Analysis - By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 29 (IPS) - Trygve Lie of Norway, the first U.N. secretary-general, described his job as ‘’the most impossible on earth.'’

As chief administrative officer of the 191-member United Nations, the secretary-general also holds one of the most diplomatically sensitive posts in the world. The conventional wisdom is that he is not expected to play politics – or interfere in the internal affairs of any member state. (more…)

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Updated: 10:29 a.m. ET Oct. 29, 2004

Oct. 28 - A last-minute endorsement of President George W. Bush by a hastily formed coalition of Arab-Americans was coordinated in part by a registered lobbyist for the Libyan regime of Col. Muammar Kaddafi—a government formally branded by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism. (more…)

Mario Osava

SAO PAULO, Oct 28 (IPS) - The civil war in Colombia, the political polarisation dividing Venezuelan society, the poverty that limits public access to information, and heavy concentration of media ownership are major challenges faced by the media in Latin America. (more…)

This is an urgent call for people around the world to contact Americans they know, both in the United States and abroad, to urge them to vote for John Kerry - NOT for partisan reasons, but as the essential tactical option.

The U.S. presidential election on Tuesday November 2 is the most important election in our lifetime. Never before has so much been at stake for both the United States and the world. In his four years in office, President George W. Bush has transformed the United States from world leader into a rogue power in a precipitous and reckless manner. (more…)

MSNBC and NBC News
Updated: 1:50 p.m. ET Oct. 27, 2004

The CIA is unable to authenticate a videotape in which a man claiming to be an al-Qaida terrorist warns of devastating new attacks on the United States, a senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News on Wednesday.

The existence of the tape was first reported Wednesday afternoon by Internet columnist Matt Drudge, who said it was obtained last weekend in Pakistan by ABC News. Drudge quoted an unidentified “senior ABC News sourceâ€? as saying the network was “working 24 hours a day trying to authenticateâ€? it. (more…)

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Oct 27 (IPS) - African civil society groups are calling on the continent’s governments to make more room for them at the tables where decisions are made about development.

Civil society has contributed greatly to recent positive changes on the continent and its growing role is reflected in new institutions and processes, but the latter have not lived up to their promises of inclusion, says a report released Tuesday by Partnership Africa Canada (PAC). (more…)

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 26 (IPS) - A clash at the start of this week between hundreds of Muslim protesters and heavily armed Thai troops in the country’s south - which left over 80 dead - has delivered a blow to Bangkok’s view that it has the local communities on its side. (more…)

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Richard Wolffe
Newsweek
Updated: 4:43 p.m. ET Oct. 26, 2004

Oct. 26 - After all the conventions, after all the debates, after all the TV ads and stump speeches, what’s left? How does a presidential campaign break through the clutter to reach the hearts and minds of voters? (more…)

By Charlene Gubash
Producer
NBC News
Updated: 7:09 a.m. ET Oct. 21, 2004

CAIRO - From the slums of Cairo to remote villages in rural Egypt, a quiet revolution is taking place. Reversing generations of tradition, growing numbers of parents have decided to spare their daughters the trauma of female genital mutilation (FGM), an ancient practice whereby part of a girl’s external genitalia are cut off. (more…)

Analysis - By Stefania Milan

LONDON, Oct 25 (IPS) - The third European Social Forum appears to mark the end of the â€?love storyâ€? between grassroots social movements and the international gatherings that are now in vogue. In any case, discontent in both camps – the activists and the official organisers – will leave a mark on future events. (more…)

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Karen Fragala
Newsweek
Updated: 11:12 a.m. ET Oct. 22, 2004

Oct. 21 - Since the beginning of the conflict in Iraq, more than 1,000 American soldiers have been killed. But nearly eight times as many have been injured so far, according to the Defense Department. Soldiers know there are grave risks involved in going to war, but none of the 20 disabled veterans profiled by photojournalist Nina Berman in her new book “Purple Hearts: Back From Iraqâ€? (Trolley Books) expected to return home blind, as amputees or otherwise disfigured. Some went to Iraq hoping to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. Others were following in the footsteps of family members. Some just wanted to get out of their small towns and do something. NEWSWEEK’s Karen Fragala spoke to the author about her book and what the veterans found upon their return to America. Excerpts: (more…)

Moyiga Nduru

PRETORIA, Oct 22 (IPS) - Their typical day starts at five in the morning or earlier. Balancing a pot on their heads ­ and sometimes with a baby strapped to their backs ­ women in rural Africa may walk up to 12 kilometres a day to fetch water. (more…)

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Oct 20 (IPS) - Environmental and development groups have come together to warn that global warming threatens the Millennium Development Goals.

Environment and development have been cousins of sorts so far, but the new report ‘Up in Smoke’ released Wednesday by several groups spanning both areas points to the need for the two to come closer together. (more…)

By Howard Fineman
Newsweek

Oct. 25 issue - Gentlemen of Yale that they are, or were, George W. Bush and John Kerry made a show of good fellowship when the contest was over: two guys, eager to hammer each other politically, acting like they were booking a tennis date. “Where are you going to be on election night?” the president wanted to know, shaking hands after their final debate last week at Arizona State in Tempe. In Boston, Kerry told him, with Teresa, at the town house on Beacon Hill. Bush will be at the ranch in Texas to vote, then at the White House to watch returns. A few winks and arm pats, and they went their separate ways. (more…)

Leonardo Boff, Theologian,
October , 2004

It is usually said that the Catholic Church has sexual phobia, that she deals with family morals and sexuality issues with extreme harshness. And there is enough reason to say that, because the word, “pleasure” elicits anxiety in the Church and if, “sexual pleasure” is discussed, it elicits suspicions. In fact, the Catholic Church is more concerned with the renunciation than with the joyful celebration of life. (more…)

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 19 (IPS) - By dismissing the country’s prime minister in an unprecedented manner, Burma’s military leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe has affirmed that the junta’s hardliners will stop at nothing to retain their grip on power. (more…)

By: Eva Golinger - Venezuelanalysis.com

I. Propaganda

Setting: Venevisión, one of 5 major private television channels in Venezuela, December 20, 2002. The following is a transcription of a television advertisement played on a Venezuelan private media channel during the December 2002 managerial stoppage. The commercial that follows was interspersed amongst 10 back-to-back similar propagandas paid for by the Venezuelan opposition movement. The ads were played during breaks from 24-hour news coverage of opposition marches, speeches and interviews. During the 64-day stoppage, approximately 700 similar, yet varied, ads were broadcast daily. (more…)

Mario Osava*

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 18 (Tierramérica) - Soybean production, which awakens the ire of environmentalists because of the rapid expansion of transgenic varieties, is the target of yet another criticism: increased pressure on Brazil’s Amazon forests. (more…)

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Oct 15 (IPS) - Countries of the developing South successfully lobbied the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to incorporate development goals and consumer rights, to counterbalance the interests of powerful nations and corporations, in a resolution adopted Tuesday, Oct. 5. (more…)

ANALYSIS
By Robert O’Harrow Jr.
The Washington Post
Updated: 6:33 a.m. ET Oct. 15, 2004

WASHINGTON - First there were security cameras, sprouting like mushrooms on street corners and buildings. Then came shopper cards, offering discounts in exchange for details about buying habits.

In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of electronic tags or “cookies” on the Internet, software that monitors e-mail, GPS devices that pinpoint our position on the planet, and a growing number of machines that capture finger- and face-prints. (more…)

Stefania Milan

LONDON, Oct 14 (IPS) - London is preparing to host the third European Social Forum (ESF) after meetings in Florence in 2002 and Paris in 2003.

About 50,000 people are expected at the forum from Friday until Sunday, when the event will close with a march through the city centre calling for “another possible world.” (more…)

Lisbon, Oct. 14 (Lusa) - Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano Thursday dismissed allegations by the opposition that the government was preparing electoral fraud, promising the December
general elections would be the “most transparent possible". (more…)

Thalif Deen

When the League of Arab States was created in 1945, it was perceived as the ultimate symbol of Arab nationalism in a politically and militarily de-moralised Middle East.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 12 (IPS) - When the League of Arab States was created in 1945, it was perceived as the ultimate symbol of Arab nationalism in a politically and militarily de-moralised Middle East. (more…)

This is an issue that Bush and Kerry don’t want to talk about because it touches a politically explosive subject: immigration

By Robert J. Samuelson
Newsweek

Oct. 18 issue - The census bureau’s annual figures on family incomes and poverty were bound to become familiar factoids in the Bush-Kerry combat. The numbers seem to confirm what many people feel: the middle class is squeezed; poverty’s worsening. In 2003 the median household income dropped for the fourth consecutive year, to $43,318; the official poverty rate rose for the third year, to 12.5 percent of the population; and the number of people without health insurance increased for the third year to 45 million, or 16 percent of the population. But the debate you’re hearing is not the real deal. What ought to be the debate is shunned by both candidates because it touches a politically explosive subject: immigration. (more…)

By Peter Baker
The Washington Post
Updated: 12:44 a.m. ET Oct. 12, 2004

BESLAN, Russia - The people of Beslan buried two more children on Friday, a 7-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl. They still dig graves at the cemetery nearly every day. The weekend before there were yet another 23 funerals. (more…)

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Oct 12 (IPS) - More than 140 environmentalists from 60 countries have showed accolades on Wangari Maathai, Kenya’s assistant minister for environment, for scooping this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Maathai, who received a standing ovation from the women during the occasion in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, won the prestigious award on Oct. 8. (more…)

By Steve Fainaru
The Washington Post
Updated: 2:08 a.m. ET Oct. 10, 2004

ISKANDARIYAH, Iraq - Scrawled on the helmet of Lance Cpl. Carlos Perez are the letters FDNY. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York, the Pentagon and western Pennsylvania, Perez quit school, left his job as a firefighter in Long Island, N.Y., and joined the U.S. Marine Corps. (more…)

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Oct 11 (IPS) - Ten years after the wars in the Balkans left a quarter of a million dead, reconciliation moves are still waiting for the ‘truth’ to come out first.

â€?It often comes to who should be blamed more for war crimes,â€? Croat historian Igor Graovac told IPS. â€?It then transforms into the stand ‘we are the innocent victims, while all the others are heinous criminals’. Then it turns into a political manipulation of the public.â€? (more…)

By BRUCE K. GAGNON

JI have just returned from a one-day trip to Perry, Florida to speak to a gathering of concerned citizens who are organizing to stop the placement of a new bombing range in their rural community. It was one of the most inspiring trips that I have ever made. (more…)

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Oct (IPS) - A mutiny by army troops and the murders of Guinea-Bissau armed forces commander General Veríssimo Correia de Seabra and the director of military information Colonel Domingos Barros highlighted the fragility of the democratic institutions in that small West African nation. (more…)

Peyman Pejman

Last year the conservative Saudi Arabia shocked everyone announcing that it would hold partial municipal elections in which people for the first time could vote directly; now reform-minded activists are pushing the envelope by announcing that several women will nominate themselves for the elections.

Dubai, Oct 7 (IPS) - When conservative Saudi Arabia announced last year that it would hold partial municipal elections in which people for the first time could vote directly, the reaction of many in and out of the country was nothing less than shock. (more…)

Leonardo Boff

Ethics refers to practice, not theory. That is why the historical figures whose lives exemplify the human ethos are important. To us in the West, the most obvious figure is Francis of Assisi, considered to be “The Last Christian.” He did not live his life after the imperial model of the Church of his times, but followed the Gospel experience, rescuing the vitality of proto-Christianity, the Christianity of the origins. As we will see, Francis of Assisi integrates different ethical aspects. (more…)

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 6 (IPS) - The showdown between Burma’s military regime and the European Union (EU) at this weekend’s meeting of Asian and European leaders has propelled into one that could damage the EU’s stature if Rangoon does not blink. (more…)

By Kevin Watkins and Ngaire Woods IHT

OXFORD, England Rich countries are ardent advocates for democracy all around the world. But when it comes to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, government of the many by the few is the preferred option.
.
Developing countries are systematically denied a voice in decisions that profoundly affect the lives of their citizens. Nowhere is the democratic deficit more keenly felt than in Africa. (more…)

repared text of speech delivered at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, September 28, 2004

This is the most important election of my lifetime. I have never been heavily involved in partisan politics but these are not normal times. President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests and undermining American values. That is why I am sending you this message. I have been demonized by the Bush campaign but I hope you will give me a hearing. (more…)

Ritt Goldstein

Vast numbers of dead, the compromising of key elements within the medical community and its regulatory structures, the blind pursuit of billions of dollars in corporate profits – all have surfaced in a detonating pharmaceutical industry scandal of global dimension. (more…)

Emad Mekay

Finance ministers from the world’s richest nations have delayed a plan to write off 100 percent of debts owed by the planet’s poorest countries, quashing hopes those nations could start spending more on services like health and education and work toward ending their extreme poverty.

WASHINGTON, Oct 2 (IPS) - Finance ministers from the world’s richest nations have delayed a plan to write off 100 percent of debts owed by the planet’s poorest countries, quashing hopes those nations could start spending more on services like health and education and work toward ending their extreme poverty. (more…)

Europe waits nervously for the US election The differences with Washington go beyond disaffection with George W.Bush’s administration. The expectation is of a change of style more than of substance should John Kerry win the presidential race, writes Quentin Peel

By JAMES BLITZ and QUENTIN PEEL

Seldom has a US presidential election campaign been watched from the opposite side of the Atlantic with so much grim fascination and nervous anticipation as the present contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry. (more…)

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Oct 1 (IPS) - It is called the Clean Development Mechanism, and is one of the principal tools to turn the Kyoto Protocol into reality on the ground – or in the air.

The Kyoto protocol expected to come into force by the end of the year following ratification by Russia sets out three mechanisms to reduce emission of greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide and methane thought to lead to global warming) from industry and transport: emissions trading, joint implementation and the clean development mechanism (CDM). (more…)

Adolfo Perez Esquivel
Nobel Peace Prize

Mr. George W. Bush,
President of the United States of Northamerica
:

I don’t know if you will read this letter, not because it will not reach you, but because you are incapable of reading it. Your heart is so hardened by hatred and fear, that you have neither the capacity nor the courage to open your mind and your spirit to compassion. In spite of that, however, I cannot keep from sending it to you, because if you do not read it, I am sure it will be read by many men and women, those who are asking you to stop the massacre of the people of Iraq. (more…)