Labor ministry officials from the Group of Eight (G8) nations on Tuesday agreed to address widening income disparities and the needs of vulnerable workers amid globalization.

Senior labor officials issued a statement at the end of a three-day discussion in the central Japanese city of Niigata that called for effective career consulting and skills development for vulnerable workers, especially the "working poor."

The statement urged the member states to "promote local development and job creation by facilitating the effective use of local resources and policies" for the vulnerable population.

The participating members also adressed the need to keep a well-balanced lifestyle between work and leisure in the rapidly ageing societies through flexible job arrangements and job security.

They also agreed to improve compliance with occupational safety and health regulations, while educating workers about such issues, for a better quality of life after retirement.

Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 62, talks to SPIEGEL about why Brazil wants to join OPEC, his country's biofuels program and Europe's fear of Latin America's shift to the left.

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, when you took office five years ago, many feared that you, as a former union leader, would take the country on a socialist course. Instead, you have adopted liberal economic policies which have led the country to spectacular economic growth. Have you abandoned the principles of your past?

Lula: As president, I have to be there for everyone. That's the strength of democracy. Someone who is elected by the people will pay as much attention to the needs of a banker as to those of a street child or a blue-collar worker by seeking a balance among their individual interests. In 2003, we had to make some very tough changes to our government finances, so that Brazilians can now enjoy more stability. At the time, I used part of the political capital that I had to get the country back in shape.

NEW DELHI: Instead of blaming India and other developing nations for the rise in food prices, Americans should rethink their energy policy and go on a diet, say a growing number of politicians, economists and academics here.

Criticism of the United States has ballooned in India recently, particularly after the Bush administration seemed to blame India's increasing middle class and prosperity for rising food prices. Critics from India seem to be asking one underlying question: "Why do Americans think they deserve to eat more than Indians?"

The food problem has "clearly" been created by Americans, who are eating 50 percent more calories than the average person in India, said Pradeep Mehta, the secretary general of CUTS Center for International Trade, Economics and Environment, a private economic research organization based in India with offices in Kenya, Zambia, Vietnam and Britain.

If Americans were to slim down to even the middle-class weight in India, "many hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plates," Mehta said. The money Americans spend on liposuction to get rid of their excess fat could be funneled to famine victims instead, he added.

A massive rescue operation yesterday struggled with heavy rain and aftershocks in the search for tens of thousands of people who remained missing following the devastating earthquake which struck central China on Monday.

As President Wen Jiabao toured the disaster area to oversee rescue efforts, the authorities said the death toll had reached 12,000 people in Sichuan Province alone. In some towns, there were more people missing buried under collapsed homes, hospitals and schools than found alive, raising fears that the death toll could soon rise dramatically.

In Mianyang 60 miles east of the epicentrre, 18,645 people remained buried under debris and survivors spent a second night sleeping outside in the rain, some under striped plastic sheeting strung between trees. The government ordered them not to return home, citing safety concerns, and posted security guards outside apartment complexes to keep people out. At least 4,800 people remained buried in Mianzhu, local authorities said.

In Yingxiu, a town of 12,000 people, only 2,000 had been found alive, state television quoted He Biao, an official, as saying. "They could hear people under the debris calling for help, but no one could, because there were no professional rescue teams," he said.

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

"Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac," says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was "dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose," according to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, "Nighty-night."

(via atrios)