8th May 08 - Donald Macintyre, The Independent (UK)

It was created from the ashes of the Holocaust, and grew into one of the most confident (and controversial) nations in history. Today, as Israel turns 60, its people's hopes for a peaceful future are as delicately poised as ever.

You get the clearest sense of it in Tel Aviv. Swinging in on the Ayalon highway past the 50-floor Azrieli towers, joining the entrepreneurs in their open-necked shirts and jeans tapping at their laptops at a café off the Rothschild Boulevard, lunching among the families and fashionistas at the beachside Manta Ray, or wandering through the elegantly renovated lanes of Neve Tzedek, where Jews in the 1880s first started spreading north along the coast from Jaffa, the still-mixed neighbouring Arab port town that secular, hedonistic, Tel Aviv grew out of, you quickly begin to see how much Israel has achieved in the last 60 years.

8th May 08 - Slavoj Zizek, Le Monde Diplomatique

The West is projecting not only its own spiritual fantasies upon Tibet, but its own economic fears upon China, imagining a power struggle quite different from that which has actually happened in Tibet. We have to learn to look at Tibet as it is – and China too.

All the media reports impose an image which goes like this: the People’s Republic of China, which illegally occupied Tibet in 1950, engaged for decades in brutal and systematic destruction not only of the Tibetan religion, but of the identity of Tibetans as a free people.

Food Futures Behind Rising Prices

7th May 08 - Anil Netto, IPS News

7th May 08 - Walden Bello, Inquirer (Philippines)

Summary: The stagnation of the Philippine economy has now lasted over 25 years. Between 1990 and 2005, the Philippines’ average annual per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate was the lowest in Southeast Asia, lower than even those of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Explanations rooting the country’s failure to launch in overpopulation, corruption, protectionism, and noncompetitive wages are examined in this article and found grossly inadequate. The central bottleneck is the gutting of the government’s capacity to invest owing to the policy of prioritizing debt repayments and the severe loss of government’s revenues due to trade liberalization. In contrast to the Philippines, our neighbors promoted policies that saw state investment synergize private investment. This accounted for their superior economic performance, especially before the Asian financial crisis. Until the reigning policy framework is overturned the country will not be able to emerge out of stagnation.

6th May 08 - John Feeney, The Guardian (UK)

Only since 1800, in the last 0.01% of the history of Homo sapiens, has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care. Yet the population-environment link is clear. Our environmental impact, as gauged by total resource consumption for a country or the world, is the product of population size and the average person's consumption.

5th May 08 - Jeffrey Kaplan, Orion magazine

Prviate cars were relatively scarce in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy. Just ten years later things looked very different.

5th May 08 - Geoffrey Lean, The Independent on Sunday (UK)

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

5th May 08 - Rainer Falk, World Economy & Development

So far, only a small minority of top earners has benefited from global integration. Even conservative economists have begun to worry about social inclusion and effective redistribution. As many argue, it is better to prevent protectionist tendencies, which would cut the overall benefits of globalisation, and to share the cake more fairly.

2nd May 08 - David Cronin, IPS News

Tax havens in Europe are depriving poor countries of more money than they receive in development aid, it has been alleged. Some 11.5 trillion (million million) dollars is held in offshore accounts across the world, according to Tax Justice Network, a grouping of economists, accountants and academics. Because tax authorities are unable to touch this money, they effectively lose 250 billion dollars per year: the equivalent of five times what the United Nations estimated in 2002 as needed to finance its Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty.

2nd May 08 - Michael T. Klare, LA Times

Among the many reasons given for the recent surge in gas prices is China's soaring demand for petroleum. Because the Chinese are running around the world buying up every available barrel of oil, the argument goes, we Americans have to pay that much more to outbid them for the leftover pools of crude. And the fact that the Chinese yuan has been growing stronger while the American dollar is shrinking in value has only exacerbated the problem.