Interview with Ines Alberdi, executive director of UNIFEM

ROME, Aug 28 (IPS) - Ines Alberdi has worked for over 25 years on gender issues and in politics.

She comes to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) from her previous position as professor of sociology at Madrid University where she has taught political sociology and sociology of gender since 1993. Prior to that, she was director for research at the Centre for Sociological Research. Her main interest has been gender-based violence.
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Natural Solutions Foundation

HealthFreedomUSA.org, the website of the Natural Solutions Foundation, is beholden to no one: our only interest is health freedom. Rima E. Laibow, MD, successful natural medicine physician since the 1970s, has studied 16,000 pages of Codex documentation. Her conclusion is that people who say that Codex is “consumer protection", voluntary", or “harmless” are, at best, seriously mistaken.
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Interview with blogger and globe-trotter Michelle May

OAKLAND, California, Aug 26 (IPS) - When Michelle May, an avid traveler, returned to New York’s John F. Kennedy airport after a seven-week trip to Iran this summer, she says she was closely questioned and her luggage searched after officials read on her customs card that she had been to the Islamic Republic.

When May asked why she was being subjected to such scrutiny, a customs agent said, “They were the ones who attacked us.”
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By Miriam Mannak

CAPE TOWN, Aug 27 (IPS) - Geographic Information Systems (GIS) could play a vital role in improving agriculture and boosting food security in Africa. However, only a few African countries are capable of developing such systems, partly because of a lack of basic geographical data.

This arose during the third Map Africa conference, which took place in the South African city of Cape Town from August 25 to 26.
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Interview with Nadia D’Ávila Ferreira, Amazonas Environment Secretary*

MANAOS, Brazil, Aug 23 (Tierramérica) - The Brazilian state of Amazonas is “a quarry of ideas and creativity” and is in the vanguard for having preserved 98 percent of its native forests, paying for environmental services, and enacting the pioneering Climate Change Act, says Nadia D’Ávila Ferreira, the state’s secretary for the environment and sustainable development.
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Analysis by Zoltán Dujisin

BUDAPEST, Aug 25 (IPS) - Following tough negotiations, the U.S. and Poland have signed a deal on extension of the U.S. missile defence system to Eastern Europe, weeks after the outbreak of the Georgian-Russian conflict.

The U.S. wants to build a radar in the Czech Republic and a missile base in Poland that will allegedly protect Europe from missile attacks by ‘rogue’ states in the Middle East.
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By Andrew Nette

PHNOM PENH, Aug 22 (IPS) - It was known as the ‘secret war’, a covert operation waged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) throughout the sixties and early seventies against communist guerrillas in Laos.

And the most secret location in this clandestine war was the former CIA air base of Long Chen, in central Laos, a place that remain off limits even today.
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By Miriam Mannak

CAPE TOWN, Aug 20 (IPS) - The International Criminal Court (ICC) is using Africa as a guinea pig, and is too selective when it comes to arresting, indicting and prosecuting perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was one of the opinions raised during a recent seminar in Cape Town organised by the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR).
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By Jonas Gahr Store (*)

OSLO, Aug (IPS) There is a clear lesson to be drawn from the unsuccessful World Trade Organisation negotiations held in Geneva July 21-29: the world is witnessing a shift of power in the arena of the world economy and world trade. New states with growing economies and political ambitions are asserting themselves.
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Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Aug 19 (IPS) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation Monday brings to an end an extraordinarily close relationship between Musharraf and the George W. Bush administration, in which Musharraf was lavished with political and economic benefits from the United States despite policies that were in sharp conflict with U.S. security interests.
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Myriam Vander Stichele

The collapse of WTO talks has brought the problems of the international trade system to the surface. It is now time to overhaul a ‘free trade’ system that protects corporate globalisation at the expense of poverty eradication and sustainability.
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Interview with journalist and author Deborah Campbell

NEW YORK, Aug 18 (IPS) - Since the Israel-Lebanon 34-day war two years ago, and particularly after the Doha accord in May which restored Hezbollah to the Lebanese government and essentially gave it the veto power it demanded, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been the most popular figure anywhere in the Arab world.
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Irin -humanitarian news and analysis

DAKAR, 11 August 2008 (IRIN) - Recent visits between coup leader Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz and leaders from the African Union, League of Arab States, United Nations, and Mauritania’s major donors have prompted both protest and promises.
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Interview with Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, President of Soka Gakkai International

UNITED NATIONS, Aug (IPS) - As citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are painfully reminded of the horrors of atomic bombings that devastated the two Japanese cities in August 1945, one of the country’s most influential peace organisations is intensifying its longstanding efforts for nuclear disarmament.
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Analysis by Zoltán Dujisin

PRAGUE, Aug 11 (IPS) - As war breaks out in Georgia, the geopolitical struggle between the U.S. and Russia becomes more violent and closer to Russia’s border than ever.

The conflict started after Georgian troops tried to take control of the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia, which had been de facto independent and protected by Russian peacekeeping forces since 1992.
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By Jane Lampman
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Changemakers.net hosts global competition for innovative solutions to human trafficking.
from the August 11, 2008 edition

How do you eliminate slavery and human trafficking? Modern abolitionists across the globe are tackling that question head on – and collaborating via the Internet on their efforts.
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By Andrew Jack in Mexico City

The Financial Times

Emerging countries should fund more of their own spiralling needs to tackle Aids and other infectious diseases, the head of the largest multilateral donor agency for health warned yesterday.
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Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Aug 8 (IPS) - Journalist Ron Suskind’s revelation that Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief was a prewar intelligence source reporting to the British that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) adds yet another dimension to the systematic effort by then Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet to quash any evidence – no matter how credible – that conflicted with the George W. Bush administration’s propaganda line that Saddam was actively pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.
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By Daniel Luban

WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - News coming out of Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent months has unsettled many assumptions about the U.S. war on terror.

To most casual observers of the war on terror, Afghanistan served until recently as a reassuring contrast to the grim and bewildering conflict in Iraq - - the “good war” as opposed to the “bad war".
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Environmental News Network

LONDON (Reuters) - The U.N.’s climate change agency on Wednesday proposed to make it more difficult for speculators to earn carbon offsets from emissions-cutting projects which were already profitable.
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Interview with T. Akun, Kyrgyzstan’s Ombudsman

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, Aug 5 (IPS) - In the dungeons of Bishkek the summer temperatures are soaring. The air is thick and stagnant. Since the abolition of the death penalty, the threat of execution has been removed but inmates are living on the borderline of existence.

Kyrgyzstan’s Ombudsman T. Akun, in an interview with IPS Central Asia correspondent Kuban Abdyman, tells of his immediate reform goals – including bringing fresh air and paid employment to the former death row inmates.
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PlusNews (Johannesburg)

Mexico City, 5 August 2008 .Roadside bars, truckers and sex workers have long been seen as one of the most dangerous combinations for the transmission of HIV, with truckers often blamed for spreading the virus.

But research presented at the International AIDS Conference held in Mexico City this week, suggests that truckers have been misunderstood.
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IRIN-humanitarian news and analysis

AYEYARWADY DELTA, 4 August 2008 (IRIN) - Three months after Cyclone Nargis hit southern Myanmar, hundreds of thousands of people are still not back on their feet.

“The situation in Myanmar remains dire,” Chris Kaye, World Food Programme (WFP) country director, said. “The vast majority of families simply don’t have enough to eat.”
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Interview with Roberto Bissio, Coordinator of Social Watch

MONTEVIDEO, Aug 5 (IPS) - Inequality between men and women “is not always linked to poverty. We must not postpone action until we are rich and happy, because we may get rich without achieving gender equality,” Roberto Bissio, coordinator of the international network Social Watch, told IPS.

More than half of the world’s women live in countries that have made no progress in closing the gap between men and women in recent years, concludes the 2008 Gender Equity Index, launched in February by Social Watch, an international coalition of civil society organisations based in Montevideo, Uruguay.
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By ALLAN TURNER

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle. Aug. 4, 2008.

Medellin set to die Tuesday for Ertman-Peña killings.Texas defies global outcry from U.N., Bush, other leaders in the controversial case. Politicians worry about the impact on Americans arrested in foreign countries should Texas execute Jose Medellin.

Coined to promote tourism, that wry verbal wink at the state’s mythic image has assumed a literal meaning as Texas finds itself in defiance of the United Nations, the Organization of American States and national leaders in its planned Tuesday execution of Mexican citizen Jose Medellin.
Unless the U.S. Supreme Court or Gov. Rick Perry acts in his favor, Medellin, 33, will die for the 1993 rape-strangulation of two teenage Houston girls, Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña.
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By Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, Aug 4 (IPS) - From Republican contender John McCain’s Jul. 25 meeting with the Dalai Lama in Aspen, Colorado to Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s visit to Jerusalem’s Western Wall the same day, the intersection of religion, politics and the “war on terror” has been a recurrent theme in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

While many evangelical Christians have vocally supported the George W. Bush administration’s policies, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, other religious faiths have been at the forefront of both anti-war activism and less visible humanitarian work.
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Sergia Galván

ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento

The events of September 11th 2001 were, for the majority of governments, the perfect excuse to immediately abandon the commitments made from August 31 to September 8th 2001, at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, Africa.
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By Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jul (IPS) - U.S. defence strategy should be focused primarily in the short to medium term on unconventional threats, particularly “violent extremist movements such as al Qaeda and its associates", while it “hedge(s)” against the growing military power of “rogue states such as Iran and North Korea” and potential rivals, notably China and Russia, according to major policy guidance released here Thursday by Pentagon chief Robert Gates.
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