Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, May 31 (IPS) - Paul Wolfowitz, the former U.S. deputy defence secretary, becomes the World Bank’s 10th president Wednesday amid expectations he will lead the global lender down an increasingly politicised path.

In the countdown to Wolfowitz’s installment, dozens of advocacy groups and think tanks are voicing such concern and urging the newcomer to heed their advice lest his institution lose credibility.
(more…)

By Fred Hiatt
Post

Monday, May 30, 2005; A21

Democrats are devoting their energies to delaying the confirmation of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. Republicans are delving into U.N. scandals of the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the single most fateful decision for the United Nations’ usefulness over the coming half-decade is being shaped elsewhere. Neither Washington’s politicians nor the State Department nor the small-d democrats who claim a desire to bend international institutions closer toward principle are paying much attention.
(more…)

By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

War is a hellish business, but when you release prisoners today, they don’t just return quietly to their villages. They hire lawyers.

June 6 issue - I have resisted the temptation to write something on the Qur’an-abuse story. But since the controversy continues, here goes. I think that the Bush administration has a Jekyll-and-Hyde problem—a contradictory attitude toward the war on terror. On the one hand it has wholeheartedly embraced the view that America must change its image in the Muslim world. It wants to stop being seen as the supporter of Muslim tyrants and instead become the champion of Muslim freedoms. President Bush and his secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, are transforming American policy in this realm, and while some of the implementation has been spotty, the general thrust is clear and laudable. For this they deserve more credit than they have generally been given, perhaps because of the polarization of politics these days, perhaps because the topic inevitably gets mixed up with the botched occupation of Iraq.
(more…)

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, May 30 (IPS) - -The prospects for progress on climate change at the G8 summit in July do not look too good, going by the content of a leaked document.

The document purporting to be a draft for agreements on climate change was posted anonymously on a website Friday. The British Prime Minister’s office confirmed later that the document was genuine, but said it was being developed, and was not the final draft.
(more…)

By Philip Pullella, Reuters

ROME - May 27, 2005 . Global warming is likely to significantly diminish food production in many countries and greatly increase the number of hungry people, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Thursday.
(more…)

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May 26 (IPS) - Jan Egeland, U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, says he is livid that the international donor community has brushed aside his appeal for 16.2 million dollars in emergency food assistance to Niger – as they have other urgent U.N. appeals for Africa.

And he perceives a strong bias – this time based on language – is to blame in how donors decide who gets what.
(more…)

By Kofi A. Annan - Alpha Oumar Konare

While no one knows for sure how many people have died in the conflict in Darfur, western Sudan, more than 2.6 million are suffering because of it, and urgently need assistance.

Villages have been burnt, crops uprooted, men murdered, women raped, children abducted. And 1.9 million people have been displaced from their homes within Sudanese territory. Others are still at home but prevented from planting the crops on which their lives depend. If food does not soon reach them, they too will be forced to go search of it, swelling already overcrowded camps.
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May (IPS) - If the administration of President George W. Bush fails to conduct a truly independent investigation of U.S. abuses against detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, foreign governments should investigate and prosecute those senior officials who bear responsibility for them, the head of the U.S. chapter of Amnesty International said here Wednesday.
(more…)

GOP Sen. Voinovich urges rejecting Bolton for U.N.

Possible bipartisan deal would allow 40 hours of debate on nomination

By Sonni Efron and Maura Reynolds

Los Angeles Times

May 25, 2005

WASHINGTON - A moderate Republican senator has written to all 99 of his colleagues to urge that they reject the nomination of John R. Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
(more…)

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, May 25 (IPS) - Guantanamo Bay has become ‘’the Gulag of our time,'’ Amnesty International secretary-general Irene Khan said at the launch of the human rights group’s annual report Wednesday.
(more…)

Leonardo Boff,

Theologian

ALAI-AMLATINA, Rio de Janeiro.- We all know that The Landless Movement, (MST), struggles for agrarian reform. To the Movement, the Earth is not only a means of production, as the capitalist culture would have it, but much more; the Earth is our Common Home, she is alive, with a unique community life and we are her daughters and sons with the mission of caring for her, and liberating her from the devastating consumerist system. That is the amazing thing. This is their grandest dream, an expression of the new emerging civilizing paradigm.
(more…)

Bill Berkowitz

OAKLAND, USA, May 24 (IPS) - Mainstream U.S. environmental groups, injured by political defeats, public indifference and budget cuts, are weighing alliances with neo-conservatives – improbable rightwing bedfellows in the struggle to rein in global warming who want to reduce U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. In the process, some greens are reconsidering their longstanding opposition to nuclear power.
(more…)

By Jonathan Amos

BBC News science reporter

If we continue with current rates of species extinction, we will have no chance of rolling back poverty and the lives of all humans will be diminished.
That is the stark warning to come out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the most comprehensive audit of the health of our planet to date.
- (more…)

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, May 23 (IPS) - The International Press Institute kicked off its 54th general assembly Sunday, in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

About 400 delegates from around the world are attending the three-day meeting, where the troubled state of press freedom is coming under consideration. The International Press Institute (IPI) is a Vienna-based network of journalists, editors and other media workers which lobbies for greater press freedom and the improvement of journalistic standards, amongst other matters.
- (more…)

Increased snowfall on the central icecap partly offsets effects of melting glaciers, researchers say.

By Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer

As glaciers from Greenland to Kilimanjaro recede at record rates, the central icecap of Antarctica has been steadily growing for 11 years, partially offsetting the rise in seas from the melt waters of global warming, researchers said Thursday. -
(more…)

Fitzroy Nation

AMSTERDAM, May 20 (IPS) - Some cautious optimism accompanied skepticism at a meeting this week on the millennium development goal of promoting gender equality and empowering women.

This third among the eight millennium development goals (MDGs) seeks specifically to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.
(more…)

By EDITH M. LEDERER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

UNITED NATIONS – The United Nations chose a State Department finance expert as its new management chief Tuesday and announced a series of reforms in response to the oil-for-food and sexual exploitation scandals and staff concerns about the organization’s leadership.
(more…)

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 19 (IPS) - Jenita Mehmeti, aged four, died last summer in the refugee camp of Zitkovci in Kosovo. She was the second child among 60 born there since 1999 to die of suspected lead poisoning.
(more…)

UN WIRE

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Inadequate border control contribute to criminal activities

JOHANNESBURG, 18 May 2005 (IRIN) - The rise of transnational organised crime in Africa has scared off foreign investment and undermines economic progress across the continent, a new United Nations study has found.
(more…)

Mount St. Helens eruptionbrought a cloud of ash,then blackness, then a worldof gray volcanic grit

By Alan Boyle
MSNBC
Updated: 8:17 p.m. ET May 17, 2005

A vast cloud turned the skies pitch-black at midday, and then the rain of choking dirt began. On May 18, 1980, the eruption of Mount St. Helens looked like the end of the world. Now it’s an occasion to drag out the old pictures, check the mayonnaise jar filled with souvenir ash — and ask: “Where were you when the mountain blew?â€? (more…)

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 18 (IPS) - A regional U.N. agency is up against two formidable adversaries - the United States and Japan - as it tries to drum up support among Asian and Pacific governments to create a new financial institution, the Asian Investment Bank (AIB).
(more…)

If it wants to succeed, the United States will have to decide what its primary goal is for North Korea: policy change or regime change?

By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek International

May 23 issue - Does the United States government really care if North Korea becomes a nuclear power? Oh, it tells us all the terrible consequences that could flow from such a development: a nuclear Japan and South Korea; an arms race in East Asia; loose nukes easily available to Al Qaeda or any other high bidder. But is it really trying to stop this from happening? It doesn’t look like that to many observers in East Asia, where I’ve been for the past week.
(more…)

Commentary - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 17 (IPS) - Here’s a question for international news hounds. Who is the ‘’son of a bitch'’ referred to in this comment by a U.S. Defence Department spokesman?
(more…)

Analysis - By Bill Berkowitz

OAKLAND, USA, May 16 (IPS) - Nearly a decade after being named Time magazine’s ‘’Man of the Year,'’ Newt Gingrich is out greasing the skids for a possible 2008 run at the White House with a tour promoting ‘’Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract With America'’, a book containing a series of 20th century proposals wrapped in 21st century rhetoric. The book had a short stay on the New York Times bestseller list but will the public be buying Gingrich as presidential timber?
(more…)

Leonardo Boff,
Theologian

EVOLUTION had to proceed some thousands of millions of years before it produced the corporal senses. Actually, the universe began to see itself, to feel, to touch … to listen to itself through these senses. And when human beings appeared, those senses became conscious and then, spiritual. Through the senses, the universe sees, sings and becomes entranced with itself. (more…)

By Mario Soares (*)

LISBON, May (IPS) - Politicians come and go; ideas, and their
orientations, last. Politicians cannot avoid the crucial issues
they are asked to address.
(more…)

by Salim Lamrani; May 2005

The strong suspicions that have surrounded the dubious and partisan activities of Reporters without Boarders (RSF) were not unfounded. For many years, various critics have denounced the largely political actions of the Parisian entity, particularly with regards to Cuba and Venezuela, whose characteristics that utilizes propaganda is obvious. The positions of RSF against the governments of Havana and Caracas are found in perfect correlation with the political and media war that Washington carries out against the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutionaries.
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May (IPS) - Amid rising tension between Iran and the United States, a major U.S. human rights group said Tuesday that at least 50 people were killed during week-long protests in southwestern Khuzestan province last month and urged Iran to permit independent journalists and rights monitors to go to the strife-torn region across the border from Iraq.
(more…)

by America Vera-Zavala ; May 2005

I - The parallel revolution

On a parallel street, within walking distance from the presidential palace, you can find a squatted building taken over and run by communities. It is an old office building, very close to one of the most touristic squares in downtown Caracas: Bellas Artes and the huge hotel Hilton, which nowadays also hosts Bolivarian conferences and friends of the revolution. A theatre rehearsal is the activity on the Saturday afternoon when I visit the building. People of all ages are represented on that main floor built to be a fancy reception and not a centre for community activities. (more…)

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, May (IPS) - Diplomats charged with halting the spread of nuclear weapons were to reopen negotiations here Tuesday after a three-day break taken after a week of trying but ultimately failing to agree on an agenda for their talks.
(more…)

Andrew Calabrese
University Of Colorado

In departing from the traditional principles of a “just war� theory, which demands that military action be taken only in self-defense, the U.S. government’s policy in its war against Iraqwas preemptive, the logic being that the perceived risk of Iraqi aggression toward the UnitedStates ought to be avoided by attacking first. Perhaps this decision does not define imperialism, but it certainly has raised the specter in the eyes of much of the rest of the world. Of course, the obvious question became what evidence was there of imminent danger that should justify an attack? From the start, the principal challenge never was a matter of whether the U.S. military had the capacity to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. Rather, the challenge has been all along a matter of how to sell the war and U.S. military occupation to the community of nations, the United Nations Security Council, the American people, and the Iraqi people.
(more…)

By Andrew Calabrese*
University of Colorado

The year 2005 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the report of UNESCO’s International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, Many Voices, One World, more commonly known as “The MacBride Report.â€? The MacBride Report was written in a much different global context than we witness today. In 1980, the Cold War had a pronounced influence on geopolitical alliances, and the choice to be “non-alignedâ€? was in reference to this great polarity. The MacBride Report, and the call for a “new world information and communication orderâ€? (NWICO) that followed, precipitated the decision by the U.S. government to withdraw its membership from UNESCO. (more…)

Nasseem Ackbarally

PORT-LOUIS, Mauritius, May (IPS) - Donor nations have agreed to set up a 5.5-million-dollar tsunami early warning system for 27 Indian Ocean countries. The system will start operating within the next six months.
(more…)

Leonardo Boff,
Theologian

The long Pontificate of John Paul II and the 23 years of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, imprinted on the Church a clearly restoring trend. Strategies were developed to contain the Catholic Reformation with thorough measures, some of them highly repressive, such as the dismantling of the liberation Church of Recife, Brazil, by a pitiless canonist who came to replace the great Prophet of the Third World, Dom Helder Câmara. This and many other processes created wounds, deceptions, bitterness, criticisms and countless interior exiles of Christians who retreated into their personal faith, if they did not, filled with sadness, leave the Church. (more…)

Analysis - by Sanjay Suri

LONDON, May (IPS) - The invasion of Iraq rebounded a little on the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to dent his majority as he returned to a third term as prime minister.
(more…)

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, May (IPS) - The European Union has welcomed a â€?significant breakthroughâ€? in World Trade Organisation talks, after trade ministers breathed new life into the stalled Doha negotiations Wednesday by ending a technical dispute over tariff cuts on farm products. (more…)

By Chris Floyd
May 2005 - The Moscow Times

An occupational hazard of dissidence in the Age of Bush is the unavoidable necessity of belaboring the obvious. Again and again, you must ring the same bell; over and over, you must repeat the same blatant fact: that George W. Bush and his minions are lying hypocrites with blood on their hands. (more…)

By Anatoly Medetsky
The Moscow Times

At the height of World War II, a Nazi warplane dropped Ukrainian national Pyotr Shilo by parachute 160 kilometers west of Moscow to assassinate Josef Stalin. (more…)

Bill Berkowitz

OAKLAND, USA, May (IPS) - An armed private group that patrolled the U.S.-Mexican border last month has gone home with an unequivocal endorsement from California Governor Arnold Shwarzenegger and benign media coverage. Come October, they say, they will return to the border in the tens of thousands. (more…)

New York, Tuesday, May 2005

Tensions on the first day of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
Conference currently being held in New York are threatening to derail the
relevance of the treaty, Greenpeace warned today. (more…)

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May (IPS) - The late Tarzie Vittachi, a former deputy executive director of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, once recounted the story of an African official who walked into his office for friendly advice on how to get Western media to cover stories having a profound effect on the continent. (more…)

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May (IPS) - The Philippines, Iraq, Colombia, Bangladesh, and Russia are the world’s ‘’most murderous'’ countries in which to be a journalist, New York-based media watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Monday. (more…)

Dear :

PBS is in jeopardy. Today’s New York Times describes secret efforts by Republican operatives to make our Public Broadcasting System more “fair and balanced.” (more…)

Dear VoteNoWar.org member,

Across the country, police agencies, often working in joint action with federal law enforcement, have worked to obstruct and disrupt free speech activities and the mass assemblies of people taking to the streets to fight against war and for social justice. This movement has faced mass arrests and round-ups of political activists; brutality; abusive conditions of detention; denial of permits; political, racial and religious profiling and intelligence gathering; and disinformation campaigns. The people’s struggle in the streets - their refusal to be silenced - coupled with the work of progressive attorneys will make the difference in defending free speech rights. This battle will be fought in the courts and in the streets, on the sidewalks, and in the parklands. VoteNoWar.org members have played a significant role in organizing and coming out for anti-war demonstrations across the country. (more…)

A global common denominator is the need for a decent job. The economic
realities of each country determine just how difficult that is.
International Labour Day – for most of the world, May 1 – commemorates
the historic fight for recognition of workers’ rights. Despite the labour
movement’s achievements, serious challenges persist: gender
discrimination, child labour, worker migration, the digital divide,
evaporating pensions,
unsafe workplaces, corporate pressure against union organising, negative
impacts of trade agreements, and the precariousness of informal
employment, among many others. IPS follows the world’s workers as they
confront these challenges, their setbacks and their successes. (more…)