New Internationalist articles from July 2002

New Internationalist archives from July 2002

From this month's editor.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
July 1, 2002... FIRST, a message from my sponsor. I'm pleased to announce that, as of yesterday and following an extended period of investigation into the covert political activities of transnational corporations, my brain has been bought out as the result of...

Letters.
July 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...

Corrections.(Correction Notice)
July 1, 2002... In C Douglas Lummis' article 'Enclosing Time' (NI 343 Rush to Nowhere) Gerard Winstanley the Digger was mistakenly identified as simply an antislavery campaigner. Karl Polanyi should have been identified as an economic historian. The mistakes...

Return to nature: how hunters became protectors. (Letter from Lebanon).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... ISSAM SIDAWi, an enthusiastic fisher and hunter, was adamant. The Lebanese Government had gone too far. Not only had it declared the Palm Islands off the coastal city of Tripoli a protected reserve, but Sidawi and other locals were barred from...

Southern exposure: highlighting the work of photographers from the majority world.
July 1, 2002... The TAFOS project organized a network of grassroots photographers in Peru. Farmers, miners, members of ethnic communities, a diverse group whose view of the world is rarely recorded by photographs, produced an extraordinary collection of...

Geetaben and Shakila. (View from the South).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
July 1, 2002... THIS is a tale of two women. The first does not have a name: I'll call her Shakila. The other was called Geetaben. Geetaben's and Shakila's lives were broadly similar. Both lived in Ahmedabad in the western Indian state of Gujarat. They...

Facial-hair cream to the rescue: tropical-disease drugs in critical condition. (Health).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... MALARIA is killing between one and two million people each year, 90 per cent of them in Africa and more than half of them young children. And visceral leishmaniasis will kill half a million in the developing world if they don't receive...

Oil-free Costa Rica. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Recently inaugurated Costa Rican President Dr Abel Pacheco de la Espriella has declared his country free of oil exploration and exploitation and open-pit mining. In his inaugural speech delivered on 8 May 2002, Dr Pacheco de la Espriella...

US ban on Israel boycott. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... US citizens who wish to boycott israeli goods in protest at the Palestinian situation may find themselves in trouble. Such boycotts are actually illegal under US law. US Department of Commerce trade amendments 'counteract the participation of...

Aid to the rich. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Worth $3.3 billion, Australia's richest man, Kerry Packer does not fit the picture of a person in need of aid. But while the public's attention is on the high-profile media group Publishing & Broadcasting Limited, controlled by the Packers,...

Electromagnetic exposure: real risks or paranoia? (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... More and more studies are showing serious adverse health effects caused by electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Completed research now includes multiple studies that have linked power lines with childhood cancers; computer exposure with miscarriages;...

Alcohol. (Word Corner).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Orignally alcohol was a powder, not a drink. The word alcohol is from the Arabic al-kuhl, meaning 'the kohl'. Kohl was made form powedered antimony, a metallic, chemical element. Subsequently the word alcohol was used for any spirit produced by...

Testimony of the dead: former dictators brought to justice by their victims. (Guatemala).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In a small town in the province of Chimaltenango, Guatemala, crews are working to excavate various hillside graves. They expect to find the bodies of more than 100 villagers who were massacred in the 1980s, when US-sponsored military...

West Papua clampdown. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... A key member of the West Papuan Koteka Tribal Assembly, Benny Wenda, was arrested 8 June by the Indonesian army. The Indonesian Government which rules the region is attempting to clamp down on pro-independence activists (see West Papua NI 344)....

Seriously: you couldn't make this stuff up. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Yes Men say 'No' 'The World Trade Organization', the website of an Australian accountancy association reported last month, 'is to be disbanded and reformed based on the universal Declaration of Human Rights'. Questions were asked in the...

It's democracy, stupid: Katharine Ainger explains why corporate lobbying has to be exposed. (Introduction).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... NEW YORK, 1995. Exhausted government delegates gulp down coffee to help them work through the night on an international deal on climate change. One man, Don Pearlman, has been slipping negotiators of the oil-producing nations Kuwait and Saudi...

A tale of two coups. (Coups).(Venezuela and Argentina)
July 1, 2002... The big business-led coup in Venezuela failed, where international finance's coup in Argentina has succeeded. Greg Palast gives us the inside track on two very different power-grabs. Blondes in revolt On May Day, starting out from the...

The naked lobbyist: the world's most powerful corporate lobby groups uncovered -- by Corporate Europe Observatory.
July 1, 2002... WHO RUNS THE WORLD? There's a reason why more and more protesters are showing up at the gatherings and offices of corporate lobby groups. Made up of the movers and shakers from large transnational corporations, these groups shape policy to...

For their eyes only: when secret documents land in Greg Palast's hands, he spots the killer shark lurking in the free-trade pool. (Trade Rules).(from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy)(Excerpt)
July 1, 2002... When Churchill said, 'democracy is the worst form of government except all the others', he simply lacked the vision to see that the World Trade Organization would design a system to replace democracy with something much better - Article VI. 4...

Corporate influence -- the facts: it's been a great few decades for the world's largest corporations.(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2002... * Out of the top 100 economic units on the planet, 51 are corporations. The other 49 are countries. (1) * Trade between subsidiaries within the same parent corporation now accounts for roughly a third of world trade. (2) * While the...

Earth summit for sale: Katharine Ainger discovers how the UN learned to stop worrying and love big business. (UN).
July 1, 2002... WHITE ants -- Australian for termites - are pale grubs that chomp their way through wooden structures which still look intact from the outside. Until, that is, you lean on the framework and find yourself crashing through rotten, hollowed-out...

Corpocrats: why corporate executives don't ask political questions.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... THE global managers have arrived. They meet in identical glass-walled rooms in corporate headquarters, travel in first class and business cabins on intercontinental flights. They read the same international newspapers and watch the same global...

A short history of corporations.
July 1, 2002... WHAT IS A CORPORATION? Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary defines it as 'an ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility'. It is a legal construct, a charter granted by the state to a group of investors to gather...

The big guns. (The Corporate State).
July 1, 2002... With board members like these, who needs lobbyists? Tim Shorrock uncovers the Bush connection to US defence giant the Carlyle Group. ON 12 March 2002, Frank Carlucci, the former US Secretary of Defense and chair of the Carlvle Group,...

Spanners in the works! Strategies for taking on corporate power.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Delegitimize & dismantle * Who are these guys, anyway? Movements fighting global corporate capitalism are questioning the right of corporations to exist at all and seeking better ways to organize economically, using principles of...

John Ashcroft: taking aim at the rich and powerful. (Worldbeaters).
July 1, 2002... Last February in Nashville, Tennessee, he told an assembly of religious broadcasters that American freedoms are made in Heaven, 'not the grant of any government or document, but our endowment from God'. In the Manichean world of...

England, Half English. (Mixed Media).
July 1, 2002... by Billy Bragg and the Blokes (Cooking Vinyl COOK 222 CD) A former soldier, Billy Bragg gave up the army to dedicate his working life to a songwriting that's firmly in the tradition of political folk music. To date, this most...

Mali Music. (Mixed Media).
July 1, 2002... by Afel Bocoum, Damon Albarn, Toumani Diabate and friends (Honest Jon's Records HJR 1 CD/LP) Better known as the lead in British pop group Blur and the 'virtual' band Gorillaz, you'd expect to find Damon Albarn in London's more...

A female cabby in Sidi Bel-Abbes. (Mixed Media).
July 1, 2002... directed by Belkacem Hadjadi This is a film about going out to work. Soumicha is the only woman taxi driver in Sidi Bel-Abbes, a medium-sized town in Algeria. Widowed with three children, she has inherited a yellow Renault from her...

In the Name of Osama bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the bin Laden Brotherhood. (Mixed Media).
July 1, 2002... By Roland Jacquard translated by George Holoch (Duke University Press ISBN 08223 2991 3) Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York a torrent of books on Osama bin Laden has poured out of the world's publishing houses,...

Amen (Eyewitness). (Mixed Media).
July 1, 2002... directed by Costa-Gavras Constantin Costa-Gavras, perhaps cinema's best-known political filmmaker, has been directing films since the 1960s. Many of them dramatize real-life events, and like Z, State of Siege and Missing, heroic resistance...

The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade. (Mixed Media).
July 1, 2002... by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark (Phoenix ISBN 0 75381 329 7) Jade is precious stone found only in an area of northern Burma where millions of Jade is a precious stone found only in an years ago an upwelling of magma pierced the...

Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change. (Mixed Media).
July 1, 2002... by Guy Dauncey with Patrick Mazza (New Society ISBN 0 86571 421 5) Climate change is the environmental fear that provokes the greatest degree of apocalyptic prophesy. It's hard to escape the doom drum when the global political response...

Making waves interview with Mujeres Creando.(Bolivian anarchofeminist group)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... OVERNIGHT, in beautiful handwriting, words appear on the walls of La Paz, the high-altitude capital of Bolivia. They speak truths Bolivian women won't say out loud. Deconstructing machismo, anti-gay prejudice and neoliberalism, Bolivian...

Rogue superpower. (Essay).
July 1, 2002... Sympathy for the American people, and the easy charge of 'anti-Americanism', have restrained debate on what the US Government has really been up to since 11 September. David Ransom doesn't like the look of it -- or where it may be leading. ...

Sudan. (Country Profile).(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2002... THE broad, sleepy, tree-lined colonial avenues along the bank of the Nile are redolent of long decay. The bustling centre of Khartoum, a sprawling city of close to two million people, is barely a kilometre away but the distance between the...