By Darío Montero

MONTEVIDEO, Nov 30 (IPS) - Left-wing candidate José Mujica was elected president of Uruguay with nearly 52 percent of the vote Sunday, seven to eight percentage points ahead of his rival, the right-wing Luis Alberto Lacalle, according to projections by pollsters.

Mujica, a former senator and agriculture minister, will take over from socialist President Tabaré Vázquez on Mar. 1, to head the second administration of the leftist Broad Front coalition.
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BY JEROME MWANDA - IDN

NAIROBI (IDN-InDepthNews Service)- Developing nations are faced with huge economic and financial problems and need funds and technical cooperation from Europe and the United States. But this is only one aspect of reality. They have meanwhile acquired a higher profile in world economy and in global decision-making.
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Catherine Ashton (*)

BRUSSELS, Nov (IPS) Faced with the first truly global economic crisis in the era of globalisation, developed countries have been focused on mitigating the effects on our own economies. One could be excused for thinking that in all of this, development goals have been forgotten. They have not, and the European Union (EU) for one is as committed as ever to giving the developing world a fair deal - including on trade.
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BY JULIO GODOY - IDN

BERLIN (IDN-InDepthNews Service) - On Nov 29, the Honduran people are called upon to go to the polls to elect a new president and a new parliament. So far, so good. Until the mid 1980s, the small Central American country used to be ruled by the military, and elections appeared then a fata morgana, only realisable in faraway nations, such as Denmark or Sweden.
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By Gunnar Stalsett (*)

OSLO, Nov (IPS) Peace of the heart and mind and peace of society are intrinsically linked. Peace and justice are inseparable as are truth and reconciliation. Peace is for the hungry to be fed, the poor to be sustained, the sick to experience care, the oppressed to be released and the marginalised to have a voice. Peace is protection against violence, and it is experienced when warfare and armed conflicts are translated into development and nation building.
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BY RAMESH JAURA-IDN

BERLIN (IDN-InDepthNews Service) - Countries in the extensive Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are becoming increasingly important for the 30-nation OECD as the world economic crisis cuts growth and sends inward investment reeling.
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BY FAREED MAHDY* - IDN

ISTANBUL (InDepthNews Service-IDN) - Turkish diplomacy had to dive into the Western-Iranian troubled waters, in view of Western powers’ dissatisfaction with a new Tehran proposal on ways how to implement its latest draft agreement with them.

In fact, Turkish Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu flew to Tehran to meet President Mahmoud Ahmadynejad on Nov. 21 in a new effort to mediate between Iran and the 5+1 group (UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany).
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By Leonardo Padura Fuentes (*)

HAVANA, Nov (IPS) A little over a year ago the world was swept by surprise when it learned that Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. We had been witness to a change that many felt was unthinkable: a young black man renowned for his intelligence became president of the most powerful country on earth, one that had been a bastion of racism and that in recent years has become a hotbed of conservatism, an exporter of war, and neo-liberal economic Eden.
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Por Matthew Berger

WASHINGTON, 24 nov (IPS) - La demanda de agua en el planeta será 40 por ciento mayor a la oferta para 2030, por lo cual se debe adoptar cuanto antes un enfoque equilibrado que permita una administración eficiente del recurso, señaló un estudio conjunto del Banco Mundial y empresas internacionales.
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Libertad Digital

Nota del editor de Other News: Como todos saben, no habrá acuerdo o tratado en Copenhague. Sin embargo, esto es lo que la campaña de la derecha está haciendo: Asi se entiende por qué Obama se está deslizando por debajo del 50% de popularidad …

La cumbre sobre cambio climático que se celebrará en Copenhague en diciembre esconde la mayor amenaza para el libre mercado desde la caída del Muro de Berlín. Bajo la excusa del calentamiento, la ONU prevé un “Gobierno” con capacidad para recaudar impuestos y redistribuir riqueza a nivel mundial.
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Libertad Digital

Other News Editor’s Note: As everybody knows, there will be no agreement or treaty in Copenhagen. Yet, this is what the right wing campaign is doing: look at it, to understand why Obama is slipping below 50% of popularity

The climate change summit in Copenhagen in December lurks the greatest threat to the free market since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Under the guise of the warming, the UN provides a “Government” with the capacity to collect taxes and redistribute wealth around the world.
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By Walden Bello (*)

MANILA, Nov (IPS) The recent collapse of the global economy, caused by among other things the lack of regulation of financial markets, has further eroded the credibility of neoliberalism. And yet it continues to exercise a strong influence on the majority of economists and economic managers, for whom, despite its obvious shortcomings, it remains the default discourse.
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Deepak Chopra *

Monday, November 23, 2009. Last fall it seemed as if Sarah Palin would light a fuse and cause a social explosion. Behind her beauty-pageant smile lurked the shadow, the dark side of human nature. Her tactic of appealing to the worst impulses of the electorate had a long history in the Republican Party. Indeed, Palin inherited the selfish, mean-spirited values of another politician with a gleaming smile, Ronald Reagan.
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By Steve Watson

Other News Editor’s Note: When United States of America loses a very real war on the battlefield, as in Vietnam, to save the honor of the country, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone win wars in the imagination of cinema.There is a difference, but it helps…

Infowars.net, Thursday, Nov 12, 2009. TV star and political commentator Chuck Norris has voiced concerns that the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, beginning December 7, represents an attempt to further an agenda to create a “one world order” at the expense of national sovereignty.
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BY BAHER KAMAL*

MADRID (IDN-InDepthNews Service) – “La matematica non e un’ opinione,” Italians say. And they are right: mathematics is not an opinion.

And this is what mathematics says:

- Industrialised countries handed over US$ 18 trillion in one single year to their private banks and private giant financial corporations for the sake of saving them from the bankruptcy they themselves have caused to themselves and the whole world.
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By Maurice Strong (*)

BEIJING, (IPS) The current economic and climate change crises are both rooted in the unsustainable nature of the existing economic system. The rapid and unexpected economic meltdown, which began in the United States and quickly spread throughout the world demonstrated dramatically that the phenomenon of globalization and interdependence has a dramatic downside of shared risks and vulnerability.
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Monika Kalra Varma

Our 2008 RFK Human Rights Laureate, Aminatou Haidar, began a hunger strike on November 16th after being forcibly removed from her homeland of Western Sahara. And we need your help to support an investigation of her removal.
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By Stephen Leahy

MÉRIDA, Mexico, Nov (IPS) - At least half the planet must be protected if humanity is to survive the next century, declared conservationists at the conclusion of 9th World Wilderness Congress on Friday, Nov. 13.

“That is what the science said, this is what many aboriginal people say,” said Harvey Locke, the Wild Foundation’s vice president of conservation strategy.
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By Leonardo Padura Fuentes (*)

HAVANA, Nov (IPS) If a person’s past is the accumulation of the life experiences that made him who he is, the future embodies the dreams and the expectations of what this person wants to be and what he needs to have a better life, materially and spiritually.This ability to direct one’s gaze forward and try to extract from the present the qualities of the future is one of the intrinsic components of the human condition and the source of people’s and societies’ ability to endure.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

Innovation is as American as baseball and apple pie. But some traditions can’t be trademarked.

From the magazine issue dated Nov 23, 2009

By most measures, America remains the world leader in technological achievement. Consider the 2009 Nobel Prizes: of the 13 people honored, nine were American. Once you take out the economics, literature, and peace prizes, the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, still won close to 70 percent of the awards. Even amid a terrible recession, the country still dominates the fields of information technology, life sciences, and nanotechnology, all key industries of the future. The World Economic Forum routinely cites America as having the most competitive economy on the planet (though this year it was narrowly overtaken by Switzerland). When decision makers are asked to rank countries on innovation, the United States always comes first by a large margin.
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By Mark Sommer (*)

ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Nov (IPS) For the first postwar generation of American workers, putting in a faithful forty years ‘working for The Man’ may have sometimes felt like a jail sentence, but it offered a handsome reward.
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BBC NEWS

RICHARD BLACK : “ We are into a miasma of nuance here; but for different parties, all of the nuances are important ”

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen has said there must be firm pledges on greenhouse gas reductions at December’s climate talks in Copenhagen.
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By Andrew MacMillan (*)

SCANSANO, Italia, Nov (IPS) It is scandalous that in a world of ample food supplies, over one billion people face constant hunger -and the number is still rising. What makes matters worse is that we know how to end hunger, and yet few governments are doing so.
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By Richard Kim & Betsy Reed **

This article appeared in the November 30, 2009 edition of The Nation.

In one way of looking at it, Sarah Palin is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party.
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Analysis by Neeta Lal

NEW DELHI, Nov 13 (IPS) - Here is a sobering thought on the eve of Children’s Day celebrated across India on Nov. 14. Despite the country’s impressive economic growth trajectory and growing geopolitical heft, the benefits of that prosperity are not percolating down to its children who constitute a sizeable 30 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion population.
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Mont Blanc Meetings

The 4th Mont Blanc Meetings

Meeting in Chamonix in 9 and 10 November, 200 leaders from 35 countries looked into the world food crisis along with representatives from several UN institutions (UNPD, ILO, WFP, FAO) along with representatives of the ICA, the AIM, and research centres.
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posted by Laura Flanders *

11/12/2009 . Armistice Day reminds us that when wars end, the winners and losers are supposed to make peace. For the first time, in 2009, leaders of World War II enemies, Germany and France, commemorated the date together as a sign of new mutual respect. But this week also marked the ten-year anniversary of a different kind of war – a war on Americans’ assets and the poor. Ten years later, while the winners and losers are obvious, there’s no armistice in sight.
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By Ignacio Ramonet (*)

PARIS, Nov (IPS) It’s been twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down, on November 9, 1989. Today, as capitalism staggers beneath the blows of a historic crisis, what can we say about the intervening two decades? Why have other equally offensive and unacceptable walls not fallen?
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By Roger Hardy - BBC Middle East analyst

As international pressure mounts on Iran over its nuclear programme, there are signs that political divisions are hampering its ability to make a deal.

The mood music is not very upbeat.
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By Roberto Savio (*)

ROME, Nov (IPS) The financial landscape has now been blessed with a new American company that lists divorce settlements of millionaires on the stock market. Investors pay the high legal costs of one of the parties and shares in the proceeds if the judgment goes their way. All of this, as the financial crisis has added 100 million more poor to the world.
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By Colin Nickerson, Globe Correspondent

UMass-led scientists pinpoint the origin of the disease, and that may lead to better treatment

November 9, 2009 .AMHERST - The terrible transfer took only an instant.One mosquito; one hot-blooded human target; one quick puncture of skin. Most likely, our distant ancestor reacted with no more than a scratch and a shrug.
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By Eric Hobsbawm (*)

LONDON, Nov (IPS) The short twentieth century was an era of religious war between secular ideologies. For historical rather than logical reasons it was dominated by the opposition between two and only two mutually exclusive types of economy, ‘Socialism’, which was identified with centrally planned economies of the Soviet type and ‘Capitalism’ which covered all the rest.
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By Isolda Agazzi

IPS interviews BABACAR NDAO, West African farmer

GENEVA, Nov 9 (IPS) - Given the billions of dollars and euros that the U.S. and EU spend on trade-distorting support measures and the intractable lobby groups demanding these subsidies, these rich states’ promises to reduce such amounts will come to nought. It makes no sense for poor African states to allow these goods to flood their markets.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009

It’s really a return to the center.

The bottom line on last week’s elections is simple—the Republicans did well. Yes, these were a grab-bag collection of races with local particularities and low turnout. But notice that independents, who had shunned the GOP over the last few years, voted for the party in large numbers. And the overall results are consistent with a surprising trend across the Western world—the rise of the right.
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By Robert Scheer*

November 4, 2009 . The most idiotic thing being said about America’s involvement in Afghanistan is that the best way to protect the 68,000 US troops there now is by putting an additional 40,000 in harm’s way.
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By Johan Galtung (*)

OSLO, Nov (IPS) The Peace Prize, according to Nobel’s will, is for “the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses". Only 70 of the 119 individuals and organizations that have won the prize conform to Nobel’s will. The prize has been awarded for human rights activism, development and ecology, all important fields deserving their own prizes. But Nobel’s foresighted will is crystal clear.
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Mark Weisbrot

Among the conventional wisdom that we hear every day in the business press is that developing countries should bend over backwards to create a friendly climate for foreign corporations, follow orthodox (neoliberal) macroeconomic policy advice, and strive to achieve an investment-grade sovereign credit rating so as to attract more foreign capital.
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By Mikhail Gorbachev (*)

MOSCOW, Oct (IPS) Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the shameful symbols of the Cold War and the dangerous division of the world into opposing blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit the events of those times and take stock of them in a less emotional and more rational way.
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By Hazel Henderson *

Trading is arguably the core activity in all market economies. Free trade is the mantra of all economists – left, right and center. Trading is considered indispensible and more trade is always seen as better. The financial crisis caused a closer look at trade and financial traders to see if these conventional beliefs are still valid and whether stock markets have spun out of control.
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By Wangari Maathai (*)

NAIROBI, Oct (IPS) It’s clear that climate change poses severe environmental, economic, and social risks. But it also presents a challenge of leadership the likes of which the world has never seen. Can heads of state and governments meet it when they gather in Copenhagen in December to hammer out a new international climate agreement?
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