By Zahira Kharsany

JOHNNESBURG, Oct 29 (IPS) - More than 116 million people in 131 countries across the world participated in the global “Stand Up and Take Action” campaign that became the biggest mass mobilisation on a single issue. Activists criticised the fact that the gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase, while governments refused to make poverty alleviation a priority.
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Mark Weisbrot

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House pulled ahead of his opponent, Senator John McCain, as soon as the current financial crisis hit the headlines. As one of McCain’s top strategists recently blurted out, “If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose.”
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By Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Oct 27 (IPS) - With only one week before the Nov. 4 elections, Democrats are increasingly hopeful that they will emerge next Wednesday with control of the White House and substantially increased majorities in both houses of Congress.
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IRIN- humanitarian news and analysis

DAKAR, 27 October 2008 (IRIN) - Some of the biggest development and humanitarian NGOs are laying off staff or revising programmes for 2009 as their income streams flatten because of the global financial crisis.
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By Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Oct 27 (IPS) - Governments cannot deal with the current financial crisis on their own, and need the support of the people they govern, which is “best translated by the opinions of the civil society movement,” said Werner H. Schleiffer, executive coordinator of CONGO, the global umbrella of NGOs with consultative status with the United Nations.
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by John Nichols - The Nation

Barack Obama’s poll numbers have been looking good for so long that it is easy for his supporters to assume a triumphalism stance as America’s longest-ever presidential campaign enters its final week.

But be careful about that. The Democratic nominee for president, while he is currently ahead of Republican John McCain, stands perilously close to a dangerous threshold.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Oct (IPS) - While the ongoing financial crisis has almost entirely displaced foreign policy and even the Iraq War as the main concern of voters here, the differences in approach to the world beyond U.S. borders between the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, and his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, remain both wide and substantial.
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Tom Barry

The leading anti-immigration groups don’t specially target illegal immigrants. For the restrictionist groups Federation for American Immigration Reform, Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA, the country’s 11-12 million illegal immigrants are simply low-hanging fruit. Their long-range goal is to rid the nation of most all immigrants—both illegal and legal.

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By Nancy Durham, CBC News

October 22, 2008 .Who would have thought a dictator inspired a renewable energy campaign? That’s one explanation for how Portugal has come to embrace clean energy so enthusiastically.
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Analysis by Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Oct 23 (IPS) - For every one in 50 people around the world to make a point of standing up somewhere on the planet to say the same kind of thing adds up to a lot of people. More than any mass mobilisation on any issue ever before. And now that they have, it should follow for leaders, if only for their own sake, to sit up and listen.
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From Economist.com

Banking on inflation

WHEN markets move as rapidly as they have in recent weeks, anomalies appear, but spotting them is difficult. Sometimes £20 notes may actually be lying on the pavement, just waiting to be picked up.
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Analysis by Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Oct 22 (IPS) - Cast in the role of global saviour in the unfolding financial turmoil, China is playing host to a meeting of Asian and European leaders in Beijing this week that is expected to castigate the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism and press for a reshaped global economic order.
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By Dahr Jamail

PORTLAND, Oregon, Oct 20 (IPS) - Veterans from the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Iraqis, Afghanis, Vietnam veterans, and family members of U.S. military personnel converged in this west coast city over the weekend to share stories of atrocities being committed daily in Iraq, in a continuation of the “Winter Soldier” hearings held in Silver Spring, Maryland in March.
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STEPHANIE NOLEN

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail

In Kaniola, they have coined a new term: reviolé. Re-raped

KANIOLA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, October 17, 2008

At the Catholic parish office, on the cramped and crowded ledger pages where they list rape victims, at least half the names appear more than once: women who have been victims of sexual enslavement or public gang rape by rebel groups or the Congolese army; women, 30 in an average month, who have come to the parish to get help reaching a hospital to repair their injuries; women who have been healed, come home and a year or two or three later, been gang-raped again, during another small surge of the conflict.
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Zahira Kharsany interviews KUMI NAIDOO*

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 17 (IPS) - Since 2005, the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) has mobilised millions of unionists, activists, and ordinary people to demand an end to poverty and inequality.

Last year, 43.7 million people took part in the “Stand Up” campaign’s events around the world on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty; this year, the aim is for 67 million people to not just stand up, but to take action against inequality between Oct. 17 and 19.
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IRIN - humanitarian news and analysis

DAKAR, 16 October 2008 (IRIN) - Food security experts say international donors’ response to the world’s food crisis has been inadequate when compared to interventions to contain the global financial meltdown.

“Huge financial resources have been mobilised by the international community in a matter of days” in response to the global financial crisis, wrote Teresa Cavero in a report by the international NGO Oxfam released on 16 October – World Food Day.
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By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Oct 16 (IPS) - Faced with the prospect that a number of banks could collapse, European Union governments have this week approved a rescue plan worth more than 1,800 billion euros (2,460 billion dollars). Faced with a food crisis which has seen a major leap in the numbers of people suffering from hunger, the EU’s policy makers are mulling over a proposal to give 1 billion euros to farmers in poor countries.
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Sumit Ganguly
NEWSWEEK

Through neglect of its Christian minority, India is allowing religiously motivated violence to threaten its rise.

Since August of this year, a spate of violence has swept across significant portions of the eastern Indian state of Orissa. More than 30 people have been killed, thousands of homes torched and hundreds displaced. The principal victims have been the small, beleaguered Christian communities. Sadly, they are no strangers to such tragedies. In 1999, Hindu zealots murdered an Australian missionary, Graham Staines, and his two sons.
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Ramesh Jaura interviews ASHOK KHOSLA, new IUCN President*

BARCELONA, Oct 13 (IPS/Terraviva) - The IUCN has elected Ashok Khosla its new president. Widely recognised as a bridge between conservation and development, theory and practice, the traditional and the new, and between the North and the South, Khosla chairs the India-based Development Alternatives Group, a non-profit organisation established in 1983 “for creating large-scale sustainable livelihoods.” He is also president of the Club of Rome, a global think-tank and centre of innovation and initiative.
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ANSA

House OKs classes for foreign kids

(ANSA) - Rome, October 15 - A controversial government proposal to create special classes for immigrant children instead of allowing them to enter directly into Italian schools won approval in the House on Tuesday evening.

The measure, proposed by the Northern League and passed by 265 votes to 246, would require foreign children to pass a specially designed entrance test before being admitted to schools.
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By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Oct 14 (IPS) - In what some government critics are citing as an egregious example of public foot-dragging and bureaucratic inefficiency in immigration rule-making, the woman at the centre of one of the United States’ longest-running asylum disputes may now be in further jeopardy.

The case involves the asylum claim of Rodi Alvarado, who fled Guatemala in 1996 after suffering more than a decade of brutal domestic violence in a situation where neither the police nor the courts responded to her pleas for protection.
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George Wehrfritz - NEWSWEEK

This stable democracy with a hot market economy resembles another Asian giant in the 1990s.

Jakarta today could be any of Asia’s 21st-century boomtowns. The malls buzz, traffic snarls and modern office towers dominate the skyline. It all feels profoundly normal—but that’s big progress in a place that, barely ten years ago, seemed destined for ruin. Following the fall of longtime strongman Suharto, and with Indonesia reeling from the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, many analysts feared that Asia’s third-biggest country (population: 235 million) would go the way of Yugoslavia. Instead, it has become a cohesive, robust and exuberantly democratic moderate Muslim nation. Things are so buoyant that Indonesia invites comparison to another Asian giant: India.
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By Kathryn Strachan

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 13 (IPS) - Amid the hardship facing Ethiopia’s children, there are signs that conditions may be improving and that children’s lives are changing for the better.

According to results released this week by an international research project ‘Young Lives’, which examines key indicators of childhood poverty, Ethiopia has seen improvements over the past six years in the areas of nutrition, school enrolment and the incidence of child labour.
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INTERVIEW WITH NOBEL LAUREATE MUHAMMAD YUNUS

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus says that greed has destroyed the world’s financial system. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with him about the profit motive, social consciousness and what should be done to end the financial crisis.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Yunus, for years you have been preaching a more socially conscious way of doing business and have denounced the narrow focus on maximizing profit as harmful. Now, the entire financial system is wobbling …
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By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 9 (IPS) - As climate change, sea-level rise, earthquakes and floods threaten countries such as Bangladesh, Tuvalu, Vietnam and Tajikistan, the Tokyo-based U.N. University (UNU) warns that by 2050, some 200 million people will be displaced by environmental problems.

This estimated figure is roughly equal to two-thirds of the current population in the United States or the combined population of Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
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Nicholas Keung
IMMIGRATION/DIVERSITY REPORTER

Toronto Star

World - Basic needs of refugees not all met, UN finds . Improved access to asylum, protection of women and children required, report says

October 10, 2008. An assessment of the plight of refugees in eight countries shows disturbing gaps between basic needs and services offered, including shelter, food, sanitation and prevention of sexual violence, says a UN report released yesterday.
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Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff

The White House has faced several setbacks in its attempts to extradite Iranians accused of illegally seeking arms and military equipment for Tehran. Newsweek Web Exclusive

An aggressive Bush administration campaign to block arms sales to Iran has been dealt a series of setbacks by the refusal of some foreign governments to turn over alleged arms dealers arrested in undercover U.S. law enforcement stings.
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By Julio Godoy*

BARCELONA, Oct 9 (IPS/Terraviva) - Environmentalists are challenging dubious new proposals to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One of these new proposals is “geo-engineering” to capture carbon from the atmosphere. A disproportionately high concentration of carbon dioxide is believed to cause global warming, and consequently climate change.
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by Larry Smith

My name is Captain Kidd, God’s laws I did forbid
And most wickedly I did, as I sailed, as I sailed

I’d ninety bars of gold, as I sailed, as I sailed,
I’d ninety bars of gold, and dollars manifold,
With riches uncontrolled, as I sailed.

If you believe the noise in the market, the good folks of San Salvador have unimaginable wealth in their grasp, and are taking advice from an international media figure named Roberto Savio - an Italian part-time resident since the 1980s - on how to divvy up the spoils.
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Sabina Zaccaro interviews PAMELA COX from the World Bank

ROME, Oct 8 (IPS) - The global financial crisis and rising food prices are certain to impact Latin America despite the growth in recent years, says Pamela Cox, the World Bank’s vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Latin American countries are certainly “better positioned than they were ten years ago, so they are certainly better placed to weather a crisis, but they are going to see impacts, and are already seeing impacts,” she says.
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By Ramesh Jaura

BARCELONA, Oct 7 (IPS) - Enter the global financial crisis - exit action on climate change? That lingering apprehension is not shared by Pamela Cox, the World Bank’s vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean.

“I’m an optimist,” she said, adding that the global financial turmoil will not push climate change action into a corner. Money on the table will be used to invest in clean technologies for the countries in need, she said. Fox was at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona to launch a preview of a World Bank report on climate change in Latin America.
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ANSA

Tripoli failing to keep its end of bilateral deal

(ANSA) - Milan, October 7 - Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni on Tuesday condemned Libya for failing to keep its end of a bilateral deal, as dozens more migrants arrived by sea from north Africa. Three boats carrying 149 people were stopped near the southernmost Italian island of Lampedusa in the early hours of Tuesday, prompting angry comments from Maroni over an accord signed in August.
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By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (IPS) - By a margin of nearly two to one, Asian-American voters favour Democratic Sen. Barack Obama over his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, in the Nov. 4 elections, according to a major new poll released here Monday.

Overall, 41 percent of “likely voters” among the 4,400 Asian Americans polled nationwide by the National Asian American Survey (NAAS) said they intended to vote for Obama, while 24 percent said they supported McCain.
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By Richard Engel,
NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent

KARACHI, Pakistan – In the back of a jeep driving through Karachi, a sign on the wall of the city’s famous “Village Restaurant” caught my eye. It was just a little piece of frayed white paper plastered next to the restaurant’s much bigger logo, tempting customers to “Experience the Exotic of Traditional Dining.”

But the printed sign expressed an increasingly urgent plea in this teeming port city, once Pakistan’s capital: “Save your city from Talibanization,” it said in English.
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Bankole Thompson interviews BARACK OBAMA

GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan, Oct 3 (IPS) - Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama sat down with IPS correspondent Bankole Thompson again on Thursday for a one-on-one interview in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where over 15,000 enthusiastic Obama supporters turned out to hear his message of change at downtown’s Calder Plaza.
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From The Economist print edition

The European Union is struggling to deliver on its promises to cut carbon emissions

Oct 2nd 2008 . JUST 18 months ago the European Union promised to save the world from climate change. A final plan to deliver on those promises must be finished soon. But it is in deep trouble.
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by Johan Galtung

Stavanger, Norway, September 29, 2008

What a cynicism to talk about “crisis” as a phenomenon of a month or a year or two, when every day about 125,000 die from system-produced hunger and curable-preventable diseases! Much of the responsibility lies buried in an economism privileging the transaction system above the basic needs of the actors. Economics as a “science” is capital and system, not needs and human oriented. Capital-ism is exactly that, not a human-ism. And yet, there is a crisis on top of the permanent crisis. With a credit squeeze in an ailing finance economy transactions suffer, and so do the actors, even more than before. How come?
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By Skye Wheeler

TONJ, Oct 2 (IPS) - A lion attempted to devour Dinka chief Makom Majong Makom once. It was during the long years of Sudan’s north-south conflict that also saw a militia attack nearly destroy his rural South Sudanese community. The chief shot the animal as it leapt on top of him.
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By Diane Mapes - MSNBC contributor

After being diagnosed, patients often end up in the caretaking role

When Alicia Staley, a 37-year-old systems analyst from Boston got the news that she had cancer, she knew she was in for an emotional rollercoaster. But she assumed she’d be the one riding it.
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By Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Oct 1 (IPS) - The rivers of ink that have been spilled in investigations, trials and the collection of testimony on the Oct. 2, 1968 massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City have made it clear that the state was responsible. But not one person has been sentenced, and no one even knows exactly how many young protesters died.
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