The privatisation of water has been accompanied by large profits, higher prices, cut-offs to customers who cannot pay, lack of transparency, reduced water quality, bribery and corruption, says a book from the Council of Canadians and the Polaris Institute, which takes a sobering look at the growing scarcity of fresh water and argues that the commodification of water is wrong on ethical, environmental and social grounds. The book notes that trade agreements are robbing governments of their control over domestic water supplies: with water now classified as a good, global trade institutions give transnational corporations unprecedented access to the freshwater resources of signatory countries.

Senegal is shutting down all mining operations in protected forests in a bid to preserve the country's natural resources. No new mining permits will be issued for protected forestlands throughout Senegal. When current ones expire, they will not be renewed, government sources say.

Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa could earn about two billion U.S. dollars more every year if industrialised countries dropped their trade-distorting agricultural policies and opened their markets to goods from the developing world, says the International Food Policy Research Institute. The present round of world trade talks - called the Doha round - are meant to kick-start the economic development of the developing world. However, the talks have stalled because of differences between the developing world and the industrialised countries over trade in agricultural goods. World trade ministers are scheduled to meet in Cancun, Mexico on Sep. 10-14, to see if they can find a way out of the impasse.

From September 10 to 14, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will hold its Fifth Ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico. Pushed by multinational corporations, the United States, the European Union, and other developed countries are seeking to launch a new round of "free trade" negotiations and expand corporate globalization - further eroding human rights, workers' rights, environmental protections, and democracy - in the interest of corporate control. Popular movements in Mexico and their international allies will mark these meetings with massive demonstrations to demand a world that puts democracy and human dignity ahead of corporate profits.

"National States alone cannot offer individuals the protection they need and deserve, as the attacks on the Twin Towers in Manhattan show. The protection offered by national States is not sufficient to guarantee the life and freedom of their citizens if the international community, too, is not based on the rule of law. Only the existence of mechanisms for the protection of all persons in all countries can bring lasting, comprehensive peace." This is an extract from an interview with the International Criminal Court's first Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. The interview was published by www.moveon.org, an organisation that campaigns to bring ordinary people back into politics.

"We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain, we recognize that our existence is governed by material realities, and that, as those realities change, so will our lives. But underlying this awareness is the deep semi-consciousness that absorbs the moment in which we live, then generalizes it, projecting our future lives as repeated instances of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our true reality." Read social commentator George Monbiot's latest column, in which he argues that climate change threatens the future of humanity, but has led to a refusal of the human race to respond to the crisis rationally.

Does the Internet have the potential to accelerate development in poor nations? Or is it an innovation that will widen the gap between wealthy and poor countries? This paper places the Internet in a framework of major innovations in modern economic history that have contributed to increased global economic inequality.

Big business is lobbying hard to get the outcome it wants at the Cancun WTO Ministerial Meeting. The World Development Movement's new action calls on the UK and EU to base trade policy on the needs of poor communities, developing countries and the environment rather than on the demands of big business and corporate lobbies. Join the call to put people before profits.

Ten NGOs have sent a joint memorandum to World Trade Organisation members on the need to improve internal transparency and participation in the organisation. The Memo highlights many things wrong with the decision-making system and gives concrete proposals. This issue looms large as the Cancun Ministerial approaches. If not changed, the untransparent process will result in an anti-development outcome in Cancun. The memorandum was prepared by: The Third World Network, Oxfam International, Public Services International, WWF International, The Centre for International Environmental Law, Focus on the Global South, The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, The Africa Trade Network, The International Gender and Trade Network, and The Tebtebba International Centre for Indigenous Peoples' Rights.

Apartheid, it seems, works. Nearly 10 years since racial segregation was abolished in South Africa, identity is still rooted in race. Or so it would appear from the case of Happy Sindane, the blond Ndebele-speaking boy who walked into a police station last month saying he had been abducted from his white family by their black cleaner at the age of six and brought up among blacks. He asked the police to help him find his white parents. The story was presented, to the fury of black commentators, as that of a lost white boy who had walked, Tarzan-like, out of the jungle. The courts demolished the fantasy last week after DNA tests established that Happy had at least one black parent.

Kenyans are smuggling rare cactus plants from Somalia to Western countries where they are used to make body lotions. The Lusaka Agreement Task Force Chief Intelligence Officer, Mr Clement Mwale, said they are investigating the poachers whom he said are sophisticated operators.

This important book on the politics of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which takes the lid off how the WTO really works, and what really happened before, at, and after the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha in 2001, on the basis of interviews with 33 Geneva-based delegates to the WTO and 10 Secretariat staff members. This is the ammunition the critics of the WTO have been waiting for. It reveals the systematic subversion of an ostensibly democratic system to ensure that the "agreements" that are reached are those the major powers - primarily the US and the European Union - want, irrespective of the views of interests of most developing countries, who form the great majority of the membership.

The Mindset Network is a R225-million public-private partnership aimed at providing learning television channels in schools using Multichoice's DStv satellite network. Funded by the Liberty Foundation and Standard Bank, Mindset will launch an HIV/Aids education channel in September and a primary school channel next year. Mindset kits - which include satellite receivers, decoders, smart cards, teacher training and technological support - cost R12 000 each.

The gap between child mortality rates in rich and poor countries is growing increasingly wide, the medical journal The Lancet reports in the latest of a series of articles on child health. "Gaps in child mortality between rich and poor countries are unacceptably wide and in some areas are becoming wider, as are the gaps between wealthy and poor children within most countries," the authors of the article wrote.

This case study surveys the response of the South African labour movement to globalisation. It attempts to indicate how far unions in South Africa have maintained their position with respect to traditional constituent demands, whether they are adapting to a changing environment by organising new constituents, whether they are addressing new concerns by developing new perspectives on civil society, and whether they are enhancing their image as a major social actor.

A recent review of marine fisheries concluded that a startling 90 percent of the world's large predatory fish, including tuna, swordfish, cod, halibut, and flounder, have disappeared in the past 50 years. This 10-year study by Ransom Myers and Boris Worm at Canada's Dalhousie University attributes the decline to a growing demand for seafood, coupled with an expanding global fleet of technologically efficient boats.

The cash-strapped Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria fell under the spotlight on Wednesday, when ministers from 14 countries met in Paris, France, to address the fund's financial woes. The fund, which has committed US $1.5 billion to programmes in 92 countries in the last 18 months, faces a lack of money for proposals waiting to be funded in October.

Many of the circumstances that lead to internal displacement are similar or identical to those that cause individuals to develop a “well-founded fear of persecution” and seek international protection as refugees. Moreover, the potential consequences of withdrawing protection prematurely or erroneously from IDPs and refugees can be equally harmful. An article in the May edition of Forced Migration Review examines this issue.

As negotiations leading up to the fifth ministerial of the World Trade Organisation from September 9-14 in Cancun Mexico grind to a halt, civil society organisations are stepping up their efforts to mount massive mobilisations and civil disobedience in Cancun and elsewhere in the world during the week of the ministerial meeting. Many of the issues under discussion relating to agriculture and drug access are crucial to the welfare of the developing world. Cancun is shaping up not to be another Doha but a second Seattle, writes Walden Bello, executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South.

The United States is helping some developing countries rework their drug patent laws in ways that "go beyond global standards" in protecting pharmaceutical companies and that could "undercut" President Bush's five-year, $15 billion AIDS initiative by making antiretroviral drugs more expensive and more difficult to obtain, the Wall Street Journal reports. "There are many ways that the Bush administration has contravened the letter and spirit of international efforts to improve access to drugs in developing countries,” Asia Russell, international policy coordinator at the Health GAP, said.