Worth noting

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Karen Ann Gajewski

* As of July 16, 2003, the U.S. Congress has voted in favor of imposing U.S. economic sanctions in response to Burma's detention of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Sun Kyi (featured in the 1997 Humanist), cofounder of the National League for Democracy. The order awaits President George W. Bush's signature and would ban specified Burmese imports into the United States and freeze that nation's U.S. assets.

* An international coalition is organizing the International Occupation Watch Center to monitor the role of foreign companies in Iraq and advocate for national control of resources; monitor occupying military for any violations of human rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly; support the establishment of independent Iraqi organizations (such as media and environmental groups); monitor and work to advance the rights and freedoms of Iraqi women; and track international financial commitments toward rebuilding Iraq.

* Three years after the United Nations vowed to halve world poverty by 2015, the UN Development Program says the world poverty fight is in danger: some countries are becoming even poorer. In thirty-one of the fifty-nine top priority countries, progress has stalled or reversed and foreign debt is unusually high. The UNDP's landmark World Resources Report 2002-2004: Decisions for the Earth: Balance, Voice, and Power argues for environmental policy change to arrest environmental degradation and address the global poverty crisis. It calls for a new development compact that would double the annual development aid required from rich countries, dismantle unfair trade subsidies and tariffs, write off unsustainable debt, and create better access to technology.

* U.S. prosecutors are under fire in Puerto Rico over their insistence on seeking the death penalty in a murder trial there. The self-governing commonwealth of the United States banned capital punishment in 1929, and most Puerto Ricans are alarmed by the U.S. government's decision to apply federal law and override Puerto Rican law and culture.

* Environmental activists in Ecuador protested U.S.-led international naval exercises, warning of potential serious damage to the unique ecosystems of the Galapagos Islands and disruption of the mating season of the humpback whale. Human rights groups also worried that the "war games" could become part of a military intervention in Colombia, where internal strife has raged for nearly forty years. About two thousand troops from the U.S., Colombian, Chilean, Mexican, and Ecuadorean navies took part in the exercises which began July 12.

* Old dogs can learn new tricks. Fifty-eight former tobacco farmers in Virginia and North Carolina are foregoing tradition. According to the July/August 2003 World Watch magazine, farmers hammered by falling tobacco prices and the effects of heavy pesticides are switching to organic produce. The financial return is attractive: one farmer interviewed said that, while he made $2,500 from his best acre of tobacco, he cleared roughly $20,000 from a nearby acre of organic grape tomatoes.

* Pro-choice groups across the country applauded Barbara Boxer (Democrat, California) and fifty-three other senators when the Senate voted July 9 to overturn Bush's global gag rule. The gag rule, limiting a woman's right to choose and the right to contraception, has been Bush's top priority since day one of his presidency. The legislation now goes before the House, where administration and antichoice leaders are expected to use all their influence to dump the Boxer amendment and reinstate the Bush ban on family planning.

* Antichoice politicians in the House turned their backs on the world's poorest women on July 15 by allowing the Bush administration to eliminate UNFPA funding that provides health care and voluntary family planning services to women in developing countries. According to leaders of the National Abortion Rights Action League, "Family planning opponents in the House sacrificed the health and well-being of the world's poorest women for ... the president's domestic political agenda."

* A group of independent filmmakers, producers, engineers, and investors have created the Cinema Libre Foundation--a movement to advance social consciousness while increasing freedom of content and form in feature-length films. The foundation has scheduled its premiere festival for Los Angeles in 2004 and plans to release five films each year. On the 2003-2004 production slate so far are: Munda Mata (the story of two brothers on opposing sides of Cesar Chavez's migrant workers union), Soldier Child (the story of a kidnapped nine-year-old Ugandan boy forced into the rebel army) and Sleeping on Stones (a look at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the relationships of three boys: one Jewish, one Muslim, and one Christian).

Karen Ann Gajewski is a freelance editor and an editorial consultant to the Humanist.