By Mario Soares (*)

LISBON, Dec (IPS) Latin America is undergoing a process of accelerated transformation. Considered the “backyard of the United States” for much of the last century, it suffered a string of coups d’etat and dictatorships, many piloted by neoliberal economists from the so-called “Chicago School". It is natural that the region would want to forget this past and move in another direction.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Jan 4, 2010

Remember Iraq? For months our attention has been focused on Afghanistan, and you can be sure that the surge will be covered exhaustively as it unfolds in 2010. But the coming year could be even more pivotal in Iraq. The country will hold elections in March to determine its political future. Months of parliamentary horse trading will likely ensue, which could provoke a return to violence. The United States still has 120,000 troops stationed in Iraq, and all combat forces are scheduled to leave by August, further testing the country’s ability to handle its own security. How we draw down in Iraq is just as critical as how we ramp up in Afghanistan: If handled badly, this withdrawal could be a disaster. Handled well, it could leave behind a significant success.
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By Jacqueline Stevens

This article appeared in the January 4, 2010 edition of The Nation.

“If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International’s Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report “Jailed Without Justice” and said in an interview, “It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn’t believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren’t anything wrong.”
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Daksha Warty

RANMALA, India, Dec 22 (IPS) - The villages of Ranmala, Nandagane, Shirgaon and Mengdewadi, in Pune, Sangli and Satara districts, western India, have one thing in common.They are all headed by female sarpanches (village chiefs), and what a difference it has made.
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IRIN

MANNAR, 18 December 2009 (IRIN) - Progress is being made in clearing landmines to allow internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Sri Lanka’s north to return home, but clearance will ultimately be a long-term process with no fixed deadline, agencies say.
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By Liza Jansen

IPS interviews ROBERT CARLIN, North Korea expert

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21 (IPS) - North Koreans are not as isolated from the world as the United States thinks, and in fact understand the U.S. better than the U.S. understands North Koreans, says regional expert Robert Carlin.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 21, 2009

Why terrorism and economic turmoil won’t keep the world down for long

One year ago, the world seemed as if it might be coming apart. The global financial system, which had fueled a great expansion of capitalism and trade across the world, was crumbling. All the certainties of the age of globalization—about the virtues of free markets, trade, and technology—were being called into question. Faith in the American model had collapsed. The financial industry had crumbled. Once-roaring emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil were sinking. Worldwide trade was shrinking to a degree not seen since the 1930s.
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By Johan Galtung (*)

OSLO, Dec (IPS) In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother issues the infamous slogan, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” Is that where we have now arrived?
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By Claudia Ciobanu

IPS/TerraViva* interviews KUMI NAIDOO, head of Greenpeace International

COPENHAGEN, Dec 17 (IPS) - “Climate change is an opportunity to deal with all the issues of equity and justice that we have been struggling for all along,” said Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International in an interview with IPS on Thursday in Copenhagen.
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ANSA

Florence, December 17 - Italy’s obligation to grant asylum to refugees is a binding international requirement, not a European imposition, the country’s president Giorgio Napolitano said on Thursday.
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By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Dec 15 (IPS) - Human and rights advocates and members of the Republican Party found unusual common ground Monday.

Both registered strong objections to the announcement that the Barack Obama administration would be transferring detainees from Guantánamo to a maximum security prison in Illinois.
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From The Economist print edition

The Copenhagen climate talks : Arguments over money dampened the euphoria that marked the start of talks on a global deal to limit greenhouse gases

DESPITE the gloomy talk that preceded the UN climate conference, the opening was upbeat. Most big countries had vowed to cut or limit emissions during the previous few weeks. As delegates arrived, America’s Environmental Protection Agency announced that carbon-dioxide emissions were an “endangerment” to health. This allows Barack Obama to regulate them, whatever Congress does.
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By Julio Godoy*

BERLIN, Dec 15 (Tierramérica**) - In the decades since 1972, when Nobel laureate economist James Tobin (1918-2002) first proposed it, the idea of a tax on currency speculation has resurfaced and disappeared many times, according to the economic tides.

Now, the global economic crisis that resulted from real estate and stock speculation in the United States and other industrialised countries, and the need to pay for the high costs of fighting climate change, have created an ideal context for implementing the tax.
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BY MARTIN KHOR*

IDN-InDepthNews Service

(IDN) - With only days to go before political leaders arrive, the Copenhagen climate summit is in the grip of a deadlock over the future of the global climate regime

More than half way through the UN Copenhagen Climate Conference, the fate of the meeting lies in the balance between partial success and outright failure.
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BY FAREDD MAHDY*

IDN-InDepthNews Service

ISTANBUL (IDN) - A new book, ‘The King’s Torah’, has been published in Israel to invigorate Jewish teachings for future generations. Written by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva religious school in the Yitzhar settlement, occupied West Bank, the book justifies the killing of babies and children if they pose a threat to Israelis.
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by Jean Pascal van Ypersele *

Ian Fry, the delegate from Tuvalu (a small island state in the Pacific Ocean), had a voice broken by emotion in the COP15 Plenary room Saturday morning when he pleaded for his country’s proposal for a Copenhagen legally-binding agreement limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial. “The fate of my country lies in your hands", he said. The plenary room was suspended to his words. Every normal human being had to be moved. At least I was. Is climate science providing a basis for this emotion? Should the world accept a 2°C rise, a value which seems gaining ground, or is 1.5°C, now advocated by the Alliance of Small Island States and many developing countries, a better target? Does the IPCC provide useful information on this question?
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By Mark Sommer (*)

ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Dec (IPS) The twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall reminded Americans of just how heady it felt when a triumphant America stood astride a collapsing Soviet empire. Two decades later, Americans find themselves bewildered and resentful. Many are now asking, Where did it all go?
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BY RAMESH JAURA

IDN-InDepthNews Service

BERLIN (IDN) – The Danish government has achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the first in the history of climate negotiations to be bashed for “bias and secrecy” in its role as president of the conference of parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
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By Peter Tatchell *

Measuring and ranking every country’s observance of human rights would give nations an incentive to raise their game

Human Rights Day is the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on 10 December 1948, one of the most important documents in human history. Drafted by representatives from many countries and cultures, and endorsed today by all 192 member states of the United Nations, it embodies a global humanitarian consensus.
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By Kerry Kennedy, from Lago Agrio, Ecuador *

LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador (IPS/TerraViva) Traces of paradise are still visible. From the air, the rainforest region in northern Ecuador – known as the Oriente – appears as silvery mist and swaths of verdant green.
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By Hazel Henderson (*)

ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA, Dec (IPS) The world’s giant pension and institutional funds (university and foundation endowments) are seeing the light on climate issues. As governments wrangle over how to cap carbon and other pollutants, how much it will cost, and who should pay, private investors in North America, Europe, China, India, Japan, and Brazil have been quietly investing in the solution: shifting to low-carbon, cleaner, renewable energy and smarter, more efficient infrastructure and transportation.
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By John Nichols* - The Nation

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

Two months after we had marveled at the convergence of labor, farm, environmental and human rights activists outside the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial in Seattle, Paul Wellstone and I were riding along the back roads of New Hampshire. The Minnesota senator was trying to get liberals excited about Bill Bradley’s 2000 Democratic presidential bid. “Do you wish you were running?” I asked Wellstone. It was a question we had danced around before. This time he surprised me by answering that yes, he did sort of wish he was in the running. “You know why?” he asked. “Because I’d like to get into those debates and just say, ‘Seattle!’
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By Isolda Agazzi

GENEVA, Dec 3 (IPS) - Governments expressed the will at the seventh ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to finish the Doha Round of trade negotiations as soon as possible. But the Africa Group still deems development to be a more important priority than a speedy conclusion.
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BY RAMESH JAURA - IDN-InDepthNews Service

BERLIN (IDN) – Call it misinformation or disinformation. The industrialised countries are insisting that the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and that the foundations of a new treaty, the so-called post-Kyoto agreement, should be laid at the forthcoming UN climate change conference.
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By Tito Drago

MADRID, Dec 2 (IPS) - The firm stance taken by Western Sahara independence activist Aminatou Haidar, in her third week of a hunger strike in an airport in Spain’s Canary Islands, contrasts with the weak position of the Spanish government vis-à-vis the Moroccan government, which it has failed to pressure to allow the activist to return to her homeland.
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by Prof. Riccardo Petrella *

An initiative of the World Political Forum

Excluding water problems as such from the negotiations of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) has been a serious historic error on the scientific, politic and social level. The same holds true for the exclusion of biodiversity.
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Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Nov 30 (IPS) - Iran’s announced intention to build 10 new nuclear enrichment plants has been deemed “unacceptable” by the administration of President Barack Obama, which warned Monday of increased pressure on Tehran if it does not soon accept Western proposals to curb its nuclear programme.
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BY NIRODE MASSON - InDepthNews Service

GENEVA (IDN) - A leading think-tank has called for a moratorium on preferential trade agreements between the industrialised and developing countries, arguing that such accords curtail the ability of developing countries to deploy effective policies for development.
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