the public sector also maintain a private practice. Governments, particularly of those low down in the index, are miserable failures when it comes to control the health "black market" of corruption, bribery, and moonlighting among other illegal practices. The black markets, consequences of malfunctioning health systems themselves, and the low income of health workers, further incapacitate the systems.

Not unexpectedly, most of the countries lagging behind in the health systems index are those from sub-Saharan Africa where life expectancies are low. HIV and AIDS are major causes of ill-health. Because of the AIDS epidemic, life expectancy for babies born in 2000 in many of these nations has dropped to 40 years or less. The WHO recommends extension of health insurance to as large a percentage of the population as possible. WHO says that it is better to make "pre-payments" on health care as much as possible, whether in the form of insurance, taxes or social security. While private health expenses in industrial countries now average only some 25 percent because of universal health coverage (except in the United States, where it is 56%), in India, families typically pay 80 per cent of their health care costs as "out-of-pocket" expenses when they receive health care.

The nations with the most responsive health systems are the United States, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands and Sweden. Most were the first to address the responsiveness of their health systems to people's needs. But when the fairness of financial contribution to health systems was measured, the results were different. The measurement was based on the fraction of a household's capacity to spend (income minus food expenditure) that goes on health care (including tax payments, social insurance, private insurance and out of pocket payments). Here, Colombia came first, followed by Luxembourg, Belgium, Djibouti, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Japan and Finland. Colombia achieved top rank because someone with a low income can pay the equivalent of one dollar per year for health care, while a high-income individual pays 7.6 dollars.

Central to today's debates on human rights is the question: are invasion and bombardment by foreign forces justifiable in the name of human rights? Amnesty International, for its part, has long refused to take a position on whether or not foreign armed forces should be deployed in human rights crises. AI neither supports nor opposes such actions. It argues that human rights crises can, and should, be prevented, since they are never inevitable. AI does not oppose the use of force in order to gain justice, but does question whether justice is the driving factor in the international community's decision-making.

While the contention has both its strident proponents and opponents, AI Secretary-General Pierre Sane in his foreword to the documentation for 1999 says, "Both sides of this debate therefore have legitimate arguments. Both sides can justify their positions in terms of internationally accepted principles... There is grave doubt, however, about the motives of governments. And at the end of the day it is governments who take the decisions about whether to intervene or not, and governments who send and finance military forces."

The same NATO governments which bombed Belgrade incessantly and mercilessly were ironically the same who were willing to notch up a deal with Slobodan Miloševic's regime during the break-up of Yugoslavia and turned a blind eye towards repeated warnings about the growing human rights crisis in Kosovo. The same Western nations had vouched for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, but had refused to look into reports of widespread human rights violations on Kurds. The country leading the intervention in East Timor, Australia, was one of the first to recognise Indonesia's illegal occupation of East Timor.

Sane raises a pertinent issue when he contrasts the imposition of UN sanctions on Libya or Iraq, with the non-imposition of sanctions on Israel for refusing to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. The actions over Kosovo and East Timor are just the opposite to the international community's inaction over Chechnya or Rwanda. More than 3,000 Kurdish villages have been destroyed in Turkey, three million people there internally displaced and thousands of Kurdish civilians killed by the Turkish security forces in 15-year-long strife, but the international community has been twiddling its thumbs.

Sane wonders why the upholders of global peace continue to fuel conflicts by supplying arms. The 10 international wars and 25 civil wars raging the globe over continue to be fanned by unabated weapons exports. While summits galore talk of elimination of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the proliferation of small arms (assault rifles and sub-machine guns) has been virtually ignored. The same countries - the United States and the United Kingdom - who advocated international intervention in East Timor were guilty of being the major suppliers of arms to the Indonesian government in the first place.

Sane also lambasts hypocritical governments who oppose interventions. While on one hand, they vehemently oppose the use of force to counter mass abuses in other countries, when it comes to their own backyard they do not flinch to use force unlawfully themselves against their own people. They invoke international law to back their contentions, but violate international human rights law by abusing powers and perpetrating rights violations. They take refuge in the UN Charter to justify their theses, but resist the scrutiny of international bodies established by the UN to promote and protect human rights.

But do military such interventions actually work? Six months after NATO air strikes, violence was being committed on a daily basis against Serbs, Roma and moderate Albanians. In December 1999, murder, abductions, violent attacks, intimidation, and house burning were reported at a rate as high as six months earlier. Some 200,000 Kosovan Serbs had been forced out of their homes. Serbs and Roma were living in enclaves protected by KFOR troops. Even seven years after the intervention in Somalia, there is no functioning government and no judiciary worth the name. The Angola story is similar.

The callousness and hypocrisy can be noticed on other counts too. In those situations where the international community has chosen to intervene, the world's governments have not been prepared to commit the necessary resources. For instance, in Haiti, where the US intervened in the name of restoring democracy, the failure to invest in substantive reform of the judicial system has undermined efforts to improve the human rights climate by rebuilding the police force. Similarly, only 2,000 international police officers had been deployed in Kosovo till the end of the year, even though at least 6,000 are needed.

Military imperialism will obviously continue as long as political points need to be scored.