Global News and Analysis

Source: Common Dreams

The following is a version of a talk presented to the Houston Peace and Justice Center conference on July 9, 2011.

In mainstream politics in the United States, everyone agrees on one thing: We’re number one. We’re special. We’re America. We’re on top, where we deserve to be.

In dissident politics in the United States, we have long argued that this quest for economic and military dominance can’t be squared with basic moral and political principles. We’re on top, but it’s unjust and unsustainable. read more

Source: IPS News

Only two in every five people in the Southern African Development Community has access to safe water for drinking and household use. Three quarters of those lacking access, live in rural areas and the majority of these are women and children.

Chrispin Sedeke, head of the Transboundary Water Management Division of the Ministry for the Environment of the Democratic Republic of Congo, believes that even these discouraging figures are likely understated.

“The statistics from certain countries – like the DRC – are not up to date. The numbers are approximate; those from other countries are only partial. And all the numbers do not cover the same period; that’s what makes the global statistics presented less than reliable,” Sedeke told IPS on the sidelines of the Fifth SADC Water Dialogue, held in the Swazi capital, Mbabane, on Jun. 28 and 29. read more

Source: Pambazuka News

The Oakland Institute takes a closer look at South Sudan’s largest land deal to date – the granting of a 49-year lease of 600,000 hectares of land to US-based firm Nile Trading and Development Inc (NTD) by the shadowy Mukaya Payam Cooperative in March 2008. For a sum equivalent to around US$25,000, NTD has full rights to exploit all natural resources in the leased land during this period.

OVERVIEW

The largest land deal in South Sudan to date was negotiated between a Dallas, Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development Inc. (NTD) and Mukaya Payam Cooperative in March 2008.[1] The 49-year land lease of 600,000 hectares
(with a possibility of 400,000 additional hectares) for 75,000 Sudanese Pounds (equivalent to approximately USD 25,000),[2] allows NTD full rights to exploit all natural resources in the leased land. These include: read more

Source: The Independent

Read a book with your laptop thrumming. It can feel like trying to read in the middle of a party where everyone is shouting

In the 20th century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined that books would be burnt. In the 21st century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic Apparat – an even more omnivorous i-Phone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn – and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

Corporate influence on food production and large, chemical monoculture farms is causing a severe food insecurity crisis.

The proposed introduction of the Food Security Act by the UPA Government is a welcome and much needed step towards securing the right to food for all of India’s citizens. The right to food is the basis of the right to life, and Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees the right to life of all Indian citizens.

India has emerged as the capital of hunger, illustrated by the fact that per capita consumption has dropped from 178 kg in 1991 – the beginning of the period of economic reforms – to 155 kg in 200-2003. read more

Source: Tom Dispatch

For a book about the all-too-human “passions of war,” my 1997 work Blood Rites ended on a strangely inhuman note: I suggested that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon — honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth — it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms.  After all, certain species of ants wage war and computers can simulate “wars” that play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement. read more