New Internationalist articles from January 2002

New Internationalist archives from January 2002

Letters.
January 1, 2002... The New Internationalist welcomes your letters. But please keep them short. They may be edited for purposes of space or clarity. Letters should be sent to letters@newint.org or to your local NI office. Please remember to include a town and...

Peddling poison: Reem Hadded gauges the fallout when pesticide companies become agricultural advisors. (Letter from Lebanon).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... For the first time in a month, Issam Hamdanieh forced himself to walk through his fields in a small village in the fertile Bekaa valley. He only agreed to do so because he wanted me to understand what had happened to him. He stood in the...

Southern Exposure: Highlighting the work of photographers from the Majority World.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... IT was the morning of the Fetr holiday--the end of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk for a month and the days are considered glorious and celebrated. People go to mosques at sunrise. I decided to go to Mossalla, where people...

The couple. (Windows 7).(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... Footsteps A couple was walking across the savannah in East Africa at the beginning of the rainy season. It was way back in the Pliocene during the Tertiary period, which is like saying before before. That woman and that man still looked a...

Smoke gets in your eyes: Tobacco industry seeks to reposition itself as 'responsible'. (Currents).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Leaked documents reveal that tobacco companies are attempting to scupper an international agreement -- designed to prevent tens of millions of deaths from tobacco use -- by proposing a voluntary marketing agreement that leaves profits intact...

The pain of childbirth. (Currents).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... For every woman who dies of maternal causes in developed countries, 99 die in the developing world. Over 525,000 women annually die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth -- and maternal deaths are second only to deaths from AIDS. As...

The art of peace. (Currents).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Mozambique ended 16 years of bloody civil war in 1992. Yet the country is still awash with millions of weapons left over from that conflict. Creating a culture of peace out of such a legacy is no easy task, but the Christian Council of...

Holocaust. (Word corner).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Today the word holocaust, is often used to describe any event involving great loss of life. Holocaust is from the Greek holos (meaning whole', as in 'holistic') and kaustos (meaning 'burnt', as in caustic). Early holocausts involved a...

Funny money: Street-level initiatives in the economic crisis. (Currents).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... ARGENTINA's four-year long slump has become a full-blown economic crisis. In late December the middle classes, angered at the Government's decision to limit bank withdrawals to just $250 (a week -- a measure designed to prevent a run on the...

Seriously...: You couldn't make this stuff up. (Currents).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Capitalism now! Britain's Guardian Diary called it 'the most idiotic protest of the year'. The New York Times noted it was the 'smallest global rally on record'. This was the first global 'walk for capitalism' last 2 December, the work of...

The altered landscape. (The Starting Point).(after terrorist attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon, 2001)
January 1, 2002... The crisis that enveloped the world in the wake of 11 September 2001 seemed to blast away dreams of a better, saner world. But as Jordi Pigem explains, the altered landscape after the fall of the Twin Towers is symbolic of the end of an era....

A parliament or the planet: George Monbiot nails his colours to the mast of a directly elected world assembly. (Global Democracy).
January 1, 2002... WHEN George Bush announced that he was engaged in 'a fight to save the civilized world', he was assuming powers and responsibilities he does not possess. Though his attack on Afghanistan was retrospectively legalized by the United Nations...

Unchaining captive hearts: Westerners are not used to looking in envy at the lot of Bangladeshi villagers. But we have a lot to learn from them about reclaiming and regenerating culture from the globalizing behemoths.
January 1, 2002... MUKTAGACHA is a market town in northern Bangladesh. The market encroaches on to the highway, leaving little room for the traffic to pass. Most of the produce comes from walking distance and none from more than a cycle or bullock-cart ride away....

The right to rave.(from 'Upside Down')(Brief Article)(Excerpt)
January 1, 2002... In 1948 and again in 1976, the United Nations proclaimed long lists of human rights, but the immense majority of humanity enjoys only the rights to see, hear and remain silent. Suppose we start by exercising the never-proclaimed right to dream?...

Going down in history: The island state of Tuvalu will soon be swamped by the Pacific thanks to global warming. But its fate lends weight to a concept of 'ecological debt' that might yet change the world. (Environment).
January 1, 2002... NEAR the end of the year 2001 the world shifted on its axis. But not in the way that you might first think. A small group of nine islands, home to only 11,000 people, became the world's largest creditor nation. Let me explain. For many...

Time for renaissance. (Religion).(Islam)
January 1, 2002... Pakistani author Tehmina Durrani is no stranger to controversy - though she insists it ins't something she courts. My Feudal Lord, her no-holds-barred account of the domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, a prominent...

The impossible dream.(French Revolution, 1789, and Everywhere, 2002)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Paris, 1789 Why should we hold back our dreams? Just a few years ago many would have said it was impossible for us to challenge the King. Now we are being told to be modest in our aspirations, that we are impatient and unrealistic. But we...

Might or right: No government can justify the mass murder of its own citizens. But we have yet to evolve international institutions that can intervene to prevent it. Peter Singer lays down some ground rules. (Justice & Security).
January 1, 2002... THE aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks dramatically highlighted the way in which state sovereignty has ceased to be a sacred principle of international relations. Compare US demands on Afghanistan with Austria-Hungary's demands on...

Heavy surf & tsunamis: Ellen Frank explains why reform of the world financial system is in the interests even of the globalizers. (Money).
January 1, 2002... INTERNATIONAL financial markets, as any self-respecting critic of globalization can tell you, move some $1.5 trillion round the world on a daily basis -$10 trillion a week, $45 trillion a month, $550 trillion a year; an amount 10 times greater...

Give us your dreams: We asked NI readers for their own visions of a better world, from practical suggestions to utopian grand schemes. Here are some of the responses. (Dreams).
January 1, 2002... Common heritage The answer to global warming and world poverty and the other problems caused by capitalism can only be found within a world framework. So we are talking about a united world without frontiers, no longer divided into...

The end of styrofoam strawberry: Peter Rosset takes us on a quick world tour of sustainable food production, and finds alternative methods are not just viable, but reaping the benefits. (Food & Farming).
January 1, 2002... WE live in a contradictory moment of human history. On the one hand we find the world's farmers and farmworkers under more pressure than ever, from free trade and neoliberal budget slashing and from privatization policies of all kinds. On the...

Bringing it all back home: Jim Shultz offers some strategies to carry our resistance forward on a local level. (Local Resistance).(globalization with justice)
January 1, 2002... The movement for globalization with justice has clearly accomplished its first objective -- to get the attention of the powerful. Global economic policies that were once worked out in polite summits of the world elite are now debated on college...

With a special focus on the majority world: Our media feed us news dominated by rich-world events and preoccupations. Here the NI redresses the balance with an alternative view of the year's key events. (Chronicle 2001).
January 1, 2002... JANUARY BANGLADESH The High Court, which includes Bangladesh's first female judge, rules that fatwas -- religious edicts issued by Muslim clergy -- are illegal. Rural clergy issue dozens of fatwas each year, mainly against women. In...

Best of the year. (Video).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The front-runner this year was a marvel of low-budget lushness which got into the head of a thinking bomb' -- Indian director Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist (reviewed in NI 332) has only grown in significance now that terrorism has moved...

Best the year. (Books).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... An excellent year for books, with an impressive number getting our highest five-star rating. In fiction John le Carre's gripping The Constant Gardener (Hodder & Stoughton, reviewed in NI 332) combined a love story with a searing polemic against...

Best the year. (Music).(Diamanda Galas )(Laurie Anderson )(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... A few days after 11 September, Diamanda Galas played London's Royal Festival Hall. A New York-based performer whose work has often addressed the AIDS holocaust, she didn't say anything. She simply added 'Dark End of the Street' to her set. No...

Vespertine. (Music).
January 1, 2002... Bjork (One Little Indian TPLP 101 CD) There's an air of mystery about Vespertine that -- as anyone who's followed Bjork Gudmanssdottir's extraordinarily precocious career will tell you -- is anything but accidental. Maybe it's to do...

Mantra mix. (Music).
January 1, 2002... Various Artists (NARADA WORLD 72438-50294-0-0 CD) Not many CDs have personal endorsements from the Dalai Lama himself, so Mantra Mix -- a double CD compilation intended to raise funds for Tibetan refugees -- has, before you rip open...

Eco- Economy: Building an economy for the earth. (Books).
January 1, 2002... Lester R Brown (In Britain: Earthscan, ISBN 1853838268; in the US: W W Norton, ISBN 0393321932) Chinese economists are applying a concept that could revolutionize modern economic thought. When the massive 1998 floods, created not by...

The Blue Mountain. (Mixed Media).
January 1, 2002... Meir Shalev (Canongate, ISBN 1 84195 115 3) Israeli author Meir Shalev's fourth novel is an ambitious epic that tackles grand themes by examining, with great care and sympathy, the small change and everyday events of seemingly small...

Born in blood and fire: A concise history of Latin America. (Mixed Media).
January 1, 2002... John Chasteen (W W Norton, ISBN 0393976130) Latin American histories have tended to treat the region as if it were moored off the Spanish or Portuguese coast. Born in Blood and Fire is a welcome change, looking beyond the obvious to...

Adanggaman. (Film + Video).
January 1, 2002... Roger Gnoan M'Bala Adanggaman is a film betwixt and between. The story concerns intra-African violence during the 17th-century slave trade. Yet, although director M'Bala takes pains to specify the historical period, the film has the...

Romania. (Country Profile).(economics, politics, history)
January 1, 2002... Around a street cafe in central Bucharest a small girl loiters watchfully. She is eight or nine, unwashed, wearing a grubby pink top. It's a smart cafe -- the area is full of government and company offices. Some businesspeople get up to leave...

Before Night Falls (NI 336). (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Before Night Falls (NI 336), artist-turned-director Julian Schnabel's biopic of the trials of gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, persecuted in Cuba and isolated in the US, gained mainstream release an critical plaudits. Similarly saluted or its...