By Kristin Palitza, IPS. DURBAN, South Africa – The UN program to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+) has been touted as a global scheme to conserve forests but is just a way to pour a lot of money into forests so international investors make big profits.
Continue reading →By Staff, MercoPress. Brazil signed into law a Truth Commission to investigate the human rights crimes during two military interventions between 1946 and 1988, but this Commission falls under a 1979 Amnesty Bill that protects torturers and guerrillas from prosecution.
Continue reading →By Staff, MercoPress. The most recent Brazilian census finds that 52.3 percent of the population is non-white; half of the population earns less than the minimum wage and, on average, Brazilians who are white and Asian earn twice as much as those who are black or mixed-race.
Continue reading →By Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. Instead of unveiling his new army on the anniversary of the Bataille de Vertieres, Martelly announced that would delay the mobilization of the Haitian army and establish a commission to study the idea. Pity… a militia system would be ideal for Haiti, if it could afford one.
Continue reading →By Dady Chery, Haiti Chery (text) | Marcelo Sayao (photos). The attack on Brazil’s Rocinha slum illustrates a peacetime merger of military with police to make war on their country’s poor. If your country has contributed troops to UN (de)stabilization missions, sit up and take notice.
Continue reading →By Giovanni Dubon, Prospect Journal. In 2008, Brazil’s state of Rio de Janeiro alone experienced 1,137 police killings, compared to 371 in the whole United States.
Continue reading →By Jose Pavero and others, In: Source Book of Alternative Technologies for Freshwater Augmentation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rainwater harvesting is not used in Haiti, but over half a million people in the Caribbean get at least some of their water by this method. Rain-catchment systems are easy to build and operate and cost little to run.
Continue reading →By Fidel Castro Ruz, CubaDebate via Granma. Those countries are attempting to monopolize technologies and markets by means of patents, banks, the most modern and costly forms of transportation, cybernetic domination of complex productive processes, and the control of communications and the mass media, in order to deceive the world.
Continue reading →By Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. When the Palestinian application for full membership in UNESCO comes to the UN Security Council next month, the U.S. will certainly try to scuttle this membership. In doing so, the U.S. will lose all credibility in future Palestine-Israel negotiations.
Continue reading →By Franz Chávez, IPS. LA PAZ – With victory cheers and predictions of future campaigns in defense of their ancestral territory, indigenous protesters from Bolivia’s Amazon jungle region celebrated the new law that banned the construction of the road through their rainforest reserve.
Continue reading →Video by Yvon Vilius and Ansel Herz, Media Hacker. Anti-UN demonstrations in Port-au-Prince and Leogane this month were reported as involving a couple of hundred people. See for yourself.
Continue reading →By Kristian Beadle, Miller-McCune. Kristian Beadle steps off a rickety bus in southern Mexico and finds a traditional coffee-growing culture that admirably suits modern sustainability efforts.
Continue reading →By Andrew Leonard, Salon. “Half the workers of the world work in jobs that are off the books… The combined economic activity of these 1.8 billion workers adds up to $10 trillion. If this informal economy were squeezed into a single political structure, it would be the second largest economy in the world,” Robert Neuwirth writes in Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy.
Continue reading →By Dialogue 200 and Jubilee South Network, Press Release. We support the demands of our partner organizations in Haiti, who reject the presence of this occupation force and demand that the UN, instead of bringing new problems such as rape, murder and the cholera epidemic that has so far claimed more than 6,000 lives, proceed to apply exemplary sanctions and offer compensation to the victims.
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