By Mario Osava

BELÉM, Brazil, Jan 30 (IPS) - “True socialism is feminist,” and is already being built, said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, standing next to three other South American presidents, all of them men, at a dialogue that took place Thursday at the World Social Forum (WSF).
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By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL - The New York Times

January 30, 2009 - CHILIBRE, Panama — The land where Marta Ortega de Wing raised hundreds of pigs until 10 years ago is being overtaken by galloping jungle — palms, lizards and ants.

Instead of farming, she now shops at the supermarket and her grown children and grandchildren live in places like Panama City and New York.
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Mario Osava/IPS-TerraViva

Belém do Pará- A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message “SOS Amazon” to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF).

The mass message reflects “our concern about global warming, whose impact we will be the first to feel, although we, the peoples of the Amazon, have protected and cared for the forests,” Francisco Avelino Batista, an Apurinán Indian from the Purus river valley in the Brazilian Amazon, told IPS.
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Nick Summers - Newsweek Web Exclusive

According to author Jeff Jarvis, taking a page out of the company’s playbook could put the economy back on track
“Google is an avalanche and it has only just begun to tumble down the mountain,” Jeff Jarvis writes in a new book called “What Would Google Do?” that advises pretty much everyone—you, your company, entire industries, and the U.S. government—to study and ape the online juggernaut, or risk getting buried. Jarvis writes like he changes jobs, which is to say rapidly. He has been a TV critic, magazine founder, blogger, investor and professor, and if “WWGD” occasionally goes into sound-bite overdrive (the phrase “small is the new big” is used more than a dozen times, among other abuses), the habit can be excused as the tic of a guy who’s got a lot to say about the future of technology. He spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Nick Summers from Munich, where he is attending a conference in advance of the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Excerpts:
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By Ravi Kanth Devarakonda

GENEVA, Jan 28 (IPS) - The Davos delegate seems short of faith this year about anyone’s ability to save the world from the financial tsunami that the bosses have unleashed.

And with colleagues such as Ramalinga Raju of the now infamous Satyam Computers languishing in jail for fraud, the Davos delegate is uncertain what the 21st century holds for what was being celebrated until the other day as global capitalism.
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By Ari Berman - The Nation

01/27/2009. Republicans, having driven the economy into a ditch during the last eight years, are now opposing the one piece of legislation–an economic stimulus–that might turn things around. House Republican leaders are telling their rank-and-file to vote against the $825 billion plan, even before they meet with Barack Obama, yet again, this afternoon.
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Alejandro Kirk interviews Boaventura de Sousa Santos *

BELEM, Brazil, Jan 26 (IPS) - Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that community radio and alternative media are the only platforms that can compete with corporate media. In an interview with TerraViva’s Alejandro Kirk, de Sousa Santos stressed that the current crisis requires that participants at the World Social Forum (WSF) take a unified political stance.

Excerpts from the interview follow:
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Correspondent’s Diary - From Economist.com

Celebrating twenty years since communism’s fall

Monday
Jan 27th 2009. NOW that Russia has turned the heating back on, central Europe can start planning its celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of communism. Moscow’s shadow remains long, but the region has cause for joy. Hungary is a democracy, a member of the European Union, NATO and the Schengen Zone, which allows visa free travel across the continent.
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Anna Quindlen

The welfare of women should be a key component of American foreign policy. And we’ve got the woman to make that happen.

NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 2, 2009

As Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton begin to use their uncommon authority and intelligence to implement a new American international agenda, it might behoove them to read a speech given some years ago in Beijing. It read in part: “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights for one and for all. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely—and the right to be heard. Women must enjoy the rights to participate fully in the social and political lives of their countries if we want freedom and democracy to thrive and endure.”
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Alejandro Kirk interviews Walden Bello*

BELEM, Brazil, Jan 26 (IPS) - The World Social Forum meeting this week in this city in Brazil’s Amazon jungle region has an urgent and crucial task: coming up with alternative solutions for the global crisis of capitalism now under way, and pushing for democratic control of the economy and state worldwide, Filipino academic, author and activist Walden Bello tells TerraViva editor Alejandro Kirk in this interview.
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By Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jan 23 (IPS) - Days before families across China sit down for the Chinese New Year’s feast, the country’s leaders have moved to restore public confidence in the safety of their repast. A Chinese court has sentenced two men to death and awarded stiff sentences to others implicated in the country’s worst food-tampering scam.
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John E. Schwarz And Lew Daly

The new president and the link between economics and freedom.

America is not about common blood, or race, or ethnic background or religion. America is about an idea, and that idea is freedom.

Of course the term is omnipresent in our politics, but the meaning has always been contested. Every major transformation in our history, from the Civil War, to the New Deal, to the Reagan Revolution, was a fight over the meaning of freedom.
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Walden Bello

Not surprisingly, the swift unraveling of the global economy combined with the ascent to the U.S. presidency of an African-American liberal has left millions anticipating that the world is on the threshold of a new era. Some of President-elect Barack Obama’s new appointees – in particular ex-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to lead the National Economic Council, New York Federal Reserve Board chief Tim Geithner to head Treasury, and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk to serve as trade representative – have certainly elicited some skepticism. But the sense that the old neoliberal formulas are thoroughly discredited have convinced many that the new Democratic leadership in the world’s biggest economy will break with the market fundamentalist policies that have reigned since the early 1980s.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jan (IPS) - U.S. and international human rights groups Wednesday praised President Barack Obama’s directive to immediately suspend the work of military commissions established by his predecessor, George W. Bush, to prosecute suspected terrorists at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and pressed for its earliest possible closure.
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By John Nichols - The Nation

01/21/2009 . Apparently Barack Obama took his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” a tad more seriously than did his predecessor.

Lawyers for the United States government – the one now led by Obama – acted even as the inaugural celebrations were going on to halt the Guantánamo Bay military commission trials.
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By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 21 (IPS) - A World Social Forum (WSF) revitalised by a global crisis that has awakened new interest in the proposition that “another world is possible” - now perceived as either less utopian or more urgently needed - will take place from Jan. 27 to Feb. 1 in Belém, in northern Brazil.
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By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (IPS) - Perhaps never in human history have the hopes of so many people for positive change in international relations rested on one person as they do on Barack Obama, who is to be inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States Tuesday at noon Washington time.
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Rod Nordland - Newsweek Web Exclusive

In Zeitoun, Gaza, 29 members of one family lost their lives. Why?

Palestinian farmer Rafiq Samouni, 39, sat on the rubble of his house Monday, eating a sour orange. “We don’t have any homes, we don’t have any food–except these,” he said, gesturing at the remains of an orange tree sticking up through chunks of concrete and piles of earth churned up by Israeli tanks. “And we don’t have any relations.” Twenty-nine members of the extended Samouni family, who lived in neighboring homes in the Zeitoun area of Gaza, were killed on the first morning of Israeli ground operations, Jan. 4, and nearly all of their homes were blown up by Israeli demolition teams, most of them completely flattened. Another 19 Zeitoun residents from other families perished as well; the last of those 48 corpses was recovered Monday, after lying there for two weeks until Israeli army units finally withdrew on Sunday. The smell of death was everywhere.
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Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

JERUSALEM, Jan 19 (IPS) - Europe now evidently understands what the U.S. has long understood - if you want to move Israelis on peace, you need to make them feel secure.

There they were Sunday evening, six of the Continent’s most powerful leaders at the table of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, lining up with Israel’s “achievements” secured in its three-week war against Hamas.
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From The Economist print edition

George Bush has left a dismal legacy, but Barack Obama can do much to repair the damage

Jan 15th 2009 - SHORTLY after midday on January 20th, Barack Obama will sit for the first time at the desk where the buck stops. The American presidency is always the world’s hardest and most consequential job, but it seems particularly so this month. A global recession of a severity not seen for perhaps 80 years; a new war in the Middle East and old ones in Africa; missions very far from accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan; a prickly Russia and a rising China. These international challenges must jostle for the president’s attention alongside noisy domestic concerns like rocketing unemployment, the desperate need for a better health-care system, exploding deficits and failing cities. The burdens, surely, are too many for one man to bear.
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By Katie Paul

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 . Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe may be the only person left who denies that his country is spiraling out of control, but that hasn’t made it any easier to stop. Tuesday, the U.N. reported that more than 2,000 people have perished in the cholera epidemic sweeping the country since August. Some 40,000 are infected, and the number of cases continues to rise exponentially. Worst of all, the complete collapse of the country’s basic infrastructure—water, sanitation, health care—has given rise to other diseases, including a particularly terrifying drug-resistant form of tuberculosis, which could easily turn an epidemic into a pandemic. Through it all, Mugabe has squandered aid money, chased out humanitarian groups, and suppressed information about the crisis.
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By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 15 (IPS) - Global emissions of carbon dioxide must reach a peak in less than 10 years and then begin a rapid decline to nearly zero by 2050 to avoid catastrophic disruption to the world’s climate, according to a new report.
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By Mel Frykberg

RAMALLAH, Jan 14 (IPS) - In the face of U.S. denials, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office confirmed Wednesday that he personally intervened to ensure that the U.S. abstained from voting on UN Security Council Resolution 1860 last week.

According to Olmert, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to abstain from voting on the resolution, which called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and which she was largely responsible for authoring and putting together.
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By Bob Woodward - The Washington Post

Trial overseer cites ‘abusive’ methods against suspect in Sept. 11 attacks

Jan. 14, 2009, WASHINGTON - The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”
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Omid Memarian interviews Iranian Noble Prize Laureate SHIRIN EBADI

UNITED NATIONS, Jan (IPS) - A few days after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Iranian authorities to take immediate measures to ensure the safety of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi, she told IPS in a telephone interview from Tehran that police stood by and watched as her house was attacked by a mob.
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IRIN

MONROVIA, 12 January 2009 (IRIN) - Five years after the end of the war in Liberia, many of the hundreds of thousands of injured survivors say they are still suffering from physical wounds that were never properly treated.

Shootings, stabbings and beatings were rife during Liberia’s 14-year conflict. Although medical aid agencies and bare-bones medical facilities have treated many people for life-threatening injuries, few can offer longer-term treatment.
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By Claudia Ciobanu

BUCHAREST, Jan 12 (IPS) - The gas crisis has placed environmental concerns on the backburner, and raised demands for nuclear production at plants once considered unsafe.

Over the past week, Bulgarian authorities have had to restart one unit of Bobov Dol thermal plant because of the shortage of gas. The Bobov Dol plant is one of the main polluters in the country, lacking a sulphur purification facility and producing greenhouse emissions above the permitted level. Following Bulgaria’s entry to the EU, units of Bobov Dol had to be shut down to meet European environmental standards.
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From The Economist print edition

Until he becomes unpopular, Barack Obama will get most of what he wants from Congress

Jan 8th 2009 “CHANGE begins at home,” say the billboards in Washington, DC. They are adverts for IKEA, a discount furniture store, urging people to spruce up their apartments with new sofas. But they also describe Barack Obama’s agenda. The president-elect was chosen to stop wasting blood and treasure on foreign wars and start fixing what’s broken at home. As the flames in Gaza attest, the rest of the world is hard to ignore. Nonetheless, Mr Obama started work in the capital this week with a hugely ambitious domestic programme. He wants to rescue the economy from free fall, extend health care to nearly everyone and re-engineer the way Americans produce and consume energy. This package will be somewhat costlier and harder to assemble than an IKEA bookshelf, and he cannot hope to accomplish it alone.
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By Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Jan 9 (IPS) - Through a difficult 18 years since the end of Soviet political dictatorship, Russia has steadily made its way back on to the global stage.

Through this period many see the first Russian leader Boris Yeltsin’s ten-year rule as a “lost decade” that made way for rapid progress under former president and now prime minister Vladimir Putin. This progress is expected to continue during President Dmitry Medevdev’s administration.
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By Mark Mazzetti

Pressure will be intense over agency’s secret interrogation program
NEWS ANALYSIS
The New York Times , Jan. 9, 2009

WASHINGTON - As every previous director could attest, succeeding at the helm at the Central Intelligence Agency requires an uneasy balance: being firm enough to impose a White House agenda without inciting a revolt, while winning allegiance at the agency without being co-opted by its bureaucracy.
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Malcolm Beith
Newsweek Web Exclusive

The arrest of a beauty queen shows how narcoculture infiltrates all of Mexican society.

Nearly everything about it was journalistic catnip: Laura Elena Zúñiga Huizar, a 23-year-old beauty queen, arrested just outside of the Mexican city of Guadalajara with seven alleged drug traffickers, two assault rifles, handguns, ammunition, 16 cell phones and $53,000 in U.S. currency, just before Christmas Eve. They were going shopping in Bolivia and Colombia, Miss Sinaloa 2008 told the authorities. But beneath the surface lay a tragic reality: few are immune from Mexico’s drug war these days.
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By Jim Lobe and Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Jan 7 (IPS) - Consumed by coverage of the Nov. 4 presidential election, U.S. mainstream media ignored a key Israeli military attack on a Hamas target that some Palestinians claim marked the effective end of the ceasefire between the two sides and set the stage for the current round of bloodletting.
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By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

CAIRO, Jan 6 (IPS) - With the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip now in its second week – and as the Palestinian death toll approaches 600 – U.S. president-elect Barack Obama has continued to remain silent. Obama’s reticence, say Egyptian commentators, indicates that he will be no more even-handed on the issue of Palestine than preceding U.S. administrations.
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IRIN

GAZA CITY/RAMALLAH, 6 January 2009 (IRIN) - The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has over 10,000 staff in Gaza, but their deployment has been severely restricted due to Israeli bombing and tank shelling, UNRWA spokesman Sami Mshasha said.
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Omid Memarian interviews Iranian activist SUSSAN TAHMASEBI

BERKELEY, California, Jan 2 (IPS) - The U.S. government’s calls for civil society to work for “regime change” in Iran has increased pressure on activists on the ground who are engaged in a peaceful process of improving their society and addressing social problems, according to Sussan Tahmasebi, a prominent women’s right activist in Iran who has not been allowed to leave the country for the past two years.
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By Mark Thompson / Washington

TIME

The incoming Obama Administration says it wants to shut down the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. But even if Guantánamo closes, the controversial U.S. practice of jailing suspected al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists indefinitely won’t end, because such detentions continue on an even greater scale at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, 40 miles north of Kabul. Approximately 250 detainees are currently being held at Guantánamo; an estimated 670 are locked up under similar conditions at Bagram.
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Analysis by Zoltán Dujisin

BUDAPEST, Jan 5 (IPS) - The rotating EU presidency has been taken over for the first half of the year by a country with a president who may refuse to sign the EU Treaty, and with a weak government that has more faith in the U.S. than in Europe.

The Czech presidency has come up with a list of proposals called Europe Without Barriers to promote free movement of persons and services, and increased competitiveness. But pressing current events are likely to overshadow Czech priorities.
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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF - NYT

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia .Barack Obama’s presidency marks a triumph over the legacy of slavery, so it would be particularly meaningful if he led a new abolitionist movement against 21st-century slavery — like the trafficking of girls into brothels.

Anyone who thinks it is hyperbole to describe sex trafficking as slavery should look at the maimed face of a teenage girl, Long Pross.
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