By Michael Deibert *

Interview with Haitian Prime Minister MICHÈLE PIERRE-LOUIS

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 3 (IPS) - Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis assumed office in September 2008. Born in the southern city of Jérémie in 1947, she left Haiti with her family in 1964 following a pogrom by dictator François Duvalier against his perceived enemies in her town.
(more…)

By Frances Robles - Miami Herald

TEGUCIGALPA – The military officers who rushed deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya out of the country Sunday committed a crime but will be exonerated for saving the country from mob violence, the army’s top lawyer said.
(more…)

Analysis by Mel Frykberg

RAMALLAH, Jul 2 (IPS) - The future of Palestinian unity talks is far more complex than the bitter rivalry, bloodshed and division which represent the yawning chasm separating Palestine’s two main political factions, Hamas and Fatah.
(more…)

John Nichols - The Nation

07/02/2009 .To hear Rush Limbaugh and the tribunes of the totalitarian right tell it, everything is going swimmingly in Honduras.

Yes, the military invaded the home of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya with guns blazing, kidnapped the country’s elected leader and forced him to leave the country.
(more…)

Analysis by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jul 1 (IPS) - When the Honduran military deposed President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday, in an incident that stirred memories of Cold War military coups in Latin America, it also seems to have caused at least some foreign policy commentators here to revert to positions reminiscent of the Cold War.
(more…)

Fareed Zakaria - NEWSWEEK

Historical parallels don’t work in Iran.

From the magazine issue dated Jul 13, 2009

Whenever we see the kinds of images that have been coming out of Iran over the past two weeks, we tend to think back to 1989 and Eastern Europe. That time, when people took to the streets and challenged their governments, those seemingly stable regimes proved to be hollow and quickly collapsed. What emerged was liberal democracy. Could Iran yet undergo its own velvet revolution?
(more…)

By Matthew Berger

LONDON, Jun 30 (IPS) - Governments and interest groups around the world followed the U.S. House of Representatives’ vote Friday on the first U.S. policy to limit the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. They were especially interested in Europe, where a system similar to the bill’s cap-and-trade scheme already exists and where EU countries agreed last December to tough emissions targets.
(more…)

By HELENE COOPER and MARC LACEY - The New York Times

June 30, 2009 - WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday strongly condemned the ouster of Honduras’s president as an illegal coup that set a “terrible precedent” for the region, as the country’s new government defied international calls to return the toppled president to power and clashed with thousands of protesters.
(more…)

By Joaquin Roy (*)

BRASILIA, Jun (IPS) It is said that a French politician, asked whether Brazil had a good future, answered with scorn and knowing irony, “Brazil has always had, still has, and will always have a magnificent future.” It would seem that the country has suffered for decades under this sort of stigma.
(more…)

News Analysis by The New York Times and The Washington Post

Rare Hemisphere Unity in Assailing Honduran Coup

By SIMON ROMERO - The New York Times

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — With their condemnation on Sunday of the coup ousting President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, governments in the Western Hemisphere from across the ideological spectrum found a rare issue around which they could swiftly arrive at unity.
(more…)

Por Fabiana Frayssinet

RÍO DE JANEIRO, jun (IPS) - Con más de 90 por ciento de su nueva flota automovilística con motores impulsados indistintamente a gasolina o biodisel, el gobierno de Brasil emprende ahora una nueva carrera tecnológica. Se trata de los vehículos eléctricos.
(more…)

By Gareth Porter

EXCLUSIVE-PART 5*

WASHINGTON, Jun 26 (IPS) - In early November 1998, Louis Freeh sent an FBI team off to observe Saudi secret police officials interviewing eight Shi’a detainees from behind a one-way mirror at the Riyadh detention centre. He planned to use the Shi’a testimony to show that Iran was behind the bombing.
(more…)

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

This article appeared in the July 13, 2009 edition of The Nation.

This is not only the worst global economic downturn of the post-World War II era; it is the first serious global downturn of the modern era of globalization. America’s financial markets failed to do what they should have done–manage risk and allocate capital well–and these failures have had a major impact all over the world. Globalization, too, did not work the way it was supposed to. It helped spread the consequences of the failures of US financial markets around the world. September 11, 2001, taught us that with globalization not only do good things travel more easily across borders; bad things do too. September 15, 2008, has reinforced that lesson.
(more…)

By Gareth Porter*

EXCLUSIVE-PART 3

WASHINGTON, Jun 24 (IPS) - In March 1997, FBI Director Louis Freeh got what he calls in his memoirs “the first truly big break in the case": the arrest in Canada of one of the Saudi Hezbollah members the Saudis accused of being the driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers.
(more…)

By Greg Grandin*

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

June 23, 2009. The empire ends with a pullout. Not, as many supposed a few years ago, from Iraq. There, as well as in Afghanistan, we are mulishly staying the course, come what may, trapped in the biggest of all the “too-big-to-fail” boondoggles. But from Detroit.
(more…)

Osvaldo León *

On June 13, just after midnight, the United States produced the so-called “analog blackout,” by which all of the nation’s television stations stopped using the analog signal and gave way to exclusively digital transmission.

Presenting this change as a new technological leap forward (similar to the switch from black and white to color), the hype has framed digital TV primarily as merchandise, a spectacle that did not fail to dazzle Latin America. Yet far from being a mere technical matter, it represents for our countries a serious possibility to advance the democratization of communication.
(more…)

By Gareth Porter

EXCLUSIVE-PART 2 (*)

WASHINGTON, Jun 23 (IPS) - In the last week of October 1996, the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, gave David Williams, the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of counter-terrorism issues, what they said were summaries of the confessions obtained from some 40 Shi’a detainees.
(more…)

John Boonstra - in UN Dispatch

June 22, 2009. Excuse me if I find some irony in Ethiopia declining the Somali government’s request to send troops, when all indicators point to the likelihood that Ethiopia already sent some of its troops “reconnaissance missions” over the border weeks ago. (Not to mention the irony of Somalia inviting back the very military presence that its citizens railed against for over two years.)
(more…)

By Gareth Porter*

EXCLUSIVE-PART1

WASHINGTON, Jun 22 (IPS) - On Jun. 25, 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded at a building in the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which housed U.S. Air Force personnel, killing 19 U.S. airmen and wounding 372.
(more…)

Josep Xercavins i Valls *

“The Conference on the crisis: a key moment for the future of the UN” and/or “The silence of the powerful media about what is happening at the UN”

In a few days the “UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development” will take place in the United Nations Headquarters in New York, from 24 to 26 June 2009.
(more…)