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18th September 2006, Chase Squires, AP Ten Nobel Peace Prize laureates called for world peace Saturday and took direct aim at the United States, asking an enthusiastic crowd of 7,000 youth to demand the U.S. pull back its military, spread its wealth and offer aid to developing countries. |
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15th September 2006, Jim Lobe, IPS More than 43 million children living in conflict-affected countries are not able to attend school, according to a new report released Tuesday by the International Save the Children Alliance, which called on donor countries and multilateral agencies to commit 5.8 billion dollars a year to address the problem. |
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15th September 06, Bianca Jagger, Guardian (UK)
Those Who Oppose the Proposed UN Arms Treaty Could Derail a Chance to Save Millions of Lives. |
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A leading U.S. climate researcher said Wednesday the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert a weather catastrophe.
NASA scientist James Hansen, widely considered the doyen of American climate researchers, said governments must adopt an alternative scenario to keep carbon dioxide emission growth in check and limit the increase in global temperatures to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
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 Financial markets have failed to price in the risk that any one of a host of threats to economic stability could materialise and deliver a massive shock to the world economy, the International Monetary Fund warned yesterday.
The world's chief financial watchdog said the financial system had so far proved resilient in the face of recent price falls but warned the risk of a crash had increased. And when it comes to worrying about a crash in the financial markets that could deliver a body blow to the world economy, it seems that all roads lead to the US.
The IMF highlighted five major risks, all but one of which can be attributed to a greater or lesser extent to the economy and foreign policies of the US administration. Not that the politically savvy IMF phrases it exactly like that.
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13th September 06, Vanessa Arrington, Associated Press Iran, Syria, North Korea and more than 100 other nations are pushing to broaden the world's definition of "terrorism" to include the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Converging on Fidel Castro's communist Cuba for a summit this week, members of the Nonaligned Movement complain of a double standard: powerful nations like the United States and Israel decide for the world who the terrorists are, but face no punishment for their own acts of aggression. A draft of the group's joint declaration condemns "terrorism in all its forms," especially violence that targets civilians. |
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 Members of the U.S. Congress spent the summer touring the United States in what they said was an effort to find common ground on the difficult choices involved in fixing America's broken immigration system. Talking to Americans might help legislators take the temperature of voters on a tough and divisive election issue. But it adds little to Congress's understanding, or the American public's, of the larger forces driving contemporary migration - and of the debates and lessons learned from around the world.
The news media hasn't been of much help either in lifting the level of debate. A review of 150 newspaper editorials from the first eight months of 2006 on the subject of immigration reform revealed that only nine gave serious consideration to the multiple economic and social factors at work in migration today. And only four called for increased efforts by the United States to work more closely with its neighbors to the south to foster economic and social development in the region.
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 Physicists have suspected since the 1930s the existence of stuff they call dark matter, material that is not visible to ordinary observation. Dark matter has great significant effects for the behavior of galaxies and the expansion of the universe.
In August 2006, astronomers announced that they had detected direct evidence of the existence of dark matter, based on the effects of collisions among galaxies. Douglas Clowe at the University of Arizona in Tucson and other colleagues, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, examined a cluster of galaxies named 1E0657-56, where the center of mass has shifted, implying that dark matter is located in that space. In the X-ray spectrum, they could see two huge clouds of dust in between the galaxy clusters, remaining from the collision of two original clusters. These dust clouds are much more massive than the galaxies. These findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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 "Global carbon taxes, wealth redistribution ... radical social solutions are globalisation's last chance"
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, former adviser to Bill Clinton and million-selling author, is on a mission to save globalisation from itself. With his twinkly eyes, grey beard and impeccable academic credentials, Stiglitz is an unlikely warrior for global justice. But, in London to promote his new book before flying to Paris and then back to the US to spread the word, he has a stark warning to deliver. Without radical action to share the benefits of burgeoning international trade more fairly, he believes globalisation is at risk of being swept away by a wave of protectionist fury.
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 Days of Reckoning There’s growing concern among economists and market-savvy pundits that the global financial system is hanging by a few well-worn threads that could snap at any time. The $10.4 trillion real estate “bubble” has attracted the most attention, but the shaky derivatives market, hedge funds, and falling dollar are equally worrisome. 20 years of deregulation has created an economic monster which is increasingly unmanageable and threatens to bring down the whole system in a heap.
As Gabriel Kolko said in a recent CounterPunch article (“Why a Global Economic Deluge Looms” ), “The entire global financial structure is becoming uncontrollable in crucial ways its nominal leaders never expected. Instability is increasingly its hallmark….Contradictions now wrack the world’s financial system, and if we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, it may very well be on the verge of serious crisis.” |
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