Opinion and Analysis Archive

31.10.2006 In conjunction with the launch of a new online organizing channel called Women Connect, the Feminist Majority Foundation's president spent two days online discussing the key issues facing women around the world: choice, modern feminism, contraception availability, equal pay, women's rights in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iran, and more...

31.10.2006 The war on hunger declared after World War II has largely been abandoned. With the advent of the “market fixes all” philosophy of recent decades, the structural causes of hunger have been ignored, says Latin America analyst Laura Carlsen.

31.10.2006 A prominent principle in the new U.S. National Space Policy was to support the peaceful use of space. Yet a few weeks later, when the UN voted on such a resolution, the U.S. was the only country to vote against it.

27.10.2006 Canadian Maher Arar was recently given a human rights award for his struggle against U.S. authorities who sent him to Syria to face nearly a year of torture. Arar, who has since been completely vindicated of any links to terrorism, vividly recounts the ordeal in his video acceptance.

27.10.2006 In its first four years, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has quickly become one of the most important aid agencies in the world. It has approved over 360 grant programs in 132 countries valued at $5.6 billion, and it has disbursed over $2.7 billion.

26.10.2006 "Somehow the most reasonable, trusted, and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted," says ex-soldier Kevin Tillman in an essay encouraging U.S. voters to demand change November 7.
From: truthdig

26.10.2006 For consistently basing its labor on science and facts in a politically charged environment, for maintaining its commitment to international rules as the path to resolving differences, and for working to protect the planet from nuclear weapons proliferation, a Global Good Neighbor commendation has been bestowed on the IAEA.

25.10.2006 Companies, businesses, and individuals are proving that generating their own power can be profitable as well as Earth-friendly.

24.10.2006 The application of Mayan law in Guatemala's northwestern department of Solola has sparked a heated debate on the institutions and practices of indigenous people, human rights, and the official judicial system

24.10.2006 New Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has been a literary pioneer in trying to fuse Western and Islamic cultures, and has emerged as an outspoken proponent of free speech inside Turkey, says journalist Mevlut Katik.

21.10.2006 Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus didn't envision microcredit as a mechanism to end poverty on a wide scale, and that's not what it is today, argues development expert Walden Bello.

19.10.2006 Global education specialist Patrick Fine joined OneWorld online Tuesday to offer some keen insight into the challenges and opportunities facing kids around the world.

19.10.2006 Were it not for the Iraq War, there would be a lot more serious questioning of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, says professor Stephen Zunes on the fifth anniversary of the war there.

18.10.2006 India's tens of millions of poor working women have the ability and enterprise to move the country out of poverty, but policy makers are afraid to let them take the lead, says the founder of Ahmedabad's Self-Employed Women's Association.
From: The Hindu

18.10.2006 Diplomacy and trade, not military threats or sanctions, provide the best hope for peace on the Korean peninsula, says the East Asian representative of a U.S. faith-based group, tracing the North Korea nuclear crisis back to the Bush administration's post-9/11 refusal to negotiate.

18.10.2006 For all those who are currently obsessed with the emergence of India as the new kid on the block of potential economic superpowers, exposure to the conditions in most of our government hospitals should be made compulsory, as an important antidote.
From: Macro Scan (Economic Research Foundation, New Delhi)

18.10.2006 For decades the United Nations has seemed quite a distant place, remote from daily lives of most Asians, says former South Asia journalist Barbara Crossette. But the election of a South Korean secretary-general could focus the eyes of Asia on the world body.

17.10.2006 "The chances are very good that you will make it to Kindergarten," the Global Health Council wrote in a Happy Birthday note as the U.S. population clock ticked past 300 million Tuesday morning. The same cannot be said for thousands of others who share your birthday, the group lamented.

17.10.2006 An international women's group offers support for Bob Herbert's New York Times op-ed decrying U.S. cultural norms that have led to staggeringly high rates of violence against women.

16.10.2006 Brazil's final round of voting on October 29 will determine "if we will be a country, a society, a nation--democratic and sovereign--or be reduced to a stock market, a shopping mall surrounded by poverty on all sides," says Brazilian academic Emir Sader.