STWR - Share The World's Resources

Ortega's victory comes at a time when Latin America is on the march again. There have been some spectacular demonstrations of the popular will in Porto Alegre, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Cochabamba and Cuzco, to name but a few cities. This has offered a new hope to a world either deep in neoliberal torpor (the EU, the US, the Far East) or suffering from the military and economic depredations of the new order (Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, south Asia).

9th November 2006, Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service

If the world's growing water crisis remains unresolved -- depriving clean water to more than one billion of the world's six billion people -- it will jeopardise the U.N.'s longstanding battle to reduce global poverty, hunger and disease by its targeted date of 2015, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) warned Thursday.

9th November 2006,  The Guardian

For six years, latterly with the backing of both houses of a markedly conservative Republican Congress, George Bush has led an American administration that has played an unprecedentedly negative and polarising role in the world's affairs. On Tuesday, in the midterm US congressional elections, American voters rebuffed Mr Bush in spectacular style and with both instant and lasting political consequences. By large numbers and across almost every state of the union, the voters defeated Republican candidates and put the opposition Democrats back in charge of the House of Representatives for the first time in a dozen years.

Here's the way to look at the Election Day outcome: If the U.S. were a parliamentary democracy, Bush would be history. Our self-proclaimed "war president" has lost a vote of confidence, not by the members of his party, but by the people of the United States.

Of course, we don't live in a parliamentary democracy, so we're still stuck with the same megalomaniacal leader, even though the control of the Congress appears to be passing to the opposition party. (As of this writing, the new House will be firmly in the hands of the Democrats by a bigger margin than the current House is in the hands of Republicans, and the Senate appears headed towards Democratic control also, albeit by the narrowest of margins: 1 Lieberman.)

So the question is: what next?

We're already hearing a lot from the mainstream media about how this was all about voters wanting less extremism and more civility in government.

Bull!

The 2006 American elections have a truly global significance. They are taking place in conditions where the Bush administration and the entire US ruling elite is embroiled in a deep-going political crisis, precipitated by the disastrous consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As numerous books, articles and comment pieces—many of them echoing positions articulated within the American military—have made clear, the invasion of Iraq has been a fiasco. The underlying position of the various critics from within ruling circles is that it has weakened both the immediate and the long-term strategic position of the United States.

How to resolve this crisis? A Financial Times columnist recently suggested that anyone who could do so, ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize. No one has an answer. A situation has developed where all the options are bad—that is to say, any proposal immediately throws up new problems and contradictions.

Over the last few months, I had begun to doubt whether Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would indeed have the kind of political staying power that I described in my book, Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S. (recently released by St. Martin's Press).

Initially, it seemed as if Chavez was perfectly poised to capitalize on a wave of anti-American discontent felt throughout the hemisphere. Throughout South America, Chavez exchanged oil for political influence with newly emerging leftist regimes in Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil; the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, a key Chavez ally, seemed to underscore Venezuela's rising influence.

But then, a series of dramatic reversals cast doubt on Chavez's ambitions to become a truly hemispheric leader and a lightning rod against U.S. influence.

With the Democratic Party taking the reigns of power in Congress and the President seeking new strategies in conjunction with the review by James Baker's Iraq Study Group, change is coming to the bungled war in Iraq.

The two plans that have been most prominent are Plan A, stay the course, and Plan B, a quick exit. Plan A would continue the course of the U.S. military fighting the rebels and terrorists, whether with present or greater levels of troops. Plan B would withdraw all U.S. troops, perhaps deploying some to nearby bases such as in Kuwait and perhaps still controlling the Green Zone in Baghdad. There is also plan D to chop up Iraq into several countries, which is not going to happen, as Turkey will not allow an independent Kurdish state to exist, and there is no way to have separate religious states in Baghdad.

Plan C is the least worst option, even thought it has so far not had much discussion. The elements of Plan C are:

Here’s how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.

Note the past tense. And I’m not kidding.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won’t be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they’ll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We’ve found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here’s how they’ll do it, in three easy steps:

Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind

"Now that the year's grain harvest is safely in the bin, it is time to take stock and look ahead," writes Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute.

In six of the last seven years world grain production has fallen short of use, drawing world grain carryover stocks down to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level in 34 years. The last time they were this low wheat and rice prices doubled.

Climate change will devastate Africa without substantial help from the world community, according to a new report released at the opening of a major U.N. climate change conference in Nairobi, Kenya Monday.

"Africa is the least responsible for climate change but will be hit the hardest," said Nick Nuttall, spokesperson for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

New scientific data shows that Africa is more vulnerable to the impacts than previously thought, Nuttall told IPS from Nairobi.

Seventy million people and 30 percent of Africa's coastal infrastructure face the risk of coastal flooding by 2080 linked to rising sea levels, the report found. More than one-third of the habitats that support African wildlife could be lost. Crop yields will fall due to warmer temperatures and more intense droughts.