August 2007 Archives

Amra Bangali Rally in Jamshedpur

"In this world there is no shortage of wicked people who have an innate desire to commit atrocities and harm others. What should the virtuous people do? They should acquire virtue by doing good to others, to the society, to the country, and to the masses. Their actions should promote the socio-economic well-being of the people in a skilled way. This should be their main concern. Your good deeds may take society two steps forward, but if bad people are at work at the same time, they will take the society two steps backward and the resultant progress will be nil. Therefore, you must continue doing good to society, and at the same time must fight against the bad people to prevent them from taking a single step forward. On the path of dharma, one is not only to do noble deeds; one must also fight against the dishonest people - both are virtuous actions. There are many good people in the society - noble people engaged in noble deeds - who are not ready to fight against wrongs and injustices. This sort of passive benevolence does not really promote the cause of human progress in the world. What is desirable is to acquire virtue by doing noble deeds and fighting against all sins and crimes. Both are mandatory, both an integral part of dharma."

~ Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar ~

India has evidently become misled by confused and politically motivated legal codes in the West punishing free speech with its law against promoting "disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill will" between religious groups. This kind of law is based on Stalin's criminal code 59-7, as we have stated elsewhere. Rather than suppress intellectual freedom and punish an honest person like author Taslima Nasreen, however [please see "India to charge writer Nasreen with 'hurting Muslim feelings'" -eds], who publishes facts, India should consider another course of action.

CBC Arts

Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen will face criminal charges in India after being accused of stirring up religious enmity.

The charges come after Nasreen was attacked at a publication party because of opposition to a translation of her latest book, Shodh, in Hyderabad last week. Several lawmakers and members of a conservative Muslim political party threw flowers and other items at her and called for her death.

Nasreen, author of Wild Wind and Shame, is an exile from her native Bangladesh because of a fatwa against her and a threat by the government to lay charges stemming from her writing. - Full story

"Interviews with investment bankers, oil company executives and a thorough review of the major Petroleum Institute publications over the past seven years provide conclusive evidence that 'Big Oil' was deeply interested in negotiating oil agreements with Saddam Hussein and the Iranian Islamic government. 'Big Oil' perceives US Middle East wars as a threat to their long-standing profitable relations with all the conservative Arab oil states in the Gulf."

by James Petras / July 9th, 2007

You cannot win the peace unless you know the enemy at home and abroad. - US Marine Colonel from Tennessee.

Everywhere I visit from Copenhagen to Istanbul, Patagonia to Mexico City, journalists and academics, trade unionists and businesspeople, as well as ordinary citizens, inevitably ask me why the US public tolerates the killing of over a million Iraqis over the last two decades, and thousands of Afghans since 2001? Why, they ask, is a public, which opinion polls reveal as over sixty percent in favor of withdrawing US troops from Iraq, so politically impotent? A journalist from a leading business journal in India asked me what is preventing the US government from ending its aggression against Iran, if almost all of the world's major oil companies, including US multinationals are eager to strike oil deals with Tehran? Anti-war advocates in Europe, Asia and Latin America ask me at large public forums what has happened to the US peace movement in the face of the consensus between the Republican White House and the Democratic Party-dominated Congress to continue funding the slaughter of Iraqis, supporting Israeli starvation, killing and occupation of Palestine and destruction of Lebanon?

Absence of a Peace Movement?

Just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 over one million US citizens demonstrated against the war. Since then there have been few and smaller protests even as the slaughter of Iraqis escalates, US casualties mount and a new war with Iran looms on the horizon. The demise of the peace movement is largely the result of the major peace organizations' decision to shift from independent social mobilizations to electoral politics, namely channeling activists into working for the election of Democratic candidates - most of whom have supported the war. The rationale offered by these 'peace leaders' was that, once elected, the Democrats would respond to the anti-war voters who put them in office. Of course practical experience and history should have taught the peace movement otherwise: The Democrats in Congress voted every military budget since the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. The total capitulation of the newly elected Democratic majority has had a major demoralizing effect on the disoriented peace activists and has discredited many of its leaders. - Full story

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK (IPS) - Thailand's rural voters stood up to the country's powerful military by refusing to march in step with the junta's drum-beat for political change at the first-ever referendum for a new constitution held here.

Voters from the country's north-east, home to the poorest section of the electorate, delivered an emphatic 'no' vote in the plebiscite held on Sunday to approve the country's 18th constitution. According to the final tallies confirmed on Monday, nearly 62 percent of those from the north-east who voted, or 4.6 million people, cast a ballot against the constitution drafted by a military-appointed committee.

This rejection echoed in other areas, too, such as the northern provinces, where 46 percent, or 2.29 million, of those who voted marked the negative box on the ballot paper. In all, some 10.2 million people, or 41.4 percent of the electorate that participated, came together as part of the 'no' bandwagon.

It is a number that takes the sheen off the pro-military political establishment claiming an emphatic victory at the referendum, where those who voted for the constitution accounted for 56.7 percent of the ballots cast, or an estimated 14.3 million voters. ... Full story

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK (IPS) - As they makes half-hearted attempts to restore democracy in Thailand, the country's elites that profited most from last September's coup are in two minds about the role of elections and public participation in the future.

Thai democracy can do without either goes the thinking among a section of the country's political leadership, sections of academia and even the judiciary -- members of which were hand-picked by the junta that staged the country's 18th coup with plans to redraw its political map.

This oligarchy is leaving no room for doubt as to who it has in mind in attempting to erect this wall of exclusion -- the rural poor. Anti-poor and anti-election rhetoric is visible in the newly released draft of the country's 18th constitution and the arguments that support it. ... Full story

By Thalif Deen

STOCKHOLM (IPS) - As the world faces new threats of water scarcity, triggered by phenomena like global warming and bioenergy demands, Singapore and Iraq have been singled out as two political extremes in water management.

Singapore, the tiny city-state of 4.5 million people, has been touted as a phenomenal success story despite the absence of any natural resources. Iraq has been dismissed as an abject failure, despite its access to two major rivers within its borders.

Singapore's widely-acknowledged achievement in water management earned the South-east Asian nation the Stockholm Industry Water Award at an international water conference which concluded here Friday.

"We have ensured that our water supply is sustainable for the next 100 years, or more," says Khoo Teng Chye, chief executive of Singapore's national water agency. ... Full story

By Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI (IPS) - Members of the media in Kenya took to the streets Wednesday in a silent protest against a law that would compromise press freedom by forcing them to divulge sources. Passed by parliament earlier this month, the Media Council of Kenya Bill is now awaiting presidential assent.

A clause in the new legislation states that "When a story includes unnamed parties who are not disclosed and the same become the subject of a legal tussle as to who is meant, then the editor shall be obligated to disclose the identity of the party or parties referred to."

Their mouths gagged with tape and cloth to symbolise the ultimate effects of the law, journalists in their hundreds marched to the office of Attorney General Amos Wako and to parliament in the capital, Nairobi, to present a petition urging head of state Mwai Kibaki not to sign the bill into law. ... Full story

Belgians oppose introduction of Sharia into Europe

"Sharia rules are already being introduced every day. Islamic banking is now possible in every West European country. The pan-European aerospace company Airbus has established a Sharia-compliant subsidiary. A fatwa board of muftis has to approve all decisions."

From the desk of Paul Belien

Today, Udo Ulfkotte, one of the organizers of the anti-Sharia demonstration in Brussels on 11 September, was in the Belgian and European capital to confer with lawyers about legal steps to counter last week's decision by the mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, to ban the demonstration.

Tomorrow Hugo Coveliers, a member of the Belgian Senate, will initiate an appeal procedure on Ulfkotte's behalf against the mayor's decision before the Council of State, Belgium's highest administrative court. The CoS will have to issue its verdict before 11 September. According to Senator Coveliers it is "80% certain" that the CoS will overrule the mayor's ban and allow the demonstration to go ahead. ... Full story

"Russia will be inhabited by only 40 million people in the next 40 years, down from the current 143 million, if it does not adopt a policy to preserve natives in their regions.'

By Ali Nassor Special to The St. Petersburg Times

Demographers have provided dire statistics depicting a sharp decline in Russia's population in the next few decades - and said that St. Petersburg, which loses an average of 70 people every day and has the lowest birth rate in the nation, could be hit hardest.

According to the St. Petersburg Civil Registry Committee, an average of 130 children are born in the city every day but the daily mortality rate is just over 200.

However, the International Institute for Strategic Studies maintains that St. Petersburg's leading position in Russia's population decline has been exaggerated, reporting worse figures in the neighboring regions of Lenoblast, Novgorod and Pskov with annual demographic decline there ranging between 1.21 percent and 1.5 percent, while St. Petersburg is experiencing a less than 1 percent annual slump.

Dmitry Dubrovsky, head of modern ethnology and inter-ethnic relations at St. Petersburg's Russian Museum of Ethnography, said the forecast demographic catastrophe has nothing to do with Moscow and St. Petersburg, "because these cities as a rule are attractive spots for both internal and foreign migrants, ready to cover any demographic gap."

But "the real concern in Russia's official circles is about an extinction of Russians as a race, rather than population decline in its traditional sense," says Dubrovsky, adding that it was one of the factors that prompted President Vladimir Putin last year to adopt a special policy aimed at "calling ethnic Russians abroad back home, but restricting migration for other nationalities." ... Full story

www.prout.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The above site is listed for informational purposes only without endorsement from/by the Proutist Universal site, Proutist Universal and Peoples News Agency, Kolkata, India. Hence, the views and opinions expressed on the above site are not necessarily those of www.proutist-universal.org or of Proutist Universal, Kolkata.

PROUT - AN OVERVIEW

Prout (an acronym for Progressive Utilisation Theory) is a social and economic system first proposed by the eminent Indian philosopher, Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1921-1990). It is arguably the only socio-economic theory to emerge out of the third world that has direct applicability to the developed world.

• Prout draws on environmental, social and spiritual wisdom accumulated as a result of thousands of years of human struggle and experimentation.


• A Proutist economy is based on the cooperative system. It is community based, decentralised and promotes an economic voice for women. Prout satisfies human needs by promoting the utilisation and rational distribution of all resources, physical, mental and spiritual.


• Prout also has a program for globalisation based on the concept of political centralisation and economic decentralisation.


• Prout has a theory of class and a historical analysis based on the concept of collective psychology.

Analysis by Trita Parsi WASHINGTON (IPS) - The White House's decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organisation could deal a double blow to efforts to utilise diplomacy with Iran to stabilise Iraq. Not only does the designation risk undermining the important yet limited talks between the United States and Iran in Baghdad, but it may also negatively impact the next U.S. president's ability to seek diplomacy with Iran by further entrenching U.S.-Iran relations in a paradigm of enmity. The Washington Post and New York Times reported Tuesday that the George W. Bush administration is going to designate the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran's 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a "specially designated global terrorist" under Executive Order 13224, due to the organisation's alleged destabilising activities in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The designation would authorise the United States to target the IRGC's business dealings, including blocking its assets.

Full story: U.S./Iran: Terror Label for Guard Corp Entrenches US-Iran Enmity

Neocon madness marches on. It's time for Americans and the global community to bring criminal charges against necons for promoting and conducting an illegal war.

"The goal of the neocons is a U.S.-Israeli-dominated region, patrolled by U.S. troops and divided into a large number of much smaller statelets."

"The idea is to create - and preside over - a condition of permanent instability. There is no better way to justify the permanent presence of U.S. troops and plenty of aid to U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes."

by Justin Raimondo The idea that we invaded and occupied Iraq and launched a bid to "transform" the Middle East because we wanted to install liberal, democratic societies in the region is just not believable on many levels, and certainly recent headlines about the Palestinian coup by Fatah against Hamas - and the president's endorsement of the Abbas putsch - underscore this point. One year after Hamas soundly defeated the old, corrupt Fatah movement at the polls, the former has been expelled from the government by the unilateral action of "President" Abbas and is outlawed in the West Bank - where the Fatah-Bush theory of the "unitary presidency" apparently holds sway.

"Democracy" in the Middle East marches on!

Elections in the Middle East are like those in the European Union - if the Powers-That-Be don't get the result they want, then the results are overturned and a new election is held… a process that continues until the people learn their lesson, i.e., that resistance is futile, and ratify what has already been decided.

From the occupied territories to the war-torn cities of Iraq, what was sold as an effort to export "democracy" has instead turned into an effort to import chaos, death, and universal destruction. The "liberation" of Iraq hasn't let the democratic genie out of the bottle, but it has unleashed sectarian demons that have engulfed the country in a vicious civil war. In Lebanon, our effort to aid the Sunnis as a counterbalance to the Shi'ite Hezbollah has boomeranged, with the Fatah al-Islam group rising up against the U.S.-supported government. In Afghanistan, the regime of "President" Karzai can barely claim control of the capital city of Kabul, while in Pakistan, our biggest and most important ally in the Muslim world, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is being buffeted by the tides of pro-Islamic, anti-American public opinion, and is not expected to last much longer.

By any rational measure, the results of our Middle Eastern policy of regime-change in Iraq and bullying intervention throughout the region have been an abysmal failure from beginning to end. By neoconservative Bizarro World standards, however, what we are witnessing is a smashing success.

Full story: U.S.: Nihilism and Neoconservatism (Brothers under the skin)

"Britain, in short, surrendered her own empire to defeat a chimera conjured up by Winston Churchill, a putative danger from Nazi Germany -- a threat which never existed except when Churchill needed to call upon it."

Churchill's War: Triumph in Adversity (Vol. II), by David Irving. London: Focal Point, 2001. Hardcover. 1060 pages. Photographs. Appendices. Source references. Index.

Reviewed by Mark Weber

It has been fourteen years since the publication of the first volume of David Irving's three-part biography of Britain's legendary wartime leader. This second volume, subtitled "Triumph in Adversity," traces Winston Churchill's career from June 1941 through July 1943, the pivotal period when, after calamitous setbacks, the tide of the war turned decisively in favor of the Allies.

With this handsome, meticulously referenced and generously illustrated work (including many color photographs), Britain's best-known and most controversial historian once again displays his extraordinary knack for extracting information from overlooked diaries and suppressed records, and his gift for turning mountains of data into well-crafted prose. This measured, masterful examination of Britain's towering twentieth-century premier is Irving at his best.

Full story: Winston Churchill: An Unsettled Legacy

Winston Churchill considered blocking all immigration to Britain because he feared a growing "coloured population" was posing a threat to Britain's social stability.

Churchill, then 79, told Cabinet colleagues that he did not "want a parti-coloured UK". At a Cabinet meeting on February 3, 1954, the prime minister told colleagues: "Problems will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK?"

Churchill said immigrants were attracted to Britain by the welfare state and he said: "Public opinion in UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits."

Full story: Churchill feared growing 'coloured population'

By Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Early human-like residents of Europe may have arrived out of Asia, rather than just Africa.

An international team of researchers reports in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Asians appear to have played a larger part in the settlement of Europe than did Africans.

The team led by Maria Martinon-Torres of the National Center for the Investigation of Human Evolution, in Burgos, Spain, reached that conclusion after analyzing more than 5,000 fossil teeth from early hominins, an early form of human predecessors.

Full story: Early Humans Came from Asia Too

August 2007, Mark Weisbrot

This article will be published in an Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, publication entitled The Tenth Anniversary of the Asian Financial Crisis: Lessons Learned, Critical Assessments, and Charting the Path Forward.

The article argues that the most important long-term impact of the East Asian financial crisis, a decade later, has been that it began a process that led to the collapse of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) influence over middle-income countries. This was partly a result of the Fund's role in the crisis, detailed in the article, which was widely seen as a major failure. Partly as a result of this experience, the middle-income Asian countries have accumulated large reserve holdings and largely removed themselves from IMF influence. The IMF's authority and credibility was further undermined in the Argentine crisis of 1998-2003. In recent years the availability of alternative sources of credit, especially in Latin America, have led to the collapse of the IMF's "creditors' cartel" in that region and among middle-income countries generally. The author argues that this is the most important change in the international financial system since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1973. For the foreseeable future, any positive financial reforms will be made at the national and regional level - e.g., with the extension of such arrangements of the Chiang Mai Initiative. This is because the high-income countries are not significantly closer to supporting reforms at the level of the international financial system or institutions than they were a decade ago. It will also be important for low-income countries, where the IMF still retains its role as "gatekeeper" for official credit, to become independent from the Fund so they can pursue more effective macroeconomic and development policies.

Full report: Ten Years After: The Lasting Impact of the Asian Financial Crisis

(Videos and Photo Essay)

     

 

 

CNN : (click on the picture to play)

 Description: Singur's ground reality unearthed

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CNN : (click on the picture to play)

Description: Compensation for Singur farmers

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Google Video Clip: 3 min: (click on the picture to play)

Description: Budhdhadeb-er Gestapo bahinir Singur-dholai abhijaan.
Police atrocities on villagers of Singur. The CPIM-     path of industrializatin
of West Bengal.

By Soumitra Basu, Editor, Anyaswar

Published in : Guruchandali (in Bengali)

It is a story of that horrific night. The night of 14th of March, 2007. After the completion of "Operation Nandigram" in broad day light, CPM called a local 12 hour strike (bandh) in Nandigram. A bandh was called in the evening hours in such a remote place where people mostly keep themselves indoor after sunset. Why was that called then?

After the first bout of police action in the daylight when the news came that around 60 were killed, the second phase and the most horrendous phase was waiting to happen.

"According to a report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), just 100 families own 25 million hectares, while two million small farmers have access to only five million hectares."

"But the land will be granted to groups rather than individual owners, thus eliminating the distribution of large extensions of farmland to a few individuals."

By Franz Chávez

LA PAZ (IPS) - Bolivian President Evo Morales announced new regulations and financing for a land reform law aimed at expropriating idle or ill-gotten land in the hands of large estate owners in eastern and northeastern Bolivia and redistributing it to indigenous farmers.

The era of the latifundium or large landed estate seems to be coming to an end in South America's poorest country, where Morales proclaimed an "agrarian revolution" Thursday on the 54th anniversary of the enactment of the first law that distributed land to peasant farmers.

Morales - Bolivia's first-ever indigenous president -- announced the country's "second era" of agrarian reform in Ucurena, in the central department (province) of Cochabamba in a speech that once again declared his leftist government's commitment to the ongoing struggle for land and in defence of the country's natural resources by Bolivia's native majority.

The programme he announced will focus on the redistribution of land, the mechanisation of small-scale agriculture, the strengthening of a "People's Trade Treaty" signed with Cuba and Venezuela, and agricultural production in line with environmental conservation standards.

He also asked his cabinet to rename Aug. 2 "Agrarian Revolution Day" instead of "Day of the Indian", as it has been commemorated since the first land reform law went into effect in 1953.

Full story: Bolivia: Requiem for Land in the Hands of the Few

By EVELYN PRINGLE

On July 27, 2007 the U.S. government's Centers for Disease Control issued a press release apparently promoting the sale of anti-depressants to pregnant women. "Use of certain antidepressants, selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors most commonly known as SSRIs, during pregnancy does not significantly increase the risk for most birth defects," the CDC wrote.

The press release cited a new CDC study released in the New England Journal of Medicine and further stated, "a second study on SSRI and birth defects, also published in the June 28 issue of NEJM, did not find such an association with birth defects overall, but did find significant associations between specific SSRIs and several birth defects."

"Boys without fathers in the home are 300 times more likely to get into trouble with the law. Girls without a father in the home are five times more likely to become promiscuous."

By Janice Shaw Crouse

More and more people are separating marriage from childbearing and children.

In a culture where everybody talks about doing what is best for kids, more and more people are separating marriage from childbearing and childrearing. A just-released Pew survey of over 2,000 adults indicates what the Washington Post calls a "widening gap between parenthood and marriage." While parents are crazy about their kids, they no longer view them as a reason for marriage. In fact, out of the nine factors being measured by Pew as essential to success in marriage, children came in next to last. A mere 41 percent of those responding to the Pew survey said that children are important to a good marriage. In contrast, in 1990 fully 65 percent of respondents claimed that children are part of a good marriage.

In other words, marriage today is all about the adults' preferences; it is all about "me."

Full story: U.S.: Kids and Marriage No Longer Inseparable

By Garda Ghista

In his article, "On humanism past and present," Perez Zagorin asks the question: Is there a place for humanism in the 21st century? While asking this, he simultaneously defines humanism as the stance of regarding "the life and happiness of human beings as a supreme value to be cherished and promoted in every possible way."^[1]

Looking back through the annals of time, we find several versions of the concept of 'humanism,' starting with its birth in Greece during the fourth and fifth centuries BC, during the lives of Plato and Aristotle. According to Zagorin, it was the Sophists who originated the concept of humanism. While they did not use the term 'humanism' (in fact, there is no Greek equivalent for the term), yet the Greek philosophers discussed the ideas and concepts of humanism as it later came to exist. After Plato and Aristotle, other philosophers continued to develop the concept; however, they considered the study of humanism to be restricted to the elite of the society, the "free men of aristocratic background and independent means who had the leisure for the pursuit of excellence."^[2] Defects abounded in this early Greek concept. Not only was it restricted to the elite of society, it also accepted both slavery and perpetual war as permanent features. The Greek humanism seems woefully inadequate. Today people want inclusivity, democracy, egalitarianism, and perhaps even a soaring ideal to fill the abyssal void brought on by the rampant materialism of the 20th century.

"When you are lighter, people pay more attention to you. It makes you more important and the rich men find you attractive," the sentiments of an Accra-based woman with light skin and dark knuckles.

Yet, the self-hate phenomenon of skin-bleaching is not limited to black women alone. The music fans of men like Michael Jackson and the famous Lumba Brothers, Charles Kwadwo Fosu (Daddy Lumba) and Nana Acheampong, have seen the skin of the stars go lighter and lighter with every album hit. Through multiple surgeries, Michael Jackson has arguably become transracial.

Bleaching is often attributed to extreme low self-esteem, and a misplaced desire to be better appreciated.

But, there is a growing repugnance within black communities worldwide against bleaching.

Full story: Ghana: Self-hatred leads to skin bleaching

By George Nyathi

HARARE (IPS) - Zimbabwean media practitioners have launched a self-regulatory media body for journalists despite government threats of unspecified action against them.

The nongovernmental Media Alliance of Zimbabwe (MAZ) launched the Media Council of Zimbabwe (MCZ) earlier this month. If MCZ members have their way, the ruling ZANU-PF will cease its stranglehold on the operations of the country's media and task this autonomous body to independently regulate and monitor the media in Zimbabwe.

Several newspapers, including the country's independent daily newspaper, The Daily News and its sister publication The Daily News on Sunday, have been shut down by the government following the introduction of tough media laws aimed at restricting media reporting.

The repressive laws that the government introduced in the past five years have also seen the imposition of state permits on local reporters. Foreign journalists have been barred from working in the country.

Full story: Zimbabwe: Another Attempt to Reclaim Media Independence

By Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO (IPS) - The largest movement fighting for the distribution of unproductive rural property to landless peasant farmers in Brazil complains that the "euphoria" over the production of biofuels from sugar cane and other crops is aggravating the concentration of land ownership and driving up land prices.

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Landless Workers Movement (MST) argues that the biofuel boom is just another manifestation of the growing strength of agribusiness in Brazil, Latin America's giant.

Joao Pedro Stedile, a member of the MST national leadership, told IPS that biofuel production forms part of the "agricultural model of the dominant classes, the big capitalists who have built up an alliance of vested interests, comprised of transnational corporations on one hand and large Brazilian landowners on the other."

This alliance, he said, is based on export-oriented production on vast tracts of land, and heavy use of toxic agrochemicals that damage the environment.

The MST advocates a different model, one that is "focused on the needs of the people, and is based on keeping peasant farmers in the countryside and on multi-crop production that puts a priority on food production, without the use of agrotoxics," said the activist.

Full story: Brazil: David, Goliath and Land Reform

Brain scans showed boost in valuable brain chemical, study says By E.J. Mundell

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY (HealthDay News) - Yoga's postures, controlled breathing and meditation may work together to help ease brains plagued by anxiety or depression, a new study shows.

Brain scans of yoga practitioners showed a healthy boost in levels of the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric (GABA) immediately after a one-hour yoga session. Low brain levels of GABA are associated with anxiety and depression, the researchers said.

Full story: Yoga May Help Treat Depression, Anxiety Disorders

By Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA (IPS) - The International Labour Organisation (ILO) expressed profound concern about the persistence of forced labour in Burma, while it is closely monitoring the implementation of a mechanism for victims to file complaints, which was recently agreed with the Southeast Asian country's governing junta.

But the ILO's assessment of the case confirms that forced labour remains widespread in Myanmar (the name given to the country by the military government), and in fact continues to expand, ILO executive director Kari Tapiola told IPS.

None of the recommendations of a survey commission sent by the ILO have been put into practice yet, the international agency reported.

Full story: Burma: No End to Forced Labour

"We should learn how to use and improve modern informational webs’ for the sake of culture and enlightenment"

Moscow, Interfax - Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his concern about the lowering cultural level of modern youth.

'According to the experts, people, and especially young ones, are losing their skills to vividly express their minds, to identify inflections and nuances. Many young people are hardly aware or even isolated of their cultural roots,' Putin said on Wednesday as he opened a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art in the Kremlin.

Full story: Russian president anxious about youth isolation from cultural roots

Envoy's damning verdict revealed as violence takes Gaza closer to civil war

Read Alvaro de Soto's end of mission report

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem and Ian Williams in New York

The Guardian

The highest ranking UN official in Israel has warned that American pressure has "pummelled into submission" the UN's role as an impartial Middle East negotiator in a damning confidential report.

The 53-page "End of Mission Report" by Alvaro de Soto, the UN's Middle East envoy, obtained by the Guardian, presents a devastating account of failed diplomacy and condemns the sweeping boycott of the Palestinian government. It is dated May 5 this year, just before Mr de Soto stepped down.

The revelations from inside the UN come after another day of escalating violence in Gaza, when at least 26 Palestinians were killed after Hamas fighters launched a major assault. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, head of the rival Fatah group, warned he was facing an attempted coup.

Mr de Soto condemns Israel for setting unachievable preconditions for talks and the Palestinians for their violence. Western-led peace negotiations have become largely irrelevant, he says.

Full story: Secret UN report condemns US for Middle East failures

By Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW (IPS) - The industrialised nations of the Group of Eight are failing on the promises made in their previous summits to help Africa's economic development and to push for poverty alleviation for those struggling to survive on less than a dollar per day, say World Bank experts and development activists.

"It's obvious to the whole world that G8 member countries are not fully delivering on their promises to Africa and nobody holds them accountable for those lapses," Eric Kilongi Mgendi, regional spokesperson for the development campaign group ActionAid, told IPS in an interview from Nairobi, Kenya.

"African countries badly need technology and investment capital to help them adapt to all kinds of environmental hazards, including the changing climate. It needs the G8 to steer development to an appreciable level for the growing population," he said.

While aid would help develop much of the infrastructure, harness energy resources and improve social services, African leaders should also take progressive steps to strengthen intra-regional trade, said the activist.

Full story: Africa: G8 Has Yet to Deliver on Aid Promises - World Bank

Rabid American neocons systematically provoking Russia by Nebojsa Malic Shadows of the Cold War stalked the German spa resort of Heiligendamm this week, as the annual G-8 summit got underway. Relations between Russia and the United States have grown steadily worse for months. The latest animosity can be traced to Washington's belligerent insistence on severing the occupied province of Kosovo from Serbia, and deploying anti-missile installations in eastern Europe, ostensibly to protect the U.S. from "rogue states."

Washington points the finger at Moscow, blaming president Vladimir Putin for being an "autocrat" and "authoritarian," undermining democracy, stifling opposition and conducting a belligerent foreign policy. The same reporters and thinktanks who clamored for an illegal invasion of Iraq because "Saddam had WMDs" are now expounding on Russia's belligerence and threat to peace, freedom, and puppies.

One reason, certainly, is the dominance of "neoconservatives" in the U.S. ruling circles - people who clawed their way to power in the 1980s by harping about the (nonexistent) new threats from the Soviet Union and a need for a more "assertive" policy. Faced with the ongoing disaster that is the "War on Terror" - conveniently not mentioned by name any more - the neocons revert to type and seek a new conflict, this time with Moscow.

Full story: U.S. versus Russia: Haunting Heiligendamm