UN Dispatch

Though far from the television screens of most Americans, some of the fighting in Ethiopia and Eritrea resembles a war with which they might be familiar. At its peak, hundreds of kilometers of trenches snaked their way around the border region of the two neighboring countries in the Horn of Africa, raising frequent comparisons to World War One. And like World War One, the toll of the trench warfare on conscripts has been exacting. Though no one knows for sure, 70,000 people are estimated to have been killed. There have also been as many as 700,000 displaced or made refugees from the war, which at one point cost these desperately impoverished countries $1 million a day to sustain.
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Interview with UNICEF’s Carel de Rooy

MOSCOW, May 31 (IPS) - “While UNICEF is happy that children’s rights are commemorated on Jun. 1, we would like to see every day of the year be ‘International Children’s Day’, particularly in Russia, where children remain highly vulnerable,” says Carel de Rooy, the United Nations agency’s representative in Russia and Belarus.
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By Simon Atkinson
Business Reporter, BBC News

After the scandal surrounding the resignation of Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank will be looking for a safe, experienced pair of hands to take over as its leader.

And if, as expected, it accepts the choice of President George W Bush, then Robert Zoellick will be the man who fills the role.
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Diana Cariboni*

MONTEVIDEO, May 30 (IPS) - People have been collectively tearing their hair out all over Latin America because of the Venezuelan government’s decision not to renew the broadcasting licence of that country’s most popular television station, RCTV.

Three former Panamanian presidents – Mireya Moscoso, Guillermo Endara and Ernesto Pérez-Balladares – are planning to lobby the Organisation of American States (OAS) to get its general assembly to discuss the case in its meeting next weekend.
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Zoltán Dujisin

GLASGOW, May 29 (IPS) - Representatives of civic groups from the post-Soviet region admit that their organisations are sometimes more closely following the democratisation line set by donors than the aspirations of their societies.

“Most people are more concerned about socio-economic issues and less about democratisation, and if you want to speak for people you have to be representative of them,” Paata Papava, from the Centre for Training and Consultancy in Georgia, told IPS.
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By Steve Bloomfield.

The Independent - Africa Correspondent

Across Africa, millions are dreaming of fleeing to Europe. Families scrimp and save to find the money needed to secure a seat on a boat. Young men, often fathers, squeeze on to overcrowded, rickety fishing boats that leave Senegal, Libya or Somalia in the dead of night. They take with them nothing more than the hope that a better life lies across the sea.
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Amantha Perera

May , COLOMBO (IPS) - An army-supervised mass resettlement plan underway for more than 100,000 people, displaced by fierce battles with Tamil rebels in eastern Batticaloa district, may be causing new problems for the refugees rather than solving existing ones, say volunteers.
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Zoltan Dujisin

Glasgow 26 may (Terraviva) - Bottom-up, down-to-earth, grassroots, concrete results. Many words describe the same idea: local governments should listen more to those they represent because citizen involvement works well.

At a mini-plenary called “Local Government Making Accountability work at Grassroots Level,” panellists discussed specific actions in specific places while agreeing on common concerns.
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Stephen Zunes | May 2007
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco, IPS
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert continues to resist pressure that he resign following the publication late last month of the interim report by a special Israeli commission on Israel’s war on Lebanon last summer. Military chief Dan Halutz has already been forced to step down and Defense Minister Amir Peretz has announced he will also be resigning shortly.
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Sanjay Suri

GLASGOW, May 25 (IPS) - It might be an unexpected tribute to Paul Wolfowitz that he departed leaving the World Bank a little more civil society like. It might just happen, going by some suggestions John Garrison, senior civil society specialist with the World Bank, made at the Civicus world assembly in Glasgow Friday.
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Irene Leon

Thinking about diversity and putting it into practice opens the door towards a future of consensus and justice. However, to accomplish this, it is up to all of society to make changes in the present, that address the individual and the collective, the public and the private, subverting power relations in all of these arenas.
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Jackson Allers

BEIRUT, May (IPS) - Palestinian factions inside Lebanon have been in a quandary as to how to assist the more than 30,000 residents of the densely populated Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon trapped after three days of fighting between Lebanese Army units and members of a Sunni Islamist group, Fatah al-Islam.
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Mohammed A. Salih

ARBIL, May 21 (IPS) - The working environment for Iraq’s journalists is becoming increasingly dangerous and difficult, with 31 killed just since the start of this year, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).
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By JOCELYN NOVECK,
AP National Writer

It could have been a college reunion: hugs, tears, laughter, photos, and a big friendly guy in shorts and sneakers organizing it all. But the guy in shorts was Michael Moore, whose new documentary, “Sicko,” takes aim at the U.S. health care industry with the same fury — laced with humor, of course, and plenty of statistics — that he directed at the Bush administration in his hit “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
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Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, May (IPS) - World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, who has been warding off accusations of favouritism and nepotism at the Washington-based institution, will resign effective Jun. 30, the first president ever to be forced out.
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Eduardo Tamayo G.

On May 3rd, Finance Ministers from the six countries in favour of establishing the Bank of the South met in Quito to debate what responsibilities this institution should have. The previous week, Ricardo Patiño, Finance Minister of Ecuador, discussed Ecuador’s proposals for the Bank during the international seminar “The Illegitimacy of External Debt” which took place in Quito from the 25th to 27th of April.
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Emir Sader

When Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez launched the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (Spanish acronym ALBA [1]) back in December 2004, such an initiative seemed to be the institutional framework for the agreements Cuba and Venezuela were then developing. It represented a great example of fair trade the World Social Forum had been advocating for several years. Each country supplies what the other lacks: Cuba receives Venezuelan oil — although not at market prices — and in exchange Venezuela receives the only thing Cuba can give: its best personnel in public health, education and sports. Other agreements signed in April 2005 highlighted both countries’ positive attitude toward structural and strategic integration in order to fight capitalism and advance towards 21st-century socialism.
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Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, May 17 (IPS) - Nobody will escape the effects of climate change but the poor in Africa will suffer the most because of decreasing food production and the heightened prevalence of diseases such as malaria, warn environmentalists, church leaders and researchers.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May 16 (IPS) - As international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) continue to spread their wings to the far corners of the world, their social and economic activities, as well as their humanitarian operations in politically-troubled regions, are increasingly under public scrutiny.
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By Raymond Colitt

Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by Pope Benedict’s “arrogant and disrespectful” comments that the Roman Catholic Church had purified them and a revival of their religions would be a backward step.
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James Petras
May 2007

Introduction
Never in recent history has US Middle East policy been subject to such a barrage of conflicting pressures from erstwhile allies, clients as well as adversaries. The points of contention involve fundamental issues of war and peace, foremost of which are divergent responses to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the US-Iranian confrontation, the US occupation of Iraq as well as the US-Ethiopian proxy invasion and occupation of Somalia.
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May (IPS) - Realists in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush appear to have won another victory over the dwindling ranks of neo-conservatives and others hawks with this weekend’s announcement that Washington will soon engage in bilateral talks with Iran.
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Sara Flounders

Why is Iran increasingly a target of U.S. threats? Who in Iran will be affected if the Pentagon implements plans, already drawn up, to strike more than 10,000 targets in the first hours of a U.S. air barrage on Iran?
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Interview with Kumi Naidoo

Kumi Naidoo, secretary general of CIVICUS

JOHANNESBURG, May (IPS) - Less than a fortnight remains before the seventh annual World Assembly of CIVICUS – the World Alliance for Citizen Participation. This Johannesburg-based body brings together non-governmental organisations from across the spectrum to strengthen civil society, notably where its activities are under threat.
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Stephen Zunes | May 2007
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

Even as American officials reluctantly agreed last month to include Syrian representatives in multiparty talks on Iraqi security issues, the Bush administration continues to block Israel from resuming negotiations with Syria over its security concerns. In 2003, President Bashar al-Assad offered to resume peace talks with Israel where they had left off three years earlier, but Israel, backed by the Bush administration, refused. Assad eventually agreed to reenter peace negotiations without preconditions, but even these overtures were rejected.
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Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May (IPS) - Neo-conservative hawks who championed the invasion of Iraq are leading a new campaign to persuade state and local governments, as well as other institutional investors, to “divest” their holdings in foreign companies and U.S. overseas subsidiaries doing business in Iran.
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Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, May 9 (IPS) - The grey walls of Chinese houses in even the tiniest villages in this billion-plus country invariably display slogans extolling the wisdom of “fewer births, better quality of the nation". But a new counter-wisdom is on the rise in urban China, challenging the government’s decades-old efforts to control the country’s population growth.
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By JOSHUA FRANK

Ben Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press 2007) and the editor of Upside Down World, an online magazine that covers Latin American politics, and Toward Freedom, a progressive perspective on world events. Recently Dangl, who won a 2007 Project Censored Award for his coverage of US military operations in Paraguay, spoke with Joshua Frank about the emerging social movements in South America and how they are threatening Washington’s power in the region.
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Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May 8 (IPS) - A move to create a “code of conduct” for the U.N.’s 41 independent monitors – whose investigations include torture, racism, extra-judicial executions and violence against women – has triggered fears of possible restrictions on their existing rights and mandates.
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Nadia Martinez | May 2007
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

As the controversy around Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz’s uncertain future as president of the World Bank intensifies, the financial institution is not only losing supporters. It’s also losing victims. In Latin America, countries are paying off their World Bank loans early, cutting off ties with the Bank, and creating their own financing instruments to replace the world’s oldest multilateral lending agency.
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Damien Millet
&
Eric Toussaint

The World Bank is going through the worst period of its history. Its situation has never been so precarious. Rejected by a growing number of social movements, its credibility has been further undermined by revelations of nepotism on the part of its president, Paul Wolfowitz. At the same time, it is coming under fire from several Latin American governments that are setting up a Southern Bank with radically different perspectives. Could the deathblow be on the way ?
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Analysis by Julio Godoy

PARIS, May 7 (IPS) - Nicolas Sarkozy’s triumph in the French presidential elections could open the way for deep political and social changes, not unlike those that began with the era of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in the 1980s.
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Zoltán Dujisin

KRAKOW, Poland, May 4 (IPS) - The visit to Poland by German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month came as an attempt at closing the gap separating the two neighbours.

Analysts say Merkel’s talks with Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski showed some willingness to ease tensions between the two countries.
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Frida Berrigan

The sun was strong and so was the rhetoric, as President George W. Bush headed to Yuma, Arizona on April 9 to tackle the problem of illegal immigration. Flanked by uniformed border agents, national guardsmen and members of local law enforcement whose stiff formality emphasized his bare-armed enthusiasm, the president asserted that �securing the border is a critical part of a strategy for comprehensive immigration reform� Congress is going to take up the legislation on immigration. It is a matter of national interest and it’s a matter of deep conviction for me.�
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Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, May 3 (IPS) - Only a small proportion of the 235 million people who live in the eight Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) countries scattered over four continents enjoy access to a truly free press.
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By EDITH M. LEDERER
The Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday he intends to use Al Gore’s “very powerful political message” on climate change to mobilize international awareness and political support for international action on global warming.
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Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, May 2 (IPS) - As the world population swells to nine billion by 2050, global biodiversity will be under extreme pressure unless new ways to grow food are developed, experts say.
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Steve Jobs, CEO for Apple and Pixar Animation, gives a memorable speech in Stanford University to students who are about to enter university life. Even without a degree, his message is valuable to all.
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