Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 31 (IPS) - The recent arrest of 91 North Korean defectors in Thailand’s northernmost province of Chiang Rai has brought into relief the conditions driving such flight: hunger and growing food shortages, according to humanitarian agencies.
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Eric Holt-Gimenez

Just weeks before the elections, Congress is unable to agree on legislation regarding the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants. Legislators are at loggerheads over such disparate proposals as conditional legalization, guest-worker programs and massive deportations. In a sad testimony to the lack of bipartisan leadership, the only thing Congress has authorized this year is the construction of a $2.2 billion, 700-mile fence on the Mexican border.
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Toye Olori

LAGOS, Oct 30 (IPS) - It’s certainly a logical suggestion: in an effort to make cocoa-producing countries in Africa less dependent on consumers abroad, why not increase domestic consumption of cocoa products?
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Roger Burbach

Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva’s resounding electoral victory with over 60 percent of the vote places Brazilian politics on a new footing. While many on the left remain critical of Lula for the limited reforms of his first term, his very victory has consolidated a shift in the country’s possibilities for deeper social transformations. As Francisco Meneses of IBASE, the Brazilian Institute of Social Economic Analysis, says, “The country is more polarized, it can no longer move back to the old order. The economy is different and social expenditures have been augmented to a level that is important for the lower strata of society.”
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Stephen Zunes | October 2006
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

It has become a given, even among many progressive critics of Bush administration policy, that while the U.S. war on Iraq was illegal, immoral, unnecessary, poorly executed, and contrary to America’s national security interests, the war on Afghanistan—which was launched five years ago last week—was a legal, moral, and a necessary response to protect American national security in the aftermath of 9/11. Virtually every member of Congress who has gone on record opposing the Iraq War supported the Afghanistan War. Similarly, a number of soldiers who have resisted serving in Iraq on moral grounds have expressed their willingness to serve in Afghanistan.
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Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Oct (IPS) - Various African researchers and civil society groups have given a mixed response to the launch of a five-million-dollar prize for African leaders who relinquish power and promote good governance.
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Petar Hadji-Ristic

BERLIN, Oct 26 (IPS) - Some Europeans still need persuading about arguments for abolishing the death penalty – even though the continent is now virtually a “death penalty-free zone", says the Council of Europe’s Secretary General Terry Davis.
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Conn Hallinan | October 2006
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco, IPS
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

There are times when the tensions between Venezuela and the Bush Administration seem closer to Commedia dell’arte than politics. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez compares President George W. Bush to the devil, right down to the smell of sulfur during a speech at the UN General Assembly. Homeland Security responds by strip-searching Nicolás Maduro Moros, Venezuela’s foreign minister, at JFK airport. Venezuela seizes 176 pounds of frozen chicken on its way to the U.S. Embassy in Caracas.
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Stephen Zunes | October 2006
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

On the fifth anniversary of the launch of the U.S.-led war against Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the offensive, much of the countryside is in the hands of warlords and opium magnates, U.S. casualties are mounting, and many, if not most, Afghans are actually worse off now than they were before the U.S. invasion.
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct (IPS) - Increasingly disillusioned with more than five years of the “global war on terror", Arab- and Muslim-American voters are poised to vote heavily Democratic in the Nov. 7 mid-term elections, according to two polls released this week.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

It was was not Geraldo Alckmin who thwarted Lula’s victory in Brazil’s recent Presidential election, but the President’s own political party, PT. The mean audacity of its high leadership spoiled the victory that was almost assured to President Lula in the first round. What really happened was not so much the scandal of the dossier against candidate Serra, because there have always been dossiers fabricated by politicians who like to intimidate and who use lies as political tools. Lula’s absence in the last debate had a negative effect, but it was not the decisive factor either. What destroyed PT and blocked the path to victory was the display through the mass media of the mountains of money spent to buy the dossier. More than 30% of the workers earn only minimum salary. The worker, filled with self inflicted shame seeing those quantities of money, thinks: “My work is in fact worthless; not even if I lived two lives would I accumulate as much money as they show there.” Where did those corrupt politicians get all that money? The indignation cannot be imagined. Politicians who use such dossiers deserve political and religious excommunication, so immense is their sin against their people, against the people’s dignity and against the popular economy.
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Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Oct (IPS) - The political divisions between governments in Latin America and the Caribbean have so far frustrated the process of electing one of their number to a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
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By DON MONKERUD *

When the US Army advertises for recruits, it emphasizes jobs and benefits the Army offers, but nowhere are prospects informed about the risk of illness, sickness and death caused by the Army’s use of radioactive munitions.
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Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Oct (IPS) - While widely deplored by the world community, North Korea’s recent nuclear test has also prompted fresh calls for the major powers to get serious about dismantling their own weapons of mass destruction.
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Michael T. Klare | October 2006
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

The common wisdom circulating in Washington these days is that the United States is too bogged down in Iraq to consider risky military action against Iran or—God forbid—North Korea. Policy analysts describe the U.S. military as “over-burdened” or “stretched to the limit.” The presumption is that the Pentagon is telling President Bush that it can’t really undertake another major military contingency.
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Ali Al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail

BAGHDAD, Oct 19 (IPS) - Death squads from the Ministry of Interior posing as Iraqi police are killing more people than ever in the capital, emerging evidence shows.

The death toll is high - in all 1,536 bodies were brought to the Baghdad morgue in September. The health ministry announced last month that it will build two new morgues in Baghdad to take their capacity to 250 bodies a day.
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Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Oct (IPS) - The Israeli war against Lebanon was over soon after the United Nations brokered a ceasefire agreement last August. But while that may be true for outsiders, is not for the Lebanese.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

President Lula’s first-round victory is loaded with questions and insecurities. How to continue? What type of government is possible? The doubt is due in large part to the political stupidity and irrational strategy of the PT leadership itself. Certainly counting on the impunity of their compañeros, previously accused of corruption, they proceeded with the same immoral strategy. Because of the scandal this causes, the new government begins with a lack of credibility and ethical weakness. Worse still, it empowers the dominant elite -conservative or neoliberal - to regroup around its private, economic and social interests, against the collective interests.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 17 (IPS) - If Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki were inclined to bet his life on President George W. Bush’s latest assurances that there will be no timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, he should probably give it a second thought.
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by RICHARD FALK, MARY KALDOR, RANDALL CAROLINE FORSBERG & GEORGE PERKOVICH

The Reykjavik Summit in October 1986 will long be remembered because the leaders of the world’s two superpowers, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, seriously entertained for one brief moment the goal of a non-nuclear world. The end of the cold war reduced the fear of a nuclear exchange, but it did not bring us closer to a world free of nuclear weapons. Indeed, with the subsequent proliferation of nuclear weapons to India, Pakistan and North Korea, and with concerns growing about Iran’s nuclear program, the idea of a non-nuclear world seems more distant than ever. As the report of the International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction issued earlier this year makes clear, even the limited goals of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation have been set back by the lack of leadership on the part of the United States and by the proliferation of new weapons states. And as worrying, the goal of nuclear disarmament no longer seems to animate the progressive community or the peace movement, let alone figure into today’s discussion of American national security policy.
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By NATALIE OBIKO PEARSON,
Associated Press WriterSat

As Venezuela lobbies for a U.N. Security Council seat, President Hugo Chavez has bolstered its chances by spreading petrodollars across the Americas and beyond — extending an airstrip on a Caribbean island, sending emergency food aid to Africa, fixing a rundown hospital in Uruguay.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct (IPS) - The United States and China, two veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, may be heading for a political showdown over the implementation of a resolution aimed at imposing tough economic and military sanctions on North Korea.
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PowerPoint Racism
By JORGE MARISCAL

In a 1958 CIA information report on revolutionary activities in Cuba, the agent in charge wrote “Che [Guevara] is fairly intellectual for a Latin.” A racist assertion such as this was not uncommon in government documents. Throughout the Cold War, official bureaucratic language and content continued to be influenced by long-standing"scientific” theories about national character and racial psychology.
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By Branislav Gosovic (*)

GENEVA, SEP (IPS) The UN General Assembly is electing the seventh
Secretary-General (SG). Given the pressures to which the UN is
subjected, and the current threats to the very character and
underlying values of the international system, the election is
of great significance.
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Frida Berrigan | October 2006
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

What’s going on with the current bustle around U.S. naval stations? According to Time, the Navy has issued “Prepare to Deploy Orders” (PTDOs) to a strike group including minesweepers, a submarine, an Aegis class cruiser, and a mine hunter. Taken alongside disclosures that the chief of naval operations asked his planners for a rundown of how a blockade of Iranian oil ports would work, these military preparations led Time to conclude cautiously that the United States “may be preparing for war with Iran.”
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Ali Al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail

KHALDIYA, Oct (IPS) - The bomb went off just outside the school as the IPS correspondent stood speaking to children and teachers within.

The headmaster smiled. “You will hear many of these every day if you stay here another day or two,” he said. “The resistance will not stop until the last American leaves.”
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Peter Dhondt

BRUSSELS, Oct 12 (IPS) - A proposal by Senegalese Trade Minister Mamadou Diop to postpone the 2008 deadline for signing trade agreements with the European Union found much support at a meeting here Thursday.
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Tom Barry, IRC | October 2006
IRC Right Web
rightweb.irc-online.org

The recently released staff report on Iran issued by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee and the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on global terrorism conclude that the threats to U.S. national security are grave and increasing. These reports, which bolster arguments for a more aggressive “global war on terror,” represent the latest in a long series of documents dating back to the onset of the Cold War that declare that enemies pose ever-greater risks to U.S. national security.
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 11 (IPS) - Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea’s borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neo-conservatives in the wake of Pyongyang’s nuclear test.
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Emir Sader

What’s at stake in the second round is more than whether Petrobrás will be privatised – as Alckmin’s assistant, Mendoça de Barros, affirms in the Exame magazine – and with it, Banco do Brasil, Caixa Economica Federal and Eletrobrás. Emir Sader writes.
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Commentary by Praful Bidwai*

NEW DELHI, Oct (IPS) - North Korea has shocked the world by detonating a nuclear explosion and making good the threat it had held out six days earlier. Pyongyang’s action is one more blow to the existing global non-proliferation order and will trigger greater instability in Northeast Asia and in the Asian continent and world as a whole.
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Peter Bosshard
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco, IPS
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

To the bankers and government officials who descended on the city state for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings in September, Singapore may have looked like the perfect model of a globalized consumer society. Tellingly, for the first time, the annual meetings took place inside a giant shopping mall. Corporate logos dominated the venue, shoppers went happily about fulfilling their consumer duties, and the delegates were shrouded in a constant cloud of Muzak.
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Sabina Zaccaro

ROME, Oct 9 (IPS) - In the 13 years since its birth in Italy, the global campaign to abolish the death penalty has convinced more than half the countries in the world of its cause.

For them, however, that is not enough. Their goal is a total worldwide ban on the practise.
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Hoff Stauffer
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

The debate in the United States on global climate change is shifting from whether to do something about the problem to what to do.1 Prudent people do not want to risk unacceptable adverse economic impacts, even if they are extremely concerned about global climate change. On the other side, equally prudent people do not want to risk accomplishing too little. The debate is stymied, even though several bills on global warming have been introduced into Congress. “There will be no climate change legislation coming out of my committee this year,” Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) recently announced. “Frankly, I don’t know how to write it, and I don’t think anybody does.”2
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Juan Antonio Montecino
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

As Latin America shifts further left on the political spectrum, U.S. pundits are frantically struggling to artificially partition the continent’s leftist leaders between so-called populist demagogues and sound pragmatists.
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Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Oct 6 (IPS) - The contributions of young immigrants from the developing South hold out a solution for pension systems in the European Union, where rapid population ageing is placing heavy pressure on social security.
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Walden Bello |
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

The military coup in Thailand is the second high-profile collapse of a democracy in the developing world in the last seven years. The first was the coup in Pakistan in October 1999 that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power. There are some disturbing parallels between the two events. Both coups have been popular with the middle class, and in both countries the military promised to soon vacate power. Six years after ousting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Musharaff and the army are still in power in Pakistan. This precedent does not bode well for Thailand.
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Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Oct (IPS) - Anti-debt campaigners are hailing as groundbreaking Monday’s decision by Norway to cancel 80 million dollars in debt owed by five poor nations after it determined that the loans were not granted in a good faith effort to promote development.
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IRIN

A blade used to carry out an FGM operation.

NAIROBI, 4 Oct 2006 (IRIN) - Women in Eritrea have joined a nationwide campaign to try to eradicate female genital mutilation (FGM) by lobbying for a law to ban the practice and raise mass awareness among the population, an official at the National Union of Eritrean Women (NUEW) said on Wednesday.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Oct 5 (IPS) - Russia is increasingly supplying military arms and weaponry to developing countries in what defence analysts describe as the largest post-Soviet export deals.

By striking its largest arms deal under military-technical cooperation with Asian, African and Latin American countries and agreeing to write off some Soviet-era debts, Russia is also testing the ground for sales to other solvent and arms-hungry debtors, Russian defence analysts say.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct (IPS) - A coalition of human rights organisations and anti-war activists has renewed its campaign for a new international treaty to regulate the world’s fast-growing 1.1-trillion-dollar global arms trade.

The campaign is timed to coincide with a meeting of the 192-member U.N. committee on disarmament and international security which will discuss later this month whether or not to start work on such a landmark treaty.
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BBC NEWS

An unprecedented level of migration to cities is changing the face of the world, according to the United Nations.
More than half of the global population now live in urban areas and that figure may rise to two-thirds - or about six billion people - by 2050.

And the number of slum-dwellers is set to exceed one billion by next year.
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Raúl Zibechi

“Breaking down the fences of the large estates was not as difficult as fighting the technological packages of the transnationals,” Huli recounts as he sits in his kitchen and pours hot water into the mate we share while his son romps around the house. He says the campesinos of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST, for the Portuguese initials) dreamed for years of reclaiming their land, believing that it would solve all their problems: food for their children, a dignified life of hard work on the farm, education, health, and housing. However, the reality would prove much more difficult, for surprises they had never imagined lay ahead.
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Kimia Sanati

TEHRAN, Oct 2 (IPS) - While President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is busy running a high voltage campaign against the United States and its policies, back home citizens are wondering if he will ever make good on an election promise to crack down on the corrupt and distribute Iran’s vast oil revenues more equitably.
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