By Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Mar 31 (IPS) - Regional trade negotiations between the EU and
the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries could undermine poverty reduction
programmes, says a report released here.

The report by the Brussels-based non-governmental organisation (NGO)
Eurostep and five partners from the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group
of countries says such negotiations cannot be considered “synonymous with
reciprocal free trade” because WTO rules are currently under negotiation and
could be redefined. (more…)

by Kim Scipes
April 2004

Massive mobilizations, strikes, street conflict, hysterical mass
media, social and economic disruption: Chile in 1972-73 Venezuela in
2002-04.

The AFL-CIO is once again on the scene, this time in Venezuela, just
as it was in Chile in 1973. Once again, its operations in that
country are being funded by the U.S. government. This time, the
money is being laundered through the quasi-governmental National
Endowment for Democracy, hidden from AFL-CIO members and the
American public. (more…)

How “Bush’s Brain” hijacked Washington DC and politics-as-usual

When the Bush gang gets around to writing its memoirs, one year or
five years from now, you can be certain no one will wax nostalgic about
the winter of 2004–a time when several things went wrong at once and the
White House was caught in what looked like a long white-knuckled skid,
overtaken not just by events but by its own mistakes and disarray. (more…)

By Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Mar 30 (IPS) - The head of the United Nations refugee agency, and human rights groups say lives may be at risk if the EU approves tough new asylum rules.

European Union (EU) ministers met Tuesday (Mar. 30) to agree a pan-European asylum policy before 10 new states (Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia) join the bloc May 1. (more…)

Dear Friend,

While the messages which come from Washington do not speak much about peace, an international group of personalities, some of whom well known in the United States, like Deepak Chopra, Oscar Arias, Ricky Martin, Kennedy Cuomo,have set up a foundation to place the theme of peace again in the debate. Here goes a short information about. If you can contribute, it will be strategically placed…

Roberto Savio (more…)

By Cam McGrath

CAIRO, Mar 29 (IPS) - Grudges last a long time in this part of the world, but two
regional giants appear on the verge of putting it all behind them.

“Egypt and Iran have agreed in principle to restore relations,” Hassan Abu
Taleb, political analyst at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies
(ACPSS) told IPS. “I think we will see a push for some kind of official
negotiations [for normalisation] in the next few months.” (more…)

By Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Mar 27 (IPS) - The hole in the ozone layer risks looming
larger after the world community agreed Friday to permit the United
States and 10 other northern countries to continue using a pesticide
that was supposed to be off-limits from 2005.

The meeting was called after nations failed to agree last year on what
exemptions should be granted to the northern nations for using the
pesticide, methyl bromide, in instances where it was deemed critically
important. (more…)

“We Should Have Had Orange or Red-Type of Alert in June/July of 2001″
By Eric Boehlert
Salon.com

Friday 26 March 2004

A former FBI translator told the 9/11 commission that the bureau had detailed information well before Sept. 11, 2001, that terrorists were likely to attack the U.S. with airplanes.

A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret security clearance, who has been called “very credible” by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has told Salon she recently testified to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the FBI had detailed information prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted. (more…)

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 25 March 2004

“No one anticipated the kinds of strikes that took place in New York and at the Pentagon.” - ‘The 9/11 Debate,’ Washington Post editorial, 03-24-04

That line from the Washington Post has been repeated ad nauseam by other newspapers, and across radio and television. It has achieved the status of bedrock conventional wisdom, of something axiomatic. These statements are a paraphrase of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who said on May 17th, 2002, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile - a hijacked airplane as a missile.” (more…)

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar (IPS) - The likelihood of Malaysia going in the direction of countries known for their intolerant strand of Islam - such as Saudi Arabia - has just been stopped in its tracks by ballots, not bombs and bullets, at the weekend’s polls.

In the Mar. 21 poll in Malaysia, the ruling National Front coalition, led by the softspoken moderate Muslim and Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, received 4.3 million or 64 percent of the votes cast. The opposition Islamic party called Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) got only 15.8 percent of ballots - and lost a key state. (more…)

By David Usborne, Andrew Buncombe and Rupert Cornwell
Independent, U.K.

Wednesday 24 March 2004

The full extent of America’s failed attempts to neutralise the threat of Osama bin Laden before 11 September 2001 was graphically and embarrassingly spelt out yesterday in a report by a commission set up to investigate the terror attacks.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks did not reserve its criticism solely for the Bush administration. Its report also offered a catalogue of failed diplomatic opportunities and doomed policies that were followed by US officials as far back as the mid-1990s, when Bill Clinton was in the White House. Most of these abortive initiatives were aimed at persuading the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan to expel al-Qa’ida. (more…)

By Moyiga Nduru

PRETORIA, Mar 25 (IPS) - Academics and political analysts from around the
world have gathered in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, for a conference on
the achievements of the first decade of democracy in the country.

The three-day event, which began Wednesday (Mar. 24), is entitled “South
Africa: Ten Years After Apartheid". It has been organised by the Africa
Institute of South Africa (AISA), a non-governmental organisation (NGO)
based in Pretoria, and has attracted about 200 delegates. (more…)

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 23 March 2004

I went to New York City this weekend to cover the protests marking the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It was a good showing as far as these things go; having covered the massive demonstrations last year, I was impressed by the number of people who turned out. The protest wended its way down many blocks of Madison Avenue, and then down the Avenue of the Americas, pretty much cutting that portion of the city in two. The protesters themselves were well-behaved - vocal, colorful, angry, but well-behaved - and the police stayed out of the way.

Later that afternoon, I jumped into a cab and headed down to the financial district to do something I hadn’t done yet. A few minutes later, I found myself at the corner of Church St. and Vesey St. standing between two graveyards. The one on the left was small, fenced in by a black wrought-iron fence, and very old. It reminded me of the Revolutionary War-era Granary on Tremont St. in Boston, where Paul Revere and Samuel Adams rest. The graveyard on the right was much newer, massive, fenced in by a towering gray barrier. There were no old headstones, no grass for the wind to ruffle. (more…)

By Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Mar 24 (IPS) û Moves to lift the EU arms sale embargo on China
are creating differences both within the Union and between the EU and the
United States.

Many European leaders are pressing for an end to the 15-year-old embargo
on weapons transfers to China later this week. European heads of state will
discuss the EU embargo at their annual spring summit Thursday and Friday
(March 25 and 26). (more…)

By PAUL KRUGMAN

From the day it took office, U.S. News & World Report wrote a few months ago, the Bush administration “dropped a shroud of secrecy” over the federal government. After 9/11, the administration’s secretiveness knew no limits — Americans, Ari Fleischer ominously warned, “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” Patriotic citizens were supposed to accept the administration’s version of events, not ask awkward questions.

But something remarkable has been happening lately: more and more insiders are finding the courage to reveal the truth on issues ranging from mercury pollution — yes, Virginia, polluters do write the regulations these days, and never mind the science — to the war on terror. (more…)

By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 22 March 2004

It all began in 2001 when Dick Cheney called a secret congress of oil, gas and nuclear interests to overhaul US energy policy. The Sierra Club demanded to see the proceedings of the meetings and was denied. Their brief to see the documents is now before the Supreme Court and Cheney’s good duck-hunting buddy Justice Scalia. Meanwhile, the Cheney juggernaut rolls on as the energy bill is scheduled for consideration in the Senate sometime before the Easter recess.

Supposedly downsized from the version that failed to pass the Senate last fall, the bill still ladles out the pork to the biggest and fattest industries while doing little to shift the nation to renewable energy. Here are some of the worst provisions: (more…)

A research insititute associate with the Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism has published a report on the state of the Media in
the United States. While this study does not has validity for the world
situation, it is still a very scaring window on the consolidation and
content of media in the country who has decided to act on behalf of its
citizens “and humankind".

And if we look to the situation in Italy, Spain and Russia, the situation,
for some aspects, is even worst. The Council of Europe has come out with a
scathing report on the lack of pluralism in media, in those three countries.
In US, the situation is becoming seriousAs of 2004 here are the facts: In
newspapers, 22 companies now represent 70 percent of the daily circulation
(73 percent on Sunday), according to data from Editor and Publisher. (more…)

By Jane Regan

GONAIVES, Mar 22 (IPS) - The flies hovering over the stinking, shining green open sewers here do not appear to notice any change. Nor do the naked children, their distended bellies and orange hair sure signs of malnutrition, worms or worse.

Still, life is different here, in Haiti’s fourth-largest city, halfway up the coast, where some 200,000 people try to eke out a living fishing or buying and selling produce and other goods. (more…)

ARISTIDE REVEALS DETAILS OF COUP

Press release for email distribution

Contact:
Sarah Sloan or Brian Becker
202-544-3389, 212-633-6646

A delegation from the United States met twice today with
overthrown Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in
Bangui, Central African Republic. Following the first
meeting, President Aristide held a news conference at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then conducted a
30-minute phone interview in English with Pacifica Radio’s
Democracy Now. (more…)

From the IPS Team

ROME, Mar 20 (IPS) - Spain and Italy saw some of the biggest demonstrations Saturday to mark a year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Spain saw a spillover of protests that have never quite died out since the train bombings in Madrid March 11 left more than 200 dead and 1,400 wounded.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators protested in Spain, and if the demonstrations were not even bigger, that could be due partly to demonstrations fatigue, and also because Spain had a chance to express itself through elections, and make it matter. (more…)

By Larry Birns

In the fall of 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide officially left his position as a parish priest to embark on an unanticipated political career. Within weeks he became the most popular president in Haiti’s 200-year history. Aristide’s Lavelas Party, meaning “flood,” referred both to the near-universal applause of Aristide’s fundamental tenets and the presumed cleansing effects it would have on remnants of the Duvalier dictatorship. Despite the country’s Provisional Electoral Council’s (CEP) approval of 11 presidential candidates for the 1990 elections, Aristide’s surge in polls was overwhelming. He won the first free and fair election in the country’s history with 67 percent of the vote. (more…)

Silencing the Truth About the Attacks
From the IPS Team

MADRID, Mar (IPS) - A group representing reporters and editors at
Spain’s state-run news agency, EFE, says the agency knew about evidence
pointing to involvement by Islamic terrorists in the Mar. 11 train bombings
in Madrid that very morning, but kept it under wraps due to pressure from
the government of Prime Minister José María Aznar.

‘’EFE knew, from the very morning of (last) Thursday’s attacks in Madrid,
about the existence of a cell-phone configured in Arabic and about the van
found in Alcalá de Henares, and knew that one of the dead was a terrorist,'’
the committee of EFE employees said in a press release. (more…)

Alan Cisco: Venezuela’s opposition has good reason to be desperate

http://soros.c.topica.com/maab3yPaa5gWVb36p4Yb/

Caracas resident American citizen Alan Cisco writes: Venezuela will be the next Haiti … or at least that’s the hope of the desperate Venezuelan opposition, whose “leaders” and media try to draw the analogy. Their fury is nominally based around signatures for a recall referendum on President Hugo Chavez. In the 1999 constitution, product of the constituent assembly fostered by Chavez, there is an unprecedented measure allowing for a recall vote on any elected official after half their term of office has expired, if it is petitioned by 20% of the electorate. Half of the Chavez’s six year term ended last August 19, 2003. (more…)

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar (IPS) - For neo-conservative and other right-wing U.S.
hawks, Madrid has suddenly become Munich in 1938 and Spain’s Prime
Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is former British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain.

In an extraordinarily unanimous campaign, newspaper columnists and
television commentators are flooding the media with cries of
‘’appeasement'’, the dreaded epithet with which Chamberlain was permanently
tagged after his meeting in Munich with Adolf Hitler, which permitted the
Nazis to slice off a major chunk of Czechoslovakia. (more…)

The Hispanic Challenge

By Samuel P. Huntington

March/April 2004

The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclavesfrom Los Angeles to Miamiand rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril. (more…)

Dear friends,

Polling by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, conducted from late February to early March in the U.S. and eight other countries, shows that one year after the war in Iraq, discontent with America and its policies has intensified rather than diminished. Opinion of the United States in France and Germany is at least as negative now as at the war’s conclusion, and British views are decidedly more critical. The results are attached. (more…)

Dear friends:

There is now a report, who explains the views and vision of the people who mobilize in the streets. Professor Mario Pianta and his team have done a very new and interesting work. Those who want to read this report, which has 66 pages, and is being presented to the London School of Economics, please vist the website www.lunaria.org

——————————————————————————–
“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:â€?What walls utter, media keeps silentâ€?. Roberto Savio

By JEFFREY SACHS

The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen US manipulation of a
small, impoverished country with the truth unexplored by journalists. In
the nearly universal media line on the Haitian revolt, President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was portrayed as an undemocratic leader who
betrayed Haiti’s democratic hopes and thereby lost the support of his
erstwhile backers. He “stole” elections and intransigently refused to
address opposition concerns. As a result he had to leave office, which
he did at the insistence of the US and France. Unfortunately, this is a
gravely distorted view. (more…)

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Mar 17 (IPS) - Six men accused of the massacre of 192 Croatian
prisoners of war back in 1991 went on trial in Belgrade
last week.

This is the first war crimes trial in Serbia for atrocities committed in the
war of disintegration of former Yugoslavia. The war
took more than 200,000 lives, mostly of non-Serbs. (more…)

Terrorism, Lies and Elections
Analysis by Diana Cariboni

MONTEVIDEO, Mar 15 (IPS) - Within just four days, terrorism radically changed
the direction of the general elections that took place
Sunday in Spain, and tested the public’s tolerance of concealment and
manipulation of information in the investigation effort.

On Sunday, the governing Popular Party (PP) lost 35 seats in Congress and its
absolute majority. To judge by the opinion polls
conducted prior to the elections, the centre-right party would not have suffered
defeat without Thursday’s rail blasts and carnage
in Madrid. (more…)

The Script of Destabilization as Applied to Venezuela

By: Dario Azzelini

These days the audience of Venezuela’s four most important private TV-channels must have the impression that there is a popular revolt against the Chávez government going on. Globovision is in a leading position with an uninterrupted live program. The local news-source for CNN is selling the idea of street fighting throughout the whole country. Even images of two burning litterbags or simply some rocks lying around are supported with dramatic music while aggressive politicians from the opposition talk about a supposed dictatorship and make calls for disobedience. Reporters of the same channel are filmed in front of a completely normal city highway and declare with a certain flavor of invitation: „The protests here will begin about midday, we’re gonna stay here until the blockades start.” On Venevision, also an organ of the coup-friendly sector of the opposition, we can observe messages of supposed calls of the audience on the bottom of the screen: „Out on the streets!” “Fight the dictatorship.” “Blockades with any means.” “Shame! Nobody can stay at home!” And a hysteric voice declares in a phone call: “People have to wake up! The regime is executing people on the streets all over the county!” (more…)

CIA Chief Clueless on Neo-Con Intelligence Channel
Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 10 (IPS) - Was Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George
Tenet really the last person in Washington to find
out that both the president and vice president were being fed phoney or ‘’sexed
up'’ intelligence about pre-war Iraq by a Pentagon
office staffed by ideologically driven neo-conservatives?

It is highly doubtful, but in his desperate attempt to walk a tightrope between
his increasingly irreconcilable loyalties to the
administration of President George W. Bush and to his own intelligence
professionals, Tenet is suggesting that he really was in the
dark about what was going on just a few miles down the Potomac River from CIA
headquarters. (more…)

By Mario Soares (*)

Is an ‘’ethical globalisation'’ possible, like that called for by
Mary Robinson? The answer must always be, Yes it is possible.

To reach this goal, however, politics must first be
rehabilitated and aligned with principles and values, and
economics must be kept from subverting politics. Instead, politics
must guide economics, which must be placed at the service of the
community. The inequalities created by the free market must be
corrected through implementation of coherent social policies that
protect the less fortunate. (more…)

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 11 March 2004

“I’m a firm believer in feeding people their own words back to them, when it’s appropriate.”
­ Trent Lott
As we hurtle headlong into the silly season, a high colonic for the mind is in order. There is going to be a lot of back-and-forth between the candidates regarding who said what and when. Feast, in that context, upon this small collection:

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.” (more…)

By Tito Drago

MADRID, Mar 11 (IPS) - Three rush-hour rail blasts in Madrid Thursday left
at least 190 dead and more than 1400 hundred wounded, brutally cutting short the
campaign for Sunday’s general elections in Spain.

The trains full of commuters heading to work or dropping their children
off at school were arriving in Madrid from lower-income districts on the
southside of the capital. (more…)

America and Its Bad Image in the Middle East

By Alain Frachon

Le Monde FR

Wednesday 10 March 2004

Right after the Second World War, the United States’ relative power in the world was about the same as today: preponderant. At that time, its power was still bolstered by a key element: the United States was loved. That is no longer the case today. America is disliked.

And this dislike, even hatred, is strongest in the Muslim Arab world, there, where for strategic reasons the United States’ image counts more than elsewhere. The terrorist threat comes principally from this universe. In the Asian country with the highest proportion of Muslims in the population, Indonesia, only 15% of people regularly polled in 2003 said they had a positive image of the United States. That was right after the war in Iraq; in 2002, the number was 61 %. In Saudi Arabia, according to a Gallup study, only 7 % of the Kingdom’s residents have a “very favorable image” of the United States. The Pew Research Center gave similar numbers for the key country of Turkey, a secular state, democratic in many respects, with a Muslim majority, and a NATO member. In 2003, the Pew Center only found a 15% favorable opinion of the United States in Turkey- versus 52% three years earlier. (more…)

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

In our ongoing efforts to build relationships that matter between the UN system and civil society, UN-NGLS is introducing a new electronic bulletin: “Civil Society Observer". Civil Society Observer is a package of selected articles, reports and other documents to keep you connected to what’s going on in global civil society and the debate surrounding its role in the world; it will come directly to your inbox every two months. (more…)

IMF Chief Resigns, Democracy Deficit Lingers
By Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Mar (IPS) - International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director
Horst Koehler resigned Thursday following his
nomination for the German presidency, and groups monitoring the institution say
his exit is a chance to highlight the lack of
democracy at one of the world’s most influential financial bodies.

IMF First Deputy Managing Director Anne Krueger will be acting managing director
until the IMF executive board names a successor to
Koehler. (more…)

sent by Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute:

People make mistakes. We should not be too surprised or dismayed at the
failure of intelligence regarding weapons in Iraq. We now know that blood
and treasure is being spent based on speculation or evidence ignored.
David
Kay¹s testimony that Iraq did not pose a threat to the US highlights why
we
must return to American values. Our founding fathers knew that because
people make mistakes the inefficiencies of checks and balances must be
legally mandated. We should be very alarmed that these restraints on
action
were and continue to be ignored with bravado. (more…)

Religious, Science Groups Urge End to Nukes
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar (IPS) - An international group of religious and scientific
leaders Monday appealed to the United States and all
other nuclear states to pledge never to use nuclear weapons and to re-affirm
their commitments to achieving total nuclear
disarmament.

The appeal, which was signed by the head of the U.S. National Council of
Churches (NCC) and the president of the international
Catholic peace group Pax Christi, and 74 others – including four Nobel
laureates – declared the weapons to be ‘’inherently
immoral'’, and expressed particular concern over U.S. plans to develop a new
generation of nuclear bombs. (more…)

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for
Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite
of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s
under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative
revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The
latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate – the
Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House,
and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were
all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there
was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even
criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The
Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing
the powers-that-be much embarrassment. (more…)

Think of the Arabs Within Israel
By Ferry Biedermann

JERUSALEM, Mar (IPS) - While world attention is focused on the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, a crisis is brewing among Israel’s own Arab citizens.

“This is not a democracy, it is an ethnocracy,” complains Assad Ghanem,
senior lecturer in political science at Israel’s Haifa University.

Ghanem is an Arab Israeli, a descendent of the indigenous population that did
not flee, or was not driven away during the war in 1948/49 when the Jewish
state was founded. (more…)

Tim Garden
Presentation given to an invited audience at Indiana University
3 March 2004

A Historic Bond
The bond that ties Europe to the United States is steeped in the history of the last century. America saved Europe from itself in two World Wars. The generosity of the Marshall Plan rebuilt not just the economies of Western Europe, but also nurtured the damaged political systems. The history of the European Union springs directly from those days. Through the Cold War, Western Europe and the USA had a common enemy in the Soviet Union. NATO provided a collective security arrangement where everyone had a voice, and the threat was clear. If there was occasional tension, it often sprang from European worries about whether the US might return to isolationism; or American irritation with lack of European investment in defence. (more…)

Putin Regime ‘Crushing Democracy’
By Mark Waller

HELSINKI, Mar (IPS) - Human rights are under increasing attack in Russia,
civil society activists warned Thursday.

Russian authorities pay lip service to civil society but are wholly
unconcerned
about human rights, Tanja Lokshina from the influential Moscow Helsinki Group
(MHG) told a packed public meeting in the Finnish capital. (more…)

MARSHALLS TEST VICTIMS SAY U.S. TURNING ITS BACK
By Giff Johnson

MAJURO, Marshall Islands - Fifty years after America tested its most powerful hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, many Marshall Islanders watch in anger as the world̢۪s most powerful nation lavishes billions of dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan but has halted funding for a medical program for nuclear test victims and is dragging its feet on a request for $2 billion in compensation.

“Why should we have to beg the United States to get funding for our medical problems that are directly related to their nuclear bombs they tested on us?” asks Rongelap Islander Lijon Eknilang, who was eight years old when radioactive fallout rained down on her unsuspecting island village in 1954. (more…)

Analysis by Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Mar (IPS) û The mask over the origins of the Commonwealth if
off, or at least it will be next week.

About time, perhaps. It is polite to speak at Commonwealth gatherings
now of diverse nations sharing a common purpose, as a working microcosm
of the world at large. But there is near silent agreement at such
meetings to say nothing about its origins. (more…)

By Robert Kagan *
Washington Post, Tuesday, March 2, 2004; Page A21

The chief criticism of President Bush’s foreign policy in this campaign is
obviously not going to be that he invaded Iraq. The big antiwar candidate,
Howard Dean, is finished. The two remaining candidates for the Democratic
nomination both voted for the war. The failure to find stockpiles of
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – and the stunning ineptitude of the
administration in defending itself against unfair charges of prewar
deception – has not undermined basic public support for the war. (more…)

By Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Mar (IPS) - As rebel leader Guy Philippe declared himself
Haiti’s “military chief” Tuesday, speculation continued to fly over the U.S.
role in deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s flight from power Sunday.

More than one observer suggested that now that the champion of the poor in
the western hemisphere’s poorest nation was gone, it was time to look ahead
to rebuilding – but first to disarming the various armed factions in Haiti. (more…)

G15 Seeks to Revitalise Doctrine of the South
By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Feb (IPS) - The Group of 15, in reality 19 countries from Asia,
Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, reiterated a
call for dialogue with the industrialised North and proposed an energy
cooperation programme within the developing South during a
summit in the Venezuelan capital.

The G15, founded in 1989 during a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade
to promote South-South cooperation, comprises
Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica,
Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Sri Lanka,
Senegal, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. (more…)

By Nat Hentoff
The Village Voice

Friday 27 February 2004

Powers Formerly Reserved Only for Kings
“[After the American Revolution], there was to be no king. . . . Allegiance would go, not to a man with a crown, but to the law. . . . It was to be a ‘government of laws and not men.’ ” —Law in America, Lawrence M. Friedman

“Pick your favorite constitutional amendment or right: its survival during the war on terror cannot be assumed if the legitimacy of these indefinite detentions is sustained.” —Thomas H. Moreland, chair of the Federal Courts Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, February 6, 2004 (more…)

‘La Plus Ca Change’ - NY Times Hit for WMD Gullibility
Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - If Walter Lippman, perhaps the most influential U.S.
press critic and foreign-policy columnist of the
20th century, were alive today, chances are he would shake his head knowingly
and mutter something like, “La plus ca change, la plus
c’est la meme chose'’. ('’The more things change, the more they remain the
same'’.)

After all, it was in 1920 that he and a colleague, Charles Merz, wrote in their
analysis of ‘New York Times’ coverage of the
Bolshevik Revolution between 1917 and 1920 that the newspaper’s reporting on
Russia during that period was ‘’nothing short of a
disaster'’. (more…)

HEALTH, SONG AND ANARCHY!
The Tradition of Libertarian Singers
by Rafael Uzcategui

To think of insurgent popular song from Latin America’s perspective is to easily evoke the names of Victor Jara, Ali Primera, Carlos Puebla, Inti-Illimani or Silvio Rodriguez. But, the importance of this way of struggling using songs is neither accidental nor unique. There has always been singing linked to all revolutionary movements in our continent, some times hidden by the events themselves or by interested reconstructions of the history of our socio-political struggles. We would like to celebrate here the existence of a tradition of popular singers, comrades of the idea of social justice with liberty: anarchism. This exercise in memory, unlike those by the “true dissidents,” does not pretend to be exclusive and, least of all, the whole truth. As any historic reconstruction -seen from a particular point of view- it contains fragments of truth. It also pretends to connect old singers with current ones, the struggles they are part of and to recreate possible links of community solidarity. (more…)