New Internationalist articles from January 2007

New Internationalist archives from January 2007

State of the world's Ocean.(From this month's editor)(Editorial)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Timeless. That's the kind of topic you want if you're an editor here. Something that stays put, like still life. You see, we plan well ahead. We are semi-detached from news values. We have long 'lead-in' times. 'Imagine how your story will read...

Planet Ocean: David Ransom looks beyond the horizon as seen from the beach.(INTRODUCTION)
January 1, 2007... Planet Ocean--this is where we live. The Ocean makes us blue to the rest of universe. It gives us life. We may name pieces of it as we please, like the bits of rock where we perch so precariously, but there is just one Ocean. Its miraculous...

The rise of slime: the run-off from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. Kenneth R Weiss finds evolution running in reverse.(POLLUTION)
January 1, 2007... In Moreton Bay, Australia, the fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour. When fishers touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips...

Lost at sea: ignorance of the ocean is more than matched by indifference to the fate of seafarers. Martin Whitfield reports.(SEAFARERS)
January 1, 2007... Shipping is big business--the first truly 'globalized' business of them all. More than 90 per cent of the volume of world trade is transported by sea. Containers are tracked from the moment they leave a factory in China to the day they are...

Conakry.(fishing)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... WOMEN PLAY AN important role in the fishing communities of Guinea, West Africa. Though they do not go to sea, they organize the trading of fish, as seen here in the market of the capital city, Conakry. Guinea has the largest and richest...

Death and the whale: two Greenpeace ships, the Esperanza and the Arctic Sunrise, track down a Japanese whaling fleet 'researching' the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The terrible reality is captured as it happens by bloggers on board the Greenpeace ships.(WHALE BLOG)
January 1, 2007... NATHAN ON BOARD THE ESPERANZA THE SEA DOWN here is always in motion: always rolling, forming waves and dissolving them, colliding with itself, shifting forms and colours, casting illusions and revealing secrets. It seems more like a...

Climate control: ocean and atmosphere are intricately linked. Dorrik Stow explores some of the facts, effects and challenges of global warming.(CLIMATE CHANGE)
January 1, 2007... 'Polar Meltdown.' 'African Apocalypse.' 'Hurricane Hotspots.' 'Permafrost Destruction.' By now we are well accustomed to such dramatic--and often exaggerated--headlines. But what do we really know about climate change and its effects?...

What people are doing to the ocean--the facts.(water pollution)
January 1, 2007... The Ocean contains 90% of the planet's biomass--'the weight of life'--and more than 90% of all its water, which covers 70% of Earth's surface. Yet most of us behave as if the Ocean didn't matter. In its most recent State of the Marine...

Africa.(The unreported year 2006)(political conditions)(Chronology)(Report)
January 1, 2007... A DEMOCRACY IS BORN (Above) It was touch and go, as the beleaguered and war-weary citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) prepared to vote in their country's first free presidential election for four decades. ...

East Asia & Pacific.(The unreported year 2006)(Report)
January 1, 2007... AUSTRALIA (Above) A global warming baddy--it has one of the highest per-capita emissions of greenhouse gases--Australia had a taste of climate chaos this year with the worst drought in centuries. But there was a good piece of news. To help...

Latin America & Caribbean.(The unreported year 2006)(Hugo Chavez wins election at Venezuela)(land reform bill introduced at Bolivia)(Chico Whitaker wins Right Livelihood Honorary Award )(Chronology)
January 1, 2007... JOURNEY WITH MAPS (Above) Thousands of Latin Americans lose their lives trying to cross the border into the US, across the Rio Grande and the Arizona desert. In February, the Mexican Human Rights Commission announced that it would give...

North America & Europe.(The unreported year 2006)(Stephen Harper appointed at Canada)(Iceland being targeted by multinationals)(Republican Party wins United States elections)(Chronology)
January 1, 2007... BON APPETIT? (Above) In what is believed to have been the biggest--and unreported--agricultural workers' protest in England since the 1920s, hundreds of migrant strawberry pickers stood up to exploitation and appalling condtions at a...

South Asia.(The unreported year 2006)(Bollywood films to be shown in Pakistan)(girl's education spreads in Afghanistan)(King Gyanendra faces defeat in Nepal)(Chronology)
January 1, 2007... NEPAL'S DAWN OF FREEDOM (Left) The hope and the joy were unmistakable when, after more than a year of absolute rule, King Gyanendra announced that he was stepping down and Parliament would be reinstated. This duly happened, along with the...

East Europe & central Asia.(The unreported year 2006)(bird flu reported at Azerbaijan)(Mikhail Saakashvili accuses Moscow of explosions in Georgia)(Alexander Lukashenko wins election in Belarus)(Chronology)
January 1, 2007... SWEEPERS (Above left) Women clean a street at night in Grozny, a city where virtually no building is left undamaged following two Russian campaigns to crush Chechen separatist forces. Chechnya may not be headline news any more, but the...

Middle East.(The unreported year 2006)(Chronology)
January 1, 2007... EXERCISING THEIR FRANCHISE (Right) For the first time women in Kuwait were able to run in elections and vote in them. Economist Rola Dashti, pictured here, gained the highest votes of any of the 28 females candidates who ran in the June...

The tempest: Mahfuz Sadique reports from Bangladesh, where the land can become a sea and the sea a wave.(BANGLADESH)
January 1, 2007... 'There was something wrong with the pubali batash (north-easterly wind).' Rustam Howlader (pictured below) tries to recreate in words and gestures exactly what went wrong on the evening of 19 September 2006. The wrinkles on his forehead...

Waterworld: national parks are commonplace on land--so why not marine reserves at sea? It's time to act, says Sara Holden.
January 1, 2007... Imagine a mining company being allowed to chip away at the great rock Uluru in Australia until there was nothing left but a small dusty mound in the desert. Could you conceive of permitting hunting in Yellowstone Park in the US on such a scale...

Friend or foe? Disagreement over energy-hungry China's overtures to Africa.(AFRICA)
January 1, 2007... IF 2005 was a year in which campaigns against onerous debt, unfair trade and flawed aid focused attention on Africa's relationship with the West, then 2006 has been the year of looking East, with China's rise to prominence in Africa capturing...

Don't buy it.(CONSUMERISM)(Buy Nothing Day)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... International 'Buy Nothing Day' was joyously celebrated across the world on November 24 (North America) and 25 (everywhere else). From India to Indiana, Taipei to Toronto and Manila to Melbourne, shoppers floundering in the festive spending...

Mine games: Peruvian villagers step up protests against Western mining companies.(PERU)(Monterrico Metals plc)
January 1, 2007... GOLD, copper, zinc--mining in Peru is extremely lucrative. But even the World Bank acknowledges that it despoils the environment, threatens farmers' livelihoods and returns little, if anything, to communities. Now ordinary Peruvians are...

Big bad world.(Cartoon)
January 1, 2007... Polyp [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Speechmarks.(Currents)
January 1, 2007... "Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity." Nadine Gordimer, South African author

The language of cosmetic surgery ...(Currents)(Brief article)(Glossary)
January 1, 2007... Word power 24 boob-job n. employment gained as a result of a surgically enhanced chest cosmetic adj. superficial; only attending to the surface facelift n. smile imperfect adj. normal plastic surgeon n. doctor who accepts...

The rock star triumphs: Chavez is re-elected and sets sights on becoming 'President-for-life'.(VENEZUELA)(Hugo Chavez)
January 1, 2007... THE rain couldn't dampen the mood as supporters of President Hugo Chavez celebrated another six-year term. On the night of 3 December 2006 they gathered in front of the palace's 'balcony of the people' to embrace their leader and shout their...

Beware Bolkestein re-born.(EUROPE)(Frits Bolkestein)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... The EU Council of Employment Ministers, in company with the European Commission, have again decided to ignore all democratic procedures and attempted to impose a neoliberal 'Directive on Services' on all Europeans. This law, originally named...

I'm an endangered species, get me outta here!(Seriously)(Extinct from ITV PLC shows extinct animals)
January 1, 2007... They're cute, they're cuddly, and now they're good fodder for reality TV programming. Yup, that's right; no longer are we restricted to seeing z-list celebrities boring us to death all day long in the Big Brother house, now we can see z-list...

Warren Buffet.(Worldbeaters)(Biography)
January 1, 2007... Job: CEO and largest shareholder in the investment company Berkshire Hathaway Reputation: The Oracle of Omaha; the world's second-richest person turned biggest philanthropist Warren Buffet is a worldbeater in the best sense of the...

Southern exposure: highlighting the work of photographers from the Majority World.(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Children on their lunch break at Maryland Convent Private Primary School in Lagos, Nigeria. A group of kids are playing in the assembly area, screaming loudly and jumping around for the attention of the camera. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ...

Two signatures.(View from Delhi)(a critique of South Asian literature)(Column)
January 1, 2007... After years of violence and bloodshed the people of Nepal are preparing for peace. As I was settling down to write this column one of them forwarded me a short poem. The first verse goes like this: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] two...

NI jumbo prize crossword.
January 1, 2007... 116 by AXE The winner will receive not only a copy of the World Guide but also a Peters Atlas. Correct solutions received by 20 February will be put into a draw--though only the winner will be notified. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Post...

The best of 2006.(world politics)
January 1, 2007... Music There has been some superlative stuff released over the past year--from the reissued 1981 masterpiece of Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Virgin reviewed NI 388) to Savane (World Circuit NI 394), the album...

Burlesque.(Sound recording review)
January 1, 2007... Burlesque by Bellowhead (Westpark 87132 CD) Stuck in a traffic jam on London's orbital road, so the story goes, folksters John Spiers and Jon Boden had the grand idea of expanding their simple squeezebox and vocal into something big....

Volk.(Sound recording review)
January 1, 2007... Volk by Laibach (Mute CAD 2616 CD) It's about time that Laibach, those Slovenian mischief-makers and utterly serious interrogators of power (pop and state), thought about what constitutes a national anthem, a format that they declare...

Rabble-Rouser for Peace: The Authorised Biography of Desmond Tutu.(What Happens After Mugabe?)(The Book of Not)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Rabble-Rouser for Peace The Authorised Biography of Desmond Tutu. by John Allen (Rider Books ISBN 1844135713) What Happens After Mugabe? by Geoff Hill (Zebra Press ISBN 1770071024) The Book of Not by Tsitsi...

Ghosts.(Movie review)
January 1, 2007... Ghosts directed and co-written by Nick Broomfield Cheap food needs cheap--often illegal--labour. Broomfield's drama is about the human cost, and it reeks authenticity. So, to play illegal Chinese workers in Britain, he casts...

Apocalypto.(Movie review)
January 1, 2007... Apocalypto directed by Mel Gibson Mel Gibson--drunken, racist ranter and macho hero of too many silly, bloody action films: can you take him seriously? But you may be a bit puzzled by his latest venture--a subtitled historical...

Questionable motives.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... 'Sex Abuse and the Vatican' (Corruption, NI 396) refers to a recent Panorama programme on BBC TV, which uses two documents (not one as your article says) to assert 'an explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the...

One trendy step ahead.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... I found Ethical shopping (NI 395) interesting, informative and disturbing. I took it that the large corporations were jumping on a bandwagon and one should be sceptical of claims such as 'see how green we are'. I was pleased to read the...

Left out of 'fair trade'.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... As small-scale producers of organic vegetables, selling directly to end-consumers, we are keenly aware of the contrast between our trading practice and the chain of interventions which leads from the production of a tropical crop to the...

System error.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... Jess Worth makes some sophisticated and thought-provoking comments (NI 395) about why ethical consuming is something of an oxymoron (as we should be consuming less, not just differently), and why we may be playing into the hands of big...

No death on demand.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... I am writing to express my concern over what I regard as a misleading advert you carried for 'Dignity in dying' (NI 395). The advert seemed to imply that the only way for a person to die 'peacefully, with dignity', was either to kill themselves...

Soviet contribution.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... It is glaringly apparent that Susan George, judging by her article, 'Whose Europe? Our Europe!' (Europa! NI 394), has no real understanding of the immense contribution made by the Soviet Union in saving Europe and, indeed, the rest of the world...

Rebellious society.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... Re the so-called 'French resistance to neoliberalism' (NI 394). I went demonstrating against the CPE (First Employment Contract) several times because of my political belief and my deep concern. I had 'lively' conversations with young people...

Falling silent.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... The statement in Currents, ('Language extinction: Caribbean conundrum', NI 394) that '90 per cent of the world's languages will be endangered by the end of the century' does not reveal the true picture regarding language death. As we enter...

To a place of healing.(Letter from Mauritius )
January 1, 2007... Twenty-five years ago, there was great consternation in the village I live in, Bambous, when a young woman neighbour, Santa, was abandoned by her fiance after he had tricked her into accompanying him into an empty house and then raped her. The...

Honduras.(Country Profile)(Country overview)
January 1, 2007... Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage, landed on the American mainland for the first time near present-day Trujillo, Honduras. The day was 14 August 1502, and he named the place Honduras ('depths' in Spanish) for the deep waters off the...