By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb (IPS) - The 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM)
Thursday pleaded with the United Nations to immediately
deploy a multinational peacekeeping force to resolve the ongoing crisis in
Haiti.

But the U.N. Security Council, the only body mandated to create such a force,
refused to be rushed into a decision. (more…)

Dear Readers,

The following study just came in from the Pew Foundation. It concerns generational differences that fuel much of current social and political tension in Western Europe and the United States over globalization, nationalism and immigration, according to an in-depth analysis of results from the Pew Global Attitudes surveys. Older Americans and Western Europeans are more likely than their grandchildren to have reservations about growing global interconnectedness, to worry that their way of life is threatened, to feel that their culture is superior to others and to support restrictions on immigration. This generation gap is less pronounced in Eastern Europe and is virtually nonexistent in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Nevertheless, Americans and Western Europeans of all ages are less likely than people in other parts of the world to tout their own cultural superiority and are less wary of foreign influence. These findings are based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project’s surveys conducted during 2002 and 2003 among more than 66,000 people in 49 nations plus the Palestinian Authority.

Please click on this link for the complete report:

http://soros.c.tep1.com/maabZrhaa4I2db36p4Yb/

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“Other News” is a personal initiative seeking to provide information that should be in the media but is not, because of commercial criteria. It welcomes contributions from everybody. Work areas include information on global issues, north-sutrh relations, gobernability of globalization. The “Other News” motto is a phrase which appeared on the wall of Barcelona’s old Customs Office, at the beginning of 2003:”What walls utter, media keeps silent”. Roberto Savio

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - Releasing its annual ‘Country Reports’ on human
rights practices around the world Wednesday, the U.S.
State Department claimed Afghanistan and Iraq as two major breakthroughs in an
otherwise bleak human rights picture.

In an introductory overview, the report singled out several countries for poorer
performances during 2003, including China, North
Korea, Burma, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Russia. (more…)

It Pays to Get Tough with IMF
By Mark Weisbrot

For the second time in less than six months, the government of Argentina stood up to the International Monetary Fund – and the IMF backed down. Last week the Fund approved the latest installment of its lending to Argentina, after having failed in its efforts to get a better deal for Argentina’s private creditors.

This is unprecedented. The IMF is the most powerful lending institution in the world, and is used to having its way – especially with a country that is not so big (38 million people) but is one of the Fund’s largest debtors in the world. And it’s not like Argentina can get easy credit elsewhere. The government is currently in default on $88 billion of debt, the biggest sovereign debt default in history. (more…)

By Mike Ceaser, Globe Correspondent

CARACAS - Over the two years preceding the thwarted coup in April against President Hugo Chavez, a US-funded prodemocracy group financed a range of antigovernment programs, including some that have come under scrutiny for the way they spent their money.

An examination of grants of more than $1 million, given to organizations in Venezuela by the National Endowment for Democracy, has found that US tax money financed several Chavez opponents, including two organizations prominent in the protests that led up to the coup. The documents and interviews also report that money sent to one US-funded organization never reached its intended target and that another organization apparently falsified its Venezuelan accomplishments. (more…)

ILO Report a ‘Major Breakthrough’
By Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Feb (IPS) - Civil society groups have hailed the
much-anticipated report on globalisation as a “major breakthrough", but
stress that the developed world needs to follow up with concrete action.

The international trade union movement and development groups say the
long-awaited report is “recognition that the tools of globalisation need
serious reform". (more…)

by Rémy Herrera
February 23, 2004

Good Governance: Conceptual Vagueness, Ideological Clearness

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the major international organizations, first and foremost among them International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have been lavishing upon their member countries recommendations for “good governance". However, the definitions of this term and, along with them, its substance, have varied noticeably from one institution to another, preventing the formulation of a precise legal definition -particularly since governance can also be global, corporate… Within the framework of its loans and “oversight” operations, the IMF seeks to promote good governance covering “all aspects of the conduct of public affairs". (more…)

Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War
Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - For those still puzzling over the whys and
wherefores of Washington’s invasion of Iraq 11 months ago,
major new, but curiously unnoticed, clues were offered this week by two central
players in the events leading up to the war.

Both clues tend to confirm growing suspicions that the Bush administration’s
drive to war in Iraq had very little, if anything, to
do with the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) or his alleged ties to terrorist groups like
al-Qaeda – the two main reasons the U.S. Congress and public were given for
the invasion. (more…)

Where’s The Army’s Suicide Report?
By T. Trent Gegax
Newsweek

Waiting For Answers, Is the Army sandbagging its anticipated ’suicide report’?

Military members and their families are asking the same question: Where is the Army’s so-called suicide report? It’s the work of the 12-member Mental Health Advisory Team, commissioned by the top generals in charge of the Iraq war after a string of battlefield suicides. It was initially due out last Thanksgiving. Then it was supposed to be released in early February. Now, there’s talk that it’s been shelved indefinitely. (more…)

A Positive Force or Source of World’s Woes?
By Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Feb (IPS) - One of the most provocative interpretations of
globalisation comes from former U.S. secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, who has said the process “is really another name for the dominant
role of the United States.”

Opinions along that line – and sometimes even more controversial – have been
heard over the past few years, making the
globalisation phenomenon a hotly debated issue at the top of the international
agenda, a fact that prompted the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) to set up a special commission. (more…)

Marketing Democracy: Changing Opinion About Inequality and Politics in East Central Europe
Contemporary Sociology; Washington; Jul 2002; Akos Rona-Tas;

Marketing Democracy: Changing Opinion About Inequality and Politics in East Central Europe, by David S. Mason and James R. Kluegel, with Ludmilla Khakulina, Petr Mateju, Antal Orkeny, Alexander Stoyanov, and Bernd Wegener. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 292 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-7425-0153-1.

The people of East Central Europe are disappointed. Having thrown off the manacles of communism only recently, they are disenchanted both with market and democracy– but are not ready to call back communism. This comes hardly as a surprise to anyone familiar with this region now but, in the early 1990s, many predicted otherwise. We thank the authors of Marketing Democracy, participants in the International Social Justice Project, for documenting with great professionalism the morose but resigned atmosphere hanging over what used to be called the Soviet Bloc. (more…)

FINANCE-EU: Budget Proposal Sidelines Development
By Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Feb 17 (IPS) Development cooperation could get downgraded in
the next EU budget, civil society groups warn.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union (EU),
proposes to spend just over 1.2 billion dollars in the 2007-2013 period, rising
from 200 billion dollars in 2007 to 235 billion dollars in 2013. (more…)

Europe Asked to Look to Its Own Poor
By Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Feb (IPS) - The EU needs to make a renewed commitment to
fight poverty and social exclusion within Europe, says a report by a leading
social rights group.

The European Union (EU) must step up efforts under the Lisbon strategy
agreed by leaders in 2000 to improve resources and investment in the poorer
regions of Europe, says the report by Caritas Europa. The group is the
European wing of Caritas Internationalis, a confederation of 162 Catholic
relief,
development and social service organisations. (more…)

Distorting the Intelligence
The New York Times | Editorial

The Senate Intelligence Committee made the right call last week when it decided to examine whether top administration officials had exaggerated or misused the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs. Whatever horrendous errors the intelligence analysts made were surely compounded when the president and other senior officials emphasized unlikely worst-case scenarios to win support for the invasion.

In making its case for war, the administration leapt well beyond the battlefield chemical weapons that Iraq had used in the past and repeatedly raised the specter that Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons might cause truly enormous casualties. Top officials warned that Saddam Hussein might use these terrifying weapons against the American homeland, either by providing them to terrorists or by firing biological weapons directly from points offshore. In making such claims, the administration went beyond the intelligence consensus in important areas. (more…)

No pot of gold for workers

Sunday, February 15, 2004

By Maria Elena Salinas

For those who respect and value the advice of the elderly, here’s a piece of advice coming from elderly Mexican workers - most of them in their 70s and 80s - that relates directly to President Bush’s immigration proposal: Beware of the promises of a guest-worker program.

These older folks should know. They were part of the original bracero program, which brought more than 4 million Mexican workers to the United States from 1942 to 1964. These temporary laborers became the backbone of U.S. agriculture during and after World War II. They picked cotton, harvested fruits and vegetables and did all the other backbreaking work required of them on U.S. farms. (more…)

Political Obstacles Slow Path to Goals
By Julio Godoy

PARIS, Feb (IPS) Lack of political will at the power centres is emerging as
the major obstacle to the millennium development goals, leading experts say..

“Every year the most powerful nations of the world spend over 1,000 billion
dollars in weapons, 350 billion dollars in subsidies for agriculture, but only
57
billion dollars in development aid,” World Bank president James Wolfensohn
told the fifth annual conference of the Parliamentary Network of the World Bank
(PNoWB). (more…)

By Jan-Mikael Patterson
The Navajo Times

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. - Just as the Janet Jackson brouhaha from the Super Bowl incident is dying down, Native Americans, especially some Navajos, are outraged with the Grammy show on television Sunday evening.

Outkast, a hip-hop funk band, performed their hit song “Hey Ya” live before a nationally televised audience. The performance disgusted one local resident.

“To me it wasn’t right, especially from the beginning,” said Darlene Yazzie in a telephone interview. “They should have had prior permission from the Navajo Nation to use the ‘Beauty Way’ song. You don’t use that kind of song for that kind of performance.” (more…)

Use of EU Funds Probed
By Julio Godoy

PARIS, Feb (IPS) - New investigations have been ordered into complaints
over use of EU money by the Palestinian Authority.

A team of European auditors is in Jerusalem to go through records and to
investigate any misuse of aid given to the Palestinian Authority by the European
Union (EU).

In Paris prosecutors are investigating transfer of money into two accounts
held
by Suha Arafat, wife of Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Yasser Arafat. Suha
Arafat lives in Paris and Geneva. (more…)

Art Speaks Up for Immigrants
By Fitzroy Nation

AMSTERDAM, Feb (IPS) - It was on the cards for months, and this week it
became official. Beginning mid-year and continuing over the next three years,
the Dutch government will deport roughly 26,000 asylum seekers.

A majority of parliamentarians from the ruling centre-right coalition
approved
the deportations, ignoring mass protests and pleas for humanitarian concern.
Some of the asylum-seekers have been in The Netherlands for five years,
awaiting processing of their applications. (more…)

U.N. Aide Backs Cleric on Elections; Offers No Timetable
By Edward Wong
The New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb — An envoy for the United Nations said he supported a powerful Shiite cleric’s call for elections to install a new sovereign government after having met with the cleric this morning.

But the envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, did not say whether he thought direct elections could be held by June 30, when the Bush administration wants to put a transitional national assembly in place to appoint the new government. (more…)

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb (IPS) - The United Nations is planning to withdraw its
3,500 peacekeepers from East Timor in May despite
calls from the government in Dili and civil society groups that the body’s work
in the world’s newest country is not finished.

‘’Certainly, the United Nations did not complete its job of readying Timor fully
to manage its affairs, and any expertise the
government requests should be provided to finish that transition,'’ says John M.
Miller, media and outreach coordinator for the East
Timor Action Network (ETAN). (more…)

From Guardsman…
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post

During the Vietnam War, I was what filmmaker Michael Moore would call a “deserter.” Along with President Bush and countless other young men, I joined the National Guard, did my six months of active duty (basic training, etc.) and then returned to my home unit, where I eventually dropped from sight. In the end, just like President Bush, I got an honorable discharge. But unlike President Bush, I have just told the truth about my service. He hasn’t.

At least I don’t think so. Nothing about Bush during that period – not his drinking, not his partying – suggests that he was a consistently conscientious member of the Texas or Alabama Air National Guard. As it happens, there are no records to show that Bush reported for duty during the summer and fall of 1972. Nonetheless, Bush insists he was where he was supposed to be – “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been honorably discharged,” Bush told Tim Russert. Please, sir, don’t make me laugh. (more…)

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic

KRAGUJEVACK, Serbia, Feb (IPS) û After 20 busy years in former
Yugoslavia and the Balkans, the little “Yugo” car has come to the end of the
road.

It is more than a car that is now coming to a halt. The end of production
marks
the symbolic end of an ethos of self-sufficient industrial production.

Production of the Yugo, or the Zastava to give it its proper name, is due to
end
this year. (more…)

By David Sirota, Christy Harvey and Judd Legum
Center for American Progress

Statement of John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress
“President Bush wouldn’t have agreed to an hour long network interview without a good reason and today he had one: in the span of a week he’s faced the dual challenges of a loss of credibility on the war in Iraq and his management of the economy.

“His statement this morning that he would cut the deficit in half is simply laughable. Analyses by independent organizations like Goldman Sachs, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for Economic Development, and Decision Economics all project deficits of about $5 trillion over the next decade, even assuming a return to strong growth. (more…)

Jail for One, Hefty Fine for Another

Yesterday one anti-Trident activist was sent to jail and another was given a hefty fine for protesting at Britain’s nuclear weapon submarine base at Faslane.

Jane Tallents (45), from Helensburgh, was sent to Cornton Vale prison for 14 days after refusing to pay a fine for blockading the base. On 6th February last year she was one of four activists who blocked the north gate of the base, while a group of others prevented worker traffic getting into the south gate. Cars were tailed back for at least five miles and the gates were shut for an hour. In August last year she was fined £290 by Justice of the Peace Fraser Gillies in Helensburgh District Court. (more…)

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - Some 30 years ago when the U.S. military was bogged
down in Vietnam, a number of prominent Jewish
intellectuals worried that the visibility of U.S. Jews as leaders in the
anti-war movement would spark a resurgence of anti-Semitism
once the conflict ended.

‘’I think anyone who looks to the future in America'’, wrote Nathan Glazer in
the neo-conservative ‘Commentary’ magazine in 1971,
‘’must consider this possibility – almost a probability – of the rise of a
stab-in-the-back myth, in which it will not only be
students and professors and intellectuals who are attacked, and not only Jews in
their role as members of this general community,
but conceivably Jews AS JEWS'’. (emphasis in original) (more…)

Still Smoke and Mirrors
By Ray McGovern
TomPaine.com

Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of Washington, DC.
For some reason February 5 has been chosen two years running for rhetoric aimed at what Socrates termed “making the worse cause appear the better"—last year by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN and Thursday by CIA Director George Tenet at Georgetown University.

As with Powell’s spurious depiction of the threat from Iraq, Tenet’s disingenuous tour de force becomes more embarrassing the closer you look. (more…)

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb (IPS) - Israel’s repressive policies in military-occupied
West Bank and Gaza have had a devastating impact on
the lives of Palestinian women and children, a new U.N. study says.

And only an end to Israel’s occupation of the territories will reverse that
trend, add experts interviewed by IPS.

‘’The capacity of Palestinian women to cope with this new situation has been
declining, and the number of women dependent on
emergency assistance, particularly food assistance, has risen,'’ the report
said. (more…)

O’Neill’s Revelations and the Mind of Bush
By KATHERINE van WORMER

Paul O’Neill’s revelations, the primary source for Ron Suskind’s book The Price of Loyalty concerning the timing of George W Bush’s plans to overthrow Saddam in Iraq should have come as no surprise. The ostensible reasons for going to war – the claimed link between Iraq and al-Queda and the claimed possession of weapons of mass destruction – have been shown to be without substance. The typical explanation offered by the mainstream press and political pundits was that September 11 was a turning point.

What September 11 did was provide the justification. “From the start,” said Paul O’Neill in his book interview, “we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country…It was about finding a way to do it that was the tone of it…the president saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.’ And how would O’Neill know? O’Neill, as Secretary of the Treasury also sat on the National Security Council. (more…)

Countdown Begins to New Lessons
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Feb (IPS) - Less than 100 days from now Slovenia becomes the
first among the six former Yugoslav republics to join the EU.

Slovenians were promised European Union (EU) membership after
independence June 1991. In the 70-year history of former Yugoslavia as one
nation, Slovenia was by far the most developed and the most Westernised area. (more…)

Today’s hard right seeks total dominion. It’s packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.

By Robert Kuttner

America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR’s New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century “Era of Good Feeling.” But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.
In past single-party eras, the majority party earned its preeminence with broad popular support. Today the electorate remains closely divided, and actually prefers more Democratic policy positions than Republican ones. Yet the drift toward an engineered one-party Republican state has aroused little press scrutiny or widespread popular protest. (more…)

Foreign Aid Budget Takes on Cold War Cast
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - If the “war on terror'’ is beginning to look
increasingly like the Cold War, then President George W.
Bush’s fiscal year (FY) 2005 foreign-aid request will not change that
impression.

While Bush is proposing to increase funding for his two key anti-poverty
initiatives, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and
anti-AIDS money for African and Caribbean countries, he is also cutting funds
for other key humanitarian and development accounts. (more…)

For Indians, Land is Life Itself
By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb (IPS) - Land represents the work of a lifetime for
some; for others, it is life itself. For that reason, death is always a
possibility in the property disputes between landowners and indigenous
people that frequently occur in many parts of Brazil.

The latest outbreak of tension and warnings of bloodshed have occurred in
the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, near the Paraguayan border,
where just before Christmas, some 3,000 Guarani Indians invaded 14 ranches
that they claim as part of their ancestral land. (more…)

By Charles Lambroschini
Le Figaro

Since Saddam Hussein’s capture, the war has changed direction. Sunday’s suicide attack in Iraqi Kurdistan, which has resulted in 65 deaths so far, is the latest demonstration: for the Sunni resistance, the primary target is not the American occupier, but their local competition, the Shi’ites and the Kurds.

Incapable of winning, given that they comprise 20% of the population only, the Sunnis have chosen a break-up strategy. The motive for the escalation of violence is to grab a minority status from the other elements of the Iraq mosaic that would, once again, divide to conquer, or, failing that, explode the country into three independent entities. (more…)

Bio-Pirates of the Antarctic
By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, (IPS) - Antarctic bio-prospectors are acting like
bio-pirates, plundering the continent’s biological
treasures before global measures to control its biodiversity can be put in
place, experts warn in a United Nations University report
released Monday.

“Bio-piracy is happening. But the piracy isn’t illegal because they’re not
stealing it from anyone, since no one owns it,” says Sam
Johnston of the U.N. University’s Institute of Advanced Studies. (more…)

Panel of Experts Finds That Anti-Pollution Laws Are Outdated
By Andrew C. Revkin
The New York Times

Despite three decades of progress, existing air-quality laws are inadequate to prevent pollution from threatening the environment and human health, the nation’s top scientific advisory group concluded yesterday.

The panel, the National Research Council of the National Academies, said it was particularly concerned about ozone, an ingredient of smog that has proved difficult to curtail, and fine soot, which has been shown to be especially harmful. (more…)

Manufacturing the Love of Possession
by Richard York

Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 203 pages, cloth $26.95.

In 1877, speaking at the Powder River Conference, Chief Sitting Bull of the Lakota nation said of the European invaders who were destroying his people and their way of life, “[T]he love of possession is a disease with them.â€? Disease is an apt term, because it does not necessarily imply that the love of possession was inherent in the nature of the invaders, but rather that the affliction may have been acquired. Thus, any scholar wishing to locate the origin of the affliction should, like an epidemiologist, search out its sources and possible transmission vectors. (more…)

New AIDS Group Focuses on Women
By Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb 2 (IPS) - A global initiative will seek to put women at the
heart of new projects to fight AIDS.

“Women are still very marginal when it comes to responses to AIDS,”
United Nations under secretary-general Peter Piot said at the launch of the
initiative in London Monday. “They should be absolutely central.” (more…)