New Internationalist articles from March 2001

New Internationalist archives from March 2001

Lebanon lights up: Reem Haddad encounters big tobacco's hard-sell tactics in the nightclubs of Beirut.
March 1, 2001... Tobacco companies in the US and Britain must be having a field day. In Lebanon, they have found the perfect market for their products. While Westerners are recoiling from the horrors of lung cancer and refusing to light up, the Lebanese seem to...

Factfile on -- music.
March 1, 2001... MUSIC IS UNIVERSAL -- it is produced by all cultures. Charles Darwin believed that music preceded speech and arose as an elaboration of mating calls. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of many who have suggested the earliest languages were...

Silences.
March 1, 2001... Goodbyes Jose Saramago's grandfather was silent: a man of the Portuguese earth, Jeronimo never studied, but he was wise of a wisdom without words. When Grandpa Jeronimo grew ill, he knew, silently, that the time for goodbyes had...

Unjust deserts: asylum seekers abused at privatized detention centre.
March 1, 2001... Calls in Australia to stop private companies running prisons and detention centres grow as details of shocking conditions at the remote Woomera centre for refugees have been revealed. In the desert centre of Australia, Woomera is a small...

Asteroid conquest (property rights in outer space).
March 1, 2001... While corporations claim ownership of the earth, SpaceDev has its sights set much higher. Founder of the company Jim Benson reveals his plans to claim parts of outer space beginning with an asteroid. `Property rights in space are a necessary...

Irritating but useful.
March 1, 2001... `To irritate' is the aim and literal name of `La Funa' -- a group of Chilean activists who track down people who served in the secret police during the Pinochet dictatorship. Once located, the `irritating people' wave signs and chant slogans to...

Witch's curse: poor living standards banish older women from their communities.
March 1, 2001... The growth in the number of female witches in Ghana may suggest something is spiritually wrong in this African nation. Although both men and women can practise witchcraft, it is only the women, especially the older ones, who are branded as...

Going bananas (an exhibit refers to stolen Jewish possessions in Nazi camps).
March 1, 2001... What's the point of stacking 40,000 bananas by hand? The artist Doug Fishbone, who has done this in Guayaquil, Ecuador, says `the main reference is to the heaps of stolen Jewish possessions in the Nazi camps. The bananas call to mind the heaps...

Crackdown: Thai military overreacts to Burmese resistance.
March 1, 2001... On 12 November 2000, Burmese opposition radio reported that Ko San Naing (alias Ye Thiha) had been arrested by Thai military intelligence. He is one of the leaders of the infamous group, Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors (VBSW). He hasn't been...

Faulty pipes (geological faults could fracture oil pipes in Alaska).
March 1, 2001... Previously unrecorded geological faults could fracture oil pipelines in southern Alaska, creating an oil spill worse than that from the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989, says local geologist Peter Haeussler. After the release of secret geological...

Jumping mines (the U.S. develops land mine technology).
March 1, 2001... The US is developing landmines that move around to avoid the crews that clear minefields. The self-righting mines will detect the distance to their neighbours using ultrasonic sensors and communicate with each other via radio. If some mines are...

Building up the poor - or reinforcing inequality? ... the impact of aid, using Bangladesh as an example.
March 1, 2001... The sign proclaimed it loudly: `Under construction -- the largest shopping mall in Asia'. Hyperbole, perhaps, though the sheer scale of the building work visible behind the sign suggested that something pretty grand was in the making. Yet I was...

Poverty line.
March 1, 2001... I was poor. Very poor. There was no food to quell my hunger No clothes to hide the shame of my naked body No roof above my head. You were so kind. You came and you said `No. Poverty is a debasing word. It dehumanizes...

Bangladesh: a brief history.
March 1, 2001... A LAND APART Bangladesh may only have existed as an independent state for 30 years but its cultural and linguistic roots go deep. The Bangla language (the term Bengali was just a British colonial rendering of this) was distinct by the 7th...

When dollars swim freely: if the billions of dollars in aid to Bangladesh over the last three decades had been given directly to the poor, it would have made a major difference in their lives.
March 1, 2001... If the billions of dollars in aid to Bangladesh over the last three decades had been given directly to the poor, it would have made a major difference to their lives. As it is, the poor continue to struggle while the rich flaunt their...

Poison in the well: ... Bangladesh's nightmare is that the water from many ... tubwells contains arsenic.
March 1, 2001... It seemed such a simple way to provide clean water: sink tubewells in every village. Bangladesh's nightmare is that the water from many of those tubewells contains arsenic. It is the largest poisoning of a population in history, with millions...

Aid - the facts.
March 1, 2001... Aid is under fire from Left and Right, from North and South. Progressives question aid's effects on the ground and its service to Western economic interests. Conservatives, meanwhile, have been successfully lobbying for cuts in overseas-aid...

Bangladesh - the facts.
March 1, 2001... PEOPLE Population: 124.8 million (the world's ninth most populous country). Annual population growth rate:(5) 1.5%, down from 2.1% 1975-1998 (Majority World average 1.4%). Urban population as % of total: 20.0%, up from 9.3% in...

Guess who's coming to dinner? When Bill Clinton swung into Bangladesh last year the red carpet was rolled out ...
March 1, 2001... Farida Akhtar, China magazine. WHEN US PRESIDENT Bill Clinton started his subcontinental tour in Bangladesh last year, naive nationalists suggested he was paying homage to the Grameen Bank's microcredit programme, which both Hillary and...

Local heroes: Bangladesh's local development organizations are world famous ...
March 1, 2001... We stood inside the brothel complex in Tangail town, 100 kilometres from Dhaka. Fifteen-year-old Shahana had just taken a client. I don't exactly stand every day beside the thin bamboo-walled rooms of sex workers, listening to their ardent...

Everything smelled of money ... training children from poor, working-class families in Dhaka as photojournalists.
March 1, 2001... In 1994 Shahidul Alam and Drik Picture Library launched a unique initiative which involved training children from poor, working-class families in Dhaka as photojournalists. Their progress since has been remarkable -- now 16 years old, the `Out...

Slash ans burn ... for the Hill People of Chittagong aid-driven development has been a bitter experience.
March 1, 2001... WHY do you Bangalis call us upa-jati (sub-nation)? We have a language, culture, religion and land of our own. We may be few in numbers, we may be a small nation but we are not sub-anyone. We are an egalitarian people. Please don't impose your...

Helmut Maucher: Maucher has gained accolades on his German home turf, winning the 1997 Worst New Word of the Year Award for coining the phrase `welfare scum'.
March 1, 2001... In 1996 the NI put the burly, plain-spoken Helmut Maucher `In the Dock' for his crimes as Chief Executive Officer of Nestle, including the pushing of babymilk formula to mothers in the South. In conditions of low literacy and poor water quality...

Constant gardener.
March 1, 2001... The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre (Hodder & Stoughton ISBN 0 340 73337 3) Since the Cold War ended, John le Carre's novels have moved beyond the closed world of spies, intrigue and duplicity, tackling the far more interesting subjects...

Getting there.
March 1, 2001... Getting There by Manjula Padmanabhan (Picador ISBN 0 330 39286 7) Delhi-based artist and cartoonist Manjula Padmanabhan has structured her first novel around events in her own past. Getting There is set in the late-1970s as our heroine,...

Captive state: the corporate takeover of Britain.
March 1, 2001... Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain by George Monbiot (Macmillan ISBN 0 333 90164 9) Why do corporations need the state at all? The way they tell it, Government is the enemy of the people, of liberty, enterprise and good...

Stepmother city: Saiinkho Namtchylak.
March 1, 2001... Stepmother City by Sainkho Namtchylak (PONDEROSA 003 CD) Tuvan composer and singer Sainkho Namtchylak -- often hailed as an eastern equivalent of Bjork -- never makes clear exactly where her personal `stepmother city' is located. But then,...

NuYorican funk experience: various artists.
March 1, 2001... The NuYorican Funk Experience by Various (NASCENTE NSCD 071 CD) Unlike many urban sprawls, New York City is alone in being able to offer up any number of soundtracks that define its population. But while much of the music one immediately...

Last resort.
March 1, 2001... The Last Resort directed by Pawel Pawlinowski A woman flees eastern Europe with her young son in pursuit of love instead finds herself trapped in a God-forsaken English coastal town and at the mercy of the kindness -- or otherwise -- of...

Terrorist.
March 1, 2001... The Terrorist directed by Santosh Sivan Indian cinematographer Santosh Sivan makes a powerful impact with this film about a girl raised by guerrillas after her family has been decimated by government forces. In the opening scene, Malli...

Marilyn Manson.
March 1, 2001... Louise Gray on the rocker they blamed for killing kids `Is adult entertainment killing our children,' asks an introductory question that flashes up on the website for rock group Marilyn Manson, `or is killing our children entertaining...

Are human rights universal?
March 1, 2001... Some ask, isn't human rights an essentially Western concept, ignoring the very different cultural, economic and political realities of the South? Can the values of the consumer society be applied to societies that have nothing to consume? Isn't...

Moldova.
March 1, 2001... The rows of vines which stripe the hills around Chisinau traditionally produced about the best wine in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's prohibition drive in the 1980s destroyed some but what Gorbachev failed to do, post-Soviet economics have...