Other News
Dear Readers,
Since it might be of interest to some of you, we have decided to distribute this page and the ones linked to it.
It consists of a search engine for people and entities that may or may not be acting within the law and who hold assets in at least one of ten offshores.
Bob Dreyfuss – The Nation
Here’s a question for the White House: Do you think it’s a good idea to greet the new president of Iran, who might be willing to seek a long-lasting accord with the United States, with a head-on confrontation with Iran and Russia in Syria?
By Thalif Deen
ROME, Jun 17 2013 (IPS) – Since its founding in 2007 to help developing nations fight poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease and gender discrimination, the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund (MDG-F) has financed about 130 joint programmes in 50 countries.
Glenn Greenwald – guardian.co.uk
Media outlets have awakened to the serious threats posed to journalism, but show little sign of doing anything about it
(updated below – Update II)
Media outlets and journalists have finally awakened to the serious threat posed by the Obama administration to press freedoms, whistle blowing and transparency.
Last week, a bright idealistic young man named Edward Snowden almost single-handedly opened the lid on the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM program, a program which marks the bleakest moment yet in the history of the Internet due to its scope, exact country of origin and implications.
By Pascal Lamy*
GENEVA, Jun (IPS) – The old theories governing the way that countries produce and trade are being replaced. The pattern of trade is being transformed by increasingly sophisticated technology and innovations in transportation; and the topography of actors is shifting to reflect new poles of growth.
By Justin Ellis
ProPublica at five: How the nonprofit collaborates, builds apps, and measures impact
Five years after launch, ProPublica’s Stephen Engelberg and Richard Tofel reflect on the nonprofit’s early days, getting readers involved in investigations, and the health of nonprofit journalism.
By Paul Krugman*
More than half a century ago, in his classic paper on the economics of speculation, Paul Samuelson noted the perverse rewards to knowing stuff just slightly before everyone else. He asked readers to imagine someone who, somehow, consistently received crucial information one second before everyone else. As he pointed out, the social value of that extra second would be minimal; but the private rewards could be huge.
By FLOYD NORRIS – The New York Times
Is Greece an “emerging” market?
“Submerging” might be more like it. But on Tuesday, MSCI, proprietors of stock indexes around the world, officially classified Greece as “emerging.”
By Jim Lobe*
WASHINGTON, Jun 12 2013 (IPS) – The world – especially the Greater Middle East – has become less peaceful than it was five years ago, according to the 2013 edition of the annual Global Peace Index (GPI) released here Tuesday by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP).
by Johan Galtung* – TRANSCEND Media Service
From Istanbul . Turkey did the impossible, moving almost without violence from a military secular dictatorship to a civilian Sunni majority democracy. Turkey got unstuck. Sarkar’s circulation of elites at work: military elites, then religious-intellectuals, then business, then ordinary people–and once again the military. Second cycle.
By Pepe Escobar * – Asia Times
The judgment of Daniel “Pentagon Papers” Ellsberg is definitive; “There has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material”. And that includes the release of the Pentagon Papers themselves. Here is the 12-minute video by The Guardian where Snowden details his motives.
Eric Maurice – Editorial, Presseurop
Ensuring your people’s prosperity is no longer enough to avoid being challenged. Turkey is due to record 3.2 per cent growth in 2013 and 4 per cent growth in 2014, according to European Commission forecasts as compared to -0.4 per cent and 1.2 per cent for the Eurozone respectively.
Daniel Ellsberg – guardian.co.uk
Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an ‘executive coup’ against the US constitution
In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that includes the Pentagon Papers, for which I was responsible 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution.
By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 6 2013 (IPS) – A quarter of all food calories grown for human consumption is being lost or wasted, either purposefully or otherwise, according to new estimates.
The Washington Post
U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge
By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Published: June 6
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
By Martin Khor* – IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis
GENEVA (IDN) – On May 7 the idyllic South Pacific island of Fiji became the venue of some political leaders and thinkers of developing countries to brainstorm about the future of South-South cooperation. The island state is chairs the Group of 77, the alliance of over 130 developing countries that operate in the United Nations and beyond.
Janis K. Lazdins-Helds* – Nicoletta Dentico*
Tropical diseases: A historical perspective
At the end of the 19th century, the colonial powers of the time coined the terms tropical medicine and tropical diseases. These terms addressed diseases that were found in their colonial territories and impacted directly on their expansionism for access to the strategic resources available in the tropical latitudes.
By Sasha Breger* – naked capitalism
In my last post, I discussed the role of debt relationships and farmland acquisition in redistributing wealth from global agriculture to finance. This post discusses another mechanism for such injustice: commodity hoarding by financial firms. Over the last several years, as agricultural commodity prices rose, large financial institutions took the opportunity to speculate in both virtual commodities (via derivatives markets, to be addressed in part 3 of this post), and physical commodities.
Chico Whitaker*
I was asked to take stock of the WSF process, after twelve years of existence. I can’t make a list of what took place during this time, which would be even tedious. Neither analyze in few pages the ups and downs of the process with the realisation – now at every two years – of more or less crowded world events, continental social forums, national and even local forums, that stay alive or have disappeared, thematic forums that are multiplying around the world; or talk of the articulations and networks, as well as new campaigns, which were born in these meetings, in the struggle for the construction of “another possible world”.