New Internationalist articles from March 2003

New Internationalist archives from March 2003

From this month's editor.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
March 1, 2003... DO we look our age? More importantly, do we act it? The NI is 30 this month and feeling frisky. And why not? We live, as ever, in interesting times. In March 1973, when the first edition appeared (with Zambian leader Kenneth Kaunda on its...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2003... 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...

Southern exposure.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Highlighting the work of photographers from the Majority World When I took this picture I was documenting life along the Cauvery River, from its source in the hills of Coorg down to the sea in Thanjavur district in the deep south. This...

An Indian by any other name. (View from the South).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... IN India we've coined a new name for our diaspora, those millions of Indians who now live outside the subcontinent. Sometimes they're known as NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) or, more recently, PIOs (People of Indian Origin). As names go, both of...

Human kidneys: The new cash crop. (Currents: Poverty).
March 1, 2003... New medical technologies have spawned a world trade in human organs that is largely resistant to regulation, says Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who offers an overview (below) and reports from Moldova and the Philippines (above). WITH the demise of...

Borderline justice: The body count of young women factory workers near the US-Mexican border continues to grow. (Currents: Human Rights).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... BY the time they are found - if they are found at all -- the bodies have been partly mummified by the sun and dry wind that sweeps across the sparse Chihuahuan desert. They have usually been dumped on the outskirts of Ciudad Jiarez: a...

Khaki. (Word Corner).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The colour khaki was first used in British cavalry uniforms in India (the Guide Corps) in 1846, and was later widely used for camouflage in the Boer War. The original khaki (from the Urdu for 'dusty') was a dusty brown colour. Olive-green tints...

Addicted to conflict: Indonesian military resist 'zone of peace'. (Currents: West Papua).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... A grassroots peace movement in West Papua -- supported by the Governor, the regional provincial assembly, the police, NGOs and religious institutions -- is rapidly gaining momentum. It is a movement that is of increasing concern to the...

Seriously...: you couldn't make this stuff up.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... AD-ventures in AD-vertising When it comes to getting grabs in the media on the effects of globalization, one of the NI's readers in Aotearoa/New Zealand reports that a good gag goes much further than a soapbox. Our reader and her husband...

Precious fluid: Dinyar Godrej on the challenge posed by the world's freshwater crisis. (Water: Keynote).
March 1, 2003... THE city doesn't sleep easy. It sleeps with an ear cocked to the fully opened taps with buckets dangling from them. At the first spluttering sounds of the water ration's arrival through the pipes in the predawn dark, bodies spring from beds to...

Big dams, big trouble: Patrick McCully presents the case against the concrete behemoths that cause more misery than they're worth. (Water: Big Dams).
March 1, 2003... BIG dams are plain bad. They flood people out of their homes and off their lands; wipeout endangered habitats and species; spread water-borne diseases; deprive flood plains of the water and sediments of life-giving floods (while increasing the...

Closing the loop: Maggie Black lets the 'waste' word slip out, a cardinal sin at an international conference on ecological sanitation. But witnessing how muck is put to good use proves her redemption. (Water: Sanitation).
March 1, 2003... WE are in the Mingyuan Hotel in Nanning, capital of Guangxi Province in China. This luxury ghetto, with frilly porticoes and tidy flower-beds, is the venue of the first ever international conference on ecological sanitation. Hundreds of...

Water the facts.
March 1, 2003... Over the past century our water consumption increased tenfold. According to the World Health Organization, 1.1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water, while some 2.4 billion lack proper sanitary provision. BASICS On our...

Stalling the big steal. (Water: Privatization).
March 1, 2003... The IMF and World Bank are prising open the water market in Ghana--whether ordinary people can afford it or not. Rudolf Amenga-Etego reports on a crime in the making and the fightback. GHANA'S most celebrated comedian, Ajax Bokana, once...

Running out of water, running out of time: as the bloodshed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues, so too do water negotiations between the two sides. Charmaine Seitz listens in. (Water: Conflict).
March 1, 2003... IT is midwinter in Bethlehem. Sturdy sprouts of new grass carpet the earth. In a clearing past a grove of olive trees, a snowy white lamb stands skittishly behind its grazing mother. The eldest member of the Darwish family leads her on a rope....

Harvesting the raindrop: where water strife once drove village communities apart, co-operative effort has brought sustenance. Sunita Narain outlines an Indian phenomenon that offers hope to the world. (Water: Conservation).
March 1, 2003... FOUR days of rain only. Just four days. And that too after three years of bad drought. But we have drinking water in our wells. This is because we have built check dams to harvest our rain. Our neighbours are fleeing the village, but we have...

Going off the mains: there's no water connection where James Stronell is building his house. He tells the NI about it. (Water: Conservation).
March 1, 2003... JAMES Stronell is busy putting the finishing touches to his autonomous house -- not connected to power, water or sewers -- in a rural area 60 kilometres west of Bendigo in southern Australia. He's an old hand at self-sufficiency. In 1993 he...

Saddam Hussein. (Worldbeaters).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... So much propaganda surrounds President Saddam Hussein of Iraq that it has become almost impossible to distinguish it from the truth. A German scientist, after a laborious comparison of facial features, has detected at least three Saddam...

Far from Heaven. (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... directed by Todd Haynes Kathy is a good person. When her husband works late at the office, she takes him his evening meal. When she learns that her black gardener's father has died, she commiserates -- genuinely. She has a dream home, a...

Hits. (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... by Pulp (Island CID 8126/063 513-2 CD) So is this the end of the line, to paraphrase Jarvis Cocker in 'This is Hardcore'? And, as Hits very probably is, it's time to honour the Sheffield band whose subtle, often sour, assault on British...

A Little Deeper. (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... by Ms Dynamite (Polydor/Bigger Beats 589 955-2 CD) Something interesting is happening in the world of British hiphop, and much of it has to do with one 21-year old Londoner. Better known to the prize juries and rap fans alike as Ms...

Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way. (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... edited by Ellen Ray and William H Schaap (Ocean Press, ISBN 1-876175 64 8) The trouble is, when it comes to biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction the US knows what it is talking about. This book isn't about Iraq, though,...

Creole. (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... By Jose Eduardo Agualusa translated by Daniel Hahn (Arcadia, ISBN 1900850 613) The action in this sprightly novel by Angolan-born writer Jose Eduardo Agualusa occurs in the triangle set by the slave trade plying between Africa, Europe...

Al-Jazeera. (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... by Mohammed el-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar (Westview Press, ISBN 08133 40179) The independent satellite television network AI-Jazeera sprang to world attention following the 11 September attacks and the US bombing of Afghanistan. The...

Making waves.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Interview with Vis Navaratnam DEVELOPING new medications for the world's most neglected diseases. Challenging pharmaceutical companies and governments to treat health as a human right. These pursuits -- just some of those occupying...

Revolution vs Globalization. (Essay).
March 1, 2003... The achievements of the Cuban revolution continue to be eroded by the relentless US economic embargo and the loss of Russian aid. But, says John Ripton. the island's ultimate challenge will. lie in how it handles the powerful forces of economic...

Turkmenistan. (Country Profile).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... IF the former Soviet Central Asian republics suffered from inferiority complexes during the years of Russian cultural hegemony, their brash leaders have gone to the opposite extreme since independence in 1991. Chief among them is Turkmenistan's...