By Jayantha Dhanapala*

IDN-InDepth NewsViewpoint

WASHINGTON DC (IDN) – The quinquennial ritual of preparing for the Review Conference of the states parties of the Treaty for the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will reach its climax (or anticlimax) from May 3-27 in New York. Action plans for the three main pillars of the NPT – nonproliferation, disarmament and peaceful uses of nuclear energy – are being composed in the hope of achieving a consensus.
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By Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Apr 30, 2010 (IPS) - For many former Yugoslavs, May 4 will be a day to reflect on the 30 years since their charismatic but controversial leader, Josip Broz Tito, died.

Tito steered a plural country for 35 years after the end of World War II and, whether they liked him or not, most people above 45 in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia - that were created out of Yugoslavia by the wars of the 1990s - know that the Tito era was the best part of their lives.
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By Martin Hutchinson, Contributing Editor, Money Morning

In the “commodities new world order,” commodity producers will be king.

April 29, 2010 . Investors who need proof need only consider recent events. Iron ore prices are at record levels, and the annual-price-setting arrangement has broken down. Venezuela President Hugo Chávez has signed “dark side” agreements with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for Russian companies to develop Venezuela’s oil-and-mineral resources. China may have invested $1 trillion or so in U.S. Treasuries, but the Asian giant’s only truly successful investment so far has been the 17% stake it took in Canadian-resources player Teck Resources Ltd. (NYSE: TCK).
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By Josep Mayoral Antigas (*)

GRANOLLERS, Apr (IPS) All actors are necessary in the building of peace, and all must develop their particular roles. At the municipal level we are convinced that local governments, which are closest to the citizens, have a key role to play in bringing about peace and understanding among different cultures.
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By Badriya Khan*

IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

BARCELONA (IDN) – The world is over-armed; the world is over-hungry. This is not a new slogan – this is a proven fact showing that the world spends well over 1 trillion dollars a year on weapons, while more than one billion people are hungry.
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By Ignacio Ramonet (*)

PARIS, Apr (IPS) With the motto “Stop the misery", the European Union (EU) has declared 2010 “The Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion". In the 27 countries of the EU, there are some 85 million poor [i]. One in six Europeans lives in poverty [ii]. And the situation is getting worse as the effects of the global economic crisis spread. The social question must be put at the centre of the debate.
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By Cam McGrath

CAIRO, Apr 27, 2010 (IPS) - Europe’s appetite for renewable energy and a shifting tide in domestic energy policies could turn North Africa into major exporter of solar power by the end of the decade.

“North Africa has all the right ingredients for producing the cheapest kilowatt hour of solar energy,” says Amr Mohsen, CEO of Lotus Solar Technologies, a Cairo-based solar technology firm. “We’re finally starting to see conditions align for harnessing this potential.”
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Martin Khor*

Getting the world out of recession into sustained global recovery is a top item on the international agenda. The question is what needs to be done to achieve that.

A new South Centre report addresses this question, and this issue of the South Bulletin presents its highlights through several articles.
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BY BLAKE HOUNSHELL | Foreign Policy

Samantha Power’s new film offers a gut-wrenching portrait of the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, a man whose loss the United Nations is still struggling to overcome today.

APRIL 20, 2010 . He was the ultimate diplomatic weapon: tough, suave, fluent in five languages, unafraid to parachute into a war zone or go toe-to- toe with the bad guys, and – yes, it helped – devastatingly handsome.
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By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Apr 26, 2010 (IPS) - U.S. immigration experts, law enforcement officials and religious leaders are hitting back at the draconian legislation signed into law in Arizona last week, charging it will subject the state to “staggering potential costs” and vowing to have the law declared unconstitutional in the courts.
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By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 23, 2010 (IPS) - Burma’s military regime is facing a formidable challenge from ethnic rebel groups that are refusing to kowtow to its order that they join the South-east Asian country’s army as border guard forces.

The junta’s order that the five armed groups in the country’s northern and eastern borders meet an Apr. 28 deadline is a test of how far the oppressive regime can flex its political muscle ahead of a promised general election later this year.
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By Ramesh Jaura

IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

BERLIN (IDN) – Thirty-three years after the World Bank president Robert McNamara proposed the establishment of an international commission to break the deadlock in North-South relations, his successor Robert B. Zoellick has proclaimed that in the new system triggered by a multi-polar world, North and South are only points on a compass, not economic destinies.
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By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Apr 22, 2010 (IPS) - The European Union’s anti-poverty chief has refused to concede that his promotion of biofuels has helped exacerbate global hunger.
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BBC NEWS

The bishop of Augsburg in southern Germany has offered to resign following accusations that he hit children, Church officials say.

Bishop Walter Mixa told the Pope in a resignation letter that his diocese needed a “new start".
The bishop at first denied hitting children before saying he may have slapped them, and apologising.
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Patrick Diamond & Roger Liddle (*)

The challenge for progressives is not to expand the boundaries of the state, but to be zealous in reforming government

The financial crisis has been as challenging to the ideological worldview of global progressives as it has to the financiers and speculators who have reaped the whirlwind of global markets over the last two decades. Of course, markets around the world have spectacularly failed and, as a result, the end of the long era of free market fundamentalism is being triumphantly proclaimed. Indeed, the world recession has exposed the bankruptcy not only of institutions, but of the very ideology of neoliberalism itself.
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By Lynette Lee Corporal – Asia Media Forum*

BANGKOK, Apr 21, 2010 (IPS) - Many parents are scratching their heads as they watch youngsters in the Asia- Pacific region create often-private online worlds, feeling lost over how to be a part of it and oversee their Internet lives.
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By Stephen Leahy*

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Ap 20, 2010 (Tierramérica) - A mat the size of Uruguay composed of giant bacteria has been discovered in the mid-depths of the ocean off the coasts of Chile and Peru, report scientists who are working on a series of studies of the ocean’s smallest life forms.
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Reprieve (*)

A federal district court in Washington has today rejected the pleas of former British resident Ahmed Belbacha, refusing to block his forced return to persecution and torture in Algeria.
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By Johan Galtung (*)

JAKARTA, Apr (IPS) The US Empire is declining and leaving a power vacuum. China will not fill the gap, nor the European Union (EU) with its recent experience of how colonialism ended. The state system is also fading, with regions gaining in importance.
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By Melissa Harris-Lacewell *

This article appeared in the May 3, 2010 edition of The Nation.

President Obama created a bit of a stir in early April when he completed his Census form. In response to the question about racial identity the president indicated he was “Black, African American or Negro.” Despite having been born of a white mother and raised in part by white grandparents, Obama chose to identify himself solely as black even though the Census allows people to check multiple answers for racial identity.
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By Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Apr 16, 2010 (IPS) - Through their ancestral knowledge and traditions, indigenous peoples will make a unique and invaluable contribution to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which begins Monday, Apr. 19 in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba.
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By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

Coming to terms with Karzai.

From the magazine issue dated Apr 19, 2010

President Obama keeps saying that he intends to win the war in Afghanistan. “There will be difficult days ahead, but I am absolutely confident that we will succeed,” he promised in this year’s State of the Union address. And yet his administration is undermining its own chances of success by constantly criticizing, weakening, and undercutting America’s only credible partner in the country, Hamid Karzai.
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Cosmas Butunyi - The East African

12 April 2010. Nairobi — Faster adoption of information and communication technology could help African countries accelerate economic development while conserving the environment.
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By Antoaneta Becker

BEIJING, Apr 15, 2010 (IPS) - Adept at navigating through politically sensitive anniversaries, the Chinese government has one more socially volatile date marked in its calendar: this year’s 30th anniversary of its one-child policy.
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By Leonardo Padura (*)

HAVANA, Apr (IPS) It will soon be three years since Cuban president Raul Castro acknowledged the necessity of introducing structural and conceptual changes in the social and economic model of the country, which is plagued by endemic inefficiency, contradictions, unpredictable factors, and bureaucratic measures and countermeasures that block any movement towards a possible tapping of the creative and productive potential of the island and its people.
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By Michael T. Klare - The Nation

This article appeared in the April 26, 2010 edition of The Nation.

With little fanfare, the Defense Department has announced a revolution in military strategy–a transformation in global outlook and combat tactics whose only true precedent is the equally momentous turnaround engineered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Kennedy administration. Then, as now, an incoming administration inherited a strategy heavily weighted toward high-intensity warfare among well-equipped adversaries, mostly in Europe and Asia; now, as then, the response has been to redirect the Pentagon’s attention toward low-intensity combat on the fringes of the developing world. The result back then was Vietnam; today it is Afghanistan and an unknown number of “future Afghanistans.”
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By By Yilmaz Akyüz (*)

GENEVA, Apr (IPS) After a deep and widespread contraction in economic activity and a significant drop in output and employment, policy makers, financial analysts, and media pundits all appear to be heartened by the news from different parts of the world that the worst is over. The main concern now is about the strength and the shape of the recovery.
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By Ernest Corea

IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

WASHINGTON DC (IDN) - Home-grown terrorism – even if only in the alleged planning stages – turns up in the most unexpected places. Michigan, for instance.

Here’s a state that’s better known for its array of lakes, its auto industry, and its Canadian-born governor. It was in Michigan, nevertheless, that a Grand Jury recently issued an indictment against nine members of the Hutaree, a supposedly “Christian” militia who were allegedly planning to “levy war on the U.S.”
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Latin American Herald Tribune

BUENOS AIRES – Police in the central Argentine city of Rafaela are investigating the slaying of a woman who suffered abuse under the 1976-1983 military regime and was a key witness in several cases arising from crimes committed during the junta’s “dirty war” against the left.

Silvia Suppo, 51, was found stabbed to death Monday inside her shop, Rafaela police chief Juan Jose Mondino said.
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By Roberto Savio (*)

ROME, Apr (IPS) In the few weeks since President Obama succeeded in passing his health reform bill, we have seen numerous developments that clearly indicate the search for global governance is growing more and more difficult. Let’s begin with the United States, where the lesson to be learned is that politics, in matters of greatest importance, can simply ignore public opinion. Various Democratic senators whom Obama pressured to support the reform bill now run the risk of losing re-election for doing so.
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By Amy Goodman*

Apr 6, 2010. A United States military video was released this week showing the indiscriminate targeting and killing of civilians in Baghdad. The nonprofit news organization WikiLeaks obtained the video and made it available on the Internet. The video was made July 12, 2007, by a U.S. military Apache helicopter gunship, and includes audio of military radio transmissions.
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By Matt Crook

DILI, Apr 9 , 2010 (IPS) - “Work with us, not against us” was the message for international donors that came out of the g7+ meeting of fragile states, which met in Dili this week to discuss how they can make better use of the foreign aid they get.

Fragile states must take the reins when it comes to ways development partners give them official development assistance, East Timor’s Minister of Finance Emilia Pires told IPS. “For us to better guide our development partners and to contribute to a better management of external aid, we have to take the leadership,” she said.
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By Lynette Lee Corporal

BANGKOK, Apr 8, 2010 (IPS) - “Our village was attacked many times. (The Burmese military) would come and take whatever they wanted from the village. Anything they don’t want, they’d burn,” said 19-year-old K K, recalling his experiences six years ago in the country’s southern Karen state.
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By Yilmaz Akyuz*

IDN-InDepth NewsViewpoint

GENEVA (IDN) - External adjustment in the U.S. and slow growth in Europe will no doubt be problematic for China because of the important contribution that exports to these markets have made to its rapid growth.
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By Fareed Mahdy

IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

Istanbul (IDN) – Bad times for the powerful Turkish army, used to acting as a state within the state and to carrying out as many coup d’etat as it deemed convenient amidst full impunity. Now the Turkish government, with strong popular support, is determined to introduce judiciary reforms and draft a new, civilian constitution to place the army under the rule of law.
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By Supachai Panitchpakdi.(*)

GENEVA, Mar (IPS) The current financial and economic crisis drew attention away from the food crisis, but the latter still remains a threat to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and sends a warning of the dangers of low investment and poor policies in the agricultural sector.
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By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Apr 6, 2010 (IPS) - Arms traders are to be given a central role in formulating a new European Union (EU) blueprint for stimulating weapons production, it has been confirmed.

The EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, has said it will draw up an action plan for how small and medium-sized companies that manufacture military goods or their components can be strengthened.
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By Thomas Hammarbeg*

IDN-InDepth NewsViewpoint

STRASBOURG (IDN) - Gross human rights violations in the past continue to affect relations in today’s Europe. In some cases the right lessons have been learned; genuine knowledge of history has facilitated understanding, tolerance and trust between individuals and peoples. However, some serious atrocities are denied or trivialised, which has created new tensions.
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By Richard Heydarian (*)

TEHRAN, Mar (IPS) Iran continues to defy western pressure and assert its interests in the highly strategic and vital region of the Persian Gulf -which supplies 40 percent of the world’s energy resources- as well as the greater Middle East and Central Asia. Sino-Iranian relations, which have grown steadily stronger are entering a critical stage, and the West will have to address the emerging alliance between these two revisionist powers.
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By Richard Heydarian (*)

TEHRAN, Mar (IPS) Iran continues to defy western pressure and assert its interests in the highly strategic and vital region of the Persian Gulf -which supplies 40 percent of the world’s energy resources- as well as the greater Middle East and Central Asia. Sino-Iranian relations, which have grown steadily stronger are entering a critical stage, and the West will have to address the emerging alliance between these two revisionist powers.
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By William R. Polk* – The Nation

This article appeared in the April 19, 2010 edition of The Nation.

In the media celebration of our “victory” over the Taliban in the Helmand Valley, little attention has been given to the nature of insurgency: the proper tactic of guerrillas is to fade away before overwhelming power, leaving behind only enough fighters to force the invaders to harm civilians and damage property. This is exactly what happened in the recent fighting in Marja. Faced with odds of perhaps 20 to 1, helicopters, tanks and bombers, the guerrillas wisely dispersed. Victory may not be quite the right description.
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By Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Australia, Apr 1, 2010 (IPS) - The Australian Defence Force (ADF) may have reduced its numbers in East Timor as that country’s stability improves, but the controversy created by its troops’ behaviour continues to raise questions about their sensitivity to the political situation there.
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By Ramesh Jaura

IDN-InDepth NewsPortrait

BERLIN/ROME (IDN) – IFAD, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, has been making history lately. For the first time since its inception in 1977, the specialised UN agency appointed an African as president and a woman as vice-president.
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