The Bush Administration's Global AIDS strategy, released this week by the State Department, is based on selective and misleading use of science, evidence and rhetoric in support of an ideological approach to AIDS prevention and treatment that fails to address the needs of women and girls, who now represent the majority of those infected with HIV worldwide, asserts the Centre for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), a U.S.-based organisation focused on the effects of U.S. international policies on women's rights and health worldwide. "This plan is all smoke and mirrors when it comes to responding to the spread of HIV among women and girls," asserted Jodi Jacobson, Executive Director of CHANGE. "On one hand, the strategy correctly cites critical factors, such as violence and sexual coercion, that put women and girls at high risk of infection," notes Jacobson. "Yet the plan fails to offer any concrete strategies for addressing these concerns." This posting also includes information from the latest issue of the Africa Focus Bulletin on the Aids plan.

A student from Guinea-Bissau was stabbed to death in a southern Russian city in what appears to have been a racial attack, the African country's embassy said. Skinheads have been increasingly active in Russia recently, launching attacks on dark-skinned foreign students and migrant workers. Human rights groups have said the authorities weren't doing enough to combat hate crimes.

Corruption - broadly defined as "the abuse of public or private office for personal gain" takes many different forms, from routine bribery or petty abuse to the amassing of spectacular personal wealth through embezzlement or other dishonest means. The international community is adamant that corruption must be stopped. It is demanding that the governments of poorer countries eradicate corruption within their countries if they want to be considered eligible to receive Western aid. Yet there is a deep hypocrisy in the international community's approach, at the heart of which are the taxpayer-backed export credit agencies of industrialised countries.

A new dossier on the SciDev.Net website has evolved from the previous quick guide on biodiversity with the addition of four specially commissioned policy briefs, along with new opinion pieces and features. It also has the latest news, links, definitions and details of future events. The new dossier's specially commissioned policy briefings summarise key aspects of the issue in an informative and accessible style, dealing with the The UN Convention on Biological Diversity; Modern agriculture and biodiversity; How biodiversity loss affects ecosystems and Biodiversity and climate change.

Two months into the United Nations' official year against slavery, Black Information Link(BLINK), the communication channel of the 1990 Trust, a National Black British organisation, questioned the Home Office over why they do not have any events planned for Britain. The Home Office not only confirmed they had failed to organise a single event for 2004, but also issued an amazing statement saying we should forget the slave trade rather than commemorate it. And they claimed today’s government cannot be held responsible for the millions of lives lost during slavery. The statement sparked outrage from furious campaigners who contrasted it with the government’s active support for Holocaust memorial day, held on 27 January this year.

The arguments for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that have been dinned into us for 15 years are based on an almost sublime misreading of the world's food problems. Without GM, the story has it, famine and increasing deficiency are inevitable, yet present-day deficiencies are almost never caused by an inability to produce enough. Angola is a good example: it is always bordering on disaster, yet it has 2 1/2 times the area of France and every kind of climate, and only 12.5 million people. Its farmers are highly accomplished. Famines result not from inability but from the civil war that raged for 30 years. Behind the claim that GMOs are necessary lies a deep - and racist - failure to appreciate traditional farming.

Credit and savings schemes are hailed as blueprints for tackling poverty but their benefits are exaggerated. They fail to address the way gender effects relations of power and inequality within families. Frequently unsustainable, they seldom manage to cover their running costs. If future credit and savings schemes are to be effective in poverty alleviation they need to make stronger links between local economies and global economic trends and be linked to wider programmes of women's empowerment.

The Seventh Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity ended in Kuala Lumpur with environmental officials from 100 countries renewing their commitment to cut rates of extinction by 2010, issuing a declaration that some participants called vague and disappointing. The declaration stated the countries were determined to preserve ecosystems threatened by industrialization, logging, overfishing, and other commercial activities. The ministers also said they were "alarmed that biological diversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate as a result of human activity."

When a government of a country fails or neglects to curb spread of corruption, one may conclude that government also fails to fulfil its obligation to promote and protect the fundamental human rights of the people of the country. The same also applies when a powerful country misrepresents its publicly-stated policy towards another country for hidden reasons, thus grossly violating human rights. The fight for political, social, economic and cultural rights is often inextricably linked with the fight against corruption. The elimination of corruption and the protection of human rights are interdependent.

Since the third wave of democratization that began in 1974, many regions of the world have experienced significant economic and political reforms as policymakers have sought to provide the citizens of their countries with a better life. Little systematic effort has been undertaken to understand the cumulative results of these reforms on a global scale, the extent to which outcomes have matched expectations, the effect of regional contexts on reforms, and the ways in which reforms have perhaps negatively affected the target populations. The Fifth Annual Global Development Conference, which opened on January 27 in Delhi, addressed these critical questions, premised on the belief that a better understanding of past reforms—including their initiation, implementation, and outcome—should inform the design, introduction, and execution of future reforms throughout the developing and transition worlds.

The "collaborative approach," the preferred response of the UN's humanitarian system to the crisis of internal displacement, is not working. Evaluations commissioned within the system describe "egregious failures" to protect and meet the basic needs of internally displaced persons (IDPs). Yet when pressed to defend the collaborative approach, senior officials of humanitarian agencies and donor governments invariably respond that there are no realistic alternatives to a system of ad hoc efforts on behalf of IDPs, a system characterized by diffuse responsibility and lack of accountability.

There are fears that large numbers of children may be trafficked into Britain after police discovered up to 30 had been "lost". The BBC has learnt the Metropolitan Police investigation looked at children who came through Heathrow Airport with adults who were not their parents. Until recently few checks have been made by immigration at the airport. Campaigners fear thousands of children are being used as domestic slaves after being brought into Britain. The vast majority of the children were from Nigeria, which is well known among law enforcement officials as being the main source for trafficked children into Britain.

Ten thousand people have fled ethnic fighting in western Ethiopia that has claimed more than 250 lives, according to government officials. Clashes had erupted at a gold mine, in which 196 people were killed in a single day; the killings being one of the worst instances of ethnic violence seen in Ethiopia in recent years, the government said on Wednesday. The fighting flared up just weeks after 60 people were killed in the troubled Gambella region, the federal affairs ministry said in a statement.

Humanitarian access to western Sudan's war-torn Darfur region remains limited despite government claims to have opened relief routes, say humanitarian sources. "There is absolutely no access to any place, no humanitarian access," said the advocacy group Refugees International, quoting an agency trying to bring supplies to Darfur. "Things are not changing at all. If they are changing, they are changing for the worse."

This paper from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics discusses the proposal that poverty ought to be regarded as a violation of human rights and therefore as a condition that ought to be abolished. This proposal has been presented as a new paradigm in the fight against poverty that has the potential to galvanise an effective strategy for ending poverty through an international human rights framework. The essay explores this proposal from a philosophical standpoint, and argues that the proposal would be strengthened by including compassion or humanitarianism as part of its moral basis and achieved without diluting either the moral force or the radical implications of regarding poverty as a violation of human rights.

In many of today’s conflicts, adolescents represent the majority of children who fight or are associated with armed forces and groups; however, they are often ineligible for demobilisation programs for child soldiers as they become adults in the ranks of armed groups, missing the opportunity for rehabilitation and reintegration into a peaceful community. Lingering wars can destroy most of the economic and social infrastructure of countries and exacerbate the privation of the populations involved, leading to voluntary recruitment of adolescents. As greater and greater portions of the Gross Domestic Product of countries go to war efforts, less and less of the public budget is allocated to education or health. For an increasing number of youngsters, there is no other school than a military training camp and the only way for them and their families to thrive or to be safe is to be associated with armed groups.

Nigeria and other developing countries have been advised on strategies to employ to ensure that their interest is protected at the next World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting coming up end of 2004 or early 2005 in Hong Kong. Ms Aileen Kwa a trade analyst with Focus on the Global South, based in Geneva, noted in a statement sent to Vanguard that the developing countries' negotiators, trade unions and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have worked very hard since the WTO's inception to improve upon its inequitable rule, but still, the rules have not been changed to their benefit in any way.

A recent meeting brought together 125 participants from 34 countries to strategise against the proliferation of US military bases worldwide as a result of the "war on terror". The meeting provided a space for people to share their experiences living with US military presence and present their own local struggles to confront it. More importantly, the conference gave them an opportunity to put their heads together and begin thinking about a joint and collectively coordinated global campaign against US bases.

Big brand companies and retailers in the fashion and food industries are driving down employment conditions for millions of women workers around the world, according to a new study by international agency Oxfam. Oxfam says that huge retailing “empires” are undermining the very labour standards they claim to uphold by using a common business model that demands ever-quicker and cheaper delivery of the freshest and latest products.

100 Ways of Seeing an Unequal World actually offers 123 perspectives on world inequality, each consisting of a two-page presentation with a graph or graphs on the left and explanation and interpretation on the right. The topics covered range across production, income and trade, demographics and health, agriculture, environment, refugees and repression. Sutcliffe pays special attention to regional (rather than just international) and gender inequalities, and attempts to set comparisons in a historical perspective.