Suzanne Hoeksema interviews ALICIA BÁRCENA, head of ECLAC

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 (IPS) - Chile is leading the way towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), while Honduras is seriously lagging behind, says Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
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By Naomi Klein - The Nation

This article appeared in the October 12, 2009 edition of The Nation.

On September 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his cinematic takedown of the capitalist order, Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political moment. Following is an edited transcript of their conversation.- -The Editors
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By Hiromichi Umebayashi (*)

TOKYO, Sep (IPS) Why should we abolish nuclear weapons? This apparently naive question seems to have become a matter of hotdebate. In Japan, which suffered nuclear holocaust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is a profound desire for nuclear abolition that derives from its first-hand experience of the appalling damage caused by nuclear weapons.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Oct 5, 2009

At his United Nations debut, Barack Obama urged global cooperation to combat nuclear proliferation, climate change, and other problems that go beyond the borders of any one country. The speech was well received all over the world, except one place—America’s right-wing netherworld, which quickly began whipping people into a frenzy. For Michelle Malkin, the speech was evidence that Obama was “the great appeaser,” though she then went on to say, “From the sound of it, you’d think you were listening to Thomas Jefferson.” (That’s bad?) For Rush Limbaugh, Obama’s speech was “basically a coup against America.” At the National Review’s Web site, a debate broke out—an entirely serious debate among serious people—as to whether the speech proved that Obama actually wanted the world’s tyrants to win, in the tradition of past intellectuals who admired Mussolini and Hitler. This is the discourse of American conservatism today: Obama is bad because he loves death panels and Hitler.
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By Leonardo Padura Fuentes (*)

HAVANA, Sep (IPS) Cuba’s official newspaper and organ of the Communist Party recently published a story that stunned the populace: in a country where the lack of food has become endemic and causes the people dire economic hardship, it happened that tonnes of agricultural products were left to rot outside the city of Havana because there were neither the containers nor the vehicles nor the organisational capacity to transport them.
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By Greg Grandin - The Nation

September 27, 2009. Three years ago, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez caused a stir when, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, he called then-US President George W. Bush a “devil.” “I can still smell the sulfur,” he said, standing at the same podium where, a day earlier, Bush had given his own address. Last week, Chávez once again followed a US president in the UN podium, but this time he caught a whiff of something different–"the smell of hope.” In the following interview–conducted at Venezuela’s mission to the United Nations in New York–Hugo Chávez talks about his relationship with Barack Obama and what his election could mean for the United States, as well as about the Honduran crisis, plans to extend the Pentagon’s presence in Colombia, domestic successes and challenges, and the legacy of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
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By Hazel Henderson (*)

ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA, Sep (IPS) The awful truth is emerging: globalised rogue finance is disordering human societies and destroying our ecological life-support systems on a global scale. A spate of books and studies examining the role of finance finds deep flaws in the way money is created and credit is allocated. The age-old invention of money, which extended opportunities for trading beyond barter, has become a computerised global monster. Blind to other human values and goals, this global casino has decoupled and abstracted from real economies.
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From The Economist print edition

A new climate treaty could provide a highly effective way to reduce carbon emissions by paying people to not cut down forests

Sep 24th 2009 . IN THE south-eastern corner of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, in the municipality of Novo Aripuanã, there is thick forest cover—for now. But as new, paved highways are driven into the trees, illegal loggers inevitably follow. At the current rate of deforestation, around one-third of the forest in Amazonas will have been lost by 2050, releasing a colossal 3.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
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Mark Weisbrot *

Now that President Zelaya has returned to Honduras, the coup government – after first denying that he was there – has unleashed a wave of repression to prevent people from gathering support for their elected president. This is how U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the first phase of this new repression last night in a press conference:

“I think that the government imposed a curfew, we just learned, to try to get people off the streets so that there couldn’t be unforeseen developments.”
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By Ignacio Ramonet (*)

PARIS, Sep (IPS) The conclusions of the final European Commission report on competition abuses in the pharmaceutical industry, released on July 8, are shocking and have wide-ranging ramifications. And yet the media have largely failed to cover it.
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By Matteo Fracassi

NEW YORK, Sep 23 (IPS) - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of the world’s most powerful media moguls, is being increasingly accused of using his six news organisations and television channels to manipulate the country’s political life and public opinion.

His critics, both inside and outside the country, point out that the controversial head of government believes that the power of the media - and TV in particular - is crucial to ensure his political survival.
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By Andrew Downie | The Christian Science Monitor

An ambitious commitment by some of the world’s largest companies not to buy beef or leather products from the Brazilian Amazon may falter if a strong monitoring system isn’t put in place.

Sao Paulo, Brazil. A recent decision by a group of multinational companies that include Nike, Adidas, and Timberland to boycott beef and leather products from the Brazilian Amazon – the largest cattle-ranching area in the world – might sound like a good way to reduce deforestation.
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By Leonardo Boff (*)

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep (IPS) Today there are two fundamentally different ways in which people consider the Earth. For many it is simply a vast material object lacking spirit and bequeathed to the human race to exploit as it wills. For others, it is our home, a self-regulating superorganism with a unique community of life.
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IUCN - Communications

UNFCCC subsidiary bodies meeting: 28 September to 9 October, Bangkok

Background: The UN climate change talks in Bangkok are a critical step in moving towards a new climate change agreement in Copenhagen this December. A new draft of the negotiating text is out, and governments need to work hard on substantially shortening this and reaching political decisions that would form the basis of the Copenhagen agreement. IUCN, the world’s largest conservation organization, wants governments to recognize that managing nature better helps people adapt to climate change and can actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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By Roberto Savio (*)

ROME, Sep (IPS) US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s rejection of the European request for regulation of bank executives’ bonuses has given rise to various interpretations: some cite President Barack Obama’s need to avoid more confrontations with the American right wing, others point to the influence of the historical bond between the US and the UK, the only European country to defend financial corporations.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

Missile defense wasn’t the answer.

From the magazine issue dated Sep 28, 2009

By canceling plans to station antiballistic-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Re-public, President Obama has traded fantasy for reality. Keep in mind a few facts about missile defense. Since the 1980s, the United States has spent well over $150 billion to develop such systems. That’s more than the total cost of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo mission to the moon. Yet in 25 years the program has not produced a workable weapons system, something unprecedented even in the annals of the Pentagon’s bloated budgets. A group of leading scientists, including 10 Nobel laureates in physics, wrote a letter to Obama in July, arguing that the Polish and Czech interceptors “would offer little or no defensive capability, even in principle.” That’s why the Bush administration proposed deploying the system only in 2018, by which point, it hoped, the thing would actually work.
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Miren Gutierrez* interviews HAZEL HENDERSON

ROME, Sep 18 (IPS) - Hazel Henderson is a futurist, an economic iconoclast, founder of Ethical Markets Media, and author of the books Building A Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship, and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy. Her main focus is exploring the “blind spots” in conventional economic theory.
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By Bernard Kouchner *

At May’s Paris conference on innovative financing, I put back on the international agenda an old idea, proposed by the European Parliament in 2000, voted for by France in 2001 and supported by many non-governmental organisations. It is wholly relevant today: to fund development, we have to think about introducing a voluntary contribution based on international financial transactions.
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IRIN

BUNIA, 16 September 2009 (IRIN) - Militia attacks in parts of northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in the past few months are worsening the humanitarian situation there and preventing access to affected populations, says a UN official.
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By Zoltán Dujisin

BUDAPEST, Sep 17 (IPS) - The Czech Republic has entered election campaign period with dire warnings being sounded of falling into the Russian sphere of influence, just as the U.S. drops its plans to build a missile base in Eastern Europe.
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IRIN

HARARE, 14 September 2009 (IRIN) - It was in many ways a shotgun marriage, except that both the parties in Zimbabwe’s unity government were equally unwilling.

On 15 September 2008 President Robert Mugabe, leader of ZANU-PF, and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and Arthur Mutambara, leader of a breakaway MDC faction, signed the Global Political Agreement (GPA), paving the way for the unity government to be established in February 2009.
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By Stephen Leahy*

DÜBENDORF, Switzerland, Sep 16 (Tierramérica) - A solar-powered aircraft will take flight next month from Switzerland with hopes ultimately to circle the Earth in 2012, without fuel, and stopping every five days only to change pilots.

“I’m intrigued by the vision of perpetual flight,” mechanical engineer Andre Borschberg, chief executive of the 100-million-dollar Solar Impulse project, told Tierramérica.
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Analysis by Mario Osava *

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep (IPS) - A broad range of projects in Brazil are using ballet and folk dances, classical and popular music, theatre, circus arts, capoeira - an Afro-Brazilian combination of dance and martial arts - fashion, visual arts and the audiovisual media to reach disadvantaged and at-risk children.

This huge laboratory, spread across mainly non-governmental organisations scattered throughout this country of 190 million, is developing new techniques and concepts to boost social inclusion and education.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Sep 21, 2009

It’s time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option. The United States, NATO, the European Union, and other nations have invested massively in stabilizing the country over the past eight years, and they will not—and should not—abandon it because the Taliban is proving a tougher foe than anticipated. But it’s also time for the Obama administration to get real about the country. There continues to be a large gap between the goals being outlined by the administration and the means available to achieve them. This gap is best closed not by sending in tens of thousands more troops but rather by understanding the limits of what we can reasonably achieve in Afghanistan.
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By Kenneth Roth*

Letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

The U.S. Department of Justice should open a criminal investigation into post-9/11 interrogation practices, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder released July 29.
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By Nasseem Ackbarally

PORT LOUIS, Sep 14 (IPS) - “Why should we surrender ourselves to the invasion of highly subsidised European goods? What will be the impact of capital outflows because of strategic services such as telecommunication, port, energy and water services being liberalised and privatised in the interest of European companies?”
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Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

JERUSALEM, Sep 11 (IPS) - Questions about Iran’s nuclear thrust are tumbling out, echoing around the world in several directions.

- Is Iran now “either very near or in possession” of enough low-enriched uranium to produce one nuclear weapon, as a senior U.S. diplomat warned?
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From The Economist print edition

A bunch of governments is trying to stem the flow of lethal weapons

Sep 10th 2009 | NAIROBI . THE UN reckons there are some 500m small arms in circulation around the world. At least 70m are Kalashnikovs. The Soviet-designed automatic assault rifle, the Avtomat Kalashnikova, was first manufactured in 1947 (hence its commonest version, the AK-47). Its compactness and durability have made it Africa’s killing weapon of choice since the 1980s, despite its inaccuracy. These days, the continent has all of the score of Kalashnikov variants, including the AKM, the Chinese Type 56, and the Serbian Zastava M70.
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By Max Blumenthal - The Nation

The following is an excerpt from Max Blumenthal’s new book Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party published by Nation Books.

A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs, [a home to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family], in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church [once under the stewardship of Pastor Ted Haggard] who with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled twenty-four-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray’s mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his “nightmare of Christianity.”
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By Cam McGrath*

CAIRO, Sep (IPS/IFEJ) - With oil and gas reserves running dry, the most populous country in the Arab world is eyeing wind power as a solution to its looming energy crunch.

Egypt relies on the burning of fossil fuels to satisfy about 85 percent of its electricity requirements. But with electricity consumption growing at 8 percent a year, and the country’s oil and gas reserves expected to dry up within 30-50 years, energy policymakers have taken an increasingly hard look at the potential of wind power.
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From The Economist print edition

The idea of a United States of East Africa is less far-fetched than it was

WHAT exactly is “East Africa” these days? Certainly, the parts of old British East Africa—Uganda, Tanzania (first a German colony) and Kenya. They have trodden very different paths since colonial days. Uganda has had coups, turmoil under Milton Obote, bloody convulsions under Idi Amin, and long spells of civil strife. Under Julius Nyerere, an incompetent or saintly authoritarian (depending on who you ask), Tanzania strove for a socialist ideal that kept its people plodding and poor but united and peaceful. Kenya was more dynamic and worldly, but more violent and corrupt. It may now be the least stable of the trio.
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By Mario Soares (*)

LISBON, Sep (IPS) In Europe summer is usually the time when publishers release forgotten books, biographies, and travel writing, and major magazines put out special editions on a past subject of current interest.
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By Michael Schuman - Time*

The Great Recession hasn’t been great for free trade. As unemployment rose and consumer demand dried up throughout much of the world, governments have been more focused on protecting their own industries and workers than making the compromises necessary to promote international commerce.
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By Mark Sommer (*)

ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Sep (IPS) We Americans like our meat. In the course of a year, on average we eat more than 220 pounds of chicken, beef, and pork. But some are starting to pause at the meat counter as they hear about incidents of contamination and compromised food safety, the breeding of drug-resistant super-bugs and the inhumane conditions endured by animals raised in extreme confinement.
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By William Deresiewicz - The Nation

This article appeared in the September 21, 2009 edition of The Nation.

“García Márquez is like a head of state,” Fidel Castro has remarked. “The only question is, which state?” The comment starts to take us into what’s unique about its subject’s work and life–not least because of who delivered it.
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By Prime Sarmiento

IPS interviews respected Chinese environmentalist YU XIAOGANG.

MANILA, Sep 7 (IPS) - The Chinese government needs to engage local communities in harnessing its vast water and hydropower resources and pursuing sustainable development, says environmental advocate Yu Xiaogang, recipient of the 2009 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Participatory Social Impact Assessment for Watershed Management.
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By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Sep 4 (IPS) - For the past decade, it was demand for Asian exports from the developed world that helped this region march ahead towards meeting internationally set development targets – such as slashing the numbers living in poverty.

But the global financial crisis is threatening to put the breaks on the continent’s efforts in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The crisis that began in the United States and spread to other developed economies has seen markets for Asian exports dry up.
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By Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Sep 7, 2009

Why, years after the cold war, the Kremlin’s still obsessed with getting respect.

IN 1946 a young U.S. diplomat named John Fischer wrote an earnest little book called Why They Behave Like Russians. Fischer, who’d served with the United Nations in postwar Kiev and Moscow, was attempting to explain to a bewildered U.S. public why their wartime ally Joseph Stalin, recipient of billions of dollars in American Lend-Lease aid, had suddenly turned on Washington, declaring it a deadly enemy, and seemed hellbent on starting a Third World War. The book is still a fascinating read—not least because so many of its conclusions continue to ring true today.
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By Matteo Fracassi

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 3 (IPS) - Italy is in many ways a country of contradictions, known for its beautiful beaches and vulnerable coasts, its staunch Catholicism and growing intolerance towards immigrants.
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BY TARO ICHIKAWA - IDN-InDepth News Service

TOKYO (IDN) - If a world without nuclear weapons is not to remain distant and just a dream, the nuclear haves must demonstrate political will, leadership and flexibility at the landmark Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference slated for May next year in New York.
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By Zoltán Dujisin

BISHKEK, Sep 2 (IPS) - A U.S. base located just 40km from a Russian base - it can happen in Kyrgyzstan, a new focal point in the great geopolitics of Central Asia where China and Turkey are beginning to show their cards as well.

The country of five million is one of the Soviet Union’s former republics in Central Asia, bordering China and the former Soviet republics Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
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By Kerry Kennedy

“I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history …The names of those who in their lives fought for life Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center. Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, And left the vivid air signed with their honor". (Stephen Spender)

Senator Edward Kennedy served on the Board of Directors of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights from 1968 until his passing last week. Witnessing the outpouring of love for him over the past week has been deeply moving and a source of strength and inspiration.
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BY JAYA RAMACHANDRAN

Some experts in Africa want about 200 billion U.S. dollars a year in compensation for the effects of climate change.

BERLIN (IDN-InDepth News Service) - India, China and 53 African countries – together home to more than half of the world’s population – have opened what may turn out to be a new chapter in the history of international climate diplomacy as the clock ticks down to Copenhagen.
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By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Sep 1 (IPS) - Did physicians and psychologists help the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency develop a new research protocol to assess and refine the use of waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques?
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