Fawzia Sheikh

JERUSALEM, Feb (IPS) - Although Israeli pollsters peg the Kadima Party as the frontrunner in winning next month’s elections, it is still uncertain who will secure the coveted Russian vote that always plays a critical role on polling day.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 2006
Editorial

The administration’s tendency to dodge accountability for lawless actions by resorting to secrecy and claims of national security is on sharp display in the case of a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, who spent months under torture because of United States action. A federal trial judge in Brooklyn has refused to stand up to the executive branch, in a decision that is both chilling and ripe for prompt overturning.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - U.S. President George W. Bush hopes his maiden tour of India and Pakistan this week will draw both South Asian giants more firmly into Washington’s orbit, as well as help restore his battered foreign policy image back home.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian

With the economy becoming ever more autonomous, and with the weakening of the nation-state, it is illusory to think that elected presidents are the ones who weild the power to lead a country. The real destiny of the people is not decided by the President. He is hostage to the Secretary of the Treasury, and the President of the Central Bank who, on their turn, are hostages of the world economic-financial system, to whose logic they are subservient. When President Bush speaks to the nation, many people probably listen to him. When the president of the Federal Reserve, FED, speaks, the whole nation stops to listen. His words have virtual life or death significance for many employees, and for the destiny of many enterprises.
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Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb (IPS) - Even before the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol’s first period can begin, a dialogue has been launched on limiting climate change after the current agreement ends in six years.

And it is not too early. Questions enough have been raised about the Kyoto deal to question its continuation in its present form after the first implementation period 2008-2012.
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By John Gershman | February 2006
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus

The recent attention focused on how American foreign policy can promote democracy abroad has obscured something just as fundamental and controversial. How does U.S. foreign policy influence democratic values, practices, and institutions at home? And what roles do and should democratic processes play in shaping America’s foreign policy? The aim of this brief discussion paper is to raise some of these questions as a way of contributing to a strategic dialogue on these less prominent dimensions of the relationship between democracy and U.S. foreign policy.
I. Perspectives
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Saloumeh Peyman

TEHRAN, Jan (IPS) - By allowing inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit and verify its nuclear programme this week, Iran has indicated readiness to work with the United Nations watchdog, while continuing to limit the role of the Western powers.
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By SCOTT SHANE
THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON, Feb — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
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By Augusto Zamora (*)

MADRID, Feb (IPS) - The crisis that erupted over the publication of
cartoons of the prophet Mohammed has aroused a range of reactions,
most having to do with a presumed confrontation between freedom of
expression and the intolerance or religious fanaticism of Islam.
Were these indeed the terms of the conflict, there are few in the
western world who would have doubts about which side to take.
Freedom of expression is an essential component of democracy, and
believers in democracy would have to support the newspapers that
published the cartoons and condemn Muslim intolerance.
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Analysis by Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld has signaled that he plans to intensify a campaign to influence global media coverage of the United States, a move that is likely to heighten the debate over press freedom and propaganda-free reporting.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Letter of The Earth Commission

A lot is being written about the Muslim reaction to the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Yet, nothing I have read so far addresses, in my opinion, the essence, the gist of the question. Mauro Santayana, in the Jornal do Brasil, came the closest. We desperately need a deeper analysis, because therein lies the key to the fuse of the possible war of civilizations, as was suggested by Samuel P. Huntington is his controversial book Clash of Civilizations, (1996.)
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial

Who needs sophomoric cartoons to inflame the Muslim world when you’ve got the Bush administration’s prison system? One reason the White House is so helpless against the violence spawned by those Danish cartoons is that it has squandered so much of its moral standing at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. This week, the world got two chilling reminders of why both prisons must be closed.
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William Fisher

NEW YORK, Feb (IPS) - Last June, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, “If you think of the people down there (at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba), these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They’re terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, (Osama bin Laden’s) bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker.”
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Fawzia Sheikh

JERUSALEM, Feb (IPS) - Israel has said that Russia’s plans next month to meet leaders of the new militant Palestinian government Hamas may legitimise its political status in the eyes of the international community but not diminish its terrorist nature.
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Brian Concannon Jr., Esq.
February 2006

On February 7, Haitian voters went to the polls to elect a President for the fourth time since 1990. Through great patience and determination they overcame official disorganization, incompetence and discrimination, and for the fourth time since 1990 handed their chosen candidate a landslide victory. And for the fourth time Haitian elites, with support from the International Community, started immediately to undercut the victory, seeking at the negotiation table what they could not win at the voting booth.
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Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed

BASRA, Feb (IPS) - New footage of British soldiers beating up young Iraqi men in Amarah city in 2003, and the release of more photographs of atrocities by U.S. soldiers against Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison has spread outrage across Iraq.
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By ANTONIO REGALADO and JIM CARLTON
The Wall Street Journal

Amid a growing outcry from climate researchers in its own ranks, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration backed away from a statement it released after last year’s powerful hurricane season that discounted any link to global warming.

A corrected statement, which says some NOAA researchers disagree with that view, was posted to NOAA’s Web site yesterday.
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Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb (IPS) - As violence over the Mohammed cartoons continues at scattered locations around the world, Britain has looked away from them in the interest of good race relations.
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By EDITH M. LEDERER
The Associated Press
February 2006

UNITED NATIONS – Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Thursday said the United States should close the prison at Guantanamo Bay for terror suspects as soon as possible, backing a key conclusion of a U.N.-appointed independent panel.
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UN News Centre

February 2006 – A top official of the United Nations body monitoring climate change called on the dozens of industrialized nations that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gasses to sustain their momentum as they move toward legally binding targets for cutting carbon emissions by 2012.
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William Fisher

NEW YORK, Feb (IPS) - Foreign policy and human rights experts appear to agree with a United Nations report calling on Washington to shut down its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but most believe that simply closing it misses a larger point: What to do with the prisoners?
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Frances Suselo - Asia Water Wire*

BANGKOK , Feb (IPS) - Apichart Anukularmphai would rather conceded the title of ‘world’s champion rice exporter’ to Vietnam than to his own country Thailand. This, he says, is because Thailand is actually giving away its water for free every time it sells its rice.
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# A U.N. inquiry says the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay at times amounts to torture and violates international law.

By Maggie Farley, Times Staff Writer
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Baradan Kuppusamy

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb (IPS) - Delegates at an international conference here entitled ‘Who Speaks for Islam? Who speaks for the West’, were inclined to blame the ferocity of reactions against the cartoon controversy, which gripped the world this past week, on the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Leonardo Boff, Theologian
Letter of The Earth Commission

Those who have followed my previous articles are perhaps left with an impression of pessimism, that we are arriving too late; that we will find the worst. Actually, we are realists. All crisis situations, such as ours, have a component of dissolution, as a pre-condition for the new to emerge. The new, however, does not emerge from a Quantum vacuum, this is to say, from the unlimited potentialities present in the process of cosmic and social evolution. It has antecedents and its seeds are cultivated until it achieves the hegemony of the process as a whole. This is why it is important to be mindful of the changes still occurring within the system of the old Society of Industrial Growth, even though those changes no longer obey its logic.
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By Col. Daniel Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.) | January 25, 2006
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
www.fpif.org

“Most people just don’t understand how pervasive government surveillance is. If you place an international phone call, the odds that the [U.S.] National Security Agency is looking are very good. If it goes by oceanic fiber-optic cable, they are listening to it. If it goes by satellite, they are listening to it. If it is a radio broadcast or a cell phone conversation, in principle, they could listen to it. Frankly, they can get what they want.”
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - The escalating crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme appears to have persuaded the U.S. public that Tehran now poses a greater threat to the United States than any other country, or even al Qaeda, according to recent surveys.
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Feb 2006 - AlertNet
By Emma Batha

LONDON (AlertNet) - Global efforts to tackle AIDS are neglecting the 15 million children who have lost at least one parent to the disease, experts told an international conference on HIV on Thursday.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb (IPS) - The 15-member United Nations Security Council, whose primary responsibility is the maintenance of international peace and security as mandated by the U.N. charter, is scheduled to meet next week to discuss something outside its traditional purview: charges of corruption and malfeasance facing the world body’s Secretariat.
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By: Phyllis Bennis - Foreign Policy in Focus

The Palestinian elections, while conducted under military occupation, were different than those in Iraq. The process was created and implemented overwhelmingly by Palestinians themselves, voter turn-out was high, and appears more or less free of intimidation. The most significant impediment was Israel’s refusal to allow campaigning of Hamas and other parties in occupied East Jerusalem, and its severe limits on who could vote within the city. But there is no indication yet that those problems had a significant impact on the result.
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Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - A World Trade Organisation decision that called European safety bans on genetically modified food illegal under its global trade rules could usher in a new phase of potentially hazardous “Frankenfoods” worldwide and further erosion of local protections, say environmental and advocacy groups.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Feb (IPS) - Proposals to permit polygamy in order to reverse a declining population have raised a heated debate in Russia between Muslims who support it and Christian groups that oppose it.
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www.chinaview.cn

GENEVA, Feb. (Xinhua) – The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) applauded on Monday the progress made in some African countries toward ending the human rights violating practice of female genital mutilation.
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Julio Godoy

PARIS, Feb (IPS) - Leading French Muslims say the Danish cartoons that seek to portray an equation of Prophet Mohammed with terrorism symbolise a growing European prejudice against the Islamic world.
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By Stephen Zunes | February 2006 - Editor: John Gershman, IRC - Foreign Policy In Focus

This essay evaluates some of the key claims made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address of January 31, 2006.
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Venezuela has hit back at a US congressman’s criticism of a recently unveiled alliance between Aljazeera and Latin America’s Telesur network.
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Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb (IPS) - Land conflicts involving indigenous people have multiplied in Brazil over the last few months, generating greater tension and showing once again that the country’s roughly 400,000 indigenous people still have a long way to go to win respect for their rights.
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By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith | January 2006 - Editor: John Gershman, IRC - www.fpif.org

A jury verdict in Memphis late last year caused little stir among the general public, but it may have caught the attention of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other high officials of the Bush administration. The jury found Colonel Nicolas Carranza, former Vice Minister of Defense of El Salvador and now a U.S. citizen living in Memphis, responsible for overseeing the torture and killing in that country 25 years ago. 1 Could similar charges be brought against high U.S. officials for the actions of their subordinates in Abu Ghraib, Falluja, and Guantanamo?
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - U.S. President George W. Bush’s proposals to boost government spending on clean energy technologies, like much of the rest of his State of the Union Address, received a tepid reaction from analysts here Wednesday who described the speech as uncharacteristically timid.
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Diego Cevallos*

MEXICO CITY, Feb 1 (Tierramérica) - There are many who predict that future wars will be over water supplies, but the wait won’t be long for witnessing some intense skirmishes, expected in March at the 4th World Water Forum between those who favour and those who oppose privatisation of this essential resource.
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By Richard Waddington

GENEVA, Jan (Reuters) - More frequent floods and drought, blamed by some scientists on global warming, brought a near 20 percent rise in natural disasters in 2005, researchers said on Monday.
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BROOKLIN, Canada, Jan (IPS) - Washington’s attempts to bring security to Iraq and Afghanistan are not only making life harder for local people, they are breeding more terrorists, warn international security experts.
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