By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor

The Independent

Published: 28 September 2007

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has been forced to backtrack after dropping a diplomatic clanger, notably upsetting Egypt, Nigeria and Germany, by endorsing four other countries as future permanent members of the UN Security Council.
(more…)

By Meghan Sapp

DURBAN, Sep 27 (IPS) - Biofuels offer Africa the chance to supply itself with alternative energy sources, and also to become a major supplier of these sources for developed markets. Yet, challenges – from creating the relevant infrastructure to competition for biofuel crops from food markets – remain.
(more…)

By Abdoulaye Wade

September 27, 2007

FOR MUCH of the last half-century, the role that African-Americans play in Africa has been more a subject of lip service and rhetorical fealty than reality. That is about to change. Without much notice in the United States, Africa - and the role that African-Americans can fill in promoting its development - is undergoing a deep-seated transformation.
(more…)

By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Sep 27 (IPS) - Seven months after a major investigation spelt out Europe’s involvement in a murky U.S. torture and kidnapping programme, the EU’s governments have claimed they are powerless to prevent such human rights abuses in the future.
(more…)

Sabin Russell, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

With little hope that they will be able to meet their goal of providing universal access to AIDS drugs by 2010, global health strategists have come up with a Plan B.

It would take a quadrupling of current spending, to $42 billion a year, to treat all 14 million people who will need the drugs just three years from now, according to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS.
(more…)

By Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON, Sep 26 (IPS) - Iraq, a quagmire? “No, that’s someone else’s business,” former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld brusquely told the White House press corps in the summer of 2003. “I don’t do quagmires.”

The scene is played twice in Charles Ferguson’s film “No End in Sight", as if cruel irony was easier to swallow the second time around.
(more…)

By Kristi Heim
Seattle Times business reporter

At the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., a malaria-prevention group funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosted lunch recently for 35 African ambassadors and a special guest, South African pop singer Yvonne Chaka Chaka.
(more…)

By Zoltán Dujisin

PRAGUE, Sep 25 (IPS) - The case of an ethnic Hungarian student who claims to have been attacked by Slovak xenophobes has come to symbolise the persistent clashes that strain relations between two of the EU (European Union)’s most unfriendly neighbours.
(more…)

IAN JAMES

Hugo Chavez is driving across the plains of Venezuela, raving about a Hollywood film in which the enslaved hero rises up to challenge the emperor of Rome.

“‘Gladiator’ — What a movie! I saw it three times,” the president tells an Associated Press reporter traveling with him in a Toyota 4Runner, along with his daughter and a state governor. “It’s confronting the empire, and confronting evil. … And you end up relating to that gladiator.”
(more…)

By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Sep 24 (IPS) - Stockholders, investors and financial analysts are now demanding to know how climate change will affect companies’ bottom line, and a new report reveals large corporations’ risks and opportunities.
(more…)

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

UNITED NATIONS, N.Y.
The United States wants the United Nations playing a larger role in Iraq. And the UN – with a new mandate in hand that calls for bulking up its presence on the ground and tackling a wider range of political and social issues – seems willing to try.
(more…)

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Sep 21 (IPS) - Burma’s Buddhist monks are threatening to turn an on-going protest against steep hikes in fuel prices into a religious and moral showdown with the country’s oppressive military regime.
(more…)

Interview with Jean Bricmont, author of ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’

BRUSSELS, Sep 20 (IPS) - International law is seen by many to have been shunted aside by Western powers when launching their most significant military operations in the past decade.

In 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation lacked any mandate from the United Nations when it attacked Serbia. In Afghanistan, the U.S. continued bombing in 2002, even when the government that replaced the Taliban asked it to stop (lest the civilian death toll rise).
(more…)

By ALAN FEUER

The cast of characters evoked by a major prosecution witness at the federal kickbacks trial of the Texas oilman Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. has included former chiefs of the State and Treasury Departments, a former director of the C.I.A., a onetime vice-presidential candidate, a retired leader of the Senate and an adviser to President Kennedy. But perhaps the most intriguing figure hovering in the background has been Saddam Hussein.
(more…)

By Maureen Fan
Washington Post Foreign Service

Wednesday, September 19, 2007; A16

MIANCHI, China – Twice a week, just after school lets out in this small county in Henan province, a 13-year-old girl with a short bob and wide smile holds her parents’ hands and walks two blocks down the street into the harsh fluorescent light of an emergency medical station.
(more…)

By Anuradha Kher

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 18 (IPS) - As much as 50 percent of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited and 17 percent are over-exploited, putting marine biodiversity at severe risk, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Worldwatch Institute.
(more…)

Por Demba Moussa Dembele (*)

DAKAR, Sep (IPS) África y Europa comparten una historia que se extiende a lo largo de más de cinco siglos. En su mayor parte los países africanos fueron colonias europeas. Esta fue una historia de dominación, explotación y saqueo. Esas complejas relaciones continuaron cuando la mayoría de las ex colonias había logrado su independencia en la década del 60.
(more…)

Paul Owen
Tuesday September 18, 2007

Guardian Unlimited

Up to 600,000 illegal immigrants would be eligible for an amnesty under plans adopted today by the Liberal Democrats.
The party’s annual conference in Brighton voted in favour of a plan to create “an earned route to citizenship” for illegal migrants who had been in the UK for 10 years.
(more…)

Interview with Tariq Ali

LAHORE, Pakistan, Sep 16 (IPS) - Eminent writer, historian and filmmaker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. While a student at Oxford University, he became involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam. That was the beginning of a long career in the literary arts and in peace activism that has earned him iconic status.
(more…)

By Stephen Leahy

MONTREAL, Sep 17 (IPS) - Delegates from 191 nations are in Montreal, Canada this week to celebrate and extend the world’s most successful environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer.

With 95 percent of the target chemicals now eliminated, there is strong support to accelerate the phase-out of newer ozone-depleting chemicals that are also powerful greenhouses gases.
(more…)

By Peter Baker and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 16, 2007; A01

When Army Gen. David H. Petraeus last week proposed withdrawing more than 20,000 U.S. troops from Iraq, some congressional Democrats nodded their heads and saw it as a positive, if insufficient, step forward. Some wanted to take credit. After all, they reasoned, the drawdown, the benchmarks report, even Petraeus’s Capitol Hill testimony came about only because of Democratic pressure.
(more…)

By Elinor Mills

Story last modified Fri Sep 14 07:30:41 PDT 2007

While Google is leading a charge to create a global privacy standard for how companies protect consumer data, the search giant is recommending that remedies focus on whether a person was actually harmed by having the information exposed.
(more…)

By Kimia Sanati

TEHRAN, Sep 14 (IPS) - When Iran’s reformist Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, ‘keeper of the Revolution’s secrets and kingmaker’, was elected as speaker of the powerful Assembly of Experts earlier this month, it signalled a major shift in the country’s tumultuous political scene.
(more…)

Interview with Stephen Lewis, International AIDS Activist

VANCOUVER, Sep 13 (IPS) - This week, Stephen Lewis, the outspoken former U.N. special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, was invested as Knight Commander of the Most Dignified Order of Moshoeshoe – a knighthood which is Lesotho’s highest honour.

IPS correspondent Am Johal spoke with Lewis by telephone from the Nairobi Serena Hotel about the politics of HIV control strategies, including the philosophy of “harm reduction", which recognises that a certain segment of the population will engage in risky behaviours like casual sex, prostitution and drug use, and seeks to mitigate the consequences rather than punish the behaviour itself.
(more…)

AMY GOODMAN - Democracy Now

——————————————————————————–
One month after the invasion of Iraq, the United States began airlifting planeloads of cash to Baghdad. Between April 2003 and June 2004, a total of $12 billion dollars of US currency was shipped to Iraq where it was to be dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority for reconstruction. To date, at least $9 billion dollars cannot be accounted for. In a startling new expose in Vanity Fair, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele follow the money trail from the Federal Reserve to Iraq. [includes rush transcript]
——————————————————————————–
(more…)

By K.C. Jones, InformationWeek

The technology helped reduce the time it took researchers compile lists of households in an area from a few weeks to a day.

Sept. 11, 2007 - GPS and PDAs are improving scientists’ ability to prevent the spread of malaria, according to a recent paper published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
(more…)

By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Sep 11 (IPS) - Many new medical technologies to improve the lives of people in the global South fail to be adopted not because of the costs but because of ethical, social and cultural issues, a new study reveals.

These issues include community and public engagement, cultural acceptability and gender, according to the comprehensive study featuring interviews with leading health experts in developing countries and published Monday in the U.S. peer-reviewed online journal PLoS Medicine.
(more…)

Staff Reporter of the Sun
September 11, 2007

UNITED NATIONS – Praising Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s “flexibility” on the Darfur crisis, Secretary-General Ban yesterday indicated that one of the fundamental articles of the United Nations, its “universal declaration of human rights,” may not be all that universal after all.
(more…)

Interview with Peter Schatzer, Int’l Organisation for Migration

ROME, Sep 11 (IPS) - Migrants most often carry their religion with them, and this often leads to clashes with people in their host country, Peter Schatzer, Director Mediterranean Regional Office and Head of Mission in Italy for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), tells IPS correspondent Sabina Zaccaro. And that makes religion a particular issue for about 95 million migrants around the world.
(more…)

By Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Sep 10 (IPS) - A generation after the world’s worst ever industrial disaster occurred at a U.S. multinational-owned pesticide plant in Bhopal, central India, responsibility continues to be evaded on cleaning up thousands of tonnes of toxic chemicals that have contaminated the soil and water in the vicinity.
(more…)

By ALAN FRAM

Overwhelming numbers of Iraqis say the U.S. troop buildup has worsened security and the prospects for economic and political progress in their country, according to a poll released Monday that provides a strikingly bleak appraisal of the war.
(more…)

Interview with Mikey Weinstein

WASHINGTON, Sep 7 (IPS) - Last month, the Pentagon pulled the plug on a plan to dispatch so-called “freedom packages” to U.S. troops in Iraq that included Bibles, proselytising materials in English and Arabic, and an apocalyptic computer game in which “soldiers for Christ” battle satanic “Global Community Peacekeepers".

The scheme was derailed in part because of the efforts of Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which seeks to protect the wall separating church and state in the United States armed forces.
(more…)

By Jürgen Kremb in Mae La Refugee Camp, Thailand

It’s a conflict that has been going on for decades. The military junta of Myanmar continues to wage war on the country’s ethnic minorities. The refugee crisis continues to worsen as horrific violence spreads through the jungle.

Tha Lei Paw, 32, doesn’t respond at first when asked if she would return to her village when peace returns to Myanmar. She just smiles.
(more…)

By Tanya Barrientos

Inquirer Staff Writer

Don’t call Amy Goodman a member of the mass media.

Yes, she’s a journalist with a daily radio and television program broadcast on more than 200 stations across the country.

Yes, she’s won the prestigious George Polk Award and the coveted Robert F. Kennedy Prize for her international reporting.

But Goodman believes American journalism is corrupt. Particularly news outlets owned by giant corporations.
(more…)

By Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON, Sep 6 (IPS) - When John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published their controversial essay “The Israel Lobby” in the London Review of Books in March 2006, their work elicited the kind of response of which most academics only dream.
(more…)

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 5 (IPS) - A new United Nations report on human rights criticises the government in Baghdad for its continued executions of prisoners despite appeals by the United Nations and its human rights bodies for a moratorium on capital punishment.
(more…)

By DALIA NAMMARI, Associated Press Writer

QEBYA, West Bank - Walid Hassan used to eke out a miserable living working a dry and unyielding piece of land he inherited from his father.

Now, he and other West Bank Palestinians desperate for cash are inviting Israelis to dump thousands of tons of garbage in their fields — rogue operations that could have dire public health and environmental consequences.
(more…)

By John Ward Anderson

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 1, 2007; A20

PARIS, Aug. 31 – A five-day U.N. conference on climate change ended in Vienna on Friday with significant disagreements remaining about how countries should reduce greenhouse gas emissions and daunting estimates about the price tag for combating global warming.
(more…)

By Nora Barrows-Friedman

AMRA, Negev desert, Israel, Sep 4 (IPS) - Israeli police and security forces invaded the small Bedouin village of Taweel abu Jabral in the Negev desert last week, backed by bulldozers and dump trucks. Residents and human rights organisations reported that several homes were demolished as Israeli forces confiscated property and left families homeless in temperatures that soared above 40 degrees centigrade.
(more…)

Richard Norton-Taylor

The Guardian

September 3, 2007 - The long-awaited withdrawal of British troops from the Basra Palace, their last remaining base in Iraq’s second biggest city, is not a “defeat", Gordon Brown insists. The exodus of 500 British soldiers was “pre-planned and organised", he told the BBC’s Today programme.
(more…)

By Sabina Zaccaro

ROME, Sep 3 (IPS) - The use of satellite images earlier this year to document human rights violations in Darfur has strengthened interest in wider use of satellites for humanitarian purposes.

The project in Darfur, Sudan, by Google Earth, a virtual programme that maps the earth by superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, has brought a new dimension to public monitoring of abuses.
(more…)