By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Dec 22 (IPS) - Key appointments announced by President-elect Barack Obama suggest that science will soon make a major comeback in the U.S. government.

The outgoing administration of President George W. Bush has been harshly criticised by many members of the nation’s scientific community for allowing ideology to distort or eliminate findings on reproductive health, stem cell research, climate change, and a host of other critical issues.
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Dean Baker

The data hugely overestimate jobs created in new firms, which will be corrected next year.

The economy shed 533,000 jobs in November. This loss, combined with sharp upward revisions to the September and October data, brought the three-month job loss to 1,256,000 jobs, the largest three-month loss in any period since the months immediately following the end of World War II. (The job losses at the start of the recessions in 1949 and 1958 were larger relative to the size of the labor force.) The private sector lost 1,286,000 jobs over this period, as the public sector continued to add jobs at a modest pace.
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By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Dec 19 (IPS) - On the heels of a bipartisan Congressional report blaming high-level officials of the George W. Bush administration for employing harsh interrogation techniques on detainees captured in the “global war on terror", many of the world’s most respected civil libertarians are calling for the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the alleged abuses.

One of them, Amnesty International, has also released a detailed plan to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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By Alex Perry - TIME

Zimbabwe’s farms are ruined, its economy has evaporated, and its people have begun to starve and die of cholera. What better time to call a feast? According to reports in Zimbabwe’s domestic press on Thursday, President Robert Mugabe and delegates to the annual conference of his ruling Zanu-PF Party will chomp their way through 124 cattle, 81 goats and 18 pigs over the course of their deliberations in the central town of Bindura. “Even if no more beasts are donated,” said Geoffrey Nyarota, managing editor of thezimbabwetimes.com, referring to the practice of delegates donating animals to the leadership, “124 head of cattle is an inordinately large quantity of beef.” With 5,000 delegates expected to attend, he added, it worked out to “40 delegates per bovine over four days — that is not to mention the pork, the goat, the maize-meal, the rice, among other basic foodstuffs currently in acute shortage throughout Zimbabwe.” Noting he had attended weddings at which two bulls had fed 400 guests, Nyarota added, “This truly is incredible, especially in a country where millions of impoverished souls are starving.”
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By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Dec 17 (IPS) - Greenhouse gas emissions from the European Union may fall by as little as four percent between now and 2020 as a result of a new decision by the bloc’s law-makers.

In a Dec. 17 vote, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) approved the broad thrust of a package of measures to address climate change agreed by the EU’s governments last week.
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IRIN

CAIRO, 16 December 2008 (IRIN) - In the darkest alleys of Shubra, a district in Cairo, illegal organ traffickers hunt down destitute young Egyptians to try to persuade them to sell a kidney for less than US$3,000.

“It is a risk-free operation - that was what the broker told me as he talked to me about selling my kidney for good fast cash,” recalled Idris, 33, a labourer who he sold his kidney seven months ago for 12,000 Egyptian pounds (about $2,225) to an Arab tourist he never met.
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BLANCA VILÀ * - El País

La revuelta que estalló en Atenas tras la muerte de un escolar ha mostrado errores comunes a otros países: una clase política ineficiente y un sistema universitario caduco. El componente ácrata ha sido lo específico.

16/12/2008. Atenas, toda Grecia, ha reventado. La tierra y los hombres que inventaron la democracia han estallado de consternación colectiva después de años de crecimiento y bonanza en una Europa aparentemente más segura. La muerte de Alexandros, un escolar quinceañero, fue la gota de agua que colmó el vaso, generando por doquier una violencia destructora que ha escapado de las manos no sólo del Gobierno, sino del propio sistema. ¿Se ha quedado Grecia “sin Estado", tal como Le Monde titulaba hace unos días un editorial?
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Por Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canadá, dic (Tierramérica ) - Expertos en clima reunidos en Poznan, Polonia, prometieron crear un cofre dorado de créditos de carbono para financiar a comunidades rurales pobres que se conviertan en guardianas de tierras y bosques.

Pero son varias las advertencias de que el oro podría beneficiar solo a los intereses corporativos.
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By Bruce Crumley - TIME / Paris

Even as Greece awakened Monday to relative calm following eight days of rioting by outraged youths, French officials were moving to placate protesting students amid rising fears that violence could break out across France. Given the defiant nature of French student protests over the years — including weeks of violent demonstrations over a new youth labor contract in 2006 — concern is growing in France that the dismal economic outlook could push the current anti-reform protests into the kind of wild insurrection that has rocked Greece.
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By Michael Flynn

GENEVA, Dec 16 (IPS) - In the first two pages of his book on the neoconservative movement, historian Stephen Sniegoski tells us that U.S. Mideast policy during the George W. Bush presidency has been “colossally erroneous” and “disastrous to U.S. interests", that the Iraq War is a “blunder of colossal proportions", and that an attack on Iran is a “highly likely” “disaster” unless the country “eschews all elements of the Middle East war policy".
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Mary Hennock - NEWSWEEK

Boosting consumption is key to economic recovery. But that will take fixing a disastrous health system.

From the magazine issue dated Dec 22, 2008. This month marks the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in China. But rather than celebrating, officials are in a panic. The global economic crisis has rammed home the message that China’s old export-driven development model won’t work forever; last month exports were down for the first time since February 2002, and overall GDP growth has dropped from nearly 12 percent last year to a projected 8 percent in 2009. Economists and party leaders now agree: the only way to keep China humming is to boost domestic consumption. That means getting Chinese people spending. But there’s a problem. China’s social-security network is broken, badly, and nowhere are the problems worse than in health care. A serious illness can still wipe out a family’s savings. As long as that’s the case, ordinary citizens will keep sticking large chunks of their income under their mattresses. And while that lasts, consumer demand will lag.
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By Gareth Porter*

TEHRAN, Dec 15 (IPS) - Would a negotiated agreement between Iran and the Barack Obama administration be feasible if Obama sent the right signals? The answer one gets from Iranian officials and think tank analysts is, “Yes, but…”

The Iranian national security establishment has long salivated over the prospect of an agreement with Washington. But there’s a big difference between Iranian and U.S. ideas of what such an accord would look like.
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By Ramesh Jaura

POZNAN, Dec 12 (IPS) - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for a new green deal that would work for all nations, rich as well as poor, in the face of both climate change and the global economy.

Addressing the high-level segment of the gathering of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that kicked off Thursday, Ban pleaded for “global solidarity on climate change.”
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Greg Bruno, Council on Foreign Relations
Newsweek

Saudi Arabia may be making more than just peace with the Taliban.

Dec 11, 2008 . Reports of Saudi-brokered talks between Afghan officials and the Taliban in late 2008 prompted a new round of speculation about the role Riyadh might play in the future of Afghanistan. Amid U.S. calls for a regional approach to the Afghan crisis, observers and politicians–including President-elect Barack Obama during the U.S. presidential campaign–have said Saudi intervention could shape the success of the Western-led mission, from fostering talk with militants to encouraging Pakistan to help stabilize Afghanistan. But some analysts say Saudi brokering is motivated by more than just a desire to bring peace to Afghanistan. Following the reported September 2008 talks, only Iran condemned the negotiations; some believe the Afghan war zone has become a battleground for influence (ISN) between Riyadh and Tehran, as it was during the 1980s and 1990s.
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Omid Memarian interviews ABDOLFATTAH SOLTANI, Iranian human rights lawyer

BERKELEY, California, Dec 11 (IPS) - Abdolfattah Soltani has received the Nuremberg annual human rights award in appreciation of more than a decade defending individuals who have been prosecuted for their political and religious beliefs.

“I was informed by Shirin Ebadi that the jury has chosen me for this year’s Nuremberg prize,” said Soltani in an interview with IPS from Tehran.
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From The Economist print edition

Africans, Europeans and Americans must together rescue a dying country

Dec 11th 2008 . THE Zimbabwe crisis has reached a new level that is both hideous and, paradoxically, hopeful. The hideous part is that people are dying—indeed, Zimbabwe as a country is dying—at an even faster rate than before, as cholera sweeps across the country. Mass hunger looms: the UN’s World Food Programme reckons that, in the new year, it must provide food for 5.5m in a population that has shrunk, through disease and emigration, from about 12m probably to less than 9m.
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By Ramesh Jaura

POZNAN, Dec 10 (IPS) - Leading environment groups have opposed plans to hand over financing to check climate change to the World Bank.

Industrialised countries may be required to provide more than 100 billion dollars for developing countries to build low-carbon economies, according to unofficial estimates. This money should not be handled by the World Bank, 142 organisations fighting for climate justice said in a joint statement Tuesday (Dec. 9) at the UN climate talks under way in the Polish city Poznan.
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Kenneth Roth - guardian.co.uk.

The lasting legacy of the UDHR is the knowledge that governments that abuse human rights do so at a cost

Wednesday December 10 2008 . As we mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, how do we explain the declaration’s significance in a world still rife with human rights violations? Is Eleanor Roosevelt’s vision a failure because it has not put an end to the abuses that spawned it? These questions are recurring themes in the recent commentary on this site by AC Grayling, Francesca Klug and others.
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By Rebecca Murray

HARBEL, Liberia, Dec 9 (IPS) - “We are not just going to let a bulldozer come in and demolish our land. If possible we will use our children as shields. We will have to do that,” exclaims Eric Lavella, a middle-aged Firestone factory worker living in the heart of Liberia’s largest rubber plantation, 60 kilometres south of the capital Monrovia.
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By Javier Blas, Commodities Correspondent - The Financial Times

December 9 2008 .The food crisis has pushed the number of hungry people in the world to almost 1bn, in what the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation described on Tuesday as a “serious setback” to global efforts to reduce mass starvation.

“The ongoing financial and economic crisis could tip even more people into hunger and poverty,” the FAO added.
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By Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (IPS) - Anticipating the ascendance of President-elect Barack Obama to the Oval Office, groups of hawks, among them neoconservatives, have begun to offer public advice on just exactly what the new administration should do to deal with Iran.

Accusing Iran of a covert plan to pursue nuclear weapons under the guise of peaceful ambitions, most Washington voices advocate a policy of preventing the Islamic Republic from getting the bomb. But the substance of those policies varies widely.
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From The Economist print edition

Investors may draw the wrong lesson from history

Dec 4th 2008 . FOR American and European savers it has been a lost decade. After two booms and two busts, stockmarkets have earned them nothing, or less, in the past ten years. Low interest rates have made bonds and bank deposits unrewarding too. Were it not for the tax relief they receive, contributors to personal pension plans would have been better off keeping their money under their mattresses. It will be little consolation to Westerners that savers in Japan have known this empty feeling for far longer.
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By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Dec 5 (IPS) - The virtually total impunity from prosecution accorded to private contractors in Iraq may be coming to an end.

Under the new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) approved by the Iraqi government last week, U.S. contractors will be subject to Iraqi law for the first time. Moreover, some observers believe that Iraq may be able to hold them legally accountable for offences allegedly committed even before the SOFA was approved.
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By Laura King, From the Los Angeles Times

The evidence pointing to the Pakistan-based group’s hand in the rampage in India raises the question of whether Pakistan’s elite spy agencies continue to nurture militant groups.

December 5, 2008 . Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan — Lashkar-e-Taiba, the self-styled “Army of the Pure,” has left its footprints in the snows of Kashmir, the back alleys of Lahore and Karachi, the harsh terrain along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier – and now, investigators say, in Mumbai, India, the scene of last week’s horrific rampage by gunmen.
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Antonio Marafioti interviews WALDEN BELLO*

VITERBO, Italy, Dec 4 (IPS) - With the United States represented by outgoing President George W. Bush, not much can be expected of the Dec. 1-12 international conference on climate change in the Polish city of Poznan, activist Walden Bello, winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize 2003, told IPS.

Bello, executive director of Focus on the Global South – a Bangkok-based policy research institute – and a professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines, is not known for mincing words.
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Paul Craig Roberts

If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Israel Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama’s election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.
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By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Dec 3 (IPS) - The European Union is financing ecologically and socially destructive projects in Africa, a Brussels conference has been told.

Officially, the Luxembourg-based European Investment Bank (EIB) is committed to using the 53 billion euros (67 billion dollars) it releases each year, to pursue policies that protect the environment and alleviate hardship.
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IRIN

NEW YORK, 2 December 2008 (IRIN) - The Starr Foundation, set up in 1955 by US insurance entrepreneur Cornelius Vander Starr, donated US$124 million and approved a further $194 million for its beneficiaries in 2006.

Among them was NetsforLife, a distributor of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets to ward off the mosquito carrying a disease that kills a child every 30 seconds. One million people die from malaria each year and 300-500 million more are estimated to be infected.
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From Economist.com

Barack Obama introduces his national-security team

THE phrase “team of rivals” has been on every pundit’s lips since it became clear that Barack Obama would make Hillary Clinton his secretary of state. Coming from the title of a book about Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, it seems to highlight that Mr Obama wants to hear dissenting opinions, including from his biggest personal rival, Mrs Clinton. But a look at his national-security line-up, which was officially announced on Monday December 1st, suggests a team that will probably gel reasonably well.
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By Ann Ninan

DOHA, Dec 2 (IPS) - “Good but not enough!” “Missed opportunity!” “Talks fail to deliver!” These were some of the reactions from civil society as the U.N. Financing for Development (FfD) talks drew to a close in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday.

Deep divisions over the question of how to overhaul the international financial architecture, which nearly derailed the negotiations, were papered over with the governments agreeing to convene another U.N. conference to deal with the ongoing financial crisis and its impact on development.
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By Bo Ekman, President, Johan Rockström and Anders Wijkman (*)

When climate negotiators meet this week in Poznan , only one year is left before a hoped-for post-Kyoto agreement in Copenhagen next year. A lot is at stake. The IPCC reports from 2007 underlined the seriousness of the problems we face. Since then, there have been remarkable developments in climate and global environment change science. Important new observations of the accelerating and worsening impacts of climate change have been reported, which were simply unknown to scientists only a few years ago.
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Analysis by Beena Sarwar

KARACHI, Dec 1 (IPS) - The pattern is all too familiar. Every time India and Pakistan head towards dialogue and detente, something explosive happens that pushes peace to the backburner and drags them back to the familiar old tense relationship, worsened by sabre-rattling war cries from both sides.
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