Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jan (IPS) - Proposals being considered for the widespread destruction of opium plantations could end up destroying the lives of millions of farmers in Afghanistan, an independent report warned Monday.
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Leonardo Boff, Theologian, Letter of The Earth Commission

The autonomous workings of the capitalist economy, as carried out globally, tend to realize Marx’s prophesy: to destroy both of its sources of wealth, nature and human beings. For its project to be universal, capitalism would need three more Earths similar to ours. Since that is impossible, it continues to accumulate only for itself, creating ever increasing inequalities, and devastating nature. What alternatives are there? We will note some of the visions that are circulating in world circles.
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UN News Centre

January 2006 – Only if the United Nations engages with the world’s peoples as well as their governments can it be useful to humanity in this century, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told a plenary session of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, today.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Jan (IPS) - The unearthing of a rock-like transmitter planted by British spies on a Moscow street can have consequences for the funding of several non-governmental organisations.
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January 2006 - Financial Times Editorial

The United Nations secretariat is learning that it is better to wash your dirty linen in public than to let others do it for you. So it is publicising its investigation of waste and fraud in supplies to UN peacekeepers in a way that could further blight its image in the short term but should in the end enhance confidence in it. Clearly the management improvements, belatedly begun under Kofi Annan, will have to continue under whoever is chosen to succeed him as secretary-general.
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Fawzia Sheikh

JERUSALEM, Jan (IPS) - The Palestinian militant group Hamas has won an apparent victory in parliamentary elections. The win shocked the ruling Fatah party and has raised concerns about the future of the peace process, and about Palestine relations with an international community that regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
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By David R. Sands - THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 2006

A showcase U.S. aid package for Bolivia worth nearly $600 million could be in jeopardy if new leftist President Evo Morales follows through on some of his campaign promises, a senior U.S. aid official announced this week.
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Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jan (IPS) - Although the sixth World Social Forum grants equal importance to all of the myriad workshops, seminars and other activities taking place this week in the Venezuelan capital and to all of the participating civil society groups and figures, that has not kept some personalities from standing out, like U.S. peace activist Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq.
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UN News Centre

January 2006 – The United Nations is conducting some 200 investigations into its procurement activities and has placed eight officials on special leave with pay in that connection, the senior UN management official announced today, estimating that the funds involved could top the tens of millions of dollars.
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Meeting Zarina Geloo

BAMAKO, Jan (IPS) - The first phase of the World Social Forum (WSF), which ended Monday in the Malian capital of Bamako, created a focus on “Afrocentric” issues that was missing in previous forums, said coordinator Mamadou Goita.
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Leonardo Boff, Theologian, Letter of The Earth Commission

I am neither a prophet, nor a prophet’s son. I am the son of an elementary school teacher and an illiterate mother. But as a theologian, I was taught to always consider history «sub specie aeternitatis», this is, from the perspective of eternity, as manifested in Scriptures that narrate the history of a people of reference, the Judeo-Christian people; and also under ethical criteria that aid or impede the creation of the human city.
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By Brian Concannon Jr. | January 2006
Americas Program, International Relations Center (IRC) - americas.irc-online.org

Haiti’s election dates have now been reset for the fourth time in the last five months. The Interim Government of Haiti will now miss the February 7, 2005 deadline for transferring power that it had promised to meet for 21 months. These delays, and the logistical problems underlying them, are a cause for concern. But the logistical defects should not obscure the more fundamental problems that will prevent the elections, whenever held, from helping Haiti to break from its brutal history of political instability.
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Julio Godoy

PARIS, Jan (IPS) - French President Jacques Chirac’s threat that France could use nuclear weapons to retaliate against terrorist attacks has provoked strong opposition.
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Almahady Cissé

BAMAKO, Jan (IPS) - With just a day to go before Africa’s first-ever World Social Forum (WSF) gets underway in Mali, attitudes towards the meeting appear somewhat mixed in the West African country.
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By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | January 2006

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced yesterday that she plans to dramatically restructure the US diplomatic presence around the world, redeploying hundreds of diplomats from Europe and Washington to developing countries including China, India, Lebanon, and Nigeria over the next five years.
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M B Naqvi

KARACHI, Jan (IPS) - Missile strikes carried out by the United States on Damadola village near the Afghan border, killing 18 people, can fuel religious fanaticism in this country and seriously complicate President George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’, say moderate political leaders and security analysts.
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By Seth Kugel The New York Times

IZAMAL, Mexico Off a lazy plaza in the historic center of Izamal, Mexico, across the street from a Franciscan monastery built in 1561 on top of a Maya pyramid, a small market putters along. Behind open arches painted golden yellow like every other colonial building in town, poor quality T-shirts cover the walls, their silly English slogans clearly targeted at local residents, as are the avocados and chirimoyas sold by an older woman nearby.
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By Peter Apps

COLOMBO, Jan (Reuters) - Return to war in Sri Lanka could have more impact on malnutrition than the 2004 tsunami, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday, with new violence already hitting aid programmes.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan (IPS) - The widespread proliferation of small arms and light weapons can be curbed more effectively by reducing demand than by merely cutting off supplies, according to a new report on arms control released here.
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By Conn Hallinan - Editor: John Gershman, IRC - Foreign Policy In Focus - www.fpif.org

In a 2002 Le Monde Diplomatique article titled “Constructing Catastrophe,” Israeli journalist Amon Kapeliouk challenged one of the central myths about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. To wit: that Palestinian President Yasir Arafat was offered a great deal at the Camp David talks in July 2000, but turned it down and launched Intifada II.
The Camp David Myth
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Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jan (IPS) - British economy and its public services will collapse without immigrants who have entered the country illegally, leading experts say.
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By Col. Daniel Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.) | December 2005

Editor: John Gershman - Foreign Policy In Focus - www.fpif.org

The MO–method of operation or, more formally, modus operandi–is clear from even the most cursory look at the externals. Put Commander-in-Chief George Bush in front of an audience that is sure to be friendly (like military cadets), test the themes, wait for the inevitable applause, and depart right after the speech. Progressively move on to fora less hand-picked but sure to contain a number of individuals sympathetic to the White House line. Above all, sound resolute (like Churchill), stand tall, and be assured that there’s no such thing as too much repetition.

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Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jan (IPS) - Western powers are already planning use of the military option in the face of Iran’s insistence that it will go ahead with what it calls its nuclear research programme, a leading expert says.
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Leonardo Boff - Theologian

When I see people working in humanitarian projects, caring for the poor, drug addicts or with those with mental problems, as in the Center in Defense of Human Rights of Petropolis where I participate, two questions always come to my mind: why is there so much suffering, visible and invisible, in the world? And the second: the people who freely choose to share the life of those human beings, where do they get the energy to assist them, like Simon of Cyrene, trying to ease their suffering?
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Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Jan 12 (IPS) - U.S. activists are heading to the Sixth World Social Forum (WSF) with a renewed sense of optimism and international solidarity, despite Washington’s animosity toward the hemisphere’s growing slate of leftist governments.
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By MERAIAH FOLEY

Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - Associated Press

Sydney, Australia — The United States and Australia insisted Wednesday at the opening of a two-day climate change conference that industry leaders can be relied upon to voluntarily slash emissions blamed for heating the earth’s atmosphere.
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By Stephen Zunes |
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

As the official rationales for the U.S. invasion of Iraq—that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” which threatened the national security of the United States and that the Iraqi government had operational ties to al-Qaida—are now widely acknowledged to have been fabricated, and the back-up rationalization—of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq—is also losing credibility, increasing attention is being given as to why the U.S. government, with broad bipartisan support, made such a fateful decision.
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Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Jan (IPS) - Criminalised in the international sphere, uprooted by hoe and machete in Bolivia, but venerated by Andean indigenous cultures, the coca leaf will seek a new future under the country’s first indigenous president, the leader of the coca growers Evo Morales, who takes office on Jan. 22.
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As health officials monitor bird flu cases around the world and fear its mutation into a strain that can jump between people, pharmaceutical companies ramp up production of Tamiflu, LEONARD ZEHR writes, but there still isn’t nearly enough to go around.

By LEONARD ZEHR
Monday, January 9, 2006
BIOTECHNOLOGY REPORTER
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan (IPS) - Nearly a week after a massive stroke effectively removed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from Israeli politics, the outlook in Washington is mostly worried and pessimistic.
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by Jonathan Schell.

When the New York Times revealed that George W. Bush had ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap the foreign calls of American citizens without seeking court permission, as is indisputably required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978, he faced a decision. Would he deny the practice, or would he admit it? He admitted it. But instead of expressing regret, he took full ownership of the deed, stating that his order had been entirely justified, that he had in fact renewed it thirty times, that he would continue to renew it and — going even more boldly on the offensive — that those who had made his law-breaking known had committed a “shameful act.”
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Cameron Duodu

Friday January 6, 2006 ~The Guardian

The continent’s only woman head of state will have an impact well beyond her own country

Today, 159 years after the first modern nation in Africa was established by freed American slaves, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf will be inaugurated as its first woman president. She will also be the continent’s first female elected head of state. The challenges she will face are immense. Liberia has just emerged from 15 years of civil war, in which its people have been butchered and demoralised; there is no electricity in parts of the capital, Monrovia; water-supply systems have been almost universally destroyed, and schools looted or burned down; and hospitals and clinics exist in name only.
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By Mark Turner at the United Nations
January 4 2006

The beleaguered United Nations peacekeeping force on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea should be downgraded, withdrawn, or even transformed into a strong defensive force on the Ethiopian side, Kofi Annan, secretary-general, has told the UN Security Council.
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By GNA

Thursday, 05 January 2006

The United Nations (UN) has launched its International Year of Deserts and Desertification to raise global public awareness of the advancing deserts, of ways to safeguard the biological diversity of arid lands covering one-third of the planet and protecting the knowledge and traditions of the two billion people affected by the phenomenon.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan (IPS) - When the 1,700-strong U.N. peacekeeping force was withdrawn from Sierra Leone on Dec. 31, the United Nations hailed the mission as one of its major political success stories in a continent ravaged by war and ethnic conflicts.
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by Brian Concannon Jr.
December 2005

Haiti’s Judicial and Executive Branches are both getting what they deserve this holiday season- each other. After 22 months of close collaboration to trample Haiti’s Constitution and democracy, they have now turned their destructive energies on each other. The Cour de Cassation (Supreme Court) outraged Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue on December 8 by decreeing that Dumarsais Simeus was wrongfully disqualified from the upcoming Presidential elections. Latortue retaliated the next day by firing five of the Cour’s justices, replacing them with henchmen. The judiciary went on strike, which has shut down the justice system for four weeks.
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By Conn Hallinan | December 2005
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

There is a moment in Jeffery Goldberg’s New Yorker profile of Brent Scowcroft, George Bush Senior’s former National Security Adviser, when the current administration’s combination of arrogance and cluelessness crystallize. Over dinner, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice tells Scowcroft that the “good news�? from the Middle East is that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is pulling out of Gaza , the first step toward resolving the issue of a Palestinian state.
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan (IPS) - Although morale among members of the professional corps of the U.S. military remains generally high, their confidence in U.S. President George W. Bush and other civilian government leaders slipped substantially during 2005, according to major new survey released Monday by the “Military Times".
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Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Dec (IPS) - The events that unfolded inside Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s official vehicle on the evening of Dec. 18 could turn out to be a key element in deciphering what Israelis and Palestinians can expect in the course of 2006.
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from “Avvenimenti” 22/12/05 issue; by Giulietto Chiesa

Hong Kong-What’s the “green chamber” ? It’s the mysterious place where,
in the end, have been settled, maybe, the main quarrels of the Hong
Kong historic ministerial meeting of WTO. It’s historic because-as it
has been said, at the opening, by Pascal Lamy, its general director,
waving a magic wand as if he were a conjurer- “although the WTO , to
use an euphemism, isn’t certainly the most popular international
organization", everybody rushes to join it, by all means.
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