By Vandana Shiva (*)

NEW DELHI, Aug (IPS) The privatisation of the earth’s resources is a recipe for famine and desertification, violence against women, hunger, and, as happens in India, the suicide of farmers.

The state of natural resources is shaped and influenced by agricultural technologies and by how natural resources are owned.
(more…)

IRIN

NAIROBI, 28 August 2009 (IRIN) - Countries tackling food insecurity and climate change adaptation can greatly benefit from agroforestry - integrating fleshy plants and trees into their farming systems, environmental specialists say.

Sub-Saharan Africa has a history of food insecurity brought on by meagre rains, land degradation, declining soil fertility and bad management of resources, among other factors.
(more…)

By Zoltán Dujisin

PAMIR MOUNTAINS, Tajikistan, Aug 27 (IPS) - The collapse of the Soviet Union has brought misery to Tajikistan’s remote eastern half. People are being driven once again to live as nomads.

Tajikistan is a former Soviet republic that became independent in 1991. It borders the two former Soviet republics Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, China on the east and Afghanistan in the south.
(more…)

Analysis by Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Aug 26 (IPS) - Cuba’s communist government is being challenged to move toward a more participative and inclusive socialist system, one that offers real economic well-being and responds to the social and political demands that have built up and been expressed in different ways in recent years.
(more…)

By Mercedes Sayagues

SAO TOME, Aug 24 (IPS) - If you live in São Tomé, a good investment in your health is to plant a po-sabom tree (Dracaena aroborea) in your backyard. Leave space: it can grow up to 20 metres high, with sword-shaped leaves.
(more…)

Analysis by Bill Berkowitz*

OAKLAND, California, Aug 22 (IPS) - Every year during August recess, many members of the U.S. Congress go back to their districts and hold town hall meetings to get a sense of what their constituents are thinking about, and to apprise them of upcoming legislation.

This year, instead of the usual sparsely attended events, town hall meetings across the United States have turned into raucous free-for-alls as opponents of President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposals have taken to shouting down a host of senators and congresspersons.
(more…)

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

IPS interviews Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus.

BANGKOK, Aug 20 (IPS) - Having shaken up the conventions of banking by arguing that credit is a fundamental right to help the poor in his native Bangladesh get loans for small business ventures, Muhammad Yunus has set his sights on another shake-up: university education.
(more…)

By Leonardo Padura Fuentes (*)

HAVANA, Aug (IPS) Cubans are used to living with crises, limits, shortages, emergency plans, “special” -and less “special"- periods. That may be why for a number of months many Cubans have been watching with detachment the economic and financial crisis that has been battering the world for two years now. Even politicians and the media contributed to this sense that in Cuba there would be no job cuts, no foreclosed homes (because no one can legally buy one, for a start), and no gutting of social programmes.
(more…)

By Ignacio Ramonet (*)

PARIS, Aug (IPS) The world’s conservative groups and their usual propagandists [i] received the news of the June 28 coup in Honduras with immense pleasure[ii]. Although they made critical noises about the coup itself, they swallowed and justified the arguments of those who carried it out, repeating that “President Manuel Zelaya had committed numerous violations of the constitution by wanting to hold a referendum to remain in power.” [iii]
(more…)

By Roberto Savio (*)

ROME, Aug (IPS) The Washington Consensus, the neo-liberal economic prescription presumed to be universally and permanently valid, was broadsided by the current world recession together with other “one size fits all” formulas.

The name “Washington Consensus” was given in 1989 to a convergence of economic policies that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the US Treasury imposed on the world as the new model of economic development just as the Berlin Wall was coming down. The political implications were profound.
(more…)

By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

If it’s not a crisis, we can’t fix it.

From the magazine issue dated Aug 31, 2009

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen the twin personalities of the U.S. government come out: one is impressive, the other deeply worrying. Good news first: we now have increasing evidence that Washington’s response to the global financial collapse was effective. Recall the fall of 2008. The financial markets seized up, credit froze, the economy went into a nosedive. Almost every metric by which we judge the economy moved into its darkest territory since the 1930s. And this was happening at the worst possible time. A lame-duck U.S. president faced an opposition party in charge of both houses of Congress. It was a recipe for paralysis, bickering, and inaction.
(more…)

PlusNews

JOHANNESBURG, 11 August 2009 (PlusNews) - HIV is the main cause of death among pregnant women in Johannesburg, South Africa’s most populous city, according to a five-year study of maternal mortality at one of the city’s largest public hospitals.
(more…)

By Catherine Makino

IPS interviews ANN WRIGHT, retired U.S. army colonel

TOKYO, Aug 13 (IPS) - Ann Wright is a former U.S. diplomat who served in the military for 29 years. She was a deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Mongolia and Micronesia. She is one of three U.S. diplomats who publicly resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war.
(more…)

Analysis by Hilmi Toros

ISTANBUL, Aug 12 (IPS) - Once the worst of enemies, involved in 12 wars in three centuries, Turkey and Russia have suddenly become the best of friends, forging strong bonds that could be a counterpoint to the European Union if it freezes Turkey out of full membership.
(more…)

By Gordon Brown

The appalling but inevitable outcome of Aung San Suu Kyi’s sham trial is final proof that the military regime in Burma is determined to continue defying the world.
(more…)

By Elisabetta Zamparutti (*)

ROME, Aug (IPS) Movement towards the global abolition of the death penalty and the reduction in the number of executions over the last decade were confirmed in the last report of Hands Off Cain. Moreover, in China, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the world’s executions, this reduction was accompanied by another promising development: the vice president of the Chinese Supreme Court, Zhang Jun, announced in a statement on June 29 that the country would gradually slow the implementation of capital punishment to the point that there is “a very limited number of executions".
(more…)

Jennifer Moore

Since Honduran coup leaders ousted President Manuel Zelaya on June 28th at least six people have been killed and serious human rights violations against people opposing the de facto regime have been documented. (1) Vice President Alfredo López of the National Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) says threats against their members have increased during this period as a result of their participation in the National Front Against the Coup.
(more…)

By Eva Bartlett

GAZA CITY, Aug 10 (IPS) - On a Saturday morning in Gaza city, the Artificial Limb and Polio Centre (ALPC) is filled with people waiting to see the director, Dr. Hazem Al-Shawwa.

Following consultation with him and with the specialist in prosthetics and orthotics rehabilitation from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), many will begin the long road to treatment.
(more…)

From The Economist print edition

Iraqi commanders say they can run the show on their own. Really?

Aug 6th 2009 | BAGHDAD . AMERICAN commanders in Baghdad have been here before. In 2004, a year after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, they handed the reins of security to freshly trained forces of a once-again sovereign Iraq and encouraged them to take control of the main towns. But the Iraqis proved unable or unwilling to hold the line against the insurgents. The Americans delayed their exit and set about retraining the Iraqis. This time will it be different?
(more…)

By Mario Soares (*)

LISBON, Aug (IPS) A few months were enough for Obama to peacefully revolutionise the United States and the world. He radically changed the policies of Washington, domestic and international, with visible consequences at the global level despite a financial and economic crisis that, notwithstanding certain signs of improvement, is still far from turning around.
(more…)

Leonardo Boff *

As never before, in every country and forum the talk is about development and growth. It is an obsession that has dogged us for at least three centuries. Now that the economy has collapsed, the idea has returned with renewed vigor, because the logic of the system does not permit, without denying itself, the abandonment of that particular idea-matrix. Woe to the economies that cannot regain their levels of development-growth! They will fail, along with the eventual ecological and humanitarian tragedy.
(more…)

By Leonardo Padura Fuentes (*)

HAVANA, Jul (IPS) When in 1982 Ridley Scott filmed his prophetic and futuristic Blade Runner and showed the city of Los Angeles devastated by acid rain, sealed off, and darkened by a ceiling of clouds of a dense gas, that future (November 2019, in the film) seemed so remote and so poetic that few would have ever imagined it could come true. Now, ten years from that date, the world has deteriorated to the point that the images from Blade Runner amaze us less and frighten us more because we know how close we are to living on a planet similar to the one shown in the film.
(more…)

BBC

“Almost every other week we find a 14 or 15 year old carrying an explosive belt or grenade on his body”
(Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibowitz - Israeli military spokeswoman)

“ They dragged me from my home by the scruff of the neck. The more I cried the more they choked me… They pulled me along on my stomach. My knees were bleeding. They beat me with their guns and kicked me all the way to the jeep ” ( Mohammad Khawaja, 13)

2009/08/06 . A former Israeli military commander has told the BBC that Palestinian youngsters are routinely ill-treated by Israeli soldiers while in custody, reports the BBC’ s Katya Adler from Jerusalem and the West Bank.
(more…)

By Mirta Roses-Periago (*)

WASHINGTON, Jul (IPS) The fulfillment of every person’s inalienable right to health and well-being is a pivotal factor in the quest for human prosperity and more inclusive, equitable, and healthy societies across the world. This requires a strong commitment, even in the best of times, and all the more so in a period of economic and fiscal stress and a health emergency.
(more…)

By Stryker McGuire | NEWSWEEK

Its fall was inevitable, but the economic crisis will shrink the last pretenses of empire faster than anyone expected.

From the magazine issue dated Aug 17, 2009

Even in the decades after it lost its empire, Britain strode the world like a pocket superpower. Its economic strength and cultural heft, its nuclear-backed military might, its extraordinary relationship with America—all these things helped this small island nation to punch well above its weight class. Now all that is changing as the bills come due on Britain’s role in last year’s financial meltdown, the rescue of the banks, and the ensuing recession. Suddenly, the sun that once never set on the British Empire is casting long shadows over what’s left of Britain’s imperial ambitions, and the country is having to rethink its role in the world—perhaps as Little Britain, certainly as a lesser Britain.
(more…)

By Julio Godoy

BERLIN, Aug 4 (IPS) - A ceremony at Auschwitz Sunday to commemorate the half a million Sinti and Roma killed by the Nazis became a reminder of the threats these people continue to face across Europe.
(more…)

By Robert Dreyfuss

The Dreyfuss Report - The Nation

A multi-billion dollar mystery is unfolding in Iraq, and it may reach to the highest levels of the Iraqi government.

It involves what the New York Times calls an “extremist Shiite group” that has now reconciled with Prime Minister Maliki and his regime. The group is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five British contractors who, according to the Guardian, were installing a sophisticated financial tracking system in Iraq’s ministry of finance in 2007.
(more…)

By Mark Sommer (*)

ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jul (IPS) Forty years ago I drove across the United States traversing mid-winter blizzards before entering the blissful warmth and light of California, a state blessed not only with stunning topography but also a diverse and hugely talented population, a top-tier educational system, and a culture of freewheeling, sky’s-the-limit innovation. We cruised the sinuous curves of Highway 1 on the spectacular Big Sur coastline crooning, ‘California Dreamin'’.
(more…)

IRIN

DHAKA, 31 July 2009 (IRIN) - Too many teenage girls are getting married in Bangladesh today, say health specialists.

According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) State of the World’s Children 2009 report, more than 64 percent of girls marry before they are 18.
(more…)