Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Jun 30 (IPS) - Heckled by hardline parliamentarians, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tried to strike a defiant pose. Despite the spiralling violence in the Gaza Strip, from where Israel withdrew unilaterally last year, he insisted he would press ahead with his plan for a unilateral pullback in the West Bank.
(more…)

Laura Carlsen

This week’s newspapers featured variations of the stern-visaged soldier standing guard on the U.S.-Mexico border. The decision to begin deployment of thousands of National Guard members on the border sparked protests in both countries. It also belied the benevolence of immigration reform that some had heralded as progress.
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 28 (IPS) - Nearly two months after the signing of a peace accord between Sudan and a rebel group in Darfur, the humanitarian situation there appears to have worsened, while Khartoum-backed Janjaweed militia continue to attack towns and villages in neighbouring Chad.
(more…)

The New York Times

By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: June 28, 2006

The mosquito nets arrived too late for 18-month-old Phillip Odong.

The roly-poly boy came down with his fourth bout of malaria on March 16, the same day the nets were handed out at the makeshift camp where he lived in northern Uganda. “It was because of poverty that we could not afford one,” his mother, Jackeline Ato, recalled recently, seated in rags beneath a mango tree.
(more…)

Jose L. Gomez del Prado

The 25 000 private security contractors presently working in Iraq constitute, after the United States Army, the largest force of occupation well before the British Army. These private security companies with over 420 deaths and some 4 000 injured, according to the USA Department of Labor, also yield the highest number of casualties with the exception of the US Army which has already reached over 2 500 deaths and more than 18 000 injuries.
(more…)

Fritzroy Sterling

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 28 (IPS) - As the 2006 Smalls Arms Survey was being circulated at the United Nations on Monday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan accepted a photo petition from one million people worldwide calling for tougher controls over the global arms trade.
(more…)

Orlando Matos

HAVANA, Jun (IPS) - As the United States and Cuba fire accusations at each other in the latest tumultuous chapter in their conflictive relationship, some members of U.S. scientific and student communities are working to salvage exchanges between the two nations.
(more…)

Jun 2006 | JOHANNESBURG AND LUANDA
From The Economist print edition
Sub-Saharan economies are growing faster but are they really getting stronger? In two articles, we weigh the evidence

LUANDA is changing fast. A few years after the end of a devastating civil war, cranes are crowding the skyline of Angola’s capital. Derelict buildings are being spruced up, smart new houses and office blocks are sprouting. Roads are being patched up, which may ease the city’s maddening traffic jams. Last year Angola’s economy grew by an estimated 15.5%, the fastest on the continent. But the rest of Africa has also been doing well: a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that Africa’s economy grew by almost 5% last year, and is expected to do even better this year and next. At the World Economic Forum’s annual get-together this month on Africa, the mood was unusually bullish. Is Africa, often dubbed the hopeless continent, finally taking off?
(more…)

Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgestein* used to teach that our communication is nothing more than a great game of words. There is no direct relation between words and things. The words are arbitrarily invented. Their meaning is the result of conventions: everything depends on how we use them. And the conventions are established from arbitrary bases.
(more…)

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun (IPS) - A “great divide” separates the worldviews of Muslims and Westerners, according to the results of a major new survey which suggests that European Muslims, who held the most tolerant views, could be a bridge between the two groups.
(more…)

Laura Carlsen

This week’s newspapers featured variations of the stern-visaged soldier standing guard on the U.S.-Mexico border. The decision to begin deployment of thousands of National Guard members on the border sparked protests in both countries. It also belied the benevolence of immigration reform that some had heralded as progress.
(more…)

© Amancio Miguel/PlusNews

South Africa is both a source and a country of destination for trafficking

JOHANNESBURG, 21 Jun 2006 (IRIN) - The evil of human trafficking has become a hot-button international issue, but not that much is actually known about the practice, according to a new study by the South Africa-based Institute of Security Studies.
(more…)

Analysis by Kalinga Seneviratne

SYDNEY, Jun 22 (IPS) - A two month old rebellion by sacked army officials and police deserters in East Timor, one of the world’s newest and poorest countries, has resulted in an Australian-led “peacekeeping” force arrival in its capital Dili, and a media-supported push for ‘regime change’.

Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri, a Muslim leading a predominantly Catholic country, is the leader of the Fretilin Party which fought for independence from Indonesia for over two decades, and which won a landslide victory in the first legislative elections in 2001.
(more…)

The US and other major bankrollers weigh whether to follow through with a funding cutoff at the end of June.

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – It’s an active time at the United Nations: The United States is counting on it to take over peacekeeping operations in Sudan’s Darfur region by fall. African countries are looking to the UN to redouble efforts to combat AIDS, in the wake of a recent policy review. And the UN’s new Human Rights Council and the Peacebuilding Commission - both outgrowths of reforms following the oil-for-food scandal - convene this week for the first time.
(more…)

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Jun (IPS) - The drawing shows a woman clasping a child to her chest. Aptly titled ‘Embrace’, it depicts a memory that has haunted the artist, a former child soldier from the civil war in southern Sudan who goes by the name of Commander Spoon.
(more…)

Ángel Páez

BOGOTA, Jun (IPS) - The fight against poverty, which calls for a multipronged effort against hunger, inequality, and social marginalisation, is a pressing issue in Latin America. But it is apparently not for the press. In Colombia, where roughly half of the population lives in poverty, the only nationwide newspaper, El Tiempo, dedicates just 0.8 percent of its coverage to the issue.
(more…)

Boris Kagarlitsky
Euroasian Home, June 2006

This week Moscow hosted the World Editors Forum. Predictably, the prudish editors-in-chief of the world’s leading periodicals criticized the Russian authorities for violating freedom of speech. And, predictably, Vladimir Putin objected.
(more…)

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jun (IPS) - Bozana Savicki (26), a Serb from Belgrade is about to marry Igor Dumic (28) from Zagreb in Croatia. They met at the Croatian coast last summer.
(more…)

Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies, June 2006

* The Bush administration’s “offer” to join direct talks with Iran reflects Washington’s international isolation on the Iran issue; the offer itself is simultaneously very significant and entirely fake.
* The U.S. is still trying to ratchet up international pressure against Iran - proposing an “antimissile shield” for Europe, still threatening a return to the UN Security Council and calling for a “coalition” to impose economic sanctions - but the split between the U.S. and Europe is rising, and the Bush administration looks increasingly desperate. (more…)

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jun 16 (IPS) - Some of us could have been standing on a solution to that search for renewable energy all along.
(more…)

[Translated by TOI-staff from Ma’ariv, June 2006]

The view of the girl from the gaza beach, whose life was torn to pieces in front of our eyes, must wake us up from a years-long hypnotic slumber. Instead of worrying about “the damage to Israel’s image", instead of immediately starting to formulate the automatic, cliche counter-arguments, we should take a good look at our handiwork. It is long overdue for us to notice the slippery slope down which we sliding ourselves, and to start asking which deep abyss lies ahead.
(more…)

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 15 (IPS) - The National Rifle Assocation, one of the most influential pro-gun lobbies in the United States, has philosophically argued that “guns don’t kill people, only people kill people".
(more…)

Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Letter of The Earth Commission

The fashion of the day is the interest in the apocryphal, nonofficial gospels that have more to do with fantasy than with history. But, fantasy also has rights. This is why the apocryphal gospels are meaningful. They show the everyday life of Jesus and his companions.
(more…)

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Jun (IPS) - The Sudanese government appears to be taking a hard line on the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force to help protect civilians in the war-torn region of Darfur, in western Sudan.
(more…)

By David Loyn
BBC Developing World correspondent

World leaders at the end of the G8 summit

UK charity Oxfam says increases in aid from the world’s richest countries are not enough to meet promises they made at the Gleneagles G8 meeting last year.
(more…)

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jun 13 (IPS) - A set of reports released in Tanzanian capital Arusha has called for a reform of “corrupt, violent and brutal” policing ways in East African countries.

The set of five reports that look at policing in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania were released as part of a two-day roundtable on police and police reforms in East Africa hosted by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) and the East Africa Law Society.
(more…)

THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 12, 2006 Editorial

The news that three inmates at Guantánamo Bay hanged themselves should not have surprised anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the twisted history of the camp that President Bush built for selected prisoners from Afghanistan and antiterrorist operations. It was the inevitable result of creating a netherworld of despair beyond the laws of civilized nations, where men were to be held without any hope of decent treatment, impartial justice or, in so many cases, even eventual release.
(more…)

Amantha Perera

COLOMBO, Jun (IPS) - The failure of Norwegian peace brokers to get representatives of Tamil Tiger rebels and the Sri Lankan government to sit across a table, after their arrival in Oslo, appears to have served as the cue for renewed violence and brutality in Sri Lanka.
(more…)

AFP

The world’s political elite, top thinkers and powerful business folk gathered here for an annual, ultra-secretive Bilderberg conference as heavy security kept conspiracy theorists and curious onlookers at bay.
(more…)

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Jun (IPS) - They grow up in the world’s most impoverished region with many hardships in life to cope with, yet they are outnumbering their counterparts from the rest of the world who seek higher education abroad.
(more…)

By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY

UNITED NATIONS — When diplomats crafted a new United Nations Human Rights Council, John Bolton said it wasn’t good enough for the United States.

“We want a butterfly. We’re not going to put lipstick on a caterpillar and declare it a success,” the U.S. ambassador said.
(more…)

by Efraim Davidi *
International Research Conference / The Hague, May 2006
The Impact of Global Production
Systems on Trade Union Strategies

The aim of this paper is to try to understand the Israeli industrialists’ strategy in the globalization process in the course of the recent years. The new strategy was implemented in the days of the first Intifada (the Palestinian uprising) in the late 80’s. At that time voices were heard in the Association of Israeli Industrialists, the strongest organization of Israeli employers, advocating an agreement with the Palestinians which would not oppose the establishment of an independent Palestinian State, as long as the economic dependence on Israel is preserved.
(more…)

Brian Conley and Isam Rashid

BAGHDAD, Jun (IPS) - Baghdad’s central morgue received more than a thousand bodies each month this year, a doctor has revealed. The body count here gives a more accurate picture of the story in Baghdad than any official statistics.
(more…)

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Jun (IPS) - María Angélica is a Chilean woman who could not work in her profession as a chef for nearly two years, because she had to look after her mother, who was ill. Including this kind of unpaid women’s work in national budgets is one of the big challenges Latin America faces in order to make progress in gender equality.
(more…)

David T. Ives, Executive Director
Albert Schweitzer Institute
Adjunct Professor of International Business, Philosophy, and Latin American Studies
Quinnipiac University

Almost fifty years ago, at the height of the cold war, Dr. Albert Schweitzer called for an end to nuclear testing and for the destruction of nuclear weapons. The winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize and one of the most famous men of the last century for his outstanding moral example, Schweitzer broadcast his call worldwide in three different radio addresses in several different languages with the help of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo. The 1957 broadcasts were credited with increasing the awareness of the profound dangers of nuclear weapons, the long- lasting impact of any type of nuclear explosion not only on human beings, but on the planet itself, and gradually turning most of the world against the evils of nuclear weapons.
With the inflammatory rhetoric that characterizes the current impasse over the possible development of nuclear weapons in Iran, most people seem to have forgotten the lessons of Dr. Schweitzer or, for that matter, Schweitzer’s friend and contemporary Albert Einstein, the father of the atomic bomb. Both men thought that an explosion of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world would be an unmitigated physical and moral catastrophe.
(more…)

Brian Conley

AMMAN, Jun (IPS) - These days, Ramadi is nearly impossible to enter. Against the backdrop of the Haditha massacre, IPS has received reports of civilians killed by snipers, and homes occupied with American snipers on their roof, while families were detained downstairs.
(more…)

By NANCY BETH JACKSON
The New York Times

PANAMA — In 1979, two ecologists at Midwestern universities who knew each other only through their research came up with an audacious plan. They wanted exclusive rights to the top of Barro Colorado, a six-square-mile research island that had become one of the most studied spots on earth.
(more…)

Raúl Zibechi

In a single sweep of the pen, Bolivian President Evo Morales has rearranged the continent’s entire geopolitical map. The May 1st decision to nationalize hydrocarbons placed South America’s second largest gas reserves under state control. Oil and gas are powerful weapons, capable of reshaping South American alliances, as evidenced by the close relationship between Venezuela and Bolivia—the continent’s largest reserve holders in both sectors—who have taken the political initiative and displaced the primary regional powers.
(more…)

by Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May (IPS) - A new North-South divide between rich and poor nations – over budgetary control and management reforms – may be heading for a political showdown at the United Nations.
(more…)

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, May (IPS) - There’s no way around it: tobacco products of any kind are deadly and must be controlled by means of strict regulations under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), argued the World Health Organisation (WHO) in a promo for World No Tobacco Day, Wednesday.
(more…)

US forces in Iraq are to receive extra training to promote legal and ethical behaviour, the military said, amid a mounting controversy over alleged killings by US Marines last year.
(more…)