India

AIDS without the aid

Submitted by ni-radio on June 18, 2008 - 12:00am.

In the Western World it feels like HIV/AIDS is well and truly under control. Yet world figures tell a different story. HIV/AIDS kills more people than all world wars and conflict - 1.2 million in 2007. The United Nations estimate of the people living with HIV last year was over 33 million. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, over 2,000 men become infected every day. But while the United Nations has calculated that the world needs $41 billion annually by 2010 to reach full universal access to treatment prevention and care of AIDS, only a proportion of that has been pledged so far. and diplomat, Stephen Lewis, co-director of AIDS-Free World, and before that the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, joins Chris Richards to dissect the politics behind HIV/AIDS - the indifference of Western World governments; the negligence of international institutions; and the mass misogyny that has meant that women in parts of Africa are now being deliberately infected at a far greater rate than men.

• Brazil was the first nation to provide anti-AIDS therapies free to patients who were prescribed it. Dr André de Mello e Souza - from the Pontifíca Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro - explains how dusting-down the dollars that big pharmaceutical companies make from AIDS treatment produces better health for less cost in Brazil.

• The militias in Congo are using the genitals of women as a weapon of war on a massive scale - leaving their torn flesh open to HIV. Marie Claire Faray, spokesperson of COMMON CAUSE UK - a platform for Congolese women in the United Kingdom - explains the war on women and what the international community must do to help stop it.

• In Tamil Nadu in the south of India, there is now a whopping 99 per cent AIDS-awareness. Dheepthi Namasivayam talks with sex workers, who are now AIDS awareness workers with the Indian Community Welfare Organization, about the power of their voices.

The spotlight in this program is on Kenge Kenge - which, roughly speaking, means the fusion of small, exhilarating instruments. In the CD Introducing Kenge Kenge, traditional sound boxes, one-string-fiddles and gongs combine with modern day drums and flutes to produce their dance-until-dawn Afrobeat.

Listen directly online (flash 128kbps stream)

Download the program to your computer or music player (Right click on the link and choose where
you would like to save the program to - 128kbps mp3 55.7MB)

Subscribe to the podcast Read more »

Filed under:

• aid
• Brazil
• Congo
• HIV/AIDS
• human rights
• India
• ni-radio
• women's rights

Human Tides

Submitted by ni-radio on June 11, 2008 - 12:00am.

An estimated one billion people will flee their homes by 2050...

What's the most urgent threat facing poor people in developing countries. War? Climate change? Mega-development? A recent report says it's the result of all three - that people are being forced from their homes. On current trends a staggering one billion people will flee their homes in the next 40 years - the majority because of climate change and the building of mega-projects like dams and mines. Today's co-host, John Davison - one of the authors of the report Human Tide: the real migration crisis - joins Radio New Internationalist's Chris Richards to visit some startling scenarios and meet the people who are affected:

• Ten years after Cyclone Mitch hit Honduras, Juan Almendares from Friends of the Earth reveals how displacement and disruption still endures.

• Development projects like dams displace 15 million people a year. Medha Patkar - the leader of the Save Narmada Movement - recounts how the World Bank helps fund them.

• Two hundred and fifty million people are going to be displaced because of climate-change through floods, droughts, famines and hurricanes between now and 2050. That's more than double the entire populations of Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Ibrahim Togola - from the Mali Folke Center - explains how it's already happening in Africa.

• Professor Walter Kälin, Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, presents compelling reasons why the Rich World should pay to climate-proof the Poor World.

In today's CD - Urban Gypsy performed by the Romanian-born Shukar Collective - traditions of those perennial refugees - the gypsies - meet the electric sounds of modern musicians.

Listen directly online (flash 128kbps stream)

Download the program to your computer or music player (Right click on the link and choose where
you would like to save the program to - 128kbps mp3 57MB)

Subscribe to the podcast Read more »

Filed under:

• climate change
• dams
• Honduras
• human rights
• India
• Mali
• migration
• ni-radio
• refugees
• World Bank

Fuel for thought

Submitted by ni-radio on March 26, 2008 - 11:12pm.

The global impact of using food supplies to fuel cars...

As world leaders prepare to fly into Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, for the next round of United Nations climate change talks, we’re wondering – realistically – what these talks are going to achieve. They’re supposed to strengthen global action on climate change, but just how we’re going to achieve those all-important reductions in greenhouse gases and the cooling of the environment are no where in sight. Far from focussing on how to stop the very activities that we now know lead to higher carbon emissions, governments are hitching up to the big business bandwagon that biofuels (more accurately called agrofuels) offer an important plank in combating climate change. From the Rich World, it sounds promising – replacing oil with fuels that can be naturally grown. But what do the people of the Poor World where the crops are being grown think? Today’s program asks them.  

• The current talks in Bangkok are framing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. Fiu Elisara from the O le Siosiomaga Society in Samoa assesses how effective the Kyoto protocol been so far in combating the effects of climate change in the Pacific.

• Rachel Smolker – author of a report called The Real Cost of Agrofuels: Food, Forest and the Climate – gives a global assessment of the impacts of pouring the world’s grain supplies into our cars.

• Lucia Ortiz – a Brazilian geologist – reports about how agrocrops are dispossessing her people of land and resources.

• We are being told that economic growth in developing countries like China and India will surely kill us all. But how often are these countries being asked for their side of the story? Soumitra Ghosh – who works with  the North Eastern Society for Preservation of Nature and Wild Life in West Bengal, India gives his assessment of agrofuels.

• British-based Danny Chivers performs one of his action poems, offering a straightforward but supremely effective solution to reducing our carbon footprint.

Today’s CD is called Songs of the Volcano performed Bob Brozman and the Rabaul community’s local string-bands in Papua New Guinea.  Two volcanic eruptions have destroyed Rabaul twice in a century so the energy in this CD reflects an unfailing optimism in the face of adversity – something that we’re going to need as we tackle climate change.

Listen directly online (flash 128kbps stream)

Download the program to
your computer or music player (Right click on the link and choose where
you would like to save the program to - 128kbps mp3 55.7MB)

Subscribe to the podcast Read more »

Filed under:

• agrofuels
• biofuels
• Brazil
• china
• climate change
• India
• ni-radio
• Papua New Guinea
• Samoa
• transport

Big Issues - the hands on the rudder

Submitted by ni-radio on January 16, 2008 - 4:07pm.

The first in a two-part special...

They say that media have short memories. So in the next two programs, Radio New Internationalist looks back over some of the big issues of 2007 that are set to get bigger in the next few years. This week: a selection of trends that are steering the world towards new horizons:

• World superpowers rise and fall. As the US enters its 11th hour as a world superpower, China, India and Europe are stepping in to scoop up economic, military and political allegiances. To cement its strength in foreign policy, the Chinese Government is substituting development aid for diplomacy. Nicola Bullard, a senior associate with Focus on the Global South, and Daniel Bibiero from the Mozambique NGO Justiça Ambiental investigate the results.

• Nature is being broken away by scientists and corporations. Governments say that nanotechnology is getting in the driver's seat to steer the next industrial revolution - fundamentally transforming every aspect of our lives. Business leaders predict that nano-industry may be worth one trillion US dollars in the next five years. Georgia Miller from Friends of the Earth Australia reveals the what, where and how nano works - from odour-eating socks to frightening new weapons for armies.

• Capitalism and its inequities intensify. Intellectual property is overtaking labour as a means of production, and the Majority World is striking back. Jon Ungphakorn, a former Thai Senator, and now a prominent social activist on public health and HIV/AIDs, explains why the Thai government is putting its people before profitable patents, and Abbott pharmaceutical company's vicious response.

• Truth is becoming hard to find as an army of professionals are being hired to steer society away from the facts. John Stauber, from the Center for Media and Democracy, whose organization publishes PR Watch in the United States, talks about the experts and scientists who are prepared to mortgage their professional souls to companies... and sell short the public interest in the process.

Big issues deserve big musical sounds - and today's are from a broad range of countries and performers selected from the World Music Network's Riverboat Records series.

Listen directly online (flash 128kbps stream)

Download the program to your computer or music player (Right click on the link and choose where you would like to save the program to - 128kbps mp3 55.7MB)

Subscribe to the podcast Read more »

Filed under:

• aid
• Australia
• Big Pharma
• china
• corporate power
• development
• ethics
• Europe
• health
• HIV/AIDS
• India
• intellectual property
• Mozambique
• nanotechnology
• ni-radio
• PR
• science
• Thailand

Trafficked

Submitted by ni-radio on September 19, 2007 - 4:58pm.

What kind of person wakes up and says: 'Right, I'm going to make some money by selling a person today?' Apparently it's often a parent or trusted friend; someone known to the victim. And it's women as well as men. Today's program seeks out sex traffickers …and what can be done to stop them. Through stories fresh from the streets and brothels of India, Nigeria and Moldova, profiles of both the exploiters and the exploited emerge that are very different from those reported in the Rich World.

* New Internationalist co-editor Vanessa Baird describes how the global sex trafficking industry operates. She climbs through a cruel barrier discouraging prosecutions of sex traffickers - that police intervention often means the deportation of victims - and introduces us to a country successfully taking an opposite approach.   

* Louisa Waugh - author of Selling Olga: stories of human trafficking and resistance - explains why domestic violence, migrant labour and international sex trafficking go hand-in-hand

* Film maker and writer Bishakha Datta introduces us to the sex workers of India, and why abolishing prostitution is unlikely to stop people-trafficking.

ALSO in this program: the third in a series of interviews from a conference in Shanghai held in May this year to examine the increasing influence of China in Africa. Regular Radio New Internationalist contributor, Nicola Bullard asks Walden Bello, the executive director of Focus on the Global South, for an overview.

And because today's theme was a weighty one, the music that's threading its way through the spoken words is full of exuberance and love for life.  The old up-tempo but melodic traditions of marrabenta - the national rhythm of Mozambique - meet the youthful energy of hip-hop in the CD Soul Marrabenta performed by the band Mabulu.

Listen online now (click the play button left) or download the program (click this link)

Subscribe to the podcast Read more »

Filed under:

• africa
• china
• human rights
• India
• Moldova
• Mozambique
• ni-radio
• Nigeria
• sex workers
• trafficking

Cyber crimes

Submitted by ni-radio on September 3, 2007 - 7:02am.

Next time you're downloading a film or music through the internet, spare a thought for Hew Griffiths, 44 years old, unemployed and now languishing in a jail half a world away from his home. Unlike most of the other inmates, he's not there for doing drugs, theft or assault. Rather, his crime was to belong to a group that cracked security codes of some of the United States' biggest media moguls, giving group members access to software and games that - if downloaded - could have been accessed free of charge. And whilst Australian authorities did not charge him, they nevertheless complied with a US request to send Hew to them for trial. In June this year he was judged by a Virginian court and sentenced to more than four years (51 months) in jail; shunted into a cell meant for two men in which three would sleep.

But Hew is only the first in a disturbing new trend. Following in the traditions established at Guantanamo Bay, the US is putting the world on notice that borders will not limit their prosecution and punishment of copyright crimes.  For as US Attorney General John Ashcroft explained in 2004 - with copyright industries contributing more to US economy than the entire Gross Domestic Product of countries like Argentina, The Netherlands, and Taiwan - his administration cannot afford to do otherwise. To brief us about copyright crimes in cyberspace - crimes' new frontiers - lawyers from India and Australia join today's program:

• Cyber-space copyright experts Lawrence Liang from Bangalore, India, and Professor Andrew Christie from Australia put us in touch with the world of intellectual property and debate whether Hew's crime fits his punishment.

• Stephen Kenny - whose represented four men arbitrarily detained in the war on terror - argues that the real offence against criminal law is shunting Hew off to another country for trial and sentence.
  

The music of Indian musician Debashish Bhattacharya also stars this week with three guitars that he designed himself. In Indian cosmology, the Trinity is a powerful symbol - for instance Tri Netra - Sanskrit for three eyes - represents past, present and future. Together the guitars straddle the styles of one thousand years of Indian music. The result is the magical CD Calcutta Slide Guitar.  

Listen now (click the play button left) or download the program (click this link)

Subscribe to the podcast Read more »

Filed under:

• Australia
• copyright
• crime
• India
• intellectual property
• internet
• justice
• law
• ni-radio
• US