New Internationalist articles from January 2001

New Internationalist archives from January 2001

From this month's editory.
January 1, 2001... Health is something we don't think too much about, until it deserts us. Then we immediately think about how to put things right -- and that usually involves a visit to the doctor. But health actually has little to do with the health system of...

Where are your goats? Reem Haddad draws a curious crowd when she goes on a hiking trip through the Lebanese wilderness.
January 1, 2001... `The important thing is to have some peace and quiet,' said my husband as we and another couple -- a Lebanese wife and her American husband -- set off hiking in one of the most remote regions in Lebanon. All of us desperately needed to get away...

Culture of apology: for us (in Japan), an apology is like a smile, it's free, and it means nothing.
January 1, 2001... Almost every conversation in Japan, every encounter with someone, a chance meeting, a planned appointment, begins with the words sumi ma sen -- a catchall phrase that literally means `excuse me' but also serves many other purposes. I've...

Defiant: Bolivians are up in arms over coca, dead chickens and exams.
January 1, 2001... Angry chicken producers dumped a pile of 1,000 dead and rotting birds on the front steps of the Cochabamba state Governor. Students had no teachers during the final weeks of the South American school year and examinations. And blockades meant...

Cycling for a change.
January 1, 2001... While cars have come to dominate the streets of the West, in much of the South the battle between cyclists, pedestrians and the motor vehicle is only just beginning. So last October, Cyclo North South sent a first shipment of 500 bikes from...

Devils as dogs (Australians should forgo pet dogs and cats and instead adopt native animals).
January 1, 2001... Australians should forgo pet dogs and cats and instead adopt native animals, says Director of the Australian Museum in Sydney, Michael Archer. `There is no animal that human beings have ever turned into a domestic pet that has died out,' he...

People's loss (forty million Chinese will lose their jobs in the first five years after the country enters the World Trade Organization).
January 1, 2001... Forty million Chinese will lose their jobs in the first five years after the country enters the World Trade Organization, according to investment bank Salomon Smith Barney. Economic restructuring will cause 5 million farmers to leave...

Russia's reaction (Russian government is reverting to secrecy).
January 1, 2001... Far from responding to demands for less state control of information following the sinking of the sub Kursk, the Russian Government is reverting to secrecy. The Doctrine of the Information Security of the Russian Federation, signed into force...

Good for nothing (United States Trade and Development Act).
January 1, 2001... When President Clinton signed the US Trade and Development Act in May 2000, he declared that the Act would be good `for the United States, good for Africa, good for Central America and the Caribbean'. The most publicized benefit of the Act is...

Biorat bites business (a dangerous pathogen).
January 1, 2001... The German company Bayer and British-based Zeneca Agrochemicals have launched an attack on Biorat, a mouse and rat poison developed in Cuba. The two Northern companies say Biorat is a dangerous pathogen. But Jose Antonio Fraga, director of...

Loving the ugly one.
January 1, 2001... Colombians have a new heroine -- Betty, the leading character of a television show watched by 70 per cent of the national population, I am Betty, The Ugly One. A contrast to the usual Barbie-like female characters, Betty is a dowdy secretary...

Junta.
January 1, 2001... The Spanish and Portuguese word junta (meeting or council) is from the same root as `join'. Etymologically a group of people joined together for a particular purpose, junta is now particularly used to describe a political faction taking power...

Paying for it: Georgian police critics hospitalized.
January 1, 2001... In the centre of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, Vasiko Silagadze was shoved into a car. He has that solid build and air of authority typical of investigative journalists, but Georgian police are no less strong and there were three of them....

Working themselves to death.
January 1, 2001... Social workers link Japan's high rate of suicide among middle-aged men with the nation's economic woes. Back in 1990, when the economy was stronger, 5,200 middle-aged men committed suicide. But in 1998 around 10,000 men in their forties and...

Health hazard: but Richard Swift believes we don't have to live on the critical list.
January 1, 2001... Public health has never come easy. It has always meant a political fight against the powerful and the complacent with their `I'm right Jack' attitude. But organizers and campaigners from Berlin to Bogota have fought this hard fight and achieved...

AIDS heretic: Paul Farmer reveals how the President of South Africa broke the AIDS establishment's inequality taboo.
January 1, 2001... TRAVELLING FROM RURAL HAITI TO Durban was instructive to say the least. To my eyes -- and I grew up in Florida -- Durban looked a lot like Fort Lauderdale. But as President Thabo Mbeki pointed out, there are several Africas in South Africa, and...

At debt's door: Lasanda Kurukulasuriya reports on an agrarian crisis that is driving Srit Lankan farmers to suicide.
January 1, 2001... Pesticides kill. In Sri Lanka, they are taking the lives of distressed rice-paddy farmers who commit suicide by swallowing these poisons. Their desperation is fueled by the dual burden of poverty and debt. Pesticide poisoning was the number-one...

Stressful transition: the shift to free-market captialism has left the health of older Hungarians in a very precarious state.
January 1, 2001... Bela is a homeless 66-year-old man living among the benches of a city park. His acute lung cancer will almost certainly end his life within three years. He doesn't mind much. He doesn't think anybody cares about him anymore, aside from the...

It's your lifestyle, stupid -- the cherished view of the holistic health movement is that each individual has a significant say in choosing a healthy lifestyle ...
January 1, 2001... Work Carlos tries to stay healthy. He quit doing construction work after his second child was born. Carlos had repeatedly injured his back and the unregulated work sites in Santiago had taken a toll of his fellow workers too. Besides, he...

Elusive promise: whatever happened to `health for all'? David Werner traces the fate of a revolution that could still happen.
January 1, 2001... THE ALMA ATA DECLARATION, Primary Health Care, back in produced a lot of optimism about working towards `Health for all by the Year 2000'. Health was upheld as a basic human right. Primary Health Care (PHC) was to have a far-reaching, even...

Asleep at the switch: the neoliberal drive to cut red tape is costing lives. Ulli Diemer exposes the hidden costs of deregulation and privatization.
January 1, 2001... TIME TO PLAY OUTSIDE IF YOU'RE A child. Time to relax if you're an adult, do some housework, have a cup of coffee or a nice cold glass of water. Time, if you live in the small Canadian town of Walkerton, Ontario, to walk down Durham Street to...

Peddling dangerous dreams: Albena Arnaudova on the ruthless search for new smokers.
January 1, 2001... `I choose where to go' is the last thing a Bulgarian teenager can claim. In the painful period of transition from a state-planned to a free-market economy, the quality of life for most Bulgarians has so deteriorated that 70 per cent of the...

History of public health.
January 1, 2001... Plague first appeared in Roman Europe in the sixth century under the Emperor Justinian as sanitation systems of the ancient world decayed. Later, as the caravans made their way along the Silk Routes of Asia in the fourteenth century they took...

Trust me, I'm a doctor: Trevor Turner doubts whether the heroics of ER can save our bacon.
January 1, 2001... THE HEALTH BUSINESS IS IN CRISIS. Wherever you go in the world, debates about healthcare, funding, new breakthroughs and what we expect of our doctors continue unresolved. For example, patients in Britain are dying while on the waiting list for...

Destination gridlock: car chaos is choking the urban South. But Stephanie Boyd discovers a ray of hope in Lima's hidden dreams of electrical public transit.
January 1, 2001... A lonely row of concrete pillars stretches endlessly into the smog of a grimy Lima dawn in the middle of the busy Avenida Aviacion. They are flanked by a constant stream of cars, mini-vans and buses spewing curls of black exhaust. The...

Chronicle 2000 ... an alternative view of the year's key events.
January 1, 2001... JANUARY CHILE Ricardo Lagos, an opponent to Pinochet's regime, wins the elections and becomes the first socialist president since Allende in 1973. The victory is narrow -- 51.3 per cent of the votes to Lagos and 48.7 per cent to the...

Sierra Leone: children who killed.
January 1, 2001... MORE THAN ANY OTHER RECENT CONFLICT, the war in Sierra Leone has involved children -- both as victims and as soldiers to fight for the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF). An estimated 100,000 people have been tortured or mutilated and...

Fiji: Timber! The fall of a government.
January 1, 2001... `I AM NOT A VIOLENT MAN,' said rebel leader George Speight after taking over Fiji's Parliament on 19 May. `I am a businessman.' He was indeed something of an entrepreneur -- taking goods from intimidated shop owners for free with the...

Global protest: fighting financial dictatorship.
January 1, 2001... MEDIA COVERAGE OF PROTESTS against the International Monetary Fund in Prague and against the World Economic Forum in Melbourne portrayed the anti-globalization movement as a Western phenomenon. But resistance also rocked the South, hit hard by...

Serbian uprising: Milosevic: the end?
January 1, 2001... FOR YEARS IT SEEMED SERBIAN President Slobodan Milosevic was unassailable -- managing, with a mix of brutality and cunning, to hold on to political power despite four lost wars, bombing by NATO, economic sanctions and international isolation....

Israel/Palestine: how the peace was lost.
January 1, 2001... TELEVISION AUDIENCES AROUND THE WORLD watched in horror as a 12-year-old boy was shot dead by Israeli troops clashing with stone-throwing Palestinian protesters on 2 October. Once again the Middle East was at war, as Israelis and Palestinians...

Right livelihood: the alternative `Nobels'.
January 1, 2001... NOBEL PEACE PRIZES TEND TO GO to big-name public figures. For individuals who are not politicians but who `offer practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today' there are the `Alternative Nobels', also known as...

Global warming: hot air in The Hague.
January 1, 2001... AS THE WORLD'S LEADERS GATHERED at The Hague there were great hopes that, finally, Western nations might act on promises made at the 1997 Kyoto Climate Change Conference to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Delegates from small-island states...

Tribal futures: various artists.
January 1, 2001... Tribal Futures by Various (Yomba/Survival TRIBECD 3 CD) Ever since those hip hop originals, Eric B and Rakim, struck upon the idea of splicing Ofra Haza's Yernenite song into what was otherwise a straight-ahead New York rap record, the...

Lo cubano: Orishas.
January 1, 2001... A Lo Cubano by Orishas (Cool Tempo 7243 527082 2 CD) Rap Cubano! There's a extraordinary verve and sensuality to Don di Niko and Livan (aka Flaco-Pro) and their welding of hip hop, filtered through a Parisian lens and ghetto-raw Havana...

Red dust.
January 1, 2001... Red Dust by Gillian Slovo (Virago, ISBN 1 86049 824 8) This novel springs from Gillian Slovo's traumatic experience of sitting in on hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the police officers who killed her...

Squatter's tale.
January 1, 2001... A Squatter's Tale by Ike Oguine (Heinemann, ISBN 0-435-90655-0) Ike Oguine's debut novel is a sparky, fast-moving account of success and failure on two continents. Obi, an arrogant and hedonistic young Nigerian, is living the high life...

Planet Earth: the latest weapon of war.
January 1, 2001... Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War by Rosalie Bertell (The Women's Press, ISBN 0 7043 4650 8) In the early 1980s Rosalie Bertell, a Canadian scientist, nun and peace activist, published No Immediate Danger, a pioneering study of the...

Bamboozled.
January 1, 2001... Bamboozled directed by Spike Lee A self-pronounced satire of racism in American popular culture, Bamboozled is a return to the broad strokes and agit-prop style of some of Lee's early films, such as Do the Right Thing. The film focuses...

Blackboards.
January 1, 2001... Blackboards directed by Samira Makhmalbaf A group of newly trained itinerant teachers, blackboards on their backs, ply their trade among the all-but-deserted villagers that dot the rocky Iran-Iraq border. When helicopters force the men...

India.
January 1, 2001... The India kaleidoscope has charmed the world for centuries. A flick of the wrist conjures up startlingly contrasting images. Maharajahs and millionaires. Snake-charmers and poor farmers. Beauty queens and burnt brides. A population explosion...