Ayesha Gooneratne

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 (IPS) - Despite the proven safety and effectiveness of immunisation programmes, only half of all children living in West and Central Africa are vaccinated against the leading childhood diseases, contributing to 1.4 million totally needless deaths each year, according to a new report by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.
(more…)

From The Economist print edition

Harnessing artificial tornadoes as an energy source

WEATHER systems, as the world has recently been reminded, have awesome power. The energy released by a large hurricane can exceed the energy consumption of the human race for a whole year, and even an average tornado has a power similar to that of a large power station. If only mankind could harness that energy, rather than being at its mercy. Louis Michaud, a Canadian engineer who works at a large oil company, believes he has devised a way to do just that, by generating artificial whirlwinds that can be controlled and harnessed. He calls his invention the “atmospheric vortex engine�.
(more…)

A Swiss filmermaker has recently released a movie on Aristide that
presents a balanced picture of the situation in Haiti.He interviewed the
President here in SA for the film. We recommend that you get in touch with
him as the film can help in promoting in the truth!

Below is a press release describing the film. (More is available at
http://www.aristidethefilm.com/www.aristidethefilm.com
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 29 (IPS) - The U.S. public is deeply sceptical about the priority President George W. Bush has put on promoting democracy abroad, and its experience in Iraq has made it more so, according to a detailed new survey released Thursday by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland.
(more…)

Rousbeh Legatis

UNITED NATIONS, Sep (IPS) - While the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush describes the recent elections in Afghanistan as a major step forward for the war-torn nation, human rights groups here wonder if women will have an effective voice in the new parliament.
(more…)

Financial Times - Editorial comment

Published: September 28 2005 03:00 | Last updated: September 28 2005 03:00

Shipments of donated food to poor countries have emerged as an unlikely sticking point in the Doha round trade talks. European negotiators say the US food aid programme amounts to legalised dumping of subsidised products. They are right, though their emphasis on food aid is out of proportion to its effects on trade. The real objection to food aid is that it is a bad form of aid.
(more…)

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 (IPS) - Less than two weeks after the much-ballyhooed U.N. summit meeting of some 170 political leaders, the world’s 132 developing nations want to sustain the pressure on rich donor nations to deliver on their promises.

“The 2005 world summit outcome can at best be described as a bag of mixed results,” says Jamaican Foreign Minister Keith Desmond Knight, speaking on behalf of the Group of 77, the largest single coalition of developing nations.
(more…)

By David White in London

Published: September 27 2005 03:00 | Last updated: September 27 2005 03:00

Pledges by G8 leaders to double aid to Africa will not be enough to cover the cost of tackling the HIV/Aids epidemic, a United Nations envoy warned yesterday.

Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, said funding would fall short of requirements even if the US and other big donors fulfilled the promises made at July’s Gleneagles summit. And there were already signs that their commitments were being eroded.
(more…)

Kaci Racelma

ALGIERS, Sep 26 (IPS) - In a sad reflection of the times, the Drop-In Assistance Centre for Female Sexual Harassment Victims has done a bustling trade in the Algerian capital, Algiers, since being established two years ago. Hundreds of women have made use of the centre, which is funded by the General Union of Algerian Workers – the country’s largest labour body.
(more…)

By Geoffrey Lean and Christopher Silvester

Blair falls into line with Bush view on global warming

Tony Blair has undermined the agreement he masterminded at the Gleneagles Summit Tony Blair has admitted that he is changing his views on combating global warming to mirror those of President Bush - and oppose negotiating international treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol.
(more…)

By Samantha Power -Le Monde diplomatique.

The United Nations dossier - To save the world from hell

There will be an exceptional summit of world leaders in New York this month to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, and to consider proposals for its desperately needed reform, although whatever they can agree upon is sure to be disappointing and will be derided. The UN has failed to banish war, yet it remains indispensable to the world’s peace.
(more…)

Peer Review Organisers Urged to “Walk With a Friend”
Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Sep 23 (IPS) - South Africa’s civil society groups are demanding a bigger role in the national self-assessment to be conducted under the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM).

APRM is the brainchild of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), an initiative that seeks to attract more foreign investment to the continent by improving the management of African states.
(more…)

Videoconference Links People Across the World to Discuss Ways to Address World Poverty, Hunger, and Health

WASHINGTON—As part of The People Speak, a series of discussions on international policy and the role of the United Nations, engaged citizens of Washington, D.C.; Omaha, Nebraska; Accra, Ghana; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania will gather through a videoconference to discuss: How the Millennium Development Goals Address World Poverty, Hunger and Health. Sponsored by the United Nations Foundation, the event, which is part of a series of videoconferences, will be held on Thursday, September 22, 2005 10 a.m. EST. at the World Bank.
(more…)

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Sep 22 (IPS) - The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) managed to avoid a scandal over the exclusion of a group of Chinese activists, but controversy will be difficult to defuse when discussion turns to human rights violations in Tunisia, the host country of the Summit’s second phase.
(more…)

Commentary, John Hughes
The Christian Science Monitor

SALT LAKE CITY - Last week wasn’t a great one for President Bush.

He was buffeted by political fallout over the tardy governmental response to hurricane Katrina. Violence continued apace in Iraq.

While there was cautious optimism for a breakthrough with North Korea, Iran remained obdurate about developing nuclear technology that the president is sure is a cover for developing nuclear weapons.
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep (IPS) - It was four years ago today that a little-known group called the “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC) published an open letter to President George W. Bush advising him on how precisely he should carry out his brand-new “war on terrorism".
(more…)

Le Monde diplomatique.

What kind of new worldwide organisation could be established that would truly defend humankind’s common resources and limit the major powers? Here are some suggestions for further debate.

By Monique Chemillier-Gendreau

THE reform of the United Nations is an old problem (1). UN bureaucracy, grossly inflated over the years, is widely thought inefficient. The Security Council, the main UN peacemaking body, still dominated by the victors of the second world war, has not lived up to its mandate. It has allowed conflicts to proliferate and intervened arbitrarily.
(more…)

Shirin

WASHINGTON, Sep (IPS) - When the world’s finance ministers converge on Washington for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this week, they will determine the fate of an unprecedented proposal set forth by the richest countries of the world regarding their relationship with the poorest.
(more…)

Leonardo Boff, Theologian

Continuing with the internal political and moral crisis of Brazil’s Workers Party, the PT, many are perplexed, and ask themselves: how did it come to this, that the top leadership of the PT could betray the ethical and political principles the party has always preached, as an organization; and when it reached the central government, roundly denied?
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 19 (IPS) - If U.S. President George W. Bush is serious about his enthusiastic embrace last week at the United Nations of democracy and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to slash global poverty, he will press his treasury secretary and other members of the governing board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting here this week to stop imposing strict spending limits on poor-country governments.
(more…)

WHO BIRD FLU WARNING
16.9.2005. 09:26:25

The boss of the World Health Organisation, Lee Jong-wook, has issued a new warning about avian flu.

He has again warned that the virus, which has triggered a major health scare in Southeast Asia, could mutate into a major killer.
(more…)

Elisa Marincola

ROME, Sep 16 (IPS) - The United Nations summit in New York seems to have taken little note of the recommendations of a ‘People’s UN’ held on the eve of the summit.

The recommendations came from a summit of civil society members from around the world held in Perugia in Italy. This was the sixth assembly of the Peoples United Nations that is organised by the civil society group Peace Roundtable and the Italian Coordination of Local Authorities for Peace and Human Rights.
(more…)

By Tom Barry

What to do with Hugo? That’s a question that is bedeviling the Bush administration, which sees its centuries-old hegemonic hold on Latin America and the Caribbean slipping.

As President Hugo Chavez adeptly leverages Venezuela’s oil wealth to forge an array of regional alliances that leave the United States out in the cold, U.S. – Venezuela tensions are heating up. Boosted by the rising prices of oil and the deepening regional anger over U.S. imperial arrogance, Chavez has proved able not only to construct a counter-hegemonic constituency in Venezuela among the country’s poor majority but also to piece together a regional network that is challenging U.S. political and economic dominance. Uncle Sam is becoming the odd man out in the hemisphere claimed as U.S. domain since the early 19 th century.
(more…)

Nicola Spurr - IPS/TerraViva*

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 15 (IPS) - Women’s civil society groups are congratulating themselves on the inclusion in the United Nations World Summit outcome document of important steps forward for women’s participation in peace and security processes.

The document commits member states to implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Passed in 2000, this resolution promotes the role of women in peace-building and conflict prevention.
(more…)

Harmonie Toros - IPS/TerraViva*

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 14 (IPS) - Who is rich and who is poor? Answering that question is no longer only about Gross Domestic Product and other traditional economic indicators, the World Bank said Tuesday, proposing a new accounting method that includes natural and human wealth.
(more…)

Story from BBC NEWS

African nations are gaining little benefit from foreign direct investment, according to a United Nations report.
Hopes that foreign investment could be the key to development in Africa have “not been realised", the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said.
(more…)

Stephen Leahy*

TORONTO, Sep 13 (Tierramérica) - A huge ozone hole has developed over Antarctica for the second year running, exposing southern Argentina and Chile to high levels of damaging ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.

The “hole” over the South Pole – actually an annual thinning of the ozone layer during the southern hemisphere spring months of September and October – currently measures about 25 million square km and growing, according to European Space Agency satellite data, and it may yet become the biggest hole in history.
(more…)

The following is a message from Tobias Wolff to his father, Robert Paul
Wolff, professor in the Afro-American Studies Department at UMass Amherst,
and contains an eyewitness account of two friends of Tobias who were trapped
in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Dad –
Forward this message to your friends in the department (and elsewhere) - it’s
critical! T.
(more…)

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 12 (IPS) - The U.N. summit, billed as one of the largest single gatherings of world leaders, will prove to be an exercise in futility if its primary focus on poverty and hunger eradication is subverted by other extraneous political issues, according to development experts, senior U.N. officials and representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
(more…)

Leonardo Boff
Theologian

The present crisis in Brazil is more political than moral. It is a crisis of representation. The people do not feel represented by those elected to congress. The proof is that, corruption aside, in two years, 210 of the 513 congress men and women have changed political parties.
(more…)

By Dr. Claude Martin, WWF International

September 09, 2005 —

Many of us in the conservation world are concerned that the natural environment – as the fundamental provider of life on this planet – seems to have dropped off the international community’s radar screen in the lead up to the UN-hosted World Summit.
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 8 (IPS) - If U.S. President George W. Bush was counting on Sunday’s “Freedom Walk” and country music festival at the Pentagon to revive the patriotic spirit (and rally his sagging approval ratings) that followed the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on their fourth anniversary, he is likely to be very disappointed.
(more…)

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
NEWS

Johannesburg

HIV/AIDS has accounted for huge reversals in human development in Southern Africa, which could impact on the region meeting some of the UN’s poverty-slashing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), according to a new report.

The UN’s ‘2005 Human Development Report’ released on Wednesday noted that 12 of the 18 countries that have suffered development reversals between 1990 and 2003 were in sub-Saharan Africa, with Southern Africa “hit hardest".
(more…)

Julio Godoy

HELSINKI, Sep 8 (IPS) - “Child labour is evil,” says Aimé Bada, a defender of minors’ rights from Senegal. “But it is a necessary evil, because without the income the children earn in the poorest countries of the world, their families would be worse off.”

Bada knows what he is talking about. He spent his childhood earning to pay family bills; he had to. He has now become an advocate of children’s rights, and in that he includes the right to work.
(more…)

Marina Penderis

HELSINKI, Sep 7 (IPS) - The world needs alternative media, and alternative media needs credibility, experts said at a meeting on communication at the start of the Helsinki Conference here Wednesday.

Alternative media is increasingly being recognised by many as a growing force.
(more…)

John Nichols

The Nation –

Finally, we have discovered the roots of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”

On the heels of the president’s “What, me worry?” response to the death, destruction and dislocation that followed upon Hurricane Katrina comes the news of his mother’s Labor Day visit with hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston.
(more…)

By Lazlo Trankovits, dpa

New Orleans (dpa) - The stocky, black-uniformed man with the
bandana tied around his head seems friendly enough - until he pulls
out a revolver.

Suddenly the officer‘s face muscles go tense and with the weapon
held at arm‘s length his eyes scan a line of empty windows along Camp
Street in “French Quarter", the waterlogged wasteland that was once a
bustling part of New Orleans. “Come out with your hands up,” he calls
out but nobody does. Another false alarm.
(more…)

William Fisher

NEW YORK, Sep 6 (IPS) - Ten years after the Oklahoma City bombing left 16 8 people dead, one U.S. national security agency believes the domestic radical right does not pose a substantial threat to the United States, while another labels white supremacists as “terrorists” – along with anti-war groups, affirmative action organisations and animal rights activists.

The apparent inconsistencies arise from documents recently made public from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
(more…)

THE NEW YORK TIMES

United States of Shame
By MAUREEN DOWD

Stuff happens.

And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.

America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it’s happening in America.
(more…)

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Sep (IPS) - Three international rights organisations have joined forces to ensure that women’s voices will be heard at the United Nations 2005 World Summit, scheduled to take place later this month (Sep. 14 to 16).

The ‘Gender Monitoring Group of the World Summit’ is the brainchild of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership, located in the American state of New Jersey, the Fiji-based Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era – and the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO), which is headquartered in New York.
(more…)

William Fisher

NEW YORK, Sep 2 (IPS) - “The rich got richer and the poor got poorer” is a sentence most often used to describe the economic plight of underdeveloped countries.

But last week, it was being used to describe the economy of the world’s lone superpower: the United States.
(more…)

Kate Hudson

Friday September 2, 2005

Guardian

Attempts by John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the UN, to strip nuclear disarmament out of the draft document for this month’s UN summit, comes as no surprise. It’s just the latest in a series of efforts by the US to change the international framework on non-proliferation. These are part of the US’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy, manifested not only in the illegal war on Iraq but in contempt for international law and multilateral treaty frameworks.
For decades, nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation have been linked through the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Nuclear weapons states have agreed to get rid of their arsenals, while in return non-nuclear weapons states have committed not to develop nuclear weapons. In recent years the US has sought to sideline or overturn the disarmament requirement, focusing on preventing more countries acquiring nuclear weapons. The US seeks to reinterpret the NPT as legitimising the possession of weapons by existing nuclear states, while using it as the justification for confrontation with states accused of proliferation.
(more…)

By F. Gregory Gause III

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005

——————————————————————————–
Summary: The Bush administration contends that the push for democracy in the Muslim world will improve U.S. security. But this premise is faulty: there is no evidence that democracy reduces terrorism. Indeed, a democratic Middle East would probably result in Islamist governments unwilling to cooperate with Washington.
F. GREGORY GAUSE III is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont and Director of its Middle East Studies Program.
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 1 (IPS) - With state, local, and federal officials still grappling with the extent of the devastation and human suffering inflicted by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and points east, suggestions that the already plunging political standing of Pres. George W. Bush could also be a major casualty of the disaster have begun taking hold.
(more…)