He must stick to his strengths, avoid polarization, and deliver a real agenda for a second term. Too bad so few will tune in

By Richard S. Dunham
Business Week
Updated: 8:00 p.m. ET Aug. 30, 2004

The Presidential nominating convention, once the stuff of political drama and intraparty struggles over the great issues of the day, is gone. Instead of soaring debates over war and racial discrimination and women’s rights, these pageants have become little more than taxpayer-funded, Madison Avenue-produced infomercials targeting a tiny slice of the electorate: the vanishing undecided voter.

No wonder John Kerry got little bounce from a well-choreographed and generally upbeat Democratic convention in Boston, and George Bush probably won’t do any better from the Gotham fest. Fewer people than ever are tuning in, thanks in large part to Big Media’s decision to cut back coverage to three hours total in prime time over each four-day confab. (more…)

Bayano Valy

MAPUTO, Aug 31 (IPS) - When her husband died two months ago, Albertina Come did not only lose him. She also lost their house and belongings acquired through hard work over ten years of marriage.

Come’s husband is among some 97,000 Mozambicans who health authorities say will die of HIV/AIDS this year alone. More than 400,000 Mozambicans have died of the disease since 1999, and the death toll is expected to reach over 1.2 million by 2010. (more…)

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 27 (IPS) - As the United Nations continues to face a shortage of well-equipped, professionally trained soldiers for its growing peacekeeping operations overseas, a proposal to hire private security forces to rectify the shortfall has been greeted with scepticism.

‘’There is little or no support for the privatisation of U.N. peacekeeping,'’ says a senior U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘’I cannot think of any member state willing to go along with the proposal,'’ he told IPS. (more…)

By: Eduardo Galeano - Página 12

Strange dictator this Hugo Chávez. Masochistic and suicidal: he created a Constitution that permits the people to throw him out, and he risked this occurring in a recall referendum. This referendum that took place in Venezuela was the first of its kind in Universal history. He was not cast out. And this makes it the Eighth election that Chávez has won in five years, with a transparency that would have sent dear Bush on a holiday.

Obedient to his Constitution, Chávez accepted the referendum, promoted by the opposition, and subjected himself to the will of the people: “You all decideâ€?. Up until now, the presidents interrupted their rule only for death, a putsch, an uprising or parliamentary decision. The referendum has inaugurated an innovative form of direct democracy. An extraordinary accountability: How many presidents, of what countries of the world, would be enthusiastic to allow for that? And how many would continue being president afterwards? (more…)

By: Jonah Gindin ­ Venezuelanalysis.com

With Chávez’ barely contested victory in the long awaited referendum on his mandate as Venezuelan President, there has been a manifest change in the attitude of the mainstream media towards Venezuela’s Bolívarian revolution. Venezuela’s left President has diverted a huge portion of this country’s oil wealth to social programs for the first time since oil was discovered in the early 20th century, though the distribution of oil wealth always held a prominent position in political discourse. The relationship between Chávez and the international private media has been anything but friendly since he was first-elected in 1998. Since then he has been re-elected once, his mandate reconfirmed in last Sunday’s referendum, and he has emerged successful from five other referenda and plebiscites on issues ranging from a new constitution to democratizing the labour movement. (more…)

Peyman Pejman

BAGHDAD, Aug 26 (IPS) - As almost six million Iraqi children prepare to start their second year at school away from the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, officials see major challenges ahead.

At this time last year Iraq was still fresh from the war that toppled Saddam. U.S.-led occupation forces had been on the ground less than six months. Many schools had been damaged by the war or in the looting that followed. (more…)

By JUAN FORERO

CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug.- When President Hugo Chávez was ousted in a coup two years ago, the Bush administration celebrated, calling the ouster his own doing. The rest of Latin America was left fuming by the overthrow and expressed strong support for Mr. Chávez as he was almost immediately swept back into power in a popular uprising.

On Sunday, when Mr. Chávez triumphed over his adversaries in a referendum on whether he should be recalled from office, countries from Brazil to Argentina, Colombia to Spain heartily congratulated him. The United States remained silent for more than a day, until a State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, offered tepid backing for the “preliminary results.” (more…)

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Aug 25 (IPS) - Immigration policy threatens to divide EU member states as the new European Commission looks for a common stand.

Control of European Union (EU) borders will fall to commissioner for justice and home affairs Rocco Buttiglione after the new commission takes charge Nov. 1. The European Commission is the executive arm of the EU. (more…)

Diana Mendoza

MANILA, Aug 25 (IPS) - Testing the limits of press freedom is a perilous venture in the Philippines. Good journalists in the country run the risk of either being maimed for life or killed for reporting without fear or favour.

Around three Filipino journalists on the average are killed each year. But recently, the number of journalists slain has increased dramatically. (more…)

ANALYSIS
By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
The Washington Post
Updated: 1:00 a.m. ET Aug. 25, 2004

The controversy over John F. Kerry’s service in Vietnam and his days as an antiwar protester entered its third week yesterday with both Kerry and President Bush vulnerable to the political fallout from an episode that has unexpectedly come to dominate the coverage of the presidential campaign.

Privately, key Democratic strategists fear that attack ads against Kerry will undermine the Democratic presidential nominee’s character and credibility, no matter whether the charges are accurate, because they dovetail with an argument Bush’s campaign has tried to pound home in its advertising – that Kerry is unreliable and untrustworthy. Many of the charges have been rebutted by veterans who served with Kerry and by military records. (more…)

The threat of an Al Qaeda attack there is real—and growing

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Christopher Dickey
Paris Bureau Chief, Middle East Regional Editor
Newsweek
Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET Aug. 20, 2004

Aug. 20 - Who’d have thought laid-back Italy would be a major hub for Al Qaeda operatives? But their reach extends from Casablanca to Baghdad to Milan.

With growing frequency and ferocity, Web sites supposedly linked to Al Qaeda threaten Italy with gruesome terrorist attacks “hitting quality targets with nonconventional weapons that will cause a huge disaster.â€? If Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi doesn’t pull his troops out of Iraq, bloggers from hell say they’ll call on secret sleeper cells to raze Italy’s cities to the ground, make people “taste the bitter fruits of bloodâ€? … and so on. (more…)

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Aug 24 (IPS) - The European Union is beginning to take action over the human rights crisis in Darfur ahead of the Aug. 29 United Nations deadline to the Sudanese government.

Adviser to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Pieter Feith said after a fact-finding mission to Sudan early August that Sudan did not present a genocide situation. That led to an EU reluctance to intervene. (more…)

Public letter from the Latin American Communication Networks in support of the CRIS campaign

A different communication is posible

The communication organizations of Latin America that promote communication rights, assembled in the city of Quito for the Social Forum of the Americas, issue the following statement to communicators, members of society and the public opinion in general:

We recognize the growing influence of communication and of new communication and information technologies. Nevertheless, we reject the continuing unfair concentration of Media property and of Media content in the hands of the few that for years control the modes of production, commerce, and finance. (more…)

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Aug 23 (IPS) - Secret detention centres in Iraq and Afghanistan must be included in U.S. military monitoring of prisoner mistreatment, according to an article in the ‘Lancet’ medical journal that details collusion between medical staff and abusive interrogators.

While much evidence in the ongoing military investigations has been made public, the article also notes that two earlier U.S. Army probes remain classified, and that thousands of pages of appendices to the initial report on Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. Maj Gen Antonio Taguba are unavailable. (more…)

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 20 (IPS) - South-east Asia’s march to create a regional free trade area by 2018 is causing heartburn among public health experts, given that this push to end trade tariff barriers could open the doors for an avalanche of cigarettes to flood local stores.

On Friday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) appealed to South-east Asian governments to ‘’weigh the public health risks of liberalisation of the tobacco trade under the ASEAN (Association of South-east Asian Nations) Free Trade Agreement (AFTA).'’ (more…)

ACLU warns of surveillance-industrial complex

By Bob Sullivan
Technology correspondent
MSNBC
Updated: 10:22 a.m. ET Aug. 20, 2004

In May 2002, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors voluntarily provided the FBI with a disk containing the names, addresses and other personal information of about 2 million people, nearly every U.S. citizen who had learned to scuba dive in the previous three years. That’s just one of the myriad ways federal law enforcement agencies are quietly recruiting private industry and private citizens as de facto agents in the war on terror, according to a report recently issued by the ACLU called The Surveillance-Industrial Complex. The study paints a picture of an unofficial government policy to enlist companies and citizens in the building of massive databases aimed at monitoring people in the United States. (more…)

MSNBC News Services
Updated: 12:37 p.m. ET Aug. 19, 2004

WASHINGTON - A new U.S. Army report clears top U.S. military brass in Iraq of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison but implicates 20 or more intelligence troops in the scandal, according to defense officials.

The investigation report, expected to be sent to Congress next week, recommends discipline against the military intelligence troops ranging from administrative reduction in rank and loss of pay to further investigation that could lead to military trials, one of the officials told Reuters. (more…)

Eli Clifton

WASHINGTON, Aug 19 (IPS) - A newly released survey projects massive population growth in the developing world over the next 45 years, due to its disproportionately young populace and higher birth rates.

While there has been a decline in fertility rates in parts of Latin America and Asia, growth rates in Africa and other areas of Asia are booming at dangerously high levels, says demographer Carl Haub of the Population Research Bureau (PRB), which produced the report. (more…)

By Alejandro Kirk

CARACAS.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has never claimed to be anything but the result of 40 years of massive weakening of the democratic system established in 1958 by popular revolt, led by two political parties which allowed a few domestic and economic groups to take hold of most of the immense wealth coming from oil exports.
Coming out of jail for staging a failed coup in 1992, Chávez was elected president in 1998, on the wake of a political earthquake that ended the two party-system led by the Social-Democratic Acción Democrática party and Christian-Democratic Copei. (more…)

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 18 (IPS) - “If only I can stop sewing for a month, my cough will come down…I spend the money from my sewing for buying food and making sandwiches for my grandchildren to take to school,” says an old South African woman captured on video while working at an archaic sewing machine.

A 57-year old Ugandan man, who lost four of his children to AIDS, tells of how he is looking after 14 grandchildren ­ seven of whom need to have school fees paid. The video was screened at a three-day conference on ageing in Africa, which opened in the South African commercial hub of Johannesburg Wednesday, Aug. 18. (more…)

Alejandro Kirk

CARACAS, Aug (IPS) - The stamp of approval that Venezuela’s recall referendum won Monday from the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Carter Centre will help pave the way for a new stage of President Hugo Chávez’s “social revolution".

In his first speech early Monday, the president announced that Venezuela would move forward with determination towards overcoming the economic and social injustices inherited from neo-liberal free-market policies of the past, and towards national reconciliation. (more…)

Concerns include slowing down data, who’s in charge

NBC News and news services
Updated: 2:55 p.m. ET Aug. 17, 2004

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld struck a cautious tone Tuesday on the need for a national intelligence director, telling senators that any changes should not create new barriers between the military and agencies that collect intelligence.

For his part, acting CIA director John McLaughlin raised what he believes is a critical flaw in the proposal recommended by the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission. He warned senators that they wouldn’t be able to hold a national intelligence director responsible should things go wrong unless Congress gives that person an entire organization to collect and analyze intelligence. (more…)

Polls consistently showing Kerry with an advantage

By Richard Morin and Christopher Muste
The Washington Post
Updated: 3:18 a.m. ET Aug. 15, 2004

WASHINGTON - Mounting concerns over the war and the sluggish economy have sent President Bush’s popularity plummeting among young adults in the past four months, complicating his bid for reelection and challenging Republicans to increase their efforts to win over new or lightly committed young voters.

Four years ago, network exit polls found that Bush and Democrat Al Gore split the vote of 18-to-29-year-olds, with Gore claiming 48 percent and Bush getting 46 percent — the best showing by a Republican presidential candidate in more than a decade. (more…)

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Aug 16 (IPS) - Although the opposition complained of fraud, the international election observer missions monitoring the recall referendum in Venezuela agreed Monday that President Hugo Chávez had won, and said they found no signs of fraud.

Nobel Peace laureate and former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Organisation of American States (OAS) Secretary-General César Gaviria said in a joint news briefing in Caracas that Chávez survived Sunday’s referendum. (more…)

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Aug 13 (IPS) - One of the first tasks of new EU development commissioner Louis Michel will be to persuade member states to contribute 0.7 percent of GNI to external aid.

Belgian Michel declared after he was picked for the role by José Manuel Barroso who becomes European Union (EU) Commission president in November that he would “work to honour those who had supported me.” (more…)

Bush’s CIA nominee has alarmed civil libertarians with a plan that would authorize the agency to arrest U.S. citizens. Plus, the real threat to the Olympic games

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 6:39 p.m. ET Aug. 11, 2004

Aug. 11 - Rep. Porter Goss, President Bush’s nominee to head the CIA, recently introduced legislation that would give the president new authority to direct CIA agents to conduct law-enforcement operations inside the United States—including arresting American citizens.

The legislation, introduced by Goss on June 16 and touted as an “intelligence reformâ€? bill, would substantially restructure the U.S. intelligence community by giving the director of Central Intelligence (DCI) broad new powers to oversee its various components scattered throughout the government. (more…)

The Internet is full of possibilities. You’ll find everything from encyclopedic entries to telephone book listings, and it’s all available at the click of a search button. But how does an Internet search actually work?

When you begin a search for a specific word, you click on a so-called search engine, a Web site designed specifically for culling the World Wide Web for all websites containing the entered word or words. There are two types of search engines, crawler-based and human-powered directories. (more…)

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug (IPS) - Just days before Venezuelans vote on whether to recall Hugo Chavez, U.S. officials and analysts appear increasingly resigned to at least another two and a half years of a government headed by the fiery populist.

They have watched Chavez surge in the polls in the past few weeks and, what with a leaderless opposition united only in its contempt for the president, they now see Fidel Castro’s biggest foreign admirer as likely to prevail, if not in the plebiscite itself, then in new elections that must take place within 30 days of the recall vote. (more…)

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Aug 11 (IPS) - Increased international presence is urgently needed to protect civilians and bring stability to Sudan, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.

The human rights group condemns the Sudanese government for rejecting a proposal by the transnational African Union to enlarge its presence to carry out such a role. The African Union had proposed expanding its force in Sudan from 300 to 2,000, and acquiring a mandate to actively protect civilians. (more…)

By Gov. Howard Dean, M.D.
August 2004

For most Americans, the issue of the U.S. Naval bombing range on the island of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico, is one that was resolved a few years ago when the United States Navy closed its base there after six decades of bombing and other military operations. For the people who live there, the bombing has stopped but, the dying and disease have continued. (more…)

Sonny Inbaraj

BANGKOK, Aug 8 (IPS) - Democracy is still nowhere in sight in Burma sixteen years after the bloodiest massacre of unarmed demonstrators in a mass uprising of students – who took to the streets of Rangoon and other major cities on Aug. 8, 1988 – to protest against decades of military rule and severe economic mismanagement by the generals.

Democracy is still nowhere in sight in Burma sixteen years after the bloodiest massacre of unarmed demonstrators in a mass uprising of students – who took to the streets of Rangoon and other major cities on Aug. 8, 1988 – to protest against decades of military rule and severe economic mismanagement by the generals. (more…)

The Guardian - UK

by Richard Gott in Caracas

To the dismay of opposition groups in Venezuela, and to the surprise of international observers gathering in Caracas, President Hugo Chávez is about to secure a stunning victory on August 15, in a referendum designed to lead to his overthrow.

First elected in 1998 as a barely known colonel, armed with little more than revolutionary rhetoric and a moderate social-democratic programme, Chávez has become the leader of the emerging opposition in Latin America to the neo-liberal hegemony of the United States. Closely allied to Fidel Castro, he rivals the Cuban leader in his fierce denunciations of George Bush, a strategy that goes down well with the great majority of the population of Latin America, where only the elites welcome the economic and political recipes devised in Washington. (more…)

From Rehnquist to Robert Byrd to endangered species, reminders ofthe former president are ubiquitous

By Tom Curry

National affairs writer
MSNBC
Updated: 9:55 a.m. ET Aug. 9, 2004

WASHINGTON - “If you seek his monument, look around you.� So goes the epitaph for the architect Sir Christopher Wren, whose churches fill London.

So where do you go in Washington, D.C., to seek Richard Nixon’s monument? There’s no Nixon Memorial, as there is for Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. (more…)

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Aug 9 (IPS) - When the Belgian Defence Ministry earlier this year blamed North America for the world’s worst ever genocide over its killing of millions of indigenous peoples, outrage at the claim spotlighted a topic that rarely enters the public realm but has long been accepted by many native Americans and their supporters.

When the Belgian Defence Ministry earlier this year blamed North America for the world’s worst ever genocide over its killing of millions of indigenous peoples, outrage at the claim spotlighted a topic that rarely enters the public realm but has long been accepted by many native Americans and their supporters. (more…)

By Svetlana Sedina

Sepulchral silence from the authorities regarding the gangster-style maneuvers in the elimination of “New Times�, one of Russia’s last independent publications.

One of the main changes in Russian society brought about by Perestroika and, especially, Glasnost during the final years of the Soviet Union, was an opening in the freedom of speech, granting countless benefits to a community unaccustomed to an independent press, not taking orders from the Government and the Party. (more…)

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Aug 6 (IPS) - While the flurry of diplomatic activity around developments in the western Sudanese region of Darfur continues, heavy rains are complicating efforts to alleviate the humanitarian crisis there.

“The poor roads coupled with heavy rains there have made it difficult for aid workers to reach the IDPs (internally displaced persons),” Ben Parker, a United Nations spokesman on Sudan, told IPS. (more…)

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 5 (IPS) - When two reporters and a lawyer traveled to Zimbabwe recently on a fact-finding mission, they found it a journey of the most arduous kind.

The delegation ­ from Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia ­ was sent by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), with support from the Southern Africa Media Project of a German foundation: the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. (MISA is a non-governmental organisation based in the Namibian capital, Windhoek.) (more…)

From The Economist print edition

They are going to mix, whether you like it or not

“WHERE does the power come from, to see the race to its end?â€? asks Eric Liddell in that cinematic celebration of the Olympian ideal, “Chariots of Fireâ€?. The runner’s answer? “From within.â€? Eighty years after Liddell won his gold medal, for competitors at the Olympic games starting next week in Athens that power may come instead from without—in the form of drugs designed to maximise performance. (more…)

CPA criticized for sloppy record keeping, violating its own rules

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
The Washington Post
Updated: 8:04 a.m. ET Aug. 4, 2004

Halliburton Co. and other U.S. contractors are being paid at least $1.9 billion from Iraqi funds under an arrangement set by the U.S.-led occupation authority, according to a review of documents and interviews with government agencies, companies and auditors.

Most of the money is for two controversial deals that originally had been financed with money approved by the U.S. Congress, but later shifted to Iraqi funds that were governed by fewer restrictions and less rigorous oversight. (more…)

Tito Drago

MADRID, Aug 4 (IPS) - On the 300th anniversary of Britain’s occupation of the Rock of Gibraltar, the British government actively took part in the celebrations, irking Spain, which continues to claim sovereignty over the enclave, the last existing colony in Europe.

Britain bases its position on the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, a peace agreement signed by the British and Spanish crowns in which Spain implicitly accepted the occupation of Gibraltar – although without renouncing its right to sovereignty over the 6.5-sq-km territory on Spain’s southern coast. (more…)

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 3 (IPS) - The United States and Britain are being accused of undermining the work of international humanitarian organisations in Afghanistan by misusing aid to advance their military interests.

‘’There are times when aid agencies need the support of the military – as in Bosnia – but we are concerned about the increased involvement of the U.S. and UK military in the provision of aid,'’ says Caroline Green of Oxfam International. (more…)

MSNBC News Services
Updated: 4:27 p.m. ET Aug. 3, 2004

LONDON - With the price of crude oil hitting fresh highs this week, bringing $50 crude firmly into view, analysts say it will take a sea-change — a recession, an abnormally mild northern winter or perhaps a change in U.S. President — to end the rally in prices.

Early Tuesday, U.S. oil prices hit fresh record highs above $44 a barrel after the head of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel said there was little the group could do to cool red-hot markets. U.S. light crude struck $44.24 a barrel, the highest since crude futures were launched on the New York Mercantile Exchange in 1983. It settled 33 cents higher at $44.15. (more…)

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Aug 2 (IPS) - While top trade officials are commending themselves on breathing new life into the stalled Doha Round of trade talks over the weekend, interest groups say the negotiations have a long way to go before a satisfactory deal is reached.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreed a framework for the multilateral trade talks Sunday (Aug. 1) which aims to revive the delayed Doha Development Round (DDR). (more…)

By DOUG THOMPSON & TERESA HAMPTON

President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.�

Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home. (more…)