William Fisher

NEW YORK, Aug 31 (IPS) - His name is Junaid Ahmad. He is 24 years old. And he is among a rapidly increasing number of first generation Muslim-Americans who have decided to pursue careers in the law.
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TomPaine.com
By Erik Leaver | August 2006
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

The arrest of 24 British citizens accused of planning massive suicide missions against U.S.-bound airplanes unleashed widespread chaos and delays in airports around the world. In the aftermath of the arrests, amid the ensuing code red alerts, panic levels across Europe and the U.S. spiked. Hours after the plot was revealed, President George W. Bush boasted that, “This country is safer than it was prior to 9/11.” While the plot’s disruption may have averted a catastrophe, there is little evidence to support the president’s claim.
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Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Aug (IPS) - The Global Environment Facility (GEF), the world’s largest environmental funding body, received a shot in the arm Tuesday after 32 countries agreed to contribute a whopping 3.13 billion dollars for environmental projects over the next four years amid rising concerns about the impact human activities are having on the Earth.
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Ariela Ruiz Caro

The U.S. government’s announcement that it will review the possibility of limiting, suspending, or withdrawing trade preferences under the General System of Preferences (GSP) to three Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela—is political pressure to make these nations participate in the model of regional integration proposed by the United States.
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Juliana Lara Resende and Alberto Cremonesi

UNITED NATIONS, Aug (IPS) - After five years of debate on a draft treaty to protect the rights of the disabled, which will directly affect 650 million people, or 10 percent of the global population, the United Nations has finalised its first ever legally binding treaty on the issue.
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Arnold Kohen | August 2006
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

In recent months, East Timor has witnessed a tragic renewal of violence. In May, after the government dismissed about one-third of the country’s soldiers, fighting broke out among the security forces. Gangs of unemployed youth, possibly manipulated by some political leaders, set much of East Timor’s capital of Dili ablaze. Amid warnings of a full-scale conflagration, a temporary Australian-led international peacekeeping force entered the territory to quell the violence. At least 37 people have died since conflict reignited. About 150,000 displaced persons are taking refuge in camps for fear of fresh fighting.
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Mavis Anderson | August 2006
Americas Program, International Relations Center (IRC)
americas.irc-online.org

Fidel Castro’s recent announcement that he would temporarily transfer power to his brother Raul and others in the Cuban Government has led to much speculation about the course of events in both Cuba and Miami. With hard-line Cuban Americans dancing in the streets of Little Havana, and even preparing boats to sail to the island to foment unrest, the question on everyone’s mind is: does this signal the beginning of a much-discussed transition for Cuba? And if so, what will it look like?
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Deidre May

KYOTO, Aug (IPS) - Warning that spiralling violence in the Middle East presented a serious threat to world security, religious leaders gathered in this ancient city for a global inter-faith meet are calling for urgent resolution of festering conflicts in the region.
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Juan Michel - Special to IPS*

TORONTO, Aug 25 (IPS) - When it comes to responding to HIV and AIDS, Muslims are neither better nor worse than anyone else, but in its progressive form, Islam is certainly better prepared to respond than the Vatican, says Farid Esack.

In the following interview, this South African Muslim professor and – as he defines himself – anti-AIDS militant, talks about mutual stereotypes, why religions fear sex, and the sacred nature of entering into the life of an HIV-positive person.
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The Daily Star Editorial

Only in the Middle East could a so-called “peace process” have produced so much process and so little peace over a span of decades. The Arab Peace Initiative (API) of March 2002 was unanimously approved by the heads of state of all 22 Arab League member-states and promulgated with great fanfare. More than four years later, Arab governments are now asking the United Nations Security Council to hold a ministerial meeting in hopes of, in effect, resurrecting the very same offer.
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Michael Fullilove International Herald Tribune

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2006

SYDNEY Diplomacy

Twice in the past month, China has supported tough UN Security Council resolutions on the world’s most dangerous problems. These were difficult decisions and they surprised many observers. In truth, they were the culmination of a decades-long process that has seen China’s assertiveness at the UN follow the same growth curve as its economic strength and military capacity.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 24 (IPS) - The world’s 50 poorest nations – ranging from Cape Verde and Haiti to Nepal and Sierra Leone – are turning to the major oil-producing nations for urgently needed assistance for development.

Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, U.N. under-secretary-general for Least Developed Countries (LDCs), has proposed that oil-producing nations should consider earmarking just 10 cents per barrel from their rising incomes for infrastructure development in LDCs in the next 10 years.
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Moyiga Nduru

MASERU, Aug 19 (IPS) - The annual summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) wrapped up Friday with a call to speed up the process of increasing women’s representation at all levels of government in the 14-nation body.
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By Mark Turner at the United Nations

Published: August 22 2006 17:57 | Last updated: August 22 2006 21:27

The prospect of large new peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and Darfur would push the number of troops under United Nations command to an all-time high, officials have warned, posing a daunting logistical challenge as the world body seeks to restore its battered reputation.
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By Howard LaFranchi
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BRUSSELS
Ever since the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO has been working to transform itself from a cold-war, Europe-focused bulwark against a communist threat to a military and political alliance relevant to the world of the 21st century.
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Analysis by Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, Aug 22 (IPS) - Chanting members of the Maoist student union swarmed onto the streets of Nepal’s capital Saturday to protest fuel price hikes – but had to cut short the demonstration when they ran out of kerosene to fuel their homemade torches.

That incident can be seen as a metaphor for the “people’s movement” that in April forced King Gyanendra to hand back rule to the House of Representatives: the people still want change but lack a guiding light to lead them.
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Thalif Deen

STOCKHOLM, Aug 21 (IPS) - An international conference on water management opened in the Swedish capital Monday with the grim prediction that both rich and poor nations are heading towards a crisis unless positive steps are taken to efficiently conserve one of the world’s life-sustaining resources.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

The present days are disturbing. They have caused a big wave of apocalyptic people, ranging from the simple Christians of the Church of The Later Day Saints to President Bush of the United States. It sounds logical. Some of the apocalyptic texts of the New Testament seem to describe these days: «And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will raise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there will be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in diverse places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. … Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heavens shall be shaken» (Matthew 24,6-8.29.)
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By Arun Kumar

Washington, Aug 17 (IANS) Shashi Tharoor, India’s nominee and a leading contender for the post of United Nations secretary-general, says if elected his first priority would be to ensure that the world body is ready to tackle the problems of the 21st century.
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Stephen Leahy

TORONTO, Canada, Aug 18 (IPS) - While modest gains have been made in lowering the cost of many life-saving HIV/AIDS drugs, these formulas no longer work for a growing number of people, who now need so-called “second-line” drugs that are still priced far out of reach.
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Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Aug 17 (IPS) - Many Muslims in Britain are beginning to doubt the alleged plot to blow up aircraft flying to the United States from Britain.

The arrest of 24 people last week was followed by the cancellation and diversion of hundreds of flights at British airports. The plot story became leading global news. But most of the information on arrested suspects has come by way of allegations and police leaks. These have not yet added up to any indication of evidence.
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© Derk Segaar/IRIN

KHARTOUM, 17 Aug 2006 (IRIN) - Almost 500,000 Darfurians have been cut off from emergency food aid due to insecurity in the region, which has rendered them inaccessible to humanitarian workers, according to the United Nations.

“This is a major concern for us,” the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) spokesman Kenro Oshidari told reporters in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, on Wednesday. “It is happening during the period of the hunger season, before the harvest. This is the season typically when malnutrition rates rise and disease increases because of the rains.”
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Kester Kenn Klomegah

IVANOVO, Russia, Aug 16 (IPS) - Russian prosecutors confirmed earlier this month that they will begin the extradition of 13 people who authorities say were involved in a May 2005 uprising in Uzbekistan. Human Rights organisations are fighting the move, saying many in the group could face torture or execution if they are sent back.
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Public Doesn’t Understand Global Warming

By Dr. David Suzuki, David Suzuki Foundation

Environmental News Network (ENN)

August 16, 2006

Have you ever been to a focus group? They’re very odd. Often used in marketing research, these small selections of randomly chosen people are brought together as a sampling of public opinion to gauge how folks feel about a particular product or issue.
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RICHARD B. BLAKNEY AND JAMES MAYNARD (*)

GUEST COLUMNISTS -Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Tuesday, August 15, 2006
The P-I’s Julia Youngs, in her Wednesday column, “United Nations breaks its promise,” conveys a highly distorted view of the U.N.’s mission, functions and accomplishments. The U.N. does not make promises. The U.N. formulates resolutions and then attempts to provide an umbrella for their enforcement with authorities delegated by the Security Council and with member nations’ participation. The U.N. does not employ a peacekeeping force of its own available for immediate deployment. It must rely on force contributions from member nations under conditions set by the Security Council and acting under instructions that often do not provide for armed intervention. Under those conditions and in the absence of the appropriate resources, enforcing Security Council resolutions may be difficult. The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon is a case in point. It is unfortunate that the very council members who now criticize UNIFIL are the same members who did not give it the resources to do its job.
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Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Aug 15 (IPS) - The fourteenth summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) could be the first major international meeting to be held in Havana without the active participation of President Fidel Castro, a staunch defender of this bloc of developing countries, which he presided over a quarter of a century ago.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission
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What I am going to reveal here will irritate or scandalize those who do not like Cuba or Fidel Castro. That does not worry me. If you do not see the light of the star in the darkest night, it is not the star’s fault; but yours.

Because of my book, Church: Charisma and Power, in 1985, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger subjected me to «obsequious silence». I accepted the sentence, and quit teaching, writing and speaking in public. Months later, I was surprised to receive an invitation from Commandant Fidel Castro, asking me to spend two weeks with him on the Island, during his vacation. I accepted immediately, because I saw an opportunity to resume the critiquing dialogues that we had enjoyed several times previously, together with Frei Betto.
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Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Aug 14 (IPS) - As a ceasefire went into effect Monday morning between Israel and Hezbollah and a tense calm descended on the region, Israelis were wondering whether the truce would hold, and were beginning to ask questions about what they had gained – or lost – during the 33 days of fighting.

With the ceasefire going into effect at 5 am GMT, Israelis in northern Israel began emerging from their bomb shelters where they have spent much of the last month, as it appeared that Hezbollah had halted its daily barrage of rockets on towns across northern Israel.
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By Fiona Harvey in London

The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet is accelerating, threatening an increasing rise in sea levels.

Satellite measurements showed that the speed of ice-sheet melting had risen threefold in the last two years compared with the average for the previous five years, according to a paper published in today’s edition of the peer-review journal Science.
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Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Aug 11 (IPS) - The arrest of 19 people – all Muslims – over what the police have described as a sinister plot to blow up U.S. bound aircraft from London, has cast a shadow of suspicion over the entire Muslim community in Britain.

Dramatically released information on the cracking of the suspected conspiracy led to cancellation of several flights in and out of Britain Thursday. Many flights remained disrupted Friday. Passengers were being allowed almost no hand luggage on board.
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Omid Memarian

BERKELEY, California, Aug 10 (IPS) - Amid the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of Iran in the west, a chorus of new literary voices has emerged that portrays a far more complex image of that nation and its culture.

Persis Karim, editor of the anthology “Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora” (University of Arkansas Press, 2006), suggests that literature can contribute something important, even essential, that has been absent from the conversation about Iran.
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TANYA TALAGA, Staff Reporter

Toronto Star

Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy on HIV/AIDS issues, said today that Canada’s failure to supply any country struggling to control it’s AIDS pandemic with antiretroviral medication – as promised two years ago – is “delinquent beyond the definition of delinquency.”
Government officials from Kenya and Ethiopia have asked Lewis: “Where are the government medications?”
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By BBC

French and American diplomats at the UN are starting work on re-drafting their plan to end the Middle East crisis.

An Arab League delegation argued that a resolution should call for an immediate Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon.

France and the US do not want major changes to their text and diplomats say prospects for an early vote are fading.

Israel’s cabinet is meeting to discuss an army plan to push deeper into Lebanon and take control of areas used by Hezbollah to fire rockets.
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Analysis by Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 9 (IPS) - The United States, which pays 22 percent of the U.N.’s regular annual budget of 1.8 billion dollars, has arrogantly demanded a dominant voice in management and administration – primarily because it is the biggest single financial contributor to the world body.

“U.N. member states, and particularly its largest contributors, want to know if they are getting the most value for the dollars they contribute,” says Mark P. Lagon, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary for international organisation affairs.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 8 (IPS) - Israel’s phenomenal victories against collective Arab armies in 1967 and later against Egypt in 1973 firmly established the Jewish state’s legendary military superiority in the Middle East.

The 1967 war – called the Six Day War – was so swift it ended in less than a week, with Egypt losing 264 aircraft and 700 battle tanks; Jordan 22 aircraft and 125 tanks, and Syria 58 aircraft and 105 tanks.
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EDITORIAL - Toronto Star

AIDS, among the most deadly and destructive contagions in human history, came to the attention of doctors 25 years ago as an unusual infection striking a small group of gay men in California. Soon after that, a full-blown pandemic erupted, one shrouded in mystery and without any known treatment. To date, AIDS has killed 25 million people around the world. About 40 million are currently living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and an estimated 11,000 die each day.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

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In his recent book, “A New Paradigm: To Understand Todays World, (Paidos, June 30, 2005), French sociologist Alain Touraine, who loves Brazil and who has adopted Latin America as the homeland of his heart, offers an intriguing thesis that helps us better understand the violence, actually, the terroristic war between Palestinians and Israelis that is taking place in Lebanon. The thesis he proposes is that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terroristic events of September 11, 2001, societies rapidly began to disintegrate, overcome by fear and their own impotence in the face of terrorism.
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By Dan Ephron and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

Prosecutors suspect Hizbullah has fund-raising cells in the United States, but not terrorists—so far, that is.

Aug. 14, 2006 issue - It began, as the Feds tell the tale, with a run-of-the-mill tax-fraud scheme. Imad Hammoud and his ring of Lebanese Americans from the Detroit area would buy boxes of cigarettes in North Carolina, where the state tax on smokes is among the lowest in the country, allegedly truck the goods back to Michigan and sell them at a profit of more than $10 a carton. Hammoud, an immigrant with ties to Hizbullah, according to an indictment filed with a U.S. district court in Michigan earlier this year, would then wire a portion of the earnings to a member of the group in Lebanon. By 2002, Hammoud and some of his colleagues were believed to be running $500,000 worth of cigarettes a week across state lines and expanding into stolen contraband and counterfeit goods, including Viagra tablets. During a three-month period that year, authorities allege, more than 90,000 Viagra knockoffs were purchased, with a plan to sell them as the real thing. “They’re small, they’re high in demand and they’re easily transportable,” says Bob Clifford, a senior FBI agent. “They’re the perfect medium.”
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Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Aug 4 (IPS) - Negative publicity and attacks by Islamist groups on non- governmental organizations (NGOs) working with women have forced several to close their offices and move staff out of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

One of the earliest to leave was Khwendo Kor (Pashtu for sisters’ home), an NGO that seeks to raise the status of women by running integrated community-based schools.
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Story from BBC NEWS

More African health staff are being lost to Aids than are being enticed to work abroad, a study says.

The death rate in Zambia’s Lusaka and Kasama districts is double the number who applied to work in the UK - the so-called brain-drain, the Lancet said.

Researchers from Boston University in the US found that the average age of death from Aids was just 38.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug 3 (IPS) - Entering the fourth week of war between Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and Israel, the George W. Bush administration’s ambitions to transform the Arab Middle East into a pro-Western, more democratic region are fading fast.
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By Edward Harris, Associated Press Writer | August 3, 2006

KINSHASA, Congo –Whether a new peace or more violence lies ahead for Congo, its people have embraced the chance to join fellow Africans who are increasingly finding their voices through the ballot box.

The vote Sunday in Congo, a massive country in the center of Africa that’s been ruined by war, typifies the continent’s postcolonial struggles – and its hopes that legitimate governments will at last act on their citizens’ behalf.
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Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, (IPS) - Two Afghan journalists, who spent three years in the infamous United States military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have released a new chronicle on life in the now famous iron cages.

Their 453-page volume in the Pashto language is even more graphic than the one released recently by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan who was handed over to the U.S. military, shortly after it invaded Afghanistan and ousted the fundamentalist regime in 2001.
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By George E. Bisharat

USA Today, 8/1/2006 Cresting the ridge from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and descending toward the sea has always taken my breath away. Beirut appears in the distance, framed like a cluster of pearls against the stunning blue of the Mediterranean.

I traveled that route many times, while studying at the American University of Beirut in the early 1970s, before the madness of the Lebanese civil war made travel there imprudent. Anything seemed possible there before the war. One could meet people from all over the world or buy books in any language. Newspapers reflected a dizzying range of perspectives.
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BBC NEWS

The United Nations Security Council voted on Monday to extend by a year its arms embargo against militia groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
On Sunday, DR Congo held its first democratic poll in 40 years.

The election has been welcomed as a step towards peace. Final results will only be announced at the end of August. But concerns over instability in the east had led to fears that the election might fail. Voting there was overseen by a large UN peacekeeping force.
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Dahr Jamail

QANA, Aug 1 (IPS) - Red Cross workers and residents of Qana, where Israeli bombing killed at least 60 civilians, have told IPS that no Hezbollah rockets were launched from the city before the Israeli air strike.

The Israeli military has said it bombed the building in which several people had taken shelter, more than half of them children, because the Army had faced rocket fire from Qana. The Israeli military has said that Hezbollah was therefore responsible for the deaths.
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