Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Dec 23 (IPS) - As a year of subtle but significant geopolitical shifts draws to an end, China looms ever larger in a world unable to decide whether its rise is an opportunity or a threat.

For better or worse, every ripple from this giant economy, which is driven by the fast-expanding needs of 1.3 billion consumers, can now be felt across the world. The country’s frenetic construction is driving up world prices of nearly every commodity, while large-scale foreign investment is powering a flood of exports, which is bringing down global prices for manufactured goods.

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On Dec 16 Seymour Melman has died at 86 in his home in New York City.
He was a key figure in radical politics, peace movements and economic research. Below is the article written by Ralph Nader on him. (more…)

Forum Planetagora (*)

Jean Tardif

Globalisation is emerging from many ongoing and interrelated processes that cause the multiplication, acceleration and intensification of interactions between human societies.
Globalisation is not limited to the development of economic and financial flows; it affects every sector of human activity. It has a cultural dimension since it brings together in an unprecedented way values, ideas, lifestyles, and views of the world whose differences appear more significant as they become commonly perceptible.
Cultural globalisation, carried forth by migration, tourism and communication through the media, transforms the world, its possibilities, and its frontiers: it structures the imagination. It is a structuring process that cannot be analysed in simplistic terms of domination or uniformisation, nor can it be considered solely on the basis of increased economic and financial exchanges.

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Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Dec 22 (IPS) - Indonesia’s new president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, steps into the political limelight just as South-east Asia’s identity as a symbol of moderate Islam gets increasingly bruised by the region’s own Muslims.

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Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 21 (IPS) - As the year hurtles to a close, a good many inhabitants of South Africa’s commercial hub, Johannesburg, have deserted their home town for coastal resorts.

Those still making their weary way to work along one of the city’s major highways, the M1 South, have of late been confronted with an interesting billboard, however. This giant sign is promoting the ‘Homecoming Revolution’, a campaign that aims to persuade South Africans who are living abroad to return to their country, and help rebuild it.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

By NEIL A. LEWIS and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, - F.B.I. memorandums portray abuse of prisoners by American military personnel in Iraq that included detainees’ being beaten and choked and having lit cigarettes placed in their ears, according to newly released government documents.

Published: December 21, 2004
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Sonny Inbaraj

BANGKOK, Dec 20 (IPS) - In the Christmas of 2001, rock icon Bono of the hugely popular Irish band U2 wrote ‘Walk On’ for Burma’s top dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. ‘’You could have flown away - a singing bird in an open cage who will only fly, only fly for freedom,'’ he sang. (more…)

The lead writer of a UN report on freedom and governance in the Arab world has said the United States is threatening to cut off funds to a UN agency if the United Nations releases it.

Nadir Fergani, the Egyptian social scientist who has worked on the last three Arab Human Development Reports, told Reuters defying the United States could cost the UN Development Programme (UNDP) about $100 million a year. (more…)

Ilana Eldridge

DARWIN, Australia, Dec 17 (IPS) - The recent death of a young indigenous Australian in a prison cell in Palm Island, in the northeastern state of Queensland, has sparked renewed calls for the recommendations of a Royal Commission to be implemented in order to prevent large numbers of Aboriginals from dying in jails and detention centers. (more…)

Eduardo Tamayo G.

Agrarian reform via trade is not a solution: we need to start processes of agrarian reform that allow farmers access to land, water and seeds.

With a delegation of approximately a hundred people from all over the world, the international movement of farmers ´Via Campesina´ is participating in the World Forum for Agrarian Reform, inaugurated on 5th December in Valencia, Spain, continuing until the 8th of the month. ´Via Campesina´ hopes to give a strong message to international opinion as well as to the participants in the Forum: agrarian reform via trade is not a solution; we need to start processes of agrarian reform that allow farmers access to land, water and seeds. (more…)

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet

Posted on December 8, 2004, http://soros.c.topica.com/maacY1dabcCHjb36p4Yb/

Recently the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School presented its fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award to Bill Moyers. In presenting the award, Meryl Streep, a member of the Center board, said, “Through resourceful, intrepid reportage and perceptive voices from the forward edge of the debate, Moyers has examined an environment under siege with the aim of engaging citizens.” Following is the text of Bill Moyers’ response to Ms. Streep’s presentation of the award. (more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 16 (IPS) - Just when it appeared that Syria was complying in earnest with U.S. demands to secure its border with Iraq and even making unprecedented peace overtures to Israel, key neo-conservative opinion shapers are calling on President George W Bush to take stronger measures against Damascus, possibly including military action. (more…)

Analysis by Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 15 (IPS) - In recent weeks, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been the subject of heated debate in the United States and Europe ­ this after he was accused of oversight in his handling of the Iraq oil-for-food programme between 1996 and 2003. Allegations of conflict of interest in the Annan family concerning the initiative have also been made. (more…)

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Pentagon Weighs Use of Deception in a Broad Arena

By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - The Pentagon is engaged in bitter, high-level debate over how far it can and should go in managing or manipulating information to influence opinion abroad, senior Defense Department civilians and military officers say. (more…)

by Leonardo Boff *

The process of globalization produces a crisis in cultural identities. On the one hand, they seek to defend themselves from excessive homogenization caused by the dominant globalization of the Occidental type; on the other, they find themselves inevitably forced to confront other unknown ones, and for that reason they suffer an always painful surprise that produces understandable fears. (more…)

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 14 (IPS) - Almost half- a- century after following the Dalai Lama over the high Himalayas into exile in India, Tibetan refugees are finding it hard to keep their progeny strictly within the fold of Lamaistic Buddhism and committed to the cause of a free Tibet. (more…)

By Hazel Henderson *

The widely-touted , so-called ” Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics ” isn’t a proper Nobel Prize at all. For many years, I and others have sought to correct this widespread error by reminding people of its actual name : The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The Bank set up this $1 million prize in 1969 , as I have held , in order to legitimize the economics profession as a science. (more…)

Dahr Jamail

BAGHDAD, Dec 13 (IPS) - The U.S. military has been preventing delivery of medical care in several instances, medical staff say.

Iraqi doctors at many hospitals have reported raids by coalition forces. Some of the more recent raids have been in Amiriyat al-Fallujah, about 10km to the east of Fallujah, the town to which U.S. forces have laid bloody siege. Amiriyat al-Fallujah has been the source of several reported resistance attacks on U.S. forces. (more…)

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (IPS) - The interregnum between November’s election and the formal launch in January of U.S. President George W Bush’s second term has a strange feel.

Perhaps it is that Colin Powell, who until now stayed as close to Washington as he could to try to prevent Vice President Dick Cheney or Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld from pushing phoney intelligence and aggressive policy advice policies on the president in his absence, has been traveling virtually all over the world, assuring appropriately sceptical foreign leaders that Bush will really – REALLY – be committed to multilateralism in his second term. (more…)

By Petra Cahill
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 12:41 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2004

More than 1 billion children are suffering from the deprivations of HIV/ AIDS, poverty and war, which threatens to debilitate the future of entire nations, according to a UNICEF report on “The State of the World’s Childrenâ€? for the year 2005 released on Thursday. (more…)

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 8 (IPS) - Wang Ke gets agitated when asked about the arrival of the first Chinese visitors to Africa. As legend has it, the explorers were not overly impressed by what they discovered on the continent. After capturing a few giraffe, they boarded their ship and returned to China. (more…)

By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

Dec. 13 issue - You have never heard of Paul Rusesabagina. But if you watch the stunning new movie “Hotel Rwanda,” you will never forget him. The movie tells the true story of Rusesabagina, an “ordinary” Rwandan, a hotel manager, who was able to shelter and save more than 1,200 people—Tutsis and Hutus—in the midst of the Rwandan genocide. He is a Rwandan Schindler, who in a series of amazing improvisations—using contacts, skills and herculean effort—managed to keep his flock alive. (more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec (IPS) - Roughly 70 percent of the world’s coral reefs are effectively destroyed or threatened with destruction, according to a major assessment released here Monday by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. (more…)

As Ukraine prepares for its new presidential election, some business and political leaders have reason to worry about how they will fare under a Yuschenko administration

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Frank Brown
Newsweek
Updated: 4:38 p.m. ET Dec. 6, 2004

Dec. 6 - The standoff is over—at least for now. After mobilizing hundreds of thousands of supporters to take to the street for over two weeks of massive protests over a fraud-tainted poll, Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko is the heavy favorite to win in a court-ordered election that again pits him against Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in a re-run scheduled for Dec. 26. (more…)

by Naomi Klein

Iconic images inspire love and hate, and so it is with the photograph of James Blake Miller, the 20-year-old Marine from Appalachia who has been christened “the face of Falluja” by prowar pundits and “The Marlboro Man” by pretty much everyone else. Reprinted in more than a hundred newspapers, the Los Angeles Times photograph shows Miller “after more than twelve hours of nearly nonstop deadly combat” in Falluja, his face coated in war paint, a bloody scratch on his nose, and a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips. (more…)

Moyiga Nduru

PRETORIA, Dec 6 (IPS) - â€?HIV is just a virus…If we change our attitudes, HIV will die. It will have no space and capacity to spread,â€? says Musa Njoko, a young South African woman who has been living with the virus for the past decade. (more…)

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 3 (IPS) - Twenty years after the world’s worst industrial disaster at a pesticides plant in the central Indian city of Bhopal, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are in agreement that tragedies of such magnitude teach no lessons in a world driven by corporate profit. (more…)

By R. Jeffrey Smith
The Washington Post
Updated: 5:02 a.m. ET Dec. 3, 2004

WASHINGTON - A recent classified assessment of U.S. military detention facilities in Afghanistan found that they have been plagued by many of the problems that existed at military prisons in Iraq, including weak or nonexistent guidance for interrogators, creating what the assessment described as an “opportunity” for prisoner abuse. (more…)

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (IPS) - The Pentagon’s announcement this week that it is adding 12,000 more troops to the approximately 138,000 soldiers it already has in Iraq has put an abrupt end to the fleeting sense of triumph that followed November’s ‘’victory'’ by U.S. marines who regained control of Fallujah, the main Sunni rebel stronghold. (more…)

Brussels, 2 December 2004

The European Commission has adopted a strategy to fight anti-personnel landmines worldwide, supported by a budget of E 140 million. The strategy, which will run from 2005-7, aims to reduce the anti-personnel landmine threat; to alleviate mine victim suffering and aid socio-economic reintegration; and to enhance local and regional mine action capacity. The adoption of the strategy coincides with the First Review Conference of the Mine Ban Treaty in Nairobi (29 November ­ 3 December), where the External Relations Commissioner will address the participants by video, and with the International Day of Disabled Persons (3 December). (more…)

WASHINGTON – December 1 – A range of global justice, faith-based, and AIDS advocacy organizations today marked World AIDS Day at noon by co-sponsoring a major rally & die-in outside the World Bank and IMF to condemn policies that undermine the fight against HIV/AIDS for women and girls globally. Participants called for full debt cancellation for all impoverished nations and an end to budget austerity measures that hinder the ability of poor countries to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis. (more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 30 (IPS) - U.S. officials Tuesday insisted that detainees held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have been treated ‘’humanely,'’ despite a Red Cross report that concluded interrogators were using psychological and physical techniques that were ‘’tantamount to torture'’. (more…)