The Canadian Press

UNITED NATIONS - Bird flu in poultry and wild birds spread to 60 countries but is entrenched only in six because of improved and faster responses, experts said.

Despite those strides, the risk of a worldwide human-to-human pandemic remains as great today as it was when the hard-to-treat H5N1 flu strain first gained intense attention in mid-2005, said a new report by Dr. David Nabarro, the UN official co-ordinating the global fight against avian influenza, and World Bank officials.
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By Rosalia Omungo

DAR ES SALAAM, Nov 30 (IPS) - The East African Community signed a framework agreement as part of the economic partnership agreement (EPA) talks with the European Union (EU) to ensure continued access to EU markets for African small farmers, says Juma Mwapachu, secretary general of the East African regional body.

The East African Community (EAC) consists of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi – some of the poorest countries on the African continent. The framework agreement on trade in goods determines the reduction and eventual scrapping of tariffs on 81 percent of EU imports entering the EAC market. This will happen in phases.
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By Francis Kokutse

DAR ES SALAAM, Nov 29 (IPS) - The director of Panorama – the Palestinian Center for the Dissemination of Democracy and Community Development – has condemned those who carry out terrorist acts in the name of Islam, saying they are not representative of the global Muslim community.

Walid Salem made the comments in an interview with IPS on the sidelines of the third conference to be held under the Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy. This joint initiative by Finland and Tanzania, which began in 2003, has tried to provide a new forum for North-South dialogue.
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AMY GOODMAN

Leading Australian Scientist Tim Flannery on Climate Change and How To Save the Planet
Friday, November 23rd, 2007

We spend the hour with one of the world’s leading scientists studying climate change, Tim Flannery. An Australian mammologist, palaeontologist and field zoologist, he has discovered and named more than thirty new species of mammals. He has been described as being in the league of all-time great explorers such as David Livingstone. Flannery might be best known as the author of the bestselling book “The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change.” Earlier this year he was named 2007 Australian of the Year. Tim Flannery recently spoke before a packed crowd at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe New Mexico as part of “Readings and Conversations,” a series sponsored by the Lannan Foundation. Today, Tim Flannery’s speech on the environment, how human activity is altering the earth’s climate and what we can do to save it.
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By Michael Gerson

Wednesday, November 28, 2007; A23

KIGALI, Rwanda – We are used to seeing aged Holocaust survivors with faded photographs, telling their stories to remind the young and forgetful. So it is shocking to meet a 31-year-old genocide survivor with memories so fresh they bleed.

I talked to Freddy Mutanguha in a field of white crosses, near a half-finished monument to perhaps 800,000 victims of the Rwandan genocide. “My mom,” he recalled, “gave money to be killed by a bullet, because she saw the machetes and knew what they would do to her. But the bullet was too expensive.”
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Interview with Yahya Sergio Yahe Pallavicini

VENICE, Nov 28 (IPS) - The daily work of ordinary people committed to building dialogue both within and outside their communities make for less spectacular news reports than stories about communities at odds, says Imam Yahya Sergio Yahe Pallavicini. These ordinary people are the majority, and they are more open to productive communication with the West than we generally believe, he says.

Pallavicini, vice president of the Italian-Islamic Religious Community (Comunità Religiosa Islamica Italiana, Co.Re.Is.), is an Italian citizen who was born a Muslim to a Japanese mother and an Italian father. He is member of the Italian minister of the interior’s Council on Islam in Italy and Imam of the al-Wahid Mosque of Milan.
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Interview with Dr. Seth Berkley, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative

NEW YORK, Nov 27 (IPS) - When one of the world’s most promising large-scale HIV vaccine trials was shut down in September after it became clear that not only did the drug fail to block the virus, but may have even increased the vulnerability of some test volunteers to contracting HIV, it was a profoundly disappointing moment in the more than 20-year quest for a vaccine.
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The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 27, 2007

UNITED NATIONS, New York: Floods, droughts and other disasters will rob millions of children of the decent meals and schools they need unless rich nations provide $86 billion by 2015 to help the poor adapt to global warming, an expert panel warned Tuesday.
The United States needs to cover $40 billion of that spending, which will “strengthen the capacity of vulnerable people” to cope with climate-related risks, says the report commissioned by the UN Development Program.
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By Juan Forero

First of Several Grand Projects in Venezuela Reflects Leader’s Monopoly on Big Decisions

Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 27, 2007; Page A10

CAMINO DE LOS INDIOS, Venezuela – Like most ambitious state projects in oil-rich Venezuela, the new city being built in the thickly wooded mountains here began as a whim of President Hugo Chávez’s.

Flying in his helicopter north of Caracas over forests filled with monkeys and tropical birds, the president suddenly had a eureka moment – he would carve a self-sustaining, self-contained city from the wilderness. Chávez envisioned this as the first of several utopian cities, a bold plan reflecting both Venezuela’s capacity for undertaking ambitious projects and the president’s growing propensity for making all major decisions.
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Interview with Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

KAMPALA, Nov 25 (IPS) - The past year has marked the half-way point for realisation of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The eight goals were agreed on by global leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, with 2015 set as the deadline for achieving the MDGs.

The goals focus on halving extreme hunger and poverty, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment, and reducing child and maternal mortality. They are also aimed at fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability – and creating a “global partnership for development” that will address several key issues, including barriers to trade and country debt.
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By Michael STERN

Last November 10 in Beijing the Chinese government was delivered the first eco-building of the capital by the General Direction for Sustainable Development of the Italian Ministry of Environment. That same day in Rome, the Italian Minister of Environment was proposing in a government meeting the dismissal of that general Direction: the proposal is now undergoing through the administrative pattern that will end in the next few weeks with the final decision by the Parliament. A close look at this wired situation says a lot about politics “Italian style”.
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From Economist.com

Nov 23rd 2007

Animation takes on a whole new reality

CAN created images seem more real than reality itself? Portrait artists from Roman times onwards have exploited optical effects to flatter their patrons as well as to push the boundaries of perception. Think of the roughly 70 self-portraits and etchings Rembrandt made during his lifetime—his dispassionate struggle to comprehend himself physically and psychologically. You only have to look at the puffy cheeks, bulbous nose and furrowed brows to appreciate the artist’s genius at creating a three-dimensional sense of volume on a two-dimensional canvas.
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Interview with Madeleine Thien, Canadian novelist

VANCOUVER, Nov 22 (IPS) - Madeleine Thien is the Canadian-born daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants. She launched her writing career with a widely acclaimed short story collection called “Simple Recipes” in 2001. Thien’s recently released first novel, “Certainty", is about the legacies of loss, displacement from war and how human beings deal with trauma. She recently spoke with IPS correspondent Am Johal.
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Patrícia Adegas

The 10th Congress of the European Society for Sexual Medicine (ESSM) takes place in Lisbon Congress Center, Lisbon, Portugal. Leading European experts will discuss the importance of Sexual Health, on men and women. Sexual Health, its influence, not only on quality of life, but also as a key component and indicator of Health, not to let aside the role of sexuality in individual and social construction of identity, constitutes the ESSM commitment.
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Interview with Amartya Sen, Nobel economist

LONDON, Nov 21 (IPS) - The “war on terror” is not everybody’s language, nor for that matter is “globalisation", says Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen. Nor is anyone right to think that religious radicalism is really an Islamic problem, he says.

Such views made Sen, an Indian, a natural choice to lead the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding in its search for civil paths to peace. The group’s report titled “Civil Paths to Peace” was launched in London last week.
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By Paul Richter

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 21, 2007

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration announced Tuesday that it would hold a stripped-down international conference next week to begin negotiating the core issues that divide the Israelis and Palestinians, the first formal attempt to revive peace talks in seven years.

U.S. officials issued invitations to 49 nations and international organizations for the three-day gathering, to be attended by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The talks are aimed at building support for the wider peace negotiations and laying the groundwork for a Palestinian state in the next 14 months, before President Bush leaves office.
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Interview with Sahar Mahdi Al Yassiri

CASABLANCA, Morocco, Nov 21 (IPS) - Professor Sahar Mahdi Al Yassiri is a well-know writer on death penalty abolition in the Islamic world. Al Yassiri, a lawyer by trade, is also a member of several human rights NGOs, including the Right to Life Centre for Death Penalty Abolition in North Africa and the Middle East. In an interview with Abderrahim El Ouali, IPS correspondent in the region, she explains why it is crucial that women play a more active role in the abolition movement:
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Hugo Chávez, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero y el rey de España
Por: Salim Lamrani (especial para ARGENPRESS.info)
Fecha publicación:20/11/2007

La XVII Cumbre Iberoamericana de Jefes de Estado, que tuvo lugar en Chile del 8 al 10 de noviembre de 2007, fue objeto de un intenso debate que enfrentó a América Latina contra Europa y España en particular. Un incidente ocurrido entre el presidente venezolano Hugo Chávez por un lado y, por el otro, el presidente español José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero y el rey Juan Carlos de Borbón, ha tenido una amplia repercusión mediática internacional. No obstante, la prensa occidental se esmeró en centrarse únicamente en la violenta y descortés reacción del rey de España, sin abordar las cuestiones de fondo que desembocaron en el vivo intercambio.
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He was jailed and forced out of his traditional robes after Burmese soldiers arrested him during the junta’s crackdown. A monk’s tale.

By Lennox Samuels
Newsweek Web Exclusive

It was momentum, not militancy, that got the 26-year-old monk to join his Buddhist brethren massing on the streets of Rangoon. He left his monastery on the first day of the September protests and was soon marching near the famed Shwedagon Pagoda, confronting Burmese soldiers who barred him and others from climbing the shrine’s stairs. He dropped out pretty quickly, though, when the Sangha, the state council of Buddhist monks, ordered the monks to stand down.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 20 (IPS) - While the vast majority of analysts here agree that sectarian violence in Iraq has declined sharply from pre-"surge” levels one year ago, a major debate has broken out as to whether the achievement of the Surge’s strategic objective – national reconciliation – is closer or more distant than ever.
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Interview with Adil Najam, top Pakistani academic

KARACHI, Nov 17 (IPS) - Adil Najam is co-director of the Project on Human Development at the Pardee Centre for the Study of the Longer Range Future at Boston University.

Najam, who earlier taught at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has to his credit important works on longer-term global policy problems, especially those relating to sustainable human development and climate change negotiations. Books released this year include ‘Southern Visions on Trade and Sustainable Development’.
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WWF

Brussels, Belgium – The growing economic strength of the European Union has doubled the ecological
pressure on the planet in the past 30 years, according to a new report from WWF, the global conservation
organisation. Despite technological advances, environmental pressure has been growing at a faster rate than the European population, creating a deficit of natural resources for the rest of the world and for future
generations.
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By Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Nov 15 (IPS) - Governments of poor countries in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) made a show of unity the day after the sixth anniversary of the start of the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks.

At least 100 countries of the developing South exhibited ‘’unity, a strong stand, and a willingness to negotiate,’’ said Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, the coordinator of the Group of 20 (G20) bloc of developing nations brought together by their special interest in agriculture.
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Mark Tran and agencies

Friday November 16, 2007

Guardian Unlimited

A UN general assembly committee has passed a draft resolution calling for an end to the death penalty in a debate that put the US in the same camp as Iran and Syria.
The resolution, passed 99-52 by the human rights committee yesterday, must still be submitted to the 192-member general assembly for a vote. If approved, it would be non-binding, but would carry moral weight.
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By Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 15 (IPS) - The crackdown in eastern Europe and the United States on websites posting racist content or child pornography could expose Latin America to the risk of becoming a new “cyber paradise” for on-line paedophilia and racism, experts say.
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The Economist

THE gloomy story of east European politics goes like this. Politicians are out of touch and voters don’t care; outside pressure can be safely ignored; reform stalls or goes backwards. That certainly has seemed the case in many new member states of the European Union, and in countries queuing to join. It looks like the story of Georgia now.
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By Nizar Abdel-Kader

Commentary

Another Middle East peace summit is coming up in Annapolis. This is President George W. Bush’s first proper diplomatic initiative toward peace since he took office in 2001. The summit will focus on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Some Western policymakers think the conference comes at the most favorable moment since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000 for both Palestinians and Israelis to engage in serious peace talks. This assumption is based, first of all, on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who seems prepared for the first time to invest her efforts properly in a peace initiative.
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Interview with Robert Costanza, Professor of Ecological Economics

ROME, Nov 14 (IPS) - If the world political agenda is dictated to by the economy, “we need natural and social capital to be included in the market,” says Robert Costanza, director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont in the U.S.

The concept of what the economy is and what it is for has to be reframed, he says. “The conventional view is that the economy is the market, and that if something is not handled in the market, if it is not a private good or service, then it gets ignored.
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Interview with Stefano Manservisi, Director-General for EU Development Policies

LISBON, Nov 13 (IPS) - “We want to build a more united Europe for development,” says Stefano Manservisi, European Union director-general for development policies and its relations with African, Caribbean and Pacific states. “If we are united, we can do more.”

Manservisi spoke to IPS correspondent Stefania Milan at the European Development Days held in Lisbon Nov. 7-9. The meeting, the second such, is the biggest EU event on development policies. This time it discussed the impact of climate change on development.
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By Jack Chang

McClatchy Newspapers

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — When hundreds of technology experts from around the world gather here this week to hammer out the future of the Internet, the hottest issue won’t be spam, phishing or any of the other phenomena that bedevil users everywhere.

Instead, ending U.S. control over what’s become a global network will be at the top of the agenda for many of the more than 2,000 participants expected at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, which begins Monday.
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Interview with Robert Brubaker of the American Restroom Association

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 12 (IPS) - Come Nov. 21, the United Nations will formally launch the “Ínternational Year of Sanitation, 2008″, with the primary goal of finding ways to provide toilet facilities to some 2.6 billion people worldwide who lack proper sanitation.

But this problem is not confined only to the world’s poorest nations. The American Restroom Association (ARA) says there is a woeful shortage of public toilets in the United States, one of the world’s most economically advanced countries.
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When the US decided that its backyard would in future be a greater Middle East – from Pakistan to Morocco – it imagined that it could rearrange the region to suit itself. The results have been disastrous and will be long-lasting
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By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Nov 8 (IPS) - The start of direct talks between Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and an envoy of the leader of Colombia’s FARC guerrillas took the Colombian government by surprise.
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By Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Nov 7 (IPS) - “I have the habit of saying what I have to and will continue to do so,” Syed Talat Hussain, anchor of a popular current affairs programme on Aaj TV, says in an interview from Islamabad.
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By Edward Luce in Washington

November 2007

Democratic White House frontrunner Hillary Clinton on Monday pledged that as president she would negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol on climate change by 2010 – two years before Kyoto expires.

“This [tackling global warming] is too important,” she said. “We cannot afford to wait two more years.”
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Yu Bin | November 1, 2007
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

For years, dealing with Pyongyang has been the most difficult diplomatic endeavor for Beijing. This was the case even before the outbreak of the Korea War when Kim Il Sung, father of the current North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, worked out a war plan with Soviet leader Stalin and then sold it to Mao. The day after the North attacked the South, President Truman ordered the 7th Fleet back to the Taiwan Strait and hence the Mainland lost Taiwan. During the three-year conflict, China bore the brunt of the fighting and suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. The post-war North Korean official propaganda, however, scarcely acknowledged China’s role. Last October, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) tested its nuclear device despite China’s warning and efforts to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully. Now, after years of China’s hard work to host many rounds of six-party talks, a North-South summit early this month in Pyongyang went as far as to suggest that China may not be a party “directly concerned” with a “permanent peace regime” on the peninsula.
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By Beena Sarwar

KARACHI, Nov (IPS) - Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf appears to be following a strategy of being hard on lawyers and the judiciary, and soft on Islamist extremists – the two groups he blamed for imposing emergency rule in the country on Saturday.
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UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations launched a new Web site powered by Google and network equipment maker Cisco on Thursday that will show how and where the world is succeeding or failing in meeting the Millennium Development Goals on ending poverty.
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By Larry Jagan

Ibrahim Gambari in New Delhi for consultations on Burma

BANGKOK, Nov 5 (IPS) - On his second visit to Burma since the brutal crackdown on demonstrators, in September, United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari held talks with senior members of the Burmese military regime. But there are few signs of a breakthrough in encouraging a transition to civilian rule.
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Umendra Dutt
02 November 2007

There is a silent and constructive revolution happening in Punjab to save the environment, regenerate ecological resources, bring back soil productivity and re-establish ecological balance in the farms.
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By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 (IPS) - The 192-member U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote, perhaps by early or mid-November, on one of the most divisive political issues before the world body: a moratorium on the death penalty.
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By Kaushik Basu
Professor of economics, Cornell University

Until a few years ago, the suggestion that India could grow as fast as China belonged to the same category as other incredible pronouncements by ‘fact-proof’ politicians.

There was little by way of hard data to back up such a claim. But now no longer.
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US-IRAN: Republican Maverick Calls for Unconditional Talks

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 31 (IPS) - Amid growing contention among Democratic presidential contenders about U.S. policy toward Iran, a senior Republican lawmaker has appealed to President George W. Bush to pursue “direct, unconditional, and comprehensive talks” with Tehran. (more…)