In The News

Modern-Day Mercenaries

Raenette Taljaard December 9, 2003
From Iraq to Afghanistan, the US and its allies are relying on private military companies (PMCs) to provide a range of security services commonly associated with national militaries. Raenette Taljaard, Member of Parliament in South Africa, cautions that this move toward the privatization of security should not go un-checked. As unregulated non-state actors motivated by profits, PMCs can serve...

Backing Down on Steel Tariffs, U.S. Strengthens Trade Group

David E. Sanger December 5, 2003
The fight over US steel tariffs, writes David Sanger in the New York Times, will go down in history as the case that defines the World Trade Organization's power. No case in the eight year history of the WTO has tested its power to quite the same degree, but now it has been tested – and won. Last week President Bush was forced to eliminate steel tariffs that the WTO ruled illegal after the...

China Steps Up to a Global Threat

John Gittings December 5, 2003
World AIDS Day on December 1 was marked in China by an unprecedented openness on the subject of HIV-AIDS. One of the nation's top leaders, Premier Wen Jiabao, visited patients in AIDS wards and proclaimed a new commitment to providing medical treatment for HIV-infected people and to prevention measures and education about the HIV virus. Veteran China watcher John Gittings writes that...

Africa: Gender Inequality Fuels AIDS Crisis

December 3, 2003
Agencies trying to curb the AIDS crisis in Africa need to expand their approach, argues Human Rights Watch. There is a crucial link between gender inequality and the spread of AIDS. Sexual assault, the use of rape as a mechanism of war, the cultural acceptance of domestic violence, and women's lack of voice have kept women at the mercy of the disease in Africa. On that continent, women are...

A New Opportunity in Cancun's Failure

Balakrishnan Rajagopal December 3, 2003
The failure of September's global trade talks in Cancun may have indicated disagreement on a global level, but the unified voice of a small coalition of countries showed that smaller scale negotiations can be very effective. The emergence of the G-22 bloc of smaller countries, says development expert Balakrishnan Rajagopal, harkens back to the Bandung meeting of 29 formerly colonized...

UN Calls for More Aid to Help North Korea Reform

Andrew Ward December 3, 2003
North Korea has seen much of its food aid disappear in the past year, presumably as donor nations aim to pressure Pyongyang to stop its nuclear weapons program. In the shift to a market economy, one million people were left without food, and analysts say that the politically-minded decision to cut off aid is starving the public. Without an increase in aid, North Koreans will be in dire straits...

The Bigger Problem: Weapons of Individual Destruction

Raenette Taljaard October 15, 2003
The American hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has turned up little so far, but in the meantime coalition soldiers and Iraqi civilians continue to be victims of armed violence. By ignoring the proliferation of small arms and light weapons, says Raenette Taljaard, a member of the South African Parliament, the international community is failing millions of people around the world....