IRIN - humanitarian news and analysis

DAKAR, 28 May 2008 (IRIN) - The global food and fuel price crisis presents a “strategic opportunity” to West African states to become more food-secure according to agricultural analysts, but they will only achieve this by committing 10 percent of state budgets to agriculture and better exploiting their comparative advantage.
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By Julio Godoy

BONN, May 30 (IPS) - When some multinational companies dump chemicals into the sea, they call it ‘ocean fertilisation’. This practice is near the top of the agenda at the UN conference on biological diversity in Bonn.

“‘Ocean fertilisation’ simply means dumping into the ocean particles of iron, nitrogen or urea allegedly to transform the ecological balance of particular marine habitats, to encourage additional phytoplankton growth, and increase absorption of carbon dioxide (CO2),” Saskia Richartz, ocean expert at Greenpeace told IPS.
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By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

Five states bordering on the potentially energy-rich Arctic Ocean have met in Greenland in an attempt to head off a new “gold rush” in the high north.

They agreed to settle disputes through the UN procedures in an orderly way.
“The five nations have now declared that they will follow the rules,” said the Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moller.
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Interview with Flora Igoki Terah

NAIROBI, May 29 (IPS) - On Sep. 7 last year, as she walked to her home, parliamentary candidate Flora Igoki Terah was attacked and tortured by a gang of five men. Terah’s case is one of several case studies highlighted in Amnesty International’s 2008 report on the state of the world’s human rights, released on May 28.
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Shashi Tharoor

The Guardian,

John McCain wants to create a new alliance to circumvent the UN. We mustn’t let this idea gain consensus in Washington

Tuesday May 27 2008 -Amid the continuing brouhaha about issues of race and gender in the US presidential campaign, we may be in danger of losing sight of the most important question that has arisen in the candidates’ skirmishing over international affairs. That relates to John McCain’s advocacy of the establishment of a “league of democracies", and the mounting clamour for Barack Obama to espouse the same idea as his own.
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By Jonathan Wheatley in São Paulo

May 26 2008 Brazil’s new environment minister takes office on Tuesday in the middle of a spat over an apparent recent increase in deforestation in the Amazon region.

The dispute concerns satellite data on deforestation and punitive measures based on that data taken by the government against ranchers and farmers in the worst-affected regions.
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By Tom Barry

Are Americans willing to pay for the intensifying crackdown on immigrants?

The Bush administration and Congress are fueling an increasingly hard-line immigration policy with seemingly unlimited federal funding. The Department of Homeland Security, which in 2003 became the new home of both the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is requesting a 19% increase for immigration enforcement and border control for 2009.
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By Zoltán Dujisin

PRAGUE, May 24 (IPS) - The EU seems to be backing nuclear energy as the response to global warming and gas dependency, but civic groups warn that safety and waste processing should be preconditions for the industry’s growth.
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ANSA

Detainees protest over death of Tunisian

(ANSA) - Turin, May 26 - Detainees at a migrant holding centre here have launched a hunger strike in protest at the sudden death of a Tunisian man over the weekend, an Italian MEP said on Monday.
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By Michael J. Carter

SEATTLE, May 26 (IPS) - Race played a “real” role in deciding who was sentenced to death in hundreds of capital trials over a seven-year period in one Texas county, according to new academic research to be published shortly.
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ANSA

Antonio Fazio accused of hindering 2005 bank takeover

(ANSA) - Milan, May 23 - Former Bank of Italy governor Antonio Fazio was indicted Friday along with 15 others for a 2005 scandal-hit bank takeover bid. Other high-profile names on the indictment list were former Banca Popolare Italiana (BPI) chief Gianpiero Fiorani, former Unipol chairman Giovanni Consorte and Senator Luigi Grillo, a member of Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party.
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By Zoltán Dujisin

PRAGUE, May 23 (IPS) - One result of the Czech media and politicians’ frequent warnings of the dangers of Islamic terrorism has been a growing Islamophobia.

Attitudes towards Muslims are said to have worsened following the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, and the media has since played with Czechs’ fears of terrorism by supporting pro-U.S. foreign policy goals.
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IRIN

BANGKOK, 21 May 2008 (IRIN) - John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, has expressed caution over the prospects of greater humanitarian access to cyclone-affected Myanmar.
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By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 22 (IPS) - Brazil is a world leader in agriculture and on several environmental issues, but it will find it hard to reconcile both fronts, judging by the many battles lost by former environment minister Marina Silva, in spite of the political clout she wielded for over five years.
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From The Economist print edition
May 20th 2008

The lessons of earlier Asian nation-building efforts

NEARLY seven years after the toppling of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s future is still up for grabs. Despite tens of thousands of foreign troops, and billions of dollars in aid, the country remains stricken by poverty and insurgency.
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By Claudia Ciobanu

BUCHAREST, May (IPS) - A Roma ghetto in Ponticelli neighbourhood of Naples, Italy, was burnt down May 14 by locals angry over a reported attempt by a Roma young woman to kidnap a baby. The incident shows that, when it comes to living together with the 10 million Roma, Europeans today have no better answer than the “Gypsy hunts” of the Middle Ages.
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By William Fisher

NEW YORK, May 20 (IPS) - Key elements of the George W. Bush administration’s anti-terrorist detention policies appear to be unraveling, according to human rights and legal advocates.

In the past two weeks alone, a military judge has disqualified a Pentagon legal official from participating in the Guantanamo war crimes trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, because he had pushed for “sexy” cases that would capture attention.
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BBC NEWS

The EU has unveiled a plan for reform of its Common Agricultural Policy, the rural payments system that costs more than 40bn euros (£32bn) a year.

The proposals are aimed at making farmers more responsive to market forces amid rapidly rising food prices.
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Carmelo Ruiz Marrero

First-generation biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel debuted on the world stage as the solution to the fossil fuel trap. Soon evidence began to mount indicating that the solution may well prove to be just a new set of problems.

Executives and scientists of agribusiness and biotechnology corporations know the problems caused by first-generation agrofuels, and are wagering that these can be solved by a new generation of agrofuels derived from cellulose.
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By Aileen Kwa

GENEVA, May 19 (IPS) - As WTO negotiations pick up this week, some developing countries are in growing doubt that a deal liberalising their economies further could help them cope with the food crisis.

IPS spoke to an ambassador from an ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific) country who declined to be named. His country is a net food importer and is now struggling to deal with the high food prices on the world market.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, May 15 (IPS) - In separate speeches delivered an ocean apart, the two standard bearers of the Republican Party Thursday offered rosy visions of a future designed to gladden the hearts of Israel-centred neo-conservatives without offering any details about how their dreams will be achieved.
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Via Campesina

In May 2008 in Bonn, Germany the 4th Meeting of the Parties to the Protocol on Biosecurity (MOP4) also called the « Cartagena Protocol » and the 9th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, COP9) will take place.
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From The Economist print edition

May 15th 2008

Modern finance is under attack. Yet the banking system has done much better than it is given credit for
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By Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON, May 15 (IPS) - The World Bank says it is recalibrating its financing for anti-AIDS efforts in Africa, which shoulders more than two-thirds of the world’s HIV/AIDS burden.
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By Julio Godoy

BONN, May 14 (IPS) - Notice how green the public relations campaigns of multinational corporations have become. Major companies, from beer producers to airlines to automobile makers, want to tell you they’re doing their bit to save the environment from global warming and loss of biodiversity. What these companies actually do is another matter.
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Rwanda News Agency/Agence Rwandaise d’Information (Kigali)

Kigali - 14 May 2008. The East African Community block is one of the regions most affected by the surge in fake malaria medicines that still remain on the prescription list of private pharmacies, a news study suggests.
The block includes Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Burundi and Tanzania but the study released last week by US-based The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was done in four capitals except for Burundian Bujumbura.
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Interview with Mayor José Maria Prazeres Pós-de-Mina

MOURA, Portugal, May 13 (IPS) - He is mayor of one of Portugal’s smallest and poorest municipalities. But his perseverance in using solar energy to drive development in his region has brought José Maria Prazeres Pós-de-Mina attention from the rest of the country and from other members of the European Union (EU).
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Lucy Williamson - BBC News, Dili

The United Nations should stay in East Timor until at least 2012, President Jose Ramos Horta has said.

He told the BBC there was still great potential instability and the country needed more time to organise its police and the economy.
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By Evan Osnos and Laurie Goering

Tribune correspondents

As China and India rise, diets change and demands soar

May 11, 2008 BEIJING — Nothing about the lunch rush at a McDonald’s in China would feel out of place in America: Students huddled around video games and fries; a computer salesman scarfing a chicken sandwich; a teacher lingering over a hamburger and coffee. And in that all-American scene lies the next great challenge to the world’s food supply.
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By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 12 (IPS) - Burma’s military regime may soon face charges of allowing tens of thousands of its own people to die through incompetence and bureaucratic red-tape placed in the way of international relief efforts for over one million cyclone victims in the country.
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By Phil Chapman - BBC

China is a country that in some peoples’ minds has become synonymous with industrial pollution, rigid political control and spectacular economic expansion.

But behind this image lies another world which is the real, essential China - a place of vast shifting deserts, tropical coral reefs, steaming jungles, snow-capped peaks, evergreen forests and smoking volcanoes.
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Analysis by Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, May 8 (IPS) - As Israel marks its 60th anniversary, Israelis are deeply pessimistic about the prospects of peace with their neighbours, with an overwhelming majority believing they will be at war again within the next five years.
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Roger Burbach

The illegal referendum held on Sunday to declare autonomy in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s richest province, is backed by the Bush administration in an attempt to halt the leftward drift of South America. While the US embassy in La Paz blandly declares its support for “unity and democracy” in Bolivia, the government’s Interior Minister Alfredo Raba states what is widely known, that the United States “has an agenda more political than diplomatic in Bolivia, and this agenda is linked to opponents of the current government.” Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of the country, bluntly declares: “The imperialist project is to try to carve up Bolivia, and with that to carve up South America because it is the epicenter of great changes that are advancing on a world scale.”
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By Claudia Ciobanu

BUCHAREST, May 7 (IPS) - Romania has still not convincingly answered repeated calls from the European Commission and others to clarify allegations that it hosted CIA detention centres and that rendition flights passed through its territory.
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By Peter Gelling

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
BANTUL, Indonesia: Sitting cross-legged in the dirt beneath a canopy of jungle vegetation, Nasruddin Anshory, with his Koran open in front of him, was telling a group of visitors about their ordained responsibility to protect the environment.

“As a Muslim,” he said, “you have to do something.”
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By Bill Berkowitz*

OAKLAND, California, May 6 (IPS) - These days, while you can still pick up a newspaper or turn on a radio or television gabfest and read, hear and see the issue of immigration batted around, it has become less of a hot-button political issue in the United States.
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By Apostolis Fotiadis

PRISTINA, May 5 (IPS) - The new government in Kosovo has failed so far to live up to its promise of fighting corruption.

The Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), leading member of the ruling coalition, ran a pre-election campaign on anti-corruption rhetoric that projected now Prime Minister Hasim Thaci as one of the last few clean politicians in Kosovo.
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From Economist.com

May 3rd 2008

Robert Mugabe lost the first round

NEARLY five weeks after the presidential election, the results have at last come out. According to the electoral commission Morgan Tsvangirai, the challenger, beat Robert Mugabe, the incumbent, but too narrowly to win outright. The official data said that Mr Tsvangirai had won 47.9% of the vote to Mr Mugabe’s 43.2%. This means there must be a run-off. But it is unclear whether Mr Tsvangirai will take part. The Movement for Democratic Change insists that its candidate won outright with 50.3% and that the official results are false.
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IRIN

KABUL, 2 May 2008 (IRIN) - The Afghan government, UN agencies and donors must work together to tackle worsening food insecurity resulting from rising food prices, and avoid a humanitarian tragedy, a senior UN World Food Programme (WFP) official said.
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By Mirela Xanthaki

NEW YORK, May 2 (IPS) - Over the last 15 years, at least 500 journalists were killed directly because of their work. But in less than 15 percent of cases have the perpetrators been brought to justice, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
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