New Internationalist articles from March 2002

New Internationalist archives from March 2002

From this month's editor.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
March 1, 2002... ONE should be careful when doing an issue of the NI not to climb on too high a horse. The very things you criticize in the wider world are often things that you are guilty of yourself. This issue, about our desire to go ever faster -- a desire...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2002... Easy does it So, this is actually going to happen in my lifetime! (I'm 65.) Under Coming next month (NI 342) you refer to something I had never previously heard of: Slow Activism. This sounds too good to be true. It would be misleading to...

Home is where the hurt is: Reem Haddad on the basic obstacle to peace in the Middle East. (Letter from Lebanon).(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2002... I wanted to understand and I hung on to their every word. They were holocaust survivors. They were Jewish and I, an Arab, was in their home in Virginia. It was my first encounter with survivors of the Nazi holocaust. With pain, the couple, in...

Southern exposure: Highlighting the work of photographers from the majority world.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... This photograph was taken in Kumira, Chittagong. I came across this cowboy in a field. He seemed tired and sat down on the firewood he had collected and started playing his flute. And then this marvellous, god-gifted sunlight came out through...

Why Africans should reject Robert Mugabe's tactics. (View from the South).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Some black Africans may be tempted to approve of the attacks being carried out on white Zimbabwean farmers and their black employees by so-called war veterans, with the support of Robert Mugabe's government. There is, all over the continent,...

In the dock: WTO 'Development Agenda' rings hollow. (Trade).(World Trade Organization)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... "WE are too beholden to trade' a trade official of a developing country told me at the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Doha, Qatar last November. The meeting was a bizarre affair, The last WTO ministerial...

Camdessus resurrected. (Currents).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Hopes for fresh thinking at the UN Conference on Financing for Development, which begins in Monterrey, Mexico on 18 March, have received a setback. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has appointed two 'Special Envoys' to the conference. One is the...

Rush to nowhere: Richard Swift says it's time we slammed on the brakes. (Keynote).
March 1, 2002... THE Titanic and its sad fate have become a metaphor for human foibles and arrogance towards the power of nature leading to disaster. What is less well known is that the White Star Line built the ultramodern Titanic in part to compete in an...

Global citizens movement: A new actor for a new politics. (Resistance).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... THE global citizens movement as made a momentous discovery and revealed a dangerous truth: the corporate coup d'etal, the triumph of rich over poor, market over society, rapacity over nature is not inevitable. It put this lesson to good...

Biggest roadblocks. (Currents).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... State of the World 2002 points to several significant impediments that have slowed progress towards building a sustainable world over the last decade. Environmental policies remain a low priority. The growing number of international...

Quarantine. (Word Corner).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Quarantine could easily have been known as trentine. In 14th-century Venice, ships from disease-stricken areas were isolated for 30 (trentina) days before being allowed to unload. The period of isolation was later extended to 40 days (quaranta...

Scars of safety: The plight of Afghani refugees. (Asylum).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... ON a balmy Brisbane afternoon I am sitting in a bare-walled, inner-city flat as Ahmad tells me of talabe bakhshish -- the exchange of forgiveness before dying. Ahmad describes the guilt he felt when, with a bowed head, he asked his wife Masuma...

Spinning 9/11. (Seriously).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Three days after the 11 September attacks, Saudi Arabia hired everyone's favourite giant transnational public-relations corporation, Burson Marsteller (BM), for 'issues management' according to O'Dwyers PR Newsletter. Saudi Arabia is home to...

Creative madness. (Seriously).(new product development may boost economy)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Will the US regain its entrepreneurial confidence? US business magazine Worth brings us pioneers such as Tucker Viemeister, who has come up with a voice-activated cellphone implanted in the user's skull, just behind the ear. According to...

How corporations steal your time.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... CLASSIC CORPORATE TIME-STEALING comes in the guise of 'selling our soul to the company store', as the old song goes. Since the dawn of industrialization employers have sought to control and wring maximum effort from their employees' time. But...

Boo to Captain Clock: Jay Griffiths sides with the agitators and celebrants who subvert the regulation of time by potentates and pencil-pushers. (Taking Back Our Time).
March 1, 2002... 'We do not recognize history, patriarchy, matriarchy... or lollipop men/ladies... Our currency is to be based on the quag barter system. We do not recognize the Gregorian calendar: this day shall be known as One...' Thus spake British road...

American Karoshi: Karoshi, or working yourself to death, was thought to be a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. But, as Matthew Reiss explains, Americans are no strangers to it. (Overwork).
March 1, 2002... A THIN, 40-something man with scattered white hair and wan complexion looked up from his notebook in a church basement on Manhattan's Upper West Side. 'Hi, I'm Emerson,' he said, 'and I'm addicted to work.' 'Hi, Emerson,' answered his...

Rush to nowhere: The facts.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The graph illustrating exponential growth has become a cliche of speeded-up turbo-capitalism. Whether it is types of vinegar or video games produced, sale of computers, pollutants released into the air, consumer debt, expansion of the gross...

Suffering and smiling: Ike Oguine sits in a Lagos traffic jam and ponders on the way the private automobile isn't getting anyone anywhere. (Traffic Jam).
March 1, 2002... WHILE capitalism has speeded things up for some, others are clearly on another track. For many in developing countries, some of the tools that should enable speedy communication are themselves sources of frustration. This frustration comes...

The hurried child: Kathleen McDonnell looks at how children are being pushed on to the fast track to adult success by cynical advertisers and anxious parents. (Childhood).
March 1, 2002... No doubt about it: being a kid just ain't what it used to be. Childhood used to be thought of as a carefree time (at least that's how it looks when viewed through the lens of our collective nostalgia). True, it was the period of learning and...

The Slow Food movement. (Slow Food).(protests over fast foods and food safety)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... THIS MOVEMENT to defend endangered local foods has its roots in Italy but has since grown to 65,000 members in 42 countries. It is headquartered in the Piedmontese market town of Bra. It is opposed to the fast-food monoculture that is...

The slow cities movement. (Slow Activism).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... INSPIRED BY the Slow Food movement, 32 Italian cities and towns have committed themselves to preserve their unique character by creating 'slow cities'. According to the Mayor of the Tuscan town of Greve: 'The American urban model has invaded...

The Long Now Foundation. (Slow Activism).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... THIS ORGANIZATION is rallying around the notion of building an eight-foot-tall, state-of-the-art clock that will keep time for 10,000 years. It uses no electricity (all done with Bronze Age technology) and wilt be placed in a dry highland area....

The Society for the Deceleration of Time. (Slow Activism).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... AN ECLECTIC GROUP of some 700 members drawn from the German-speaking world and headquartered in Austria. 'The Society does quality research on the phenomena of time, organizes symposia, publishes regularly. Occasionally we go activist ourselves...

Reduce work. (Slow Activism).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... REDUCING WORKING HOURS has long been an important theme of the labour movement. Once the eight-hour day was thought to be an outrageously radical demand. Today a range of organizations is pushing for anything from a 32-hour week to a four-hour...

Adbusters. (Anti-Consumerism).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... A BI-MONTHLY MAGAZINE produced by the Adbusters Media Foundation in Vancouver, Canada. Adbusters groups together form a creative band of activists who are at the center of anti-corporate culture jamming. It was they who initiated both Buy...

Enough! (Anti-Consumerism).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The UK-based anti-consumerist movement. It provides campaigning materials and propaganda around a wide range of anti-consumerist initiatives. They bill themselves as a group that takes 'A critical look at consumerism, poverty and the planet'....

Enclosing time: The theory that 'time is money' has a pervasive grip on the world. C Douglas Lummis traces its origins back to its patron saint -- old Ben Franklin. (Stolen Time).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Enclosure Then and Now IN his The Needs of Strangers, Michael Ignatieff borrows from Shakespeare the notion of 'the heath'. The heath is wildness itself, the fearsome place where all security ends, the right place for Lear to go mad. In...

Vladimir Putin. (Worldbeaters).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... 'The current president of the United States is himself the son of a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. That's why one can say we were in quite a family atmosphere and understood each other pretty well.' President Putin on...

The Mystery of Capital & Private Planet. (Books).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto (Black Swan ISBN 13579108642) Private Planet David Cromwell (John Carpenter ISBN 1897766629) 'Capitalism appears increasingly as the leitmotif of a self-serving guild of...

Reflections on Exile. (Books).
March 1, 2002... by Edward W Said (Granta, ISBN 1 86207 444 5) This book gathers together 46 of Edward W Said's essays on politics and culture, written over the course of 35 years. Renowned both within and beyond the Palestinian diaspora, the...

By The Sea. (Books).
March 1, 2002... by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Bloomsbury, ISBN: 0747552800) Abdulrazak Gurnah's sixth novel tells the interwoven stories of two men and their families. Set in two seaside towns half-a-world apart, the book opens as Saleh Omar arrives in...

No Place Like Home - Echoes from Kosovo. (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Between 1994 and 2001 photographer Melanie Friend made several visits to Kosovo, photographing and interviewing the same people. Their contexts changed of course: a refugee camp on the Macedonian border in 1999, for example, gave way to a...

Black Hawk Down. (Film Video).
March 1, 2002... directed by Ridley Scott Ridley Scott's latest movie is a gory portrayal of the October 1993 battle in Mogadishu that marked the climax of the disastrous US 'humanitarian intervention' in Somalia. A raid against warlord Muhammad Aidid goes...

Monsoon Wedding. (Film Video).
March 1, 2002... directed by Mira Nair The Indian diaspora's gaze at the world it left behind has two opposing traits: the mainstream one, an unproblematic romanticization of the homeland's 'glorious traditions'; and the marginal one, a desire to distance...

Feminist Sweepstakes. (Music).
March 1, 2002... by Le Tigre (Chicks on Speed COSRo5 CD) 'Feminists, we're calling you. Please report to the front desk. Let's name this phenomenon. It's too dumb to bring us down.' This isn't the opening salvo to Le Tigre's second album (that...

Rock It To The Moon. (Music).
March 1, 2002... by Electrelane (Let's Rock! LROCK 03 CD) Anyone inspecting the sleeve illustrations to Feminist Sweepstakes for clues on where to get more of the Le Tigre ethos, may be interested to see a little drawing of a record by Electrelane. That's not...

On acoustic ecology. (Sharp Focus).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Phil England on listening to our sonic environment - from pond life to protest. 'Noise is a much bigger problem today than it was ever before. And so it is in the midst of the present cacophony that we've begun to listen very carefully to...

The voice of the majority: It speaks out of poverty and is rarely heard. (Essay).
March 1, 2002... In a world committed to universal democracy, human rights and freedom, it should perhaps come as a surprise that the voice of the majority of the people in the world remains unheard. That voice is, of course, the faltering voice of the poor,...

Dominican Republic. (Country Profile).
March 1, 2002... The brand-new 27-storey Acropolis tower is the latest addition to the rising skyline of Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic's capital. Headquarters to the US giant Citibank and a cluster of other financial firms, the building looms over a...