By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Aug 31 (IPS) - Poverty in the Palestinian territories has reached “unprecedented levels” because they have been held under an “economic siege” for almost seven years, a United Nations body has found.

During 2006 the number of Palestinians living in ‘deep poverty’ almost doubled to more than 1 million. Some 46 percent of public sector employees do not have enough food to meet their basic needs, with 53 percent of households in the Gaza reporting that their incomes declined in the last year by more than half.
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GLOBE EDITORIAL

August 31, 2007

PRO-DEMOCRACY activists, students, Buddhist monks, and citizens who are simply fed up with the ruling military junta in Burma have been staging impromptu protests since Aug. 19, when the cancellation of fuel subsidies sent prices soaring. The burden is unbearable for many of the 90 percent of Burma’s population living at or below the poverty line. The regime has responded to the demonstrations with violent repression. Plainclothes security agents and gangs of young thugs working for the junta beat up the protesters and throw them into flatbed trucks. Among those arrested are members of the 1988 democracy movement who have already survived long prison sentences and torture. These followers of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi are expressing resistance to the dictatorship even at the risk of losing their freedom once again.
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By Nitin Jugran Bahuguna

NEW DELHI, Aug 30 (IPS) - Though adolescents are said to be at the centre of the AIDS epidemic and India has the largest number of infections in Asia, this conservative country continues to shy away from incorporating sex education in school curricula.
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Editorial

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The economic party is winding down and most working Americans never even got near the punch bowl.
The Census Bureau reported yesterday that median household income rose 0.7 percent last year — it’s second annual increase in a row— to $48,201. The share of households living in poverty fell to 12.3 percent from 12.6 percent in 2005. This seems like welcome news, but a deeper look at the belated improvement in these numbers — more than five years after the end of the last recession — underscores how the gains from economic growth have failed to benefit most of the population.
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Analysis by Trita Parsi*

WASHINGTON, Aug 29 (IPS) - The George W. Bush administration has seemingly taken advantage of the Congressional recess to escalate tensions with Iran.

Earlier in August, the State Department revealed plans to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a global terrorist organisation. On Tuesday, in a speech to U.S. war veterans in Nevada, President Bush raised the temperature further by declaring his intent to “confront Tehran’s murderous activities” in Iraq.
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By BRIAN CONCANNON

This week the world officially commemorated one of the pivotal events of modern history with deafening silence. On August 23, 1791, a group of slaves in Haiti led by a man named Boukman ignited a revolt that changed the world. They attacked their French masters, and kept fighting until Haiti wrested independence from Napoleon in 1804. Haiti’s rebellion metastasized: the independent nation run by former slaves inspired people held in bondage throughout the world, and forever undermined the “moral” and philosophical underpinnings of slavery. Slavery held on for decades- more than seven decades in the U.S. - but from that time on it was fighting a losing battle.
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By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Aug 28 (IPS) - Israeli officials warned the George W. Bush administration that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilising to the region and urged the United States to instead target Iran as the primary enemy, according to former administration official Lawrence Wilkerson.
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By Stefania Milan

PADUA, Italy, Aug 27 (IPS) - Mid-August, a normal week in Lampedusa, a small Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. In all, 439 illegal migrants, including a 15-day old baby, arrived from North Africa in old motorboats. The same week, 20 bodies were found off the coast, victims of earlier shipwrecks.
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by NATALIE OBIKO PEARSON and IAN JAMES

Laid-off Brazilian factory workers have their jobs back, Nicaraguan farmers are getting low-interest loans and Bolivian mayors can afford new health clinics, all thanks to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Bolstered by windfall oil profits, Chavez’s government is now offering more direct state funding to Latin America and the Caribbean than the United States. A tally by The Associated Press shows Venezuela has pledged more than $8.8 billion in aid, financing and energy funding so far this year.
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Analysis by Lester R. Brown*

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (IPS) - In urban settings, the one-time use of water to disperse human and industrial wastes is becoming an outmoded practice, made obsolete by new technologies and water shortages.

Water enters a city, becomes contaminated with human and industrial wastes, and leaves the city dangerously polluted. Toxic industrial wastes discharged into rivers and lakes or into wells also permeate aquifers, making water – both surface and underground – unsafe for drinking. And their toxic wastes are destroying marine ecosystems, including local fisheries.
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By NORMAN SOLOMON

The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state.
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By Danna Harman

Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

“Is this really how to save Africa?” asks Tanzanian columnist Ayub Rioba, a day after Bill Clinton has left Africa. “We appreciate generous and humane contributions from people like Bill Clinton,” he writes in The Citizen, a respected Tanzanian national daily paper. “But we [Africans] must also show that we are doing something. We cannot sit just like couch potatoes waiting for others to come and give us medicine.”
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By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug (IPS) - Opening a new campaign to sustain his “surge” strategy in Iraq, President George W. Bush Wednesday compared Washington’s ongoing struggle there to both World War II and the Vietnam War where, he said, Washington’s withdrawal led to disaster for “millions of innocent citizens.”
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Analysis by Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Aug 22 (IPS) - Israeli officials have used almost every public platform over the last week to declare that Israel has no war-like intentions toward Syria. Officials in Damascus have made similar soothing proclamations, insisting they have no belligerent intentions toward Jerusalem. And, recently, senior officials from two Arab states passed on messages to Israel that Syria is not planning an attack in the coming months.
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NEPAL: Traffickers exploit increased mobility of underage girls

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BANKE, 22 August 2007 (IRIN) - Sixteen-year-old Sushma does not want to reveal her true identity for fear that the traffickers who sold her into the notorious brothel area of Kamathipura in Mumbai, India, could track her down and kill her.
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By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

CAIRO, Aug 21 (IPS) - Ever since the takeover of Gaza two months ago by Palestinian resistance faction Hamas, Washington and its allies have steadfastly supported the rival Fatah movement headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. But public support for Fatah, which has come to be seen by many as a stooge of Washington and Tel Aviv, has dropped off markedly.
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By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS*

Jose Padilla’s conviction on terrorism charges on August 16 was a victory, not for justice, but for the US Justice (sic) Department’s theory, the incompetent Padilla Jury delivered a deadly blow to the rule of law and opened Pandora’s Box.
Anglo-American law is a human achievement 800 years in the making. Over centuries law was transformed from a weapon in the hands of government into a shield of the people from unaccountable power. The Padilla Jury’s verdict turned law back into a weapon.
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By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO *

It’s no coincidence that the American corporate media is the wealthiest communication systems in the world, yet also one of the worst in terms of educating its citizens. Extraordinary riches require extraordinary efforts to divert public attention from extreme inequality and the democratic deficit under which Americans suffer.
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By Zoltán Dujisin

BUDAPEST, Aug 15 (IPS) - The European Union has agreed on a document to reform itself institutionally, but Brussels is beginning to understand it will have to get used to tough opposition from some of its Eastern European member states.

The Jun. 22 agreement set the mandate for completing an EU institutional reform treaty, which experts estimate will come into force by spring 2009 at the latest.
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by Jonathan Cook

August 16, 2007

Znet

This week marks a year since the end of hostilities now officially called the Second Lebanon war by Israelis. A month of fighting – mostly Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon, and rocket attacks from the Shia militia Hizbullah on northern Israel in response – ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.
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By Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Aug 17 (IPS) - The United States-India nuclear cooperation agreement, tabled in India’s Parliament on Monday, has precipitated the worst-ever political crisis for the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government since it was formed a little over three years ago.
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Rubrick Biegon | August 9, 2007
Editor: Saif Rahman and John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

Foreign policy and bridges are not typically associated with one another, except perhaps in the metaphorical sense, as with President Clinton’s “building a bridge to the twenty-first century” campaign slogan. The recent tragedy in Minneapolis, however, in which the collapse of an interstate highway bridge across the Mississippi River left at least 5 people dead and over 100 injured, raises the prospect of a more material relationship.
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Analysis by Trita Parsi*

WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (IPS) - The White House’s decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organisation could deal a double blow to efforts to utilise diplomacy with Iran to stabilise Iraq.
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Jose Felix Rivas Alvarado

The brief evolution of the proposal for the Bank of the South serves as a good example of “resistance to change”. Initially, those who like to think of themselves as opinion leaders in political and financial circles, perceived it as a mere rhetorical idea put forward by President Hugo Chavez. That is, as another one of the many proposals by the Venezuelan president, concerning non-dependent Latin American integration practices, which have been underestimated by the pedantry of those who traditionally have considered themselves the owners of the hemisphere.
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By Tahir Qadiry

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Aug (IPS) - Women have stormed a male bastion in this historic city, capital of the northern province of Balkh, and traditionalists are clicking their tongues in disapproval.
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by Nicola Nasser
August 2007
Znet

The major political players who are involved in sealing off 1.5 million Palestinians into an open air prison in the world’s most densely populated 360-square-kilometre area of the Gaza Strip are unmercifully trespassing humanitarian borders there; they perceive in the collapsing economy of the Mediterranean coastal strip, which is rapidly developing into a humanitarian crisis, a political “window of opportunity.”
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By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Aug (IPS) - Cirila Pulido and Teófila Ochoa were 12 and 13 years old when a Peruvian army patrol entered their village of Accomarca in Peru’s southern Andean region of Ayacucho on Aug. 14, 1985 and murdered 69 villagers, including the two girls’ mothers and siblings.
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Col. Daniel Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.) | August 2007
Editor: Miriam Pemberton
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

The “headline-grabber” read: “U.S. Plans New Arms Sales to Gulf Allies.”

Nothing startling there. For decades the United States has routinely sold or transferred weapons and ammunition, sent military teams abroad or brought foreign military personnel to the United States for training, and transferred technology that allowed “friendly” governments to produce almost state-of-the-art copies of U.S. weapons.
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Analysis by Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Aug 13 (IPS) - The “breakthrough” United States-India nuclear cooperation agreement finalised three weeks ago in Washington has run into serious all-round opposition in India and put Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a piquant situation
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By Mohamed Fofanah

FREETOWN, Aug 10 (IPS) - Sierra Leone will hold general elections Saturday with a number of significant achievements in hand, not least maintaining peace for five years.
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Banana Republic

By CHRIS FLOYD

As Jonathan Schwarz recently noted, there is a
deeply discouraging sameness about the outrages
that dissenting writers must address – and a new
front-page story in the Washington Post is a
perfect example. In fact, it’s a piece that could
have been written at any time in the last 100
years or more: “Feds Look the Other Way While
United Fruit Company Peddles Death and Corruption in Latin America”
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Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Aug 9 (IPS) - In hailing what he has called an “almost breathtaking” turnaround in Anbar Province that has weakened al Qaeda as a triumph for his new military strategy in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus has put a favourable spin on a development which actually challenges the central rationale for continued U.S. military occupation of Iraq.
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Alan F. Kay, 10 Carrera St., St. Augustine FL 32084, 904-826-0984

Among the 30% of the public who are Bush supporters, many dislike the incompetence and failures of his administration. Still they support Bush because they perceive Democrats as weak and disorganized – easily manipulated by the Bush team. Efforts of congressional Democrats to end the war in Iraq have so far been frustrated.
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Jennifer Moore

“We stand for ‘yes’,” said Ana Felicia Torres of Costa Rica. “We say yes to life, to human rights, to public services…education, health, housing.” While the women’s movement is actively opposing the ratification of CAFTA in Costa Rica - the only Central American nation party to this agreement not to have yet approved it - Torres emphasized that women are equally active in the search and defense of alternatives.
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Analysis by Meena Janardhan

DUBAI, Aug 8 (IPS) - The new United States plan to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and other allies in the Middle East to counter growing Iranian influence could trigger an arms race and worsen instability in an already volatile region, say experts.
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Haseenah Koyakutty | August 2007

Editor: John Feffer

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

When the surge is fully debated, the troops come home, the war is ended, and the losses counted, an unexpected casualty of the Iraq War could end up being the Far East. America’s longstanding relations with Asia are steadily going up in smoke.

The Bush administration has upset the 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) by recently calling off the commemorative U.S.-ASEAN Summit planned for September. The reason: the administration’s ugly face-off with Congress over Iraq. No one in the administration foresaw that the September 5 summit in Singapore was going to conflict with General Petraeus’s report card on the surge. The congressional calendar is predictable, even if politics is not, and the 10 heads of government are being stood up over what is apparently a scheduling glitch.
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Interview with Enrique Barón Crespo of the European Parliament

MADRID, Aug (IPS) - The European Union (EU) is a world power, the largest import market, and the biggest donor of development aid, which puts it in a position to promote democratic globalisation characterised by peace and social justice, according to Enrique Barón Crespo, a member of the European Parliament’s International Trade Committee.
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Marie Trigona

A much awaited human rights abuse trial is underway in Argentina. The accused is a catholic priest charged with carrying out human rights abuses while working in several clandestine detention centers during the nation’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship. The priest was arrested four years ago while living under an alias in Chile. This is the latest human rights trial of accused torturers since the landmark conviction of a former police officer for genocide in 2006.
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Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Aug (IPS) - A little-noticed statement by U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker after last week’s U.S.-Iran meeting revealed that the main demand of the George W. Bush administration to Iran is not to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militias but to use its influence with Shiites in Iraq to reduce their attacks on occupation forces.
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By Khody Akhavi

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 1, 2007.

WASHINGTON, Aug (IPS) - Political factions Fatah and Hamas must reconcile in order to pursue a sustainable peace in the Palestinian territories, and if and when a power-sharing agreement is brokered, the international community must be willing to accept it, according to a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG).
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News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch awaits FCC approval for his purchase of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. The sale would bring one of the nation’s oldest and most respected newspapers under a vast media empire that includes the Fox Television network, 21st Century Fox film studio, and more than 175 other newspapers. We’re joined by Dow Jones union leader and radio host Steven Yount, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sydney Schanberg, and Craig Aaron of the media reform organization Free Press. [includes rush transcript] While Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal appears to be a done deal, the takeover still needs to be OK’d by the Federal Communications Commission. On Wednesday FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said approval by the FCC was no slam dunk. Copps, a Democrat, said: “This deal means more media consolidation and fewer independent voices… What’s good for shareholders of huge media conglomerates isn’t always what’s good for the public interest or our civic dialogue.” In a moment we will discuss Rupert Murdoch’s growing media empire but first we turn to a short video produced by the media advocacy group Free Press.
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Oscar Ugarteche

We are in the midst of a change of epoch. Multilateralism as we knew it has ceased to function in the international sphere, and the world economy is moving within a new social and political order that is being built bilaterally, plurilaterally and regionally. We know that it’s a change of epoch because theories that were useful to explain the past do not help us to predict the future. The so-called market economy which held sway until 1930 returned in the 1980’s with its royal decree that the law of the strongest reigns and that Power will abuse all that it can as far social and political actors will allow. Particularly in international finance.
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Interview with Aisha Lee Shaheed

Credit:Sabina Zaccaro

Aisha Lee Shaheed.

ROME, Aug (IPS) - Rising fundamentalisms around the world are challenging human rights, and particularly women’s rights, feminist groups say. But this is not an Islam-related problem only, and isolating Muslim fundamentalism does not help Muslim women.
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Walden Bello | July 2007
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

Ten years after the Asian financial cataclysm of 1997, the economies of the Western Pacific Rim are growing, though not at the rates they enjoyed before the crisis. The region has been indelibly scarred by the crisis. There is greater poverty, inequality, and social destabilization than before the crisis. South Korea’s painful labor market reforms, for instance, have produced the quiet desperation behind one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul (IPS) - Just 25 months after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced 60 years of U.S. support for authoritarian governments in Arab world, she and Pentagon chief Robert Gates are on their way to the Middle East bearing arms and an uncannily familiar strategic vision to the same regimes.
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