IT ALL STARTED WITH MALTA — It was clear from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s personal involvement with last Monday’s summit on climate change sponsored by the world body that he wants to make the issue a priority of his term of office. A senior U.N. adviser said shaping the proposed post-Kyoto agreement (the Kyoto Protocol emission reduction targets will expire in 2012) will continue to be one of Ban Ki-moon’s main targets. The Korean doesn’t have his predecessor Kofi Annan’s public persona, but inside the organization he is widely judged to have had an effective first year in the [...]
After long being spared the violence that has characterized Basque separatist agitation in the Spanish Basque country, the French Basque country has in recent months been hit by a series of increasingly spectacular attacks. French police investigations in connection with one such attack led to the arrest last month of 13 people, including some with known links to the Basque terrorist group ETA. An internal ETA document uncovered last month by the local Basque news service Vasco Press suggests that the upswing in violence may be the result of a new ETA “strategy of confrontation” with France. -o- In a [...]
In the past week, up to 200 of people have died in Burma in the government’s violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations, according to various reports. But thousands more in Burma are routinely forcibly relocated and their villages burned by the army in an ongoing campaign against the country’s ethnic minorities. Now the Washington, D.C.-based American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is using commercially provided satellite imagery to catalogue the abuses. The AAAS’ “Science and Human Rights Project,” funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Open Society Institute, released a report Sept. 28 that documents the destruction of rural [...]
