Deforestation and climate change are returning the mosquito-borne disease to parts of Peru after 40 years

Andrés Schipani in Mazán and John Vidal
The Guardian

The afternoon is hot and sticky on the banks of the Napo river, an arm of the Amazon, but Claudio, a logger, is shivering in his creaky wooden bed.
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By Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Oct 31 (IPS) - Israel has begun limiting fuel supplies to Gaza as part of punitive measures it is implementing in an attempt to stem the firing of rockets by militants from the coastal strip into Israel. But Palestinian leaders and human rights groups are warning the move could spark a humanitarian crisis.
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Analysis by Jacques N. Couvas

ANKARA, Oct 30 (IPS) - Clashes between Turkish army units and Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas intensified during the weekend along Turkey’s borders with northern Iraq and in the country’s eastern province of Tunceli. Twenty suspected Kurdish rebels were killed, according to Turkish NTV network.
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By FRANÇOIS FURSTENBERG

MUCH as George W. Bush’s presidency was ineluctably shaped by Sept. 11, 2001, so the outbreak of the French Revolution was symbolized by the events of one fateful day, July 14, 1789. And though 18th-century France may seem impossibly distant to contemporary Americans, future historians examining Mr. Bush’s presidency within the longer sweep of political and intellectual history may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism.
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The Times of India

26 Oct 2007
UNITED NATIONS: International financial institutions and wealthy States while imposing structural reform programmes on poor countries should ensure that they do not undermine their basic cultural, social and economic rights, an independent UN human rights expert said on Friday.
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By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 26 (IPS) - Global warming has been compared to a slow-moving train wreck, in which the passengers are blissfully unaware of the coming catastrophe.

With the shocking loss of the Arctic sea ice this summer and several new reports this week that oceans and tropical forests are now absorbing less of the world’s steadily rising carbon emissions, our collective train wreck appears to have already tipped into fast forward.
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By Scott Baldauf *

Africa’s new $5 million prize for top leaders

Proponents say the Ibrahim Prize will help improve the continent’s crippling governance problem.

Johannesburg, South Africa . Imagine you’re the leader of a small African country. You’ve led your country out of civil war, created a Constitution that enshrines the rule of law and human rights, and you’ve even managed to lift some of your citizens out of poverty. To top it all off, you know when it’s time to retire. When your successor takes over, there’s no bloodbath.
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Interview with Miloon Kothari, international housing advocate

VANCOUVER, Canada, Oct 25 (IPS) - Miloon Kothari, the U.N. special rapporteur for housing, recently visited Canada on a fact-finding mission to look at homelessness, aboriginal and women’s housing issues, and the impact of the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.

IPS Correspondent Am Johal sat down for breakfast with Kothari at the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver. Excerpts from the interview follow.
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By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 24 (IPS) - Insisting that the recent transition in Cuba represents “the dying gasps of a failed regime", U.S. President George W. Bush Wednesday vowed to maintain Washington’s nearly 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba until its government “has adopted in word and deed fundamental freedoms.”
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By CHOE SANG-HUN

MANDALAY, Myanmar — As the lunch gong chimed through a tree-shaded monastery, several hundred monks in burgundy robes lined up on a mid-October day, all holding alms bowls.

It is a common scene in Myanmar, formerly Burma, where one out of every 100 people, many of them children, are monks. But the lunch line at the Mahagandhayon Monastery, the country’s largest, used to be much longer.
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From Economist.com

Poland’s likely new, less exciting, rulers

WHATEVER the details of Poland’s next government, the perplexing and sometime troubling era of the “terrible twins” is over. That, in short, is the message of the election on Sunday October 21st, in which the centre-right opposition Civic Platform party, led by Donald Tusk, trounced the ruling Law and Justice party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who will now step down as prime minister. His twin brother, Lech, will stay on as president, although with sharply diminished political clout. With 90% of the vote counted Civic Platform had received 41.6% of the vote; Law and Justice got 32%.
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By Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON, Oct 23 (IPS) - The nation’s most powerful Religious Right organisations gathered last weekend in Washington to find a presidential candidate who shared their values. And every single Republican hopeful made the pilgrimage to state his case.
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Interview with Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, UNFPA

LONDON, Oct 22 (IPS) - The Women Deliver conference held in London last week has reminded a lot of people in the world of healthcare how much more they need to deliver to make pregnancy and childbirth safer for women.

More than 1,800 delegates from 109 countries, among them 70 ministers and parliamentarians, met in London Oct. 18-20 to work out new ways of improving maternal health. Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) since January 2001, will inevitably be a leading figure in taking the new moves forward. She spoke with Sanjay Suri from IPS:
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By TIM GOLDEN

NYT

Well into the night of Sunday, Jan. 2, 2005, lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz sat alone at his desk in the headquarters of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, consumed with a new project.

He often worked late. From the time Diaz enlisted in the Army as a 17-year-old high-school dropout, hard work had been his ticket. He had earned his college degree while serving as an artillery sergeant and then completed law school a semester early, driving a mail truck on the weekends. In 10 years as a Navy lawyer, his performance evaluations had been outstanding. As his six-month tour at Guantanamo neared its end, his stint as the deputy legal adviser there looked like more of the same.
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Larry Elliott in Washington

Friday October 19, 2007

Guardian

The International Monetary Fund yesterday sought to respond to anger in developing countries at the institution’s dominance by rich western nations by promising an increase in voting rights for the world’s poorest nations.
Admitting that the IMF had to “address the issue of its own legitimacy", its outgoing managing director, Rodrigo de Rato, said the package of reforms would go beyond the deal struck in Singapore a year ago. He said that the changes would see a shift in power to the bigger emerging countries while an increase in the basic votes - the votes that each of the fund’s members have regardless of their size would ensure that the least developed nations did not lose out.
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By Linus Atarah

HELSINKI, Oct 19 (IPS) - Anyone with a mobile phone can call a radio station in Ghana now to question a government minister about the promises he made election time.

The communication revolution has broken through the earlier world in which official information was offered through government-controlled radio or television. This has brought greater transparency and accountability in the governance process, says Aida Opoku-Mensah, director of information and communication technologies at the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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Sandeep Dikshit

Brazilian President points out that the world body remained a silent spectator in Iraq

Manmohan proposes better connectivity

The three countries sign seven agreements

TSHWANE (PRETORIA): India, Brazil and South Africa on Wednesday committed themselves to jointly pursue reforms in the United Nations and a poor-friendly conclusion to the Doha Round of trade talks.
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By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 18 (IPS) - Amid rising bilateral tensions with Turkey and strong White House pressure, the Democratic leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to set aside a controversial resolution recognising as a “genocide” the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
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The tongue twisters
From The Economist print edition
Oct 11th 2007

In the last of our series on civil liberties, we look at the difficulty of reconciling traditional freedoms of expression with the new demands of national security

IN COUNTRIES at war, freedoms of the press and of speech are often restricted. For that reason, al-Qaeda’s attacks of September 11th 2001, by precipitating a “war on terror”, also raised questions—both legal and moral—about the role of the media in free societies.
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Interview with Michael Byers, Canadian author and political analyst

VANCOUVER, Oct 17 (IPS) - Dr. Michael Byers, a professor of politics and international law at the University of British Columbia, recently released a provocative book titled “Intent for a Nation - A Relentlessly Optimistic Manifesto for Canada’s Role in the World.”

He spoke with IPS writer Am Johal from Vancouver.
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By Colin Woodard |

Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

As global warming makes Greenland’s mineral wealth more accessible, talk of independence from Denmark is also heating up.

NUUK, Greenland
Judging by flags alone, you’d never guess that Nuuk is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

All around this humble capital – population 15,000 – one sees the fluttering Greenlandic flag. The Danish one, by contrast, is rarely seen at all. But if some in this largely autonomous Danish territory have their way, it will one day fly in front of a future Danish embassy here.
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By Anita Petry

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 (IPS) - Women are seen as the key for ending global poverty and the issue of gender equality is receiving special attention at events marking the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on Wednesday.

One of the largest is the International Women’s Tribunals on Poverty, which will highlight the feminisation of poverty.
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By Jason Subler and Zhou Xin

BEIJING, Oct 15 (Reuters) - China will promote more consumer spending to trim its bulging trade surplus and redouble efforts to limit damage to the environment inflicted by breakneck growth, President Hu Jintao said on Monday.

In his keynote address to the ruling Communist Party’s five-yearly Congress, Hu also reaffirmed China’s commitment to let the yuan move more freely and gradually dismantle the country’s capital controls.
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By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 15 (IPS) - Launching his latest diplomatic mission in South-east Asia, the United Nations special envoy for Burma has thrown his weight behind a view that governments in this region have to play a lead role in defusing the crisis in the military-ruled country.
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Por Mark Sommer (*)

ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Oct (IPS) Los estadounidenses disfrutan de una
ventaja en su economía personal pues pagan por los alimentos que
consumen menos que cualquier otra nación. En cambio, esos alimentos
baratos son considerablemente caros para la salud, la seguridad, los
salarios y las condiciones laborales de los trabajadores, en amplia
mayoría inmigrantes, que producen tales alimentos en Estados Unidos.
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By Katy Gabel

Washington, D.C. A new study shows that conflicts in Africa cost the continent over 300 billion U.S. dollars between 1990 and 2005 – an amount equivalent to all the international aid received by sub-Saharan Africa in the same period.
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Interview with Luisa Morgantini, Vice-President of the European Parliament

ROME, Oct 12 (IPS) - The European Union has definite responsibilities in the Palestine crisis, and must now carry them out, says Luisa Morgantini, Vice-President of the European Parliament.

The EU must “implement the existing EU-Israel Agreements on Movement and Access, and impose on Israel to respect the international law on human rights, and to end the military occupation in the West Bank and the closure of the Gaza Strip, where the robbery of Palestinian lands continues without condemnation,” Morgantini told IPS correspondent Sabina Zaccaro in an interview.
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By Marcela Valente

BARILOCHE, Argentina, Oct 11 (Tierramérica) - Latin America and the Caribbean have as much land territory as marine area. But while more than 10 percent of the land is protected, not even one percent of the sea is.

“If Latin America wants to be a world leader in protected areas, it has one pending debt: the sea,” Imène Meliane, of the global marine programme of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), told Tierramérica.
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By LINDA GREENHOUSE

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to hear an appeal filed on behalf of a German citizen of Lebanese descent who claims he was abducted by United States agents and then tortured by them while imprisoned in Afghanistan.
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Interview with Donatella della Porta, expert on social movements

FIRENZE, Italy, Oct 10 (IPS) - The peace march from Perugia to Assisi Oct. 7 brought back some memories of the massive march against the war in Iraq in 2003.

That 2003 march had gathered more than a million, but failed to prevent the invasion of Iraq. The march Sunday drew about 200,000, a fair number given the difficult times civil society groups in Italy have been going through.
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OPINION - USA TODAY

Our view on prisoner interrogation: Arrogance on torture policy undermines U.S. interests. Bush administration says one thing in public, does another in secret.

Is torture ever justified? America has been grappling with that question ever since the 9/11 attacks shifted it from the abstract to the real and immediate. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine many Americans feeling much compunction about doing unspeakable things to Osama bin Laden or some associate who might know of terror plots. On the other hand, the United States is supposed to be a beacon of moral, democratic values.
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By DAVID HO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 10/09/07

New York — Alpha Bah isn’t your typical telephone repairman or tech support guy.

He was held by rebels while working for the United Nations in his native country of Sierra Leone. In Sri Lanka, he led a team that provided satellite links for aid workers in communities smashed by the Southeast Asian tsunami. While mounting antennas on Iraqi rooftops, his job description included dropping low at the sound of gunfire.
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Interview with Pakistan’s Former PM Benazir Bhutto

KARACHI, Oct 9 (IPS) - Of the 60 years that Pakistan has existed, a total of 40 have been under the direct or indirect rule of the army. Each round of martial law has left the army with even greater power and influence. The current cycle – that began with army chief Pervez Musharraf seizing power in 1999 – has been no different.

Hopes for the restoration of civilian rule are now being pinned on twice prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who plans to return to Pakistan this month from eight years of self-exile in London and Dubai. The daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – a former prime minister executed by the military dictator who deposed him in 1977 – has vowed to send the army back to the barracks.
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By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela

JUST last year, Gen. Romeo Lucas García’s quiet death in exile here caught the attention of few people outside Guatemala, where he had presided over a ruthless period of civil war in which 37 people were burned to death during a siege at Spain’s embassy. Spain tried to extradite him in 2005 on human rights charges, but had gotten nowhere.
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Interview with Sylvia Borren, Executive Director of Oxfam-Novib

ROME, Oct 8 (IPS) - Sylvia Borren is one of the three co-chairs of GCAP, together with Kumi Naidoo (Secretary General of Civicus) and Ana Agostino (Member of GCAP’s Feminist Taskforce).

Marking the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on Oct. 17, IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutierrez speaks with Borren about what the GCAP (Global Call to Action against Poverty) campaign means for people.
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By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Oct 5 (IPS) - Opening up trade between the European Union and Africa risks violating basic human rights, according to campaigners.

Under a series of free trade deals, known as Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), governments from Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) would be required to remove most of the tariffs that they levy on imports from Europe.
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By DAVID ROHDE

SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.
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By Claudia Ciobanu

ROSIA MONTANA, Oct 4 (IPS) - “I never had money, I never wanted money, and I never will want money.” “I fear no one but God.” “I will not leave this place for as long as I live.” Such statements, from a small yet determined core of inhabitants of Rosia Montana are indication that the Canadian corporation that wants to dig for gold here could get blocked by at least some people.
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Oct 4th 2007 | AUSTIN
From Economist.com

GEORGE BUSH has some fight left in him and he has chosen a thankless battle. On Wednesday October 3rd the president vetoed legislation that would have reauthorised and expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which provides health-care insurance to more than 6m poor children.
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By Anne-Kathrin Keller

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 3 (IPS) - The scene within and outside the United Nations last week was strikingly dissimilar: while more than 140 world leaders were arriving in New York to wine, dine and address the General Assembly, a group of activists was demonstrating outside the U.N. compound for a hunger-free world.
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By KEN BELSON and JILL P. CAPUZZO

A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.
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GEOFFREY YORK

From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail

October 2, 2007
BANGKOK — After paying a heavy price for their uprising, Myanmar’s monks are nursing their wounds and hoping for international action against the military junta that crushed their peaceful protests with bullets and tear gas.

A new estimate by a well-connected dissident group has concluded that 138 people were killed and about 6,000 detained, including about 2,400 Buddhist monks, when the regime smashed the anti-government protests last week.
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By Sarah McGregor

DAR ES SALAAM, Oct 2 (IPS) - Agricultural exporters in poor nations need funds and technical assistance to comply with food safety norms in order to boost their share of world trade, according to World Trade Organization (WTO) representatives.

WTO Director General Pascal Lamy said giving higher priority to the safety standards of exports could prepare the poorest nations to benefit more from the Doha development round.
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By CELIA W. DUGGER

Norway, whose 4.7 million people already contribute almost $4 billion a year to aid developing countries, will give $1 billion on top of that in the next 10 years to reduce deaths of millions of mothers and children from preventable causes, its prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, announced last week at a Clinton Foundation conference in New York.
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Interview with Soe Myint, dissident and former plane hijacker

NEW DELHI, Oct 1 (IPS) - Ever since he hijacked a Rangoon-bound Thai airliner to Kolkata in 1990, to highlight the brutality of its military rulers, Soe Myint has been the face of the Burmese resistance in India – a country with ambiguous policies towards its eastern neighbour and
the plight of its people.
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