By Baher Kamal* – IDN-InDepth NewsViewpoint

CAIRO (IDN) – Not that nuclear issues are an actual source of concern to Egyptian citizens. They are deeply worried about their present and immediate future now that inter-religious violence is on the rise, triggering a dangerous, growing insecurity amidst an overwhelming popular discontent with President Mohamed Morsi’s regime. Simply put, there is too much frustration and deception here to think of nukes.
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By Thalif Deen

May 8 2013 (IPS) – When a Southeast Asian country was riddled with corruption in a bygone era, there were rumours that government officials routinely offered receipts every time they accepted a bribe.
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By James Kwak – The Baseline Scenario

For years, the world’s largest banks have been up in arms over threats by regulators to increase their (equity) capital requirements. Making banks hold more capital, they argue, will force them to reduce lending and will increase their cost of funding, making credit more expensive throughout the economy.
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by Roberto Savio*

Rome, May 2013 — The European Union has asked its citizens to brace for further economic misery. In a report on European economic prospects released on May 3, the European Commission said that further deterioration is expected to last at least until 2015. But, as every such report says, things will then get better!
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naked capitalism*

The consternation at the not-exactly-a-surprise nomination of billionaire Penny Pritzker to be Commerce Secretary, is sadly much less than is warranted. That suggests that the Forbes 400 member will survive her confirmation hearings. And in a telling bit of synchronicity, last week some fauxgressives set about amplifying an article in the Nation that big bank lobbying efforts were the reason Dodd Frank was amounting to very little. As we’ll discuss, both reflect how much Obama supports the interests of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate). Dodd Frank is failing because it was designed to fail; the banks getting to have as much influence over it as they have is a feature, not a bug.
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Francine Mestrum*

‘We should strive to eradicate absolute poverty by the end of this century’ said World Bank President Robert McNamara in 1973 at the annual meeting of the Bretton Woods Institutions. As we know, at the end of the century, the World Bank and the IMF introduced their ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers’ and at the UN General Assembly it was decided to halve extreme poverty by 2015, compared to 1990. To-day, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim proposes to ‘end extreme poverty by 2030’.[1]
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The Editors – The Nation

“I will not eat until they restore my dignity.” That’s what Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel told his lawyer by phone from Guantánamo Bay. On April 14, Moqbel’s cry became a harrowing New York Times op-ed, his message mixing despair, defiance and warnings of impending death. “One man here weighs just 77 pounds,” Moqbel wrote. “Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.”
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Boaventura de Sousa Santos*

The 9 April meeting between the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and Germany’s super-minister Wolfgang Schäuble made it abundantly clear that neoliberal fundamentalism is now more rampant in Europe that in the United States. Faced with Jacob Lew’s recommendation that Europe should put less emphasis on austerity and promote economic growth instead, the German minister defiantly replied that “nobody in Europe sees fiscal consolidation and growth as mutually contradictory,” and that “it is time to put an end to this debate which says we have to choose between austerity and growth.”
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Relations between Latin America and the United States are at a low point contrary to the expectations Latin Americans had when Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House. The reason is the U.S. president’s special interest in Asia: even Europeans complain about the lack of attention. Other News published a letter from Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, a renewed call for a new era of cooperation with the region.
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Elizabeth Cline – The Nation

In March 2011, I traveled undercover as a garment buyer to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to do research for my book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. I found the garment industry there to be very incestuous and opaque.
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By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 30 2013 (IPS) – The face of migration is changing dramatically as women and girls now represent about half of the over 214 million migrants worldwide.

And in some regions of the world, they outnumber their male counterparts, says Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).
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Jessica Valenti* – The Nation

Feminists put up with a lot: the mainstream media constantly announcing the movement’s death, mansplainers, stereotypes about Birkenstocks. The whole pervasive political and cultural sexism thing is no picnic, either. But there’s one thorn in this particular feminist’s side that beats all others—the inability of some men to believe and trust women when they say something is sexist.
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Asoka Bandarage* – The Huffington Post

In 1962, Rachel Carson warned in Silent Spring that “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception until death.” Today, the cycle of poison created by chemical agriculture envelops all life on earth — water, soil and air, plants and animals — and threatens the very survival of humans and the health of ecosystems. An example of how agriculture-related chemicals are affecting humans is the prevalence of the chronic kidney disease (CKD), which is spreading in agricultural communities across the world.
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by Matt Taibbi* – Rolling Stone

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.
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Ivan Krastev* – Kultura, Sofia

The European Union no longer exists, at least not as we know it. And the question is not what will be the form of the new Union, but rather why this Europe, which was the focus of so many of our dreams no longer exists. The answer is simple: today, all of the pillars that served to build and justify the existence of the European Union have collapsed.
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By PAUL KRUGMAN – The New York Times

Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the great policy debate of recent years between Keynesians, who advocate sustaining and, indeed, increasing government spending in a depression, and austerians, who demand immediate spending cuts, comes close — at least in the world of ideas. At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics.
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By Pepe Escobar* – Asia Times

LONDON – The Boston bombing was major blowback. That much is certain. The question is, what level of blowback?

It could have been a covert op gone real bad. It could have been blowback from former ”freedom fighters” – in this case ethnic Chechens – reconverted into terra-rists. It could have been straight blowback for United States foreign policy targeting Muslims, whether dispatching them to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or Bagram, extraordinarily renditioning them, or target assassinating them.
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By Roberto Savio*

ROME, Apr (IPS)–For a long time it was a given that while Europe was based on defending a more just society, with social values and solidarity, the United States was based on the glory of individualism and competition, and anything public was considered “socialist”.
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By Desmond Brown

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Apr 24 2013 (IPS) – Tourism, widely regarded as the mainstay of Caribbean economies, is being challenged to remain sustainable in an era of climate change and its impact on beaches, rivers and other attractions.
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By MARCUS WALKER – The Wall Street Journal

Angela Merkel listened in Vatican City as Pope Francis, in his inaugural Mass last month, called on the powerful to care for the weak.

A few hours later, in her limousine to the airport, the German chancellor took a phone call from the desperate president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades. “I need more solidarity,” he pleaded, according to officials familiar with the March 19 conversation. His parliament was about to reject a euro-zone bailout deal. His tiny country faced ruin.
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