Analysis by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad*

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 30 (IPS) - To the west of Peshawar on the Jamrud Road that leads to the historic Khyber Pass sits the Karkhano Market, a series of shopping plazas whose usual offering of contraband is now supplemented by standard issue U.S. military equipment, including combat fatigues, night vision goggles, body armour and army knives.
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From The Economist print edition

If food companies want to claim that their products have health benefits, they must provide solid evidence
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By Vandana Shiva (*)

NEW DELHI, Oct (IPS) Globalisation and trade liberalisation policies have led to the privatisation of water and biodiversity and the concentration of land ownership in India, reversing six decades of land reform and introducing a new form of corporate zamindari -a feudal land tenure system- through instruments like “special economic zones".
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IRIN

DATU PIANG, 29 October 2009 (IRIN) - Security is the principal concern for thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Mindanao when considering whether to return home.

“I can’t return now,” Ampino Lapinig said outside her one-room hut at the Notre Dame Dulawan evacuation centre in Datu Piang, where some 300 families or 1,500 people are sheltering. “It’s just not safe.”
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By Roberto Savio (*)

ROME, Oct (IPS) While the war in Iraq triggered massive demonstrations across the globe, the ratcheting up of the number of troops in Afghanistan has generated no more than brief debates in parliaments. Obviously the intervention in Afghanistan if far more “legitimate” than the invasion of Iraq, based as if was on false assumptions about the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Nonetheless, it is still significant that the Afghan war, with its high human costs, is accepted as inevitable and that even the world peace movement seems resigned to it.
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Mark Leon Goldberg - UN Dispatch

October 28, 2009 - Each year for as far back as I can remember, the General Assembly passes a resolution condemning the American embargo on Cuba. The resolution typically passes with only three no votes: The US, Israel, and the Palau. This year was no exception, despite the fact that the Obama administration has been inching ever closer toward a rapprochement with Cuba. Steve Clemons wanted the U.S. to abstain. As did UN Dispatch fave, Representative Jim McGovern. Alas, the Cold War rages on in the Caribbean.
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By Ignacio Ramonet (*)

PARIS, Oct (IPS) It is a major catastrophe: dozens of daily newspapers are bankrupt. In the United States, at least 120 have already closed. And the tsunami is now striking Europe. Not even institutions once considered the journals of record are safe: Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde, The Times and The Independent of the United Kingdom. and Italy’s Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica are all accumulating major economic losses as a result of the drop in subscriptions and the collapse of advertising[i].
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By Barbara Crossette - The Nation

October 26, 2009. Navi Pillay, the South African judge who became the United Nations high commissioner for human rights last year, is moving to the forefront of a campaign to free more than 250 million people from the indignities and horrors of caste discrimination. No previous commissioner has dared to openly take on this pernicious system, the majority of whose miserable victims live in India.
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Commentary by Killid Correspondents*

KABUL, Oct 26 (IPS) - The rate of civilian casualties in Afghanistan during 2009 has increased exponentially if compared with previous years.

When he first took command of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces in Afghanistan this summer, U.S. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal placed an emphasis on the reduction of civilian casualties. Since then, though, civilian casualties have increased as the result of both NATO air strikes and insurgent’s attacks.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

China turns crisis into opportunity.

From the magazine issue dated Oct 26, 2009

One year ago, the leading governments of the world saved the global economy. Remember October 2008: Lehman Brothers had disappeared, AIG was teetering, every bank was watching its balance sheet collapse. Around the world, credit had frozen and trade was grinding to a halt. Then came a series of moves beginning in Washington—bank bailouts, rescue packages, fiscal stimuli, and, most crucially, monetary easing. It is not an exaggeration to say that these measures prevented a depression. But the crisis has still fueled a major slowdown that has affected every country in the world.
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By Federico Mayor (*)

BARCELONA, Oct (IPS) The time has come. The culture of war, the economy of war, and the hegemony of the “globalisers” have been a catastrophic failure and the cause of incalculable levels of suffering, hunger, extreme poverty, and social affliction. A “new beginning” is needed urgently here at the dawn of a new century and a new millennium.
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Pablo Davalos

The notion of good living (sumak kawsay), as a new framework of political, legal and natural governance, has begun its voyage into the range of human possibilities from the hands of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador and Bolivia. It is crucial then to begin a reflection on sumak kawsay (good living) in terms which western positivism understands as reflection, that is, as an analysis of concepts that can contribute, within a framework of coherently structured concepts, which since the Enlightenment has been called science.
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BY RAMESH JAURA - IDN-InDepthNews Service

TURIN, Italy (IDN) – Some fifty knowledgeable persons from around the world are seated around a large horizontal table reflecting on Soviet, Chinese and European experiences in the twenty years after the historic Fall of the Berlin Wall, when Andrei Grachev announces that the Nobel Prize Committee has decided to bestow the Nobel Peace Prize 2009 on President Barack Obama who has been barely nine months in office.
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By Peter Dhondt

BRUSSELS, Oct 14 (IPS) - “EU policies continue to undermine the economic, social and human development of developing countries” despite repeated commitments in treaties and declarations, a group of European NGOs said in a report published Wednesday.

Efforts are being made to prevent this and there is some progress, they noted, but “there is plenty room for improvement.”
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By Ramesh Jaura

TURIN, Italy, Oct 12 (IPS) - Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, circumstances leading to that landmark event and what really happened behind the scenes remain a subject of debate. Equally controversial is what the fall of the wall brought in its wake.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Oct 19, 2009

At the heart of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for a major surge in troops is the assumption that we are failing in Afghanistan. But are we really? The United States has had one central objective: to deny Al Qaeda the means to reconstitute, train, and plan major terror attacks. This mission has been largely successful for the past eight years.
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By Julio Godoy

BERLIN, Oct 12 (IPS) - Immigrants and foreigners were again targeted through the election campaign last month by right-wing politicians looking to win votes through racist statements.
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ILO/WTO News

GENEVA (ILO/WTO News) — A joint study from the International Labour Organization and the WTO has found that high incidence of informal employment in the developing world suppresses countries’ ability to benefit from trade opening by creating poverty traps for workers in job transition.
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By Greg Grandin - The Nation

October 8, 2009. How long can the Honduran crisis drag on, with President Manuel Zelaya, ousted in a military coup more than three months ago, trapped in Tegucigalpa’s Brazilian Embassy? Well, in early 1949 in Peru, Víctor Haya de la Torre–one of last century’s most important Latin American politicians–sought asylum in the Colombian Embassy in Lima, also following a military coup. There he remained for nearly six years, playing chess, baking cakes for the embassy staff’s children and writing books. Soldiers surrounded the building for the duration, with Peru’s authoritarian regime ignoring calls from the international community to end the siege, which was condemned by the Washington Post as a “canker in hemisphere relations.”
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By Isolda Agazzi

GENEVA, Oct 9 (IPS) - Non-governmental organisations have expressed their satisfaction at the European Commission’s declaration that it would not put “undue pressure” on African and other countries to conclude the controversial trade deals called economic partnership agreements (EPAs).
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By Daniela Estrada

IPS interviews VÍCTOR ABRAMOVICH, Vice President of IACHR

SANTIAGO, Oct 8 (IPS) - Standards relating to indigenous peoples’ rights, laid down by the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, are increasingly being incorporated into the laws of countries in the region, according to Víctor Abramovich, First Vice President of the Commission.
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by Matt Walker - BBC, Editor, Earth News

We need to consider vegetation as a long-term investment rather than as a disposable asset .Dr Amy Hahs

How towns and cities cause the extinction of local plants has been revealed for the first time.

An international team of botanists has compared extinction rates of plants within 22 cities around the world.
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By Stephen Leahy

IPS interviews LESTER BROWN, founder of the Earth Policy Institute

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 7 (IPS) - Lester Brown says his views sometimes appear extreme - because the mainstream media largely doesn’t understand the urgency and challenges in avoiding catastrophic climate change.
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ANSA

Constitutional Court ruling will reopen Berlusconi trials

(ANSA) - Rome, October 7 - Italy’s Constitutional Court on Wednesday struck down a controversial immunity law shielding Premier Silvio Berlusconi from several trials was illegitimate.
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By Supachai Panitchpakdi (*)

GENEVA, Sep (IPS) The current crisis has precipitated a significant downturn in world foreign direct investment (FDI) flows which over the past year has spread to all sectors and regions. 2008 marked the end of a growth cycle in international investment that began in 2003 and reached a historic high of nearly $2 trillion in 2007.
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BBC NEWS

“Change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto”- Margaret Thatcher

As the UN climate summit in Copenhagen approaches, BBC News environment correspondent Richard Black traces key milestones, scientific discoveries, technical innovations and political action.
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By Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Oct 5 (IPS) - Some transformations occur so imperceptibly that people only become aware of them when the new reality has set in. That’s exactly what happened in Mexico’s countryside, where economic and social conditions have combined to put rural production largely in the hands of women.
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By George A. Papandreou - The Nation

Editor’s Note: On October 4, 2009, George Papandreou was elected Prime Minister of Greece. Below, we repost his April 2009 contribution to The Nation’s forum on socialists’ take on the global economic crisis.

Socialism’s all the rage. “We Are All Socialists Now,” Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we’re already living in the USSA. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about the global economic crisis? In the March 23 issue, we published Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr.’s “Rising to the Occasion” as the opening essay in a forum on “Reimagining Socialism.” TheNation.com will feature new replies to their essay over the coming weeks, fostering what we hope will be a spirited dialogue.
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By Pavol Stracansky

BRATISLAVA, Oct 2 (IPS) - New legislation in Poland introducing compulsory castration of paedophiles has angered human rights groups, who claim its introduction is little more than populist posturing.
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By George F. Will | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Oct 5, 2009

As the president contemplates his choices regarding Afghanistan—when his incontinent campaigning about health care allows him time to think about anything else—he should study an episode from when he was 4 years old. It is rich in relevance.
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By Andrea Bordé

NEW YORK, Oct 1 (IPS) - Pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline hold the future welfare of poor people living with HIV/AIDS in their hands, argues the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, which is urging the companies to release their patents on specific HIV drugs into a collective pool that will increase access and affordability to treatment in developing countries.
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IUCN/TFD

Bangkok, Thailand, 1 October, 2009 (IUCN/TFD) – With only two months to go before a new climate deal is negotiated in Copenhagen, The Forests Dialogue calls on industrialized nations to ensure robust financial commitments for conservation and sustainable management of forests and on tropical countries to ensure that these new financial streams are fairly shared with forest dependant communities.
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