Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 27 (IPS) - Driven by increased concerns and mounting evidence of the threats posed by global warming, some of the world’s most eminent scientists are telling policymakers to get their act together before it is too late to avoid a doomsday scenario.
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Democracy Now!

In his new book, CIA analyst, distinguished scholar, and best-selling author Chalmers Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach may actually lead to the nation’s collapse as a constitutional republic. It’s the last volume in his Blowback trilogy, following the best-selling “Blowback” and “The Sorrows of Empire.” In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine and military activity has led to un-intended, but direct disaster here in the United States. [includes rush transcript]
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DAVID CRARY,
AP National Writer

Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.
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Mattias Creffier

BRUSSELS, Feb 27 (IPS) - Does the presence of Heineken beer in Sierra Leone contribute to reduction of child mortality? And to what extent does the chemicals company Akzo Nobel contribute to prevent environmental damage?
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Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Feb 26 (IPS) - The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled Monday that Serbia was not guilty of genocide in neighbouring Bosnia.

The court ruled also that genocide occurred in Srebrenica, and not the whole of Bosina.
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Democracy Now!

As the fourth anniversary of the Iraq approaches, a new study by Mother Jones magazine has found that the number of fatal terrorist attacks has increased by over 600 percent since the U.S. invasion. We speak with the study’s co-author, Paul Cruickshank. [includes rush transcript]
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By Kumi Naidoo, CIVICUS Secretary-General

It is no secret that many within civil society organisations have deep reservations about the World Economic Forum. Some feel that by being there in the first place, civil society partici-pants risk legitimising the event, while others feel that we are just not heard, even if we are given the chance to speak. Yet, just as politics is too important to be left to politicians alone, the future of the world’s economy as well as the broad range of issues discussed at the WEF, is too important to be left to economists and business people alone. So, after more than a week in Nairobi at the World Social Forum (WSF), I flew off to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
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Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily

BAGHDAD, Feb 23 (IPS) - Iraqi journalists are outraged over yet another U.S. military raid on the media.
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Sabina Zaccaro

ROME, Feb 22 (IPS) - The Italian government is in crisis after it failed to win a vote Wednesday on its foreign policy programme. Although the ruling centre-left coalition held only a very slight majority in the Senate, the defeat of the motion came as a major surprise to Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

Carnival is time for story telling.

Almost all cultures believe in a heaven, but there is no easy way to get there. There is always a purification process and the journey is very dangerous. Several Amazon tribes believe that the dead are reborn as butterflies, some darker and heavier, if those persons have more debts to pay, others clearer and light if they are almost purified. They fly from flower to flower drinking the nectar to strengthen themselves for the journey.
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February 2007 — By Reuters

CANBERRA – Australia will be the world’s first country to ban incandescent lightbulbs in a bid to curb Greenhouse gas emissions, with the government saying on Tuesday they would be phased out within three years. Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull said yellow incandescent bulbs, which have been in use virtually unchanged for 125 years, would be replaced by more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs by 2009.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 20 (IPS) - Responding to widespread criticism from developing nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has withdrawn or modified some of his controversial proposals to restructure the U.N. Secretariat – specifically in relation to disarmament, peacekeeping and political affairs.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES February 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
By MICHAEL CRICHTON

YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s only too real.
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Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily

BAGHDAD, Feb (IPS) - The lack of security in Iraq is leading now to a collapse in food supplies.

“Look at us begging for food despite the fortunes we have,” 60-year-old Um Muthanna from Baghdad told IPS. Standing at a vegetable market in central Baghdad where vegetable supplies are not what they used to be, Um Mahmood despaired for Iraq.
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Zoltán Dujisin

BUDAPEST, Feb 19 (IPS) - The arguments put forward by the United States to justify its project for a missile defence base in Eastern Europe are becoming less and less convincing to public opinion and experts of the countries involved.
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How the World Can Stop Bush

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
What would be the consequences of a US or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear energy sites?
At the 2006 Perdana Global Peace Forum, Australian medical scientist Dr. Helen Caldicott provided an authoritative analysis of the devastating impact on human life that would result from the radiation release from such an attack. (more…)

Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 16 (IPS) - For several weeks now, Washington has been abuzz with rumours that U.S. President George W. Bush is preparing to attack nuclear and other sites in Iran this spring – rumours deemed sufficiently credible that lawmakers from both parties are hastily preparing legislation precisely to prevent such an eventuality.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial

Before things get any more out of hand, President Bush needs to make his intentions toward Iran clear. And Congress needs to make it clear that this time it will be neither tricked nor bullied into supporting another disastrous war.
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - Tuesday’s deal between North Korea and five other nations, including the United States, to take the first concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament in exchange for aid and normalised relations marks a long-awaited diplomatic breakthrough for U.S. President George W. Bush and a clear victory for “realists” in his administration.
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By Michael Albert

Have you ever felt like there are things you want to know about what someone thinks that would matter for the lives of many people and yet you have no way to get the answers? You can’t call the person on the phone and ask their views. The person doesn’t have a public phone number. You can’t appeal to friendship. The person doesn’t know you. You can’t use email. The person has no public email address. In the case of some folks, of course, all that insulation from the public is reasonable. Take Hugo Chavez, for example. For him to have a public phone number or email address would be ridiculously dysfunctional. But what if you have questions and you not only can’t get direct answers, but you also can’t get your questions answered by way of intermediaries because those routes are mazes that lead nowhere. Most often, then, pragmatism should trump futile persistence. Move on.
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Analysis by Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Feb 14 (IPS) - Perhaps more than anything else, the deal on denuclearising North Korea, drafted by China and agreed to by all six parties in Beijing, has scuttled the United States’ intentions of engineering a ‘regime change’ in the ‘Hermit Kingdom’.
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By STEPHANIE GASKELL
New York Post

February 2007 – Mayor Bloomberg is meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today to urge her to help keep the United Nations in New York City.
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Democracy Now!

A group of prominent British Jews have launched an organization to counterbalance what they perceive as uncritical support of Israel by major Jewish institutions in the UK. The organization, called Independent Jewish Voices, or IJV, includes well-known public figures in Britain’s Jewish community, including Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter and fashion designer Nicole Farhi. We go to London to speak with two of the group’s members. [includes rush transcript]
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - Africa and human rights activists who have been pressing U.S. President George W. Bush to take strong measures to halt what he himself has called “genocide” in the Darfur region of Sudan are growing increasingly infuriated with Washington’s inaction.
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Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Feb 12 (IPS) - Despite great expectations for a breakthrough deal on ending North Korea’s nuclear crisis, four days of tough international negotiations sponsored by China have produced little hope of a quick resolution.
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Friday 2007

The prosecution has rested its case in the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff. Libby faces five counts of lying to federal investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice in connection to the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Plame’s identity was leaked after her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, questioned the Bush administration’s pre-war claims on Iraqi weapons. Meanwhile, a Pentagon investigation has concluded Bush administration officials engaged in inappropriate behavior in their handling of Iraq intelligence before the US invasion. We’re joined by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff. [includes rush transcript] The prosecution has rested its case in the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff. Libby faces five counts of lying to federal investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice in connection to the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The prosecution’s key witness over the past two days has been Tim Russert, NBC News Washington bureau chief and the host of Meet the Press. Russert testified he didn’t talk about Plame with Libby – contradicting Libby’s claim. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald played the jury a recording that begins with Libby describing to Fitzgerald what he claims Russert told him.
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Claudia Ciobanu

BUCHAREST, Feb (IPS) - Petrosani, a town of about 50,000, presents a stark picture today of what the abrupt replacement of state socialism by unbridled capitalism can do.
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Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

Whenever they face a crisis, civilizations look back to their past, seeking inspiration for the future. We are today in the heart of a phenomenal world-wide crisis that affects all civilizations. The crisis could spur a leap towards a superior humanization, or it could be a tragic menace to our entire species. In such a critical moment, it is of great interest to explore our most ancient roots and that seminal beginning when we moved from being primates to being human beings. There must be lessons here that could be useful to us now.
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Long-Term Price of Providing Veterans Medical Care Could Reach $660 Billion

Democracy Now!
February 2007

Over 200,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at Veterans Affairs medical facilities thus far, with 900,000 still deployed on active duty. A new study from Harvard University predicts that the cost of medical care and compensation benefits for returning veterans will skyrocket once those troops return home. [includes rush transcript] A new study from Harvard University reports that the hidden financial costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan will overwhelm the Department of Veterans Affairs for decades. The study, titled “Soldiers Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan: The long-term costs of providing veterans medical care and disability benefits,” finds that the Veterans Administration is both under-funded and under-equipped to deal with the current and future costs of veterans’ health care.
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Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - Publicising a self-styled crusade against corruption, the World Bank says it is successfully stepping up its campaign against graft, probing more than 400 cases over the last two years alone and barring dozens of companies and individuals from future World Bank contracts. But critics doubt the scope of the claims.
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Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Feb (IPS) - The supreme irony of President George W. Bush’s campaign to blame Iran for the sectarian civil war in Iraq, as well as attacks on U.S. forces, is that the Shiite militias who started to drive the Sunnis out of the Baghdad area in 2004 and thus precipitated the present sectarian crisis did so with the support of both Iran and the neoconservative U.S. war planners.
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Eric Alterman, the author of the famous book” What Alternative media", in which he exposes the lack of pluralism in American media, has published a riveting book about case studies of lies from five American Presidents. What is impressive about the book is the amount of research, which makes the study more compelling, because it eliminates any possibility of doubts. Here goes a presentation by Eric Alterman of his work….
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Stephen Leahy*

TORONTO, Feb 6 (Tierramérica) - The predictions in the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says the planet’s average temperatures could increase four degrees Celsius by 2100, are seen as solid forecasts by some scientists, while others say they fall short.
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By Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6154457.html

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.
Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords. (more…)

by Immanuel Wallerstein

The World Social Forum (WSF) met in Nairobi, Kenya from January 20-25.
The organization, founded as a sort of anti-Davos, has matured and
evolved more than even its participants realize. From the beginning,
the WSF has been a meeting of a wide range of organizations and
movements from around the world who defined themselves as opposed to
neo-liberal globalization and imperialism in all its forms. Its
slogan has been “another world is possible” and its structure has
been that of an open space without officers, spokespeople, or
resolutions. The WSF has been against neo-liberal globalization and
the term alterglobalists has been coined to define the stance of its
proponents - another kind of global structure.
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Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Feb 5 (IPS) - The long awaited United Nations proposal on the status of the southern Serbian province Kosovo takes it towards independence, but not all the way.
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Raúl Zibechi

The controversy born in the heat of the recent proposal of President Hugo Chavez to create a single party of his supporters in Venezuela, which goes hand-in-hand with his initiative of building socialism for the 21st century, seems like a good opportunity to air a debate which is always valid and necessarily inconclusive about the other world to which many of us aspire. As Edgardo Lander, the Venezuelan sociologist, has pointed out, it turns out to be impossible to move ahead in the debate without making a balance-sheet of real socialism. For those of us who have formed themselves with the thinking of Marx, past and present experience of the “historical movement that is developing before our eyes” (the Communist Manifesto) is the unavoidable reference point for that debate.
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By Roberto Savio (*)

NAIROBI, Feb (IPS) Seven World Social Forums (WSF) have been enough
for the dynamic of civil society to complete a cycle and initiate a
stage of profound change – in contrast to the World Economic Forum
(WEF), which has been held 37 times.
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Julio Godoy

PARIS, Feb 1 (IPS) - The fourth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will confirm catastrophic predictions on global warming and its effect on nature and weather cycles over coming decades.
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Zia Mian
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

The Iraq War is coming up on its fourth anniversary. Increasingly embattled, even desperate, President Bush has decided to send another 21,500 American troops into the fight. They will join over 150,000 U.S. soldiers already deployed in Iraq.
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