By Tom Ridge and Barry McCaffrey |

July 31, 2007

WHILE THE war in Iraq continues to dominate the news and the presidential candidates bob and weave on the issue, the nation finds itself at a major foreign policy crossroads. Elevated terrorist threat levels and global events make it increasingly clear that the next president will face national security and foreign policy challenges that will extend far beyond the question of what to do in Iraq. The path we choose will determine our future security, our image abroad, and our ability to continue to be a credible global leader.
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By Ali al-Fadhily*

BAGHDAD, Jul 31 (IPS) - Many Iraqis believe the dramatic escalation in U.S. military use of air power is a sign of defeat for the occupation forces on the ground.

U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first six months of this year as over the first half of 2006, according to official information.
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By Zoltán Dujisin

GJIROKASTRA, Jul 30 (IPS) - Good looks have not sufficed to make Gjirokaster, a picturesque historical city in Southern Albania, the wealthy and successful tourist destination it aspires to be.

Tourism is practically the only aspiration for the 30,000-inhabitant town where most of its formerly important light industries have gone bankrupt.
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By Harriette Onyalla and Gladys Kalibala

Sunday, 29th July, 2007

THE World Health Organisation will advocate for a reduction in price of the long lasting insecticide-treated mosquito nets to fight malaria in Africa.

The representative, Dr. George Melville, said in order to eliminate malaria from the continent, there is need to ensure that adult mosquitoes are killed, those that survive are denied breeding grounds and chances of biting people.
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Seven percent of Afghan children suffer acute malnutrition and 54 percent of them are chronically malnourished, according to UNICEF

KABUL, 26 July 2007 (IRIN) - In 2007 floods, diseases, drought and armed conflict have increased the need for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, the UN Children’s Agency (UNICEF) said in its donor update report issued on 26 July. Women and children have been particularly affected, it said.
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By Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON, Jul 27 (IPS) - A shocking thing happens midway through Norman Solomon’s documentary film “War Made Easy".

While analysing the George W. Bush administration’s lead-up to the Iraq invasion, Solomon plays a news clip of Eason Jordan, a CNN News chief executive who, in an interview with CNN, boasts of the network’s cadre of professional “military experts". In fact, CNN’s retired military generals turned war analysts were so good, Eason said, that they had all been vetted and approved by the U.S. government.
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By John Bercow, MP

26 July 2007

The people of Burma endure human rights abuses on an unimaginable scale. Rape, torture and forced labour are facts of their lives. So why does the world refuse to act? A cross-party group of MPs has returned shocked by what they discovered there

Burma suffers a political, human rights and humanitarian situation as grim as any in the world today. The country is run by an utterly illegitimate government that spends 50 per cent of its budget on the military and less than a $1 (50p) per head on the health and education of its own citizens.
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By Steven Lang

JOHANNESBURG, Jul 25 (IPS) - Water resources are unevenly distributed throughout the countries of Southern Africa. The region boasts of some of the world’s largest lakes and rivers, but is also a land of vast deserts.

Measured by volume the Congo River, rising in the East African highlands and flowing through the rainforests of Central Africa, is second only to the Amazon. Lake Tanganyika, one of Africa’s Great Lakes, contains the second largest volume of freshwater in the world, and Lake Victoria has the second largest surface area of any freshwater lake.
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IRIN In-Depth

JOHANNESBURG, 24 July 2007 (IRIN In-Depth) - Women’s voices have gone largely unheard in the debate on male circumcision as an HIV prevention method, but informal discussions with women reveal a range of concerns, preferences and views that researchers and governments would do well to consider before drawing up plans for rolling out a national circumcision programme.
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By Bill Berkowitz*

OAKLAND, Jul 25 (IPS) - That it happened at all was a major feat. That not much was resolved was not surprising. That those involved are determined to meet again is fascinating. That it was organised by a controversial faith healer has made it that much more noteworthy.
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HARARE, 23 July 2007 (IRIN) - An urgent call on Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF government and the international donor community to mobilise food aid to avert an impending crisis has been met with assurances by government that “no one will starve".
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By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

CAIRO, Jul 24 (IPS) - A recent statement by Pope Benedict XVI in which he declared the Roman Catholic Church to be the only “complete” Christian faith met with angry responses from the heads of several western, Protestant denominations. In Egypt, meanwhile, Benedict’s assertion about Eastern Orthodox churches – that they “lacked something” in their capacities as churches – prompted no less of an angry reaction from the Orthodox Coptic Christian community.
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AAP - July 22, 2007 -

Leading HIV experts say it is a “shameful failure” that lives are still being lost to AIDS despite major scientific breakthroughs in the field of HIV treatment.

Organisers of an international HIV conference in Sydney have warned that the world is some way off achieving the 2010 deadline to make drug treatments universally available to sufferers.
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By Michael Deibert

PARIS, Jul 23 (IPS) - While China’s growing trade and investment flows to Africa have sparked a sometimes contentious debate with the United States and Europe over who has the continent’s best interests at heart, a closer look at the dynamic developing reveals a political landscape where the rhetoric is rarely in line with the reality, observers say.
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By Robin Wright

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 20, 2007

Pledging to make headway where others have failed, Tony Blair made his debut as the new Middle East envoy at a meeting in Portugal yesterday with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and representatives of the European Union and Russia.
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By Ellen Massey

WASHINGTON, Jul 20 (IPS) - At the end of June, a few members of the U.S. Congress made a discreet move to limit this country’s exports of cluster bombs, a weapon that has been used around the world since the Second World War to devastating humanitarian consequences.
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BEIRUT, 18 July 2007 (IRIN) - Abdullah lives like no eight year-old-boy should. Two years ago, the youngster from Raqqa, a town in the north of Syria on the banks of the River Euphrates, travelled to Lebanon with his three brothers, looking for work.

Today, Abdullah lives with around 20 other workers in a ramshackle encampment on a patch of wasteland in Lailaki, a poor suburb of south Beirut.
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By Julio Godoy

BERLIN, Jul 19 (IPS) - A summit on integration of some 15 million migrants into German society has produced an ambitious new programme.

The plan approved by the summit Jul. 12 includes about 400 measures, including such salient ones as more German language courses, more public service jobs for immigrants and those of immigrant origin, more training for youth in businesses, and special learning aid for children.
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JANE ARMSTRONG
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

July 18, 2007

In the past decade, 13 members of the news media have been slain in contract-style killings, a U.S. press watchdog says

MOSCOW — Once, Andrei Kalitin was part of a new breed of young, hot-shot Russian journalists, riding the wave of openness that washed over the country when the former Soviet Union collapsed.
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Interview with Aruna Rao

ROME, Jul 18 (IPS) - The women’s movement over the last decade has revealed how legislative guarantees and policy reforms do not necessarily result in opening institutional spaces, and that participation does not necessarily translate into influence.

To achieve true empowerment for women, “governments need to focus on supporting gender-sensitive institutional change in the institutions of governance,” says Aruna Rao.
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BBC

Indian men cannot be trusted and their promiscuous behaviour is fuelling the country’s HIV epidemic, an MP has said.

Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhury said Indian women should protect themselves from HIV/Aids by keeping condoms at home.
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By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jul 17 (IPS) - A sharp difference of opinion between the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) and the United Nations Environment programme (UNEP) has surfaced over a flagship venture of the Manila-based financial institution.
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By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Jul 16 (IPS) - An excessive number of aid donors is hampering efforts to make development assistance more effective, a new study has found.

After examining European Union aid to Cambodia, Mozambique and Peru, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London calculated that these countries have to deal with 15-17 bilateral donors from the EU, as well as the European Commission. The figure is even higher if bodies representing regions like Catalonia in Spain or Flanders in Belgium – both of which have offices in Mozambique – are included.
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Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Julian Borger

The Guardian-Monday July 16, 2007

· Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out
· President ‘not prepared to leave conflict unresolved’

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.
The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: “Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo.”
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By Michael Deibert

PARIS, Jul 13 (IPS) - While oil profits have flooded into countries such as Angola and Nigeria in recent decades, some African observers see new potential for the continent in the form of increasingly in-demand biofuels.
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by Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

Ten years ago, I stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate to introduce a bill, which eventually became known as the “Helms-Biden law", to authorize the payment of nearly $1 billion in back dues to the United Nations. Securing its passage was a hard-fought, but worthwhile, initiative.
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UN Dispatch - 11 July 2007 –

United Nations officials say the global treaty to protect the rights of the world’s estimated 650 million people with disabilities could take effect by early next year after Qatar this week became the 100th country to sign the landmark pact.
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By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 12 (IPS) - Despite the media’s and official Washington’s focus on Iraq and Iran as the most urgent challenges to U.S. foreign policy, a growing chorus of voices is calling for a major shift towards what they regard as the “central front in the war on terror” – Pakistan.
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By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 11 (IPS) - For the second year in a row, violence and persecution in Iraq fuelled a sharp rise in the number of people worldwide who were forced to flee their homelands, according to the latest edition of “World Refugee” released here Wednesday by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).
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NAIROBI, 10 July 2007 (PlusNews) - After burning the midnight oil for many weeks while preparing a US$50 million gender-based project proposal to lay before the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, Swazi activists found that it had vanished from their country’s grant application. They were dumbfounded.
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By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 10 (IPS) - Mark Malloch Brown, a former U.N. deputy secretary-general, recently anointed with the newly-created portfolio of British “minister of state for Africa, Asia and the United Nations", was a devoted loyalist who stood by the beleaguered former Secretary-General Kofi Annan right to the end.
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Monday, July 9th, 2007
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The race for the 2008 election is on, and all we hear about is the race for the money. Presidential hopefuls are vying with each other to raise tens of millions of dollars for what is projected to be the most expensive election in history. But hardly anyone is talking about where this money comes from or where it ends up. Fewer still have asked persistent questions about corporate America’s grip over not just the elections, but most policy decisions out of Washington, DC.
Today, we spend the hour with a man who has spent the last four decades doing all of this and more. I’m talking about consumer advocate, corporate critic, and three-time (will it be more?) presidential candidate Ralph Nader. We spoke with him in June at the end of a conference called “Taming the Giant Corporation.”
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UN Dispatch

6 July 2007 – The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) today urged States to step up and assist the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees – Syria and Jordan – which have still received “next to nothing,” despite the pledges of support made during an international conference on the issue in April. (more…)

By Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Jul 9 (IPS) - Try as it might Dow Chemical Company is unable to shake off the criminal liability it inherited for the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster and also responsibility to clean up toxic contamination at the site of the pesticides plant, originally owned and operated by Union Carbide Corporation.
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By Helena Cobban

Charlottesville, Va.
How effective are war-crimes courts at demonstrating that no one, regardless of his position, is above the law? Many rights activists had hoped that – after their disappointment with the trials of Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, under way in The Hague, could finally send the “right” deterrent message to other potentially abusive national leaders.
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By David Cronin

THE HAGUE, Jul 5 (IPS) - The use of contraceptives in poor countries needs to be actively promoted, the Dutch minister for development assistance has said.

Bert Koenders, who recently marked his first 100 days as member of the Dutch government, claimed that an “ideological campaign against condoms is sabotaging the fight against AIDS.”
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By Joyce Mulama

ACCRA, Jul 4 (IPS) - A gradual approach to pan-African government has won the day at the annual African Union (AU) summit that ended Tuesday in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, where a stormy debate on this issue continued into the night.
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Democracy Now!

Thirty-five years ago this weekend, Beacon Press lost a Supreme Court case brought against it by the US government for publishing the first full edition of the Pentagon Papers. It is now well known how the New York Times first published excerpts of the top-secret documents in June 1971. But less well known is how the Beacon Press - a small, nonprofit publisher affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association - came to publish the complete 7,000 pages that exposed the true history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Their publication led the Press into a spiral of two and a half years of harassment, intimidation, near-bankruptcy, and the possibility of criminal prosecution.
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Democracy Now!

The narrow 5-4 ruling rejected using race as a criteria for assigning students for different schools, rejecting integration plans for school districts in Seattle, Washington and Louisville, Kentucky. We speak with NAACP Legal Defense Fund Director Ted Shaw. [includes rush transcript] In a landmark decision Thursday, the Supreme Court voted against voluntary desegregation plans. The narrow 5-4 ruling rejected using race as a criteria for assigning students for different schools. It rejected integration plans for school districts in Seattle, Washington and Louisville, Kentucky and supported white parents from both cities whose children had been denied admission to schools nearest to them because of their diversity policies.
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By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul (IPS) - There may be moments during their summit at his family’s compound in Kennebunkport, Maine when U.S. President George W. Bush looks with envy on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, whose popularity at home guarantees him vast influence even as he prepares to leave office just nine months from now.
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Thousands of Activists Gather in Atlanta for the First-Ever U.S. Social Forum

Democracy Now!

Inspired by previous World Social Forums in Brazil, India and Kenya, over 10,000 grassroots activists have gathered in Atlanta this week for the first United States Social Forum. We begin our Atlanta coverage with Alice Lovelace, the national lead staff organizer for the U.S. Social Forum. [includes rush transcript] Over 10,000 grassroots activists have gathered in Atlanta this week for the first United States Social Forum. The theme of the five-day event has been: “Another World Is Possible. Another U.S. Is Necessary.” The gathering has been inspired by previous World Social Forums in Brazil, India and Kenya.
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By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Jul (IPS) - European Union officials have signalled that they will ban subsidies for biofuels in cases where their production causes serious environmental damage.
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