Interview with Agneta Ucko, director of Arigatou International

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 31 (IPS) - As the United Nations plans to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its landmark Convention on the Rights of the Child next year, the world’s 2.2 billion children continue to suffer the consequences of growing poverty, rising illiteracy, increasing sexual abuse and widespread military conscription in conflicts worldwide.
(more…)

Phillip Coorey

Chief Political Correspondent in New York . The Sydney Morning Herald

March 31, 2008 .KEVIN RUDD has repudiated the foreign policy style of the Howard government by announcing Australia will push for membership of the United Nations Security Council in five years.
Following a weekend meeting at the UN headquarters with the Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, Mr Rudd said Australia had last sat on the 15-member body in 1986 and it was time it had a more effective voice in the world.
(more…)

Interview with Agneta Ucko, director of Arigatou International

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 31 (IPS) - As the United Nations plans to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its landmark Convention on the Rights of the Child next year, the world’s 2.2 billion children continue to suffer the consequences of growing poverty, rising illiteracy, increasing sexual abuse and widespread military conscription in conflicts worldwide.
(more…)

By Michael Voss
BBC News, Havana

“In the early years of the revolution much of the world was homophobic. It was the same here in Cuba and led to acts which I consider unjust ” Mariela Castro

There is a Castro who is fighting to introduce radical changes in Cuba.
(more…)

By Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Mar 28 (IPS) - Organisers of Earth Hour 2008 estimate that in excess of 30 million people worldwide will take action on Saturday to raise awareness of how small changes can make big differences when it comes to climate change.
(more…)

By Claudia Ciobanu

SOFIA, Mar 27 (IPS) - Moldova and its separatist region Transdniester, engaged for 16 years in a conflict over the latter’s independence, each had reasons to believe the spring of 2008 would bring a settlement favourable to their side. But Moscow, crucial to any resolution, has already signalled it is not in a hurry to reach a resolution.
(more…)

From Economist.com

Mar 27th 2008

A poll that we commissioned suggests that Britain and America may have less in common than is widely assumed

TO TURN over the supposed Anglo-American common ground carefully, The Economist commissioned pollsters at YouGov in Britain and Polimetrix in America—supported by additional funds from the Hoover Institution, a California think-tank—to find out what people in both places thought about a number of social, political and economic matters. A thousand people in each country were consulted between March 7th and 11th. Broadly, the differences between the two countries look more striking than the similarities.
(more…)

By Mark Leon Goldberg

Once again, the World Food Program is warning that unless donors step up it will have to start rationing food aid.

The Rome-based World Food Program said it issued the appeal in a letter sent to governments on Thursday, urging them to be as generous as possible by May 1 so the WFP will not have to begin rationing food aid.
(more…)

Analysis by Zoltán Dujisin

PRAGUE, Mar 26 (IPS) - What looked like a foregone conclusion – Warsaw nodding to Washington’s request to build a U.S. missile base in Poland – is on thin ice after Poland’s new government decided to switch to what it calls a realistic approach to negotiations.
(more…)

Ian Traynor
Guardian’s Europe editor

Tuesday March 25 2008
Serbia has formally proposed partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines for the first time, asking the United Nations to ensure that Belgrade can control key institutions and functions in areas of the newly independent country where Serbs form a majority.
(more…)

By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 25 (IPS) - Increasing numbers of Brazilians are being refused entry at Spanish airports, sometimes in humiliating fashion, as the influx of Brazilian immigrants to Europe grows, and the deportations are causing diplomatic friction between the two countries.
(more…)

IRIN - humanitarian news and analysis

MONROVIA, 21 March 2008 (IRIN) - The Liberian government has created a special court to deal with not only rising rape cases, but also other forms of violence against women, Liberia’s Information Minister Laurence Bropleh told IRIN.
(more…)

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Mar 24 (IPS) - In the world of politics there is much talk now of the “traditional friendship between Russia and Serbia", meaning Russia’s support to Serbia over the Kosovo crisis. But close ties go back much further – Serbia became home to thousands of Russians who fled communism 90 years ago.
(more…)

By Julio Godoy

BERLIN, Mar 20 (IPS) - The financial crisis around the world marks the end of neo-liberal globalisation and the beginning of a new era of regulation of the global economy, political leaders and economists say.

Germany is beginning to see signs of that – as a part of a pattern spreading fast across Europe and beyond.
(more…)

By Sarah Simpson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Turmoil in the oil-rich Niger Delta region is spreading out to sea as gangs in speedboats attack trading ships.

Lagos, Nigeria .The pirates attacked at night, firing AK-47s at the fishing trawler then clambering aboard from their speedboats.
One bullet hit the chef, who lay wounded in his bunk as the pirates casually ate and slept before stripping the ship of its valuables.
(more…)

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer

Iraqis and Americans Offer Perspectives on the War

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

For a majority of Americans, today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an Iraq war that was not worth fighting, one that has cost thousands of lives and more than half a trillion dollars. For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed.
(more…)

Interview with Pema Gyalpo, Tibetan affairs expert and author

TOKYO, Mar 19 (IPS) - Pema Gyalpo was official representative of the Dalai Lama in Japan from 1975 to 1990. Founder of the Tibet Culture Centre International, he is known for his many books on Tibet, his columns in major newspapers, and as an international affairs expert.
(more…)

By Simeon Bennett

March 18 (Bloomberg) – Missed tuberculosis cases in India and China are enabling the lethal disease to spread, jeopardizing global efforts to slash new infections by 2015, the World Health Organization said.

For every five TB cases diagnosed globally in 2006, four went undetected, the Geneva-based WHO said yesterday in its annual Global Tuberculosis Control report. Progress in case detection slowed globally in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available, and began to stall in China and India.
(more…)

By Matthew Cardinale

ATLANTA, Georgia, Mar 17 (IPS) - As part of actions across the United States to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, 10 “Grandmothers for Peace", ranging in age from 57 to 80, were arrested Monday while trying to enlist in the United States Army. Acts of civil disobedience are planned this week in at least 17 other U.S. cities.
(more…)

By JASON DePARLE

The New York Times - March 17, 2008

SINDHEKELA, India — An important man from the World Bank recently arrived in this isolated village, where monkeys prowl rutted roads, rain pours through the school roof and the native son who achieved the most did so by going away.

Lessons about global poverty were waiting, but so were his sisters’ chapattis. Migrant and migration scholar, Dilip Ratha was home.
(more…)

Interview with OECD Development Assistance Committee Chairman Eckhard Deutscher

BERLIN, Mar 17 (IPS) - Instead of indulging in China bashing, major western industrial nations should listen to China and its partners in Africa and elsewhere, says Eckhard Deutscher, the new head of the influential Development Assistance Committee (DAC).
(more…)

Interview with Gustavo Quilaqueo

SANTIAGO, Mar 10 (IPS) - Wallmapuwen, which means “people of the Mapuche land” in the language of that indigenous group, aims to formally become a political party in July this year in the southern Chilean regions of Araucanía, Los Ríos and Los Lagos. One of its main goals is to achieve self-government for the Mapuche people.

The proposals set forth by Wallmapuwen can help bring cohesion to the various Mapuche communities and organisations that currently follow different strategies, the group’s president, Gustavo Quilaqueo, said in an interview with IPS correspondent Daniela Estrada.
(more…)

Robert Fisk

Few players in the ‘war on terror’ are more chilling, or misunderstood, than suicide bombers. Yet the true scale of their grisly activities has never been properly calculated. Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Robert Fisk details the shocking extent of the most widespread campaign of self-liquidation in human history.
(more…)

Interview with Kemal Dervis, UNDP Administrator

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 5 (IPS) - “UNDP’s South-South work is focused on marshalling the expertise and resources at our disposal to support developing countries pursue their development goals,” says Kemal Dervis, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
(more…)

By BOB DAVIS

March 13, 2008
WASHINGTON – The International Monetary Fund urged members to make plans to increase spending to stimulate economic growth and to rescue troubled financial institutions if the global housing-and-credit crunch worsens further.
(more…)

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS) - The world’s minorities and indigenous groups are the “silent victims” of the potentially disastrous effects of climate change, says a new study by Minority Rights Group (MRG) International.

Although both groups are often disproportionately affected by climate-related disasters, the international community continues to ignore their plight, the London-based human rights organisation charges.
(more…)

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS) - The world’s minorities and indigenous groups are the “silent victims” of the potentially disastrous effects of climate change, says a new study by Minority Rights Group (MRG) International.

Although both groups are often disproportionately affected by climate-related disasters, the international community continues to ignore their plight, the London-based human rights organisation charges.
(more…)

Amy Goodman

On the Sunday following Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney told the truth. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said regarding plans to pursue the perpetrators of that attack: “We have to work the dark side, if you will. We’re going to spend time in the shadows.” The grim, deadly consequences of his promise have, in the intervening six years, become the shame of our nation and have outraged millions around the world. President George Bush and Cheney, many argue, have overseen a massive global campaign of kidnapping, illegal detentions, harsh interrogations, torture and kangaroo courts where the accused face the death penalty, confronted by secret evidence obtained by torture, without legal representation.
(more…)

Emma Thompson

NEWSWEEK

An actress learns human trafficking doesn’t just happen ‘over there.’

Updated: 12:51 PM ET Mar 8, 2008
When I was growing up in London, I walked past a massage parlor on the way to school every day. If my friends and I ever gave a thought to what went on behind its doors, we saw it as a bit of a giggle; it existed in a world away from our own.
(more…)

Analysis by John Vandaele*

BRUSSELS, Mar 11 (IPS) - Neo-liberalism is slowly fading away. That is, if we define neo-liberalism as an ideology that steadily wants to reduce and belittle the role of government, and promote ever freer markets.

While nowadays almost everybody recognises the market as an interesting instrument, dogmatic market fundamentalism is on the way out. If you want to prevent big trouble, there is really no alternative but that it should be so.
(more…)

By Tracy Wilkinson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Stemming domestic violence and human trafficking remains a challenge in the newly independent nation.

March 10, 2008

PRISTINA, KOSOVO — She purses her lips in a “tsk-tsk” when asked difficult questions. Questions about her life, about the husband who beats her, the father who denies her an inheritance and a place to live.
(more…)

By William Fisher

WASHINGTON, Mar 10 (IPS) - Media critics, foreign policy experts and human rights advocates are charging that questions asked by the moderators of the televised debates among U.S. presidential hopefuls have frequently been trivial and designed to produce conflict to boost ratings, while ignoring many of the most pressing issues facing the United States.
(more…)

Larry Elliott, economics editor The Guardian

· Systematic discrimination to blame, says ActionAid
· Inequality will prevent UN hitting development goals

Systematic discrimination against girls and women in the world’s poorest countries will prevent the United Nations meeting its goals to reduce poverty, according to a report published today by the charity network ActionAid. The report says gender inequality must be put at the heart of the development agenda if those aims are to be met.
(more…)

By Zoltán Dujisin

MITROVICA, Kosovo, Mar 7 (IPS) - The divided city of Mitrovica in Kosovo has become a litmus test for those who believe in a multi-ethnic state. It is the only urban centre in Kosovo still inhabited by Serbs.

On Feb. 17 Kosovo, the disputed southern Serbian region, made a unilateral declaration of independence not recognised by Belgrade or by big countries such as Russia and China.
(more…)

Richard Owen of The Times in Rome

In a ground breaking move Pope Benedict XVI has approved the setting up of a permanent Catholic-Muslim Forum - the first of its kind - which is to hold its inaugural summit meeting in the Vatican in November.

The historic move follows three days of talks in Rome between Vatican officials and a Muslim delegation representing 138 Muslim scholars who last year wrote an open letter to the Pope and other Christian leaders calling for dialogue, a move inspired by Prince Ghazi bin Muhammed bin Talal of Jordan.
(more…)

By Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Mar 6 (IPS) - China is working against a possible “Kosovo precedent” on its own borders by aligning international support to oppose any move towards a declaration of independence by Taiwan and beefing up an already huge military presence opposite the self-ruled island.
(more…)

Daniel Denvir

On Saturday March 1, Colombian military forces attacked an encampment of the FARC, the largest Colombian guerilla group, across the Ecuadorian border. The strike, in violation of international law, reportedly killed up to 20 guerrillas in their sleep. Among those killed was Raúl Reyes, a top FARC commander. The attack has sparked a regional crisis and raised fears of a spreading armed conflict.
(more…)

IRIN

KAMPALA, 3 March 2008 (IRIN) - Up to 14 million people in the greater Horn of African region are expected to suffer under harsh weather conditions in the next three months that threaten food security, according to climate specialists meeting in Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
(more…)

By Mario Osava*

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 3 (IPS) - Colombia’s military incursion into Ecuador is at the centre of the current crisis between three Andean nations, which must be resolved within the framework of the Organisation of American States (OAS), according to the Brazilian government’s official position as expressed Monday by Foreign Minister Celso Amorim.
(more…)

By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela and Ecuador mobilized troops to their borders with Colombia on Sunday, intensifying a diplomatic crisis after Colombian forces killed a senior guerrilla leader at a jungle camp in Ecuador.
(more…)

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Mar 3 (IPS) - For months, U.S. President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus have been touting the programme of recruiting tens of thousands of Sunnis into U.S.-financed “Awakening Councils” as a master stroke of Iraq strategy which has weakened al Qaeda in Iraq and helps reduce sectarian conflict through “bottom up reconciliation".
(more…)