By Kerry Kennedy (*)

NEW YORK, Dec (IPS) The military junta that ran Argentina during the late
1970s and early 1980s thought nothing of keeping its naval officers in
close proximity to the thousands of dissidents tortured and executed for
opposing the regime.
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Susan George

For many months, people have been asking me about the situation in Attac-France. I’ve tried to answer their questions individually, but the story is rather a long one and the dawn of 2007 is perhaps a good time to send you news collectively, especially since this news is far better than many of us dared to hope six months ago. I will begin at the beginning, so if you know the basics concerning Attac-France, you can easily skip the first three pages and tell your machine to find START HERE [top p.4] to start reading. What follows is of course my personal account–it could hardly be otherwise–others might have a different interpretation of certain events.
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By Michael Wines

Thursday, December 28, 2006
SHIMIDER, Ethiopia
In this corrugated land of mahogany mountains and tan, parched valleys, it is hard to tell which is the greater scandal: the thousands of children malnutrition kills, or the thousands more it allows to survive.

Malnutrition still kills here, though Ethiopia’s infamous famines are in abeyance. In Wag Hamra alone, the area that includes Shimider, at least 10,000 children below age 5 died last year, thousands of them from malnutrition-related causes.
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Zoltán Dujisin

BRUSSELS, Dec. 28 (IPS) - Twelve years of continuous reform will mean that on Jan. 1 2007 Bulgaria and Romania will become the latest and poorest members of the European Union (EU), amid growing scepticism over enlargement.

Bulgaria’s and Romania’s transition from socialism was marred by political instability and financial crises, and the decade-long Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s, next door, affected the trade and investment climate in the countries.
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Leonardo Boff

Theologian
Earthcharter Commission
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Since I have a long beard and white hair, many children see me and call me “Santa Claus.” I try to explain to them, unsuccessfully, that I am only the brother of Santa Claus, and that my task is to keep watch over the children, to observe whether they are good students, whether they treat their classmates well, and whether they listen to the good counsel of their parents. I tell them that, afterwards, I tell Santa Claus everything, and that he will bring them beautiful gifts for Christmas. On one such day, one of them followed me with curiosity, and when he saw me getting in an automobile, he ran to his father and told him: «Daddy! Daddy! Santa Claus did not come in a sled; he came in a car.»
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Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Dec (IPS) - Almost four years after conflict broke out in Darfur, calls are being made for greater efforts to resolve the predicament in this western region of Sudan.

During an event marking International Human Rights Day Dec. 8, outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan reiterated that the world can, and must intensify the drive to address violence in Darfur.
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Analysis by Trita Parsi*

WASHINGTON, Dec (IPS) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been touring the Middle East with one clear message – to make peace in the Middle East, Iran must be isolated.
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JOHN CHERIAN

The re-election of the President signals the failure of the U.S.-aided right wing to gain predominance in the country.
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FRANCISCO DE OLIVEIRA

The re-election of Luiz Inácio da Silva in October 2006 allows us to decipher the ways in which Brazil’s political landscape has been reconstituted under the Workers Party government. The whirlwind of deregulation, privatization and restructuring under Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1990s—and with it, the dissolution of the industrial working class created during the developmentalist era—had torn up all established relations between economy and politics, classes and representation. The result was a period of indeterminacy, the context of Lula’s first presidential victory in 2002. Since then, a novel combination of neo-populism and party statification, shored up by social-liberal handouts, on the one hand, and government graft, on the other, has helped to forge a new form of class rule in Brazil that could be characterized as ‘hegemony in reverse’.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21 (IPS) - The world’s new economic powerhouses, including India, Brazil, South Africa and China, are largely responsible for a dramatic surge in trade and investments among the 132 developing nations in the global South.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Dec (IPS) - When Kofi Annan leaves the United Nations next week after an eventful 10-year tenure as secretary-general, there will be one prized possession he says he will virtually hand-carry: the Inter Press Service (IPS) International Achievement Award 2006.
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Conn Hallinan
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

As the dust begins to settle from the mid-term elections, popular thinking is that, over the next two years, the Democrats will force the Bush administration to edge away from the unilateral militarism that has entrapped the nation in two open-ended wars.
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Debayani Kar
&
Tom Ricker

Members of the international community got a tongue lashing at a recent donors conference on Haiti, attended by more than 90 delegations of countries and international organizations.
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Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Dec 19 (IPS) - The body of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has been reduced to a handful of ashes, kept at one of the family residences. But although he had no political power at the time of his death, his legacy of division and violence will continue to mark Chilean society.
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Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Dec (IPS) - This was the year that most people in the U.S. and Canada began to take climate change seriously and express hope that their governments would take action to reduce emissions – but it is unclear if they will take action themselves.
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By MICHAEL MOSS
THE NEW YORK TIMES

One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.
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Roger Burbach

In Santiago on September 11, 1973 I watched as Chilean air force jets flew overhead. Moments later I heard explosions and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky as the presidential palace went up in flames. Salvador Allende, the elected Socialist president of Chile died in the palace.
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Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Dec. 15 (IPS) - An Iranian and Syrian satellite, Hezbollah operating unfettered, and the Israeli army ceasing to patrol the south – that is the fate Israeli leaders fear could befall Lebanon if anti- government forces succeed in ousting the elected government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.
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by John Cavanagh

My organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, gave its annual human rights award this fall to Maher Arar, an innocent man the Bush administration falsely accused of being linked to Al Qaeda. His chilling case represents an opportunity for the new Democratic leadership in Congress to show the world that America has not entirely forgotten its proud history on human rights.
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Francesca Colombo *Tierramérica

MILAN, Dec 14 (IPS) - Aleida Guevara March has the eyes of her famous father, the revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara. She speaks energetically, as if she is attempting to convince a full auditorium of her ideas. But she also smiles tenderly as she remembers her father.
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Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Dec (IPS) - War, AIDS, malaria, cholera and famine have gradually turned Africa into a continent full of orphaned children and teenagers.
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The New York Times
By ARIEL DORFMAN Santiago, Chile
Op-Ed Contributor

IS Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s former dictator, really dead?
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Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Dec (IPS) - Millions of children across the world will continue to suffer from lack of food, healthcare and education as long as their mothers are forced to live with abusive conditions at home and discrimination in the workplace, according to a major new study released here Monday.
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By RICHARD W. BEHAN

George W. Bush, who proudly claimed the mantle of “war president,” was keenly rebuked in the recent mid-term election. The event was notable, but it merely continued the surreal politics of premeditated war"a politics that has dominated the last six bizarre, hideous years of our nation’s history.
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Analysis by Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Dec (IPS) - Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died Sunday afternoon in Santiago at the age of 91, will be remembered in Chile as one of the key figures of the 20th century, leaving behind a legacy in which human rights crimes and corruption overshadowed the status of statesman to which he once aspired.
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by Eric Foner

Ever since 1948, when Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to rank U.S. presidents on a scale from “great” to “failure,” such polls have been a favorite pastime for those of us who study the American past.
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Commentary by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

NEW DELHI, Dec 8 (IPS) - Has the International Monetary Fund (IMF) become completely irrelevant? Is this world body, set up more than six decades ago to foster global economic stability and help countries facing financial crises, really reforming itself? And will it become more responsive to the aspirations of developing countries?
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By SHARON SMITH

For more than a century, the U.S. has claimed each time it invaded another sovereign nation that it did so selflessly, shouldering the moral responsibility of “civilizing” a backward population. This process became widely known as “the white man’s burden,” after Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem of the same name, which described the conquered populations as “your new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.”
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Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 7 (IPS) - The outcome of Venezuela’s presidential elections may hold out a possibility of a thaw in relations with the United States, within a hemispheric context of greater openness to negotiation and dialogue.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

Life and consciousness are characteristics of the universe, more concretely, of our galaxy, the Milky Way, the solar system and planet Earth. A highly refined ordering of all the elements was necessary for them to arise, especially of the so called constants of nature (the speed of light, the four fundamental energies, the charge of the electrons, atomic radiation, time-space curvature, among others). Had it not been so, we would not be here writing about this. I will only mention one point from A New History of Time, (2005), astrophysicist Stephen Hawing’s latest book: «Had the electric charge of the electron been slightly different, it would have broken the equilibrium of the electromagnetic and gravitational force of the stars, and either they would not have been capable of burning the hydrogen and helium, or they would not have exploded. Either way, life could not have existed.» (p. 120). Life belongs, then, to that combination.
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By Farhang Jahanpour

November marked the 50th anniversary of the Suez crisis, when Britain, France and Israel decided to attack Egypt and unseat Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the nationalist Egyptian leader. This was one of those seminal moments in the mid-twentieth century that had momentous geopolitical consequences for the world, and especially for the Middle East.
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Pablo D’Atri - IPS/IFEJ *

SANTA ROSA, Argentina, Dec 6 (IPS) - Grasslands provide humanity with “environmental services” worth billions of dollars a year. But only 0.7 percent of the world’s grasslands – and only 0.3 percent of those in South America – are protected.
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By STEPHEN LENDMAN
The Bush family has been characterized in various ways including the Bush dynasty, crime family or syndicate. George Bush is just the latest in a line of unsavory characters but clearly the bad or worst seed and, in the eyes of most honest observers, the least worthy of an unworthy lot. He was supposed to be the latest in the Bush family line chosen to lay another golden egg for the dynasty but turned out instead to be an ugly duckling who’s just been an embarrassment and much worse because of the course he chose and his rigid ideological obstinacy to change even in the face of failure.
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Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, Dec 5 (IPS) - The final month of 2006 will be one to remember because of the first two – of perhaps many – U.S. army servicemen will face charges that can carry the death penalty for crimes committed in Iraq.
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by F. William Engdahl
Global Research
Text of author’s presentation at an international conference held in Feldkirch, Austria, September 2003.

It’s accepted wisdom that the United States, despite recent problems, is still the strongest growth locomotive for the world economy, the pillar of the global system. What if we were to discover that, instead of being the pillar, that the United States was, in fact, the heart of a dysfunctional economic system, which is spreading instability, unemployment, and depression globally?
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Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 4 (IPS) - Immediately after his landslide victory Sunday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced the start of a new socialist era for the country.
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Haider Rizvi

NEW YORK, Nov (IPS) - While there is no indication that the George W. Bush administration is willing to roll back its current restrictions on funding for HIV/AIDS, it may find it difficult to maintain the status quo when Democrats take charge of the U.S. Congress in January.
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By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN

Without notifying the public, federal agents for the past four years have assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans, computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.
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