Haiti’s University Languishes in Ruins – Part 2

When the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission failed to approve, or even respond to, a proposal by the University of the State of Haiti (UEH) for a unified campus to replace the nine destroyed or badly damaged faculties in the capital, Vice Rector Fritz Deshommes was not surprised at the silence.

Haiti’s University Languishes in Ruins – Part 1

Two years after the earthquake, and despite the proposals written, the consortiums organised and the foreign delegations entertained, the University of the State of Haiti (Université d'Etat d'Haïti or UEH) still has not seen any "reconstruction", and the proposal for a university campus that would unite all 11 faculties remains a 25-year-old dream.

Azerbaijan and Israel: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend

As the showdown over Iranian nuclear ambitions intensifies, political analysts in Azerbaijan are urging the government to deepen the country's ties with Israeli and Western security structures.

Women, Victims of War, Have No Seat at Negotiating Table

When the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held its inaugural meeting in London back in 1946, the U.S. delegate, Eleanor Roosevelt, read an open letter to "the women of the world" calling on governments to encourage women everywhere to participate in national and international affairs.

ECONOMY: Sri Lankan Poor Hit by Triple Whammy

First the government devalued the Sri Lankan rupee by three percent in November. Then interest rates were hiked. And to cap that U.S. sanctions hit Iran, which meets 90 percent of this country’s oil needs.

EL SALVADOR: Military Commission to Investigate Army Abuses

“It’s awful to see people who are criminals treated as heroes,” said Dorila Márquez, one of the survivors of the El Mozote massacre committed by Salvadoran army troops in December 1981.

Honduran Government Seeks to Minimise Cost of Prison Fire

The government of Honduras hopes to reach friendly settlements with the families of inmates killed in the Comayagua prison fire, to avoid international lawsuits.

Iran Holds Up Access to Parchin for Better IAEA Deal

The failure of a mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get Iranian permission to visit a military testing site mentioned in its latest report has been interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid the discovery of confirming evidence of past work on nuclear weapons.

Community Radios in Colombia Tune In for Peace

Cleaning up a stream that used to be a garbage dump and restocking it with fish, or helping demobilised far-right paramilitaries reintegrate into society by returning to school, are some of the early outcomes of a project involving community radio stations in a remote area of northwest Colombia.

SENEGAL: Two Women Among 14 Candidates for President

There are two women among the 14 candidates contesting the first round of Senegalese presidential elections that will be held on Feb. 26. But according to several analysts, this overwhelmingly Muslim West African country is not ready to be governed by a woman.

Somalis Hopeful of London Meeting Despite Media Scepticism

With an international meeting aimed at resolving the political crisis in Somalia set to take place Thursday, the local media in this East African nation is awash with scepticism, referring to the efforts as a new system of re-colonising the country.

Science Can Restrain Runaway Finance

The urgent need for a paradigm shift in economics and its financial and mathematical models has been widely recognized for decades. Recently, Credit Suisse research as well as complexity theorists at the Swiss Technical University in Zurich have demonstrated the concentration of companies in the current global economic system. They used network analysis of positive feedback effects (the network grows faster as more join, like Facebook). These dynamics also concentrate connectedness and produced a pattern: of the 50 largest companies in the world, 45 are financial intermediaries (‘ Global Finance Lost in Cyberspace"). The top brass of these companies meet in Davos at the World Economic Forum. These firms (Barclays, UBS, Citi, etc.) operate on outdated economic theories, assumptions and financial models and tend to favour the current cruel austerity being imposed on citizens in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and the U.S. Their financial and policy models have been critiqued by scientific research in physics, thermodynamics, anthropology and, recently, brain science, endocrinology and the behavioural sciences, as I documented earlier in The Politics of the Solar Age (NY Times Book Review, 1981). This concentration of corporate power and its outcomes are now evident in today's global financialization and led to the financial bubble which burst in 2007-9, still causing widespread human misery. Re-inflating these too-big-to-fail banks allows them to continue dominating the actual activities of real-world, local ‘main street’ economies, rather than serving their banking and credit needs. Thus, efforts to reform today's financial system simply have bailed out the past mistakes so that more crises, booms and busts are likely to continue. Current scientific knowledge of our planet's biosphere, its climate, geology and the behaviour of our human species is finally trumping this cultural legacy of conventional economics and political ideologies rooted in 18th century paradigms. Economics is not a science – as most economists will admit. Rather, its core tenets and "principles" are mere semantics: "capital" (too many definitions); "investment" (in what: nuclear power? public transport? green bonds?); "wealth" (money, ignoring all other forms of wealth); "consumption" (education, social services, household spending) and so on. The valiant work of financial reformers since the 1970s has challenged these paradigms and their outdated models: modern portfolio theory (MPT), efficient markets, rational human actors, capital asset pricing models (CAPM), value-at-risk (VAR), Black-Scholes options pricing model, NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, used by central banks to set interest rates), etc. (" Changing the Game of Finance"). Building successful alternative financial investment strategies, the pioneers of socially responsible, ethical, triple-bottom line, green investing opened a new window into mainstream finance and managed to broaden and shift the focus of asset managers beyond single bottom line money returns (" Transforming Finance 2.0"). The new scientific findings must now face down financiers and expose their mystifications. Financiers do not provide capital; they are merely intermediaries between savers and businesses in the real economy and borrowers they favour. Often they take depositors' money and invest it outside the country or simply speculate on derivatives like credit default swaps. At last, we the 99 percent must rein in these practices and reverse the focus on reforms merely tweaking false economic and financial models. These proved brittle and failed disastrously in 2007-8, causing untold human suffering and widespread ecological disruption and depletion of biodiversity. The economic "technocrats" imposition of their "austerity" cuts have made matters worse. Misdirected investments in 40 percent of London's FTSE 100 were identified as "sub-prime" by Carbon Tracker. Today we can start with science and our new knowledge of ecology, biomimicry, climate, geology, thermodynamics, endocrinology, behavioural and brain sciences. This real-world approach will help assure that technologies, business models and enterprises are based on the expansion of human knowledge and planetary awareness. We can also take into account new behavioural insights into our own human cognitive biases, expose economic theory-induced blindness to "externalities," as well as acknowledging our moral and ethical frailties. Finance and its pretensions must be defrocked and its misallocations of resources re-oriented in due diligence processes that start with science in reviewing all business opportunities. Only after passing multi-disciplinary analyses of their scientific validity and resilience, possibilities of advancing equitable human development within Life's Principles, will our models of finance and markets be reformulated to create suitable business and funding models. Some egregious conventional financial models are explored in my " Real Economies and the Illusions of Abstraction" (2010); " From Rigged Carbon Markets to Investing in Green Growth" (2011); and " Updating Fossilized Asset Allocation Classes" (2008). Overviews of global financialization and reform proposals are covered at (www.ethicalmarkets.com Reforming Global Finance). Ethical Markets' Green Transition Scoreboard® tracks progress toward deeper greening of global economies. The multi-disciplinary "dashboard" Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators are updated regularly at www.calvert-henderson.com . The European Commission's Beyond GDP programme (www.beyond-gdp.eu), the OECD's Better Life Index, Canada's Index of Wellbeing and my paper with physicist Fritjof Capra, " Qualitative Growth," the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (2009), all focus on correcting macroeconomic statistics in line with global scientific realities. Join the signers of our Transforming Finance statement! Surveys worldwide by Globescan show that the public in many countries support such statistical upgrades by wide margins. Let's set aside old dogmas and use all our new knowledge! (END/COPYRIGHT IPS) (*) Hazel Henderson is president of Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil), author of many books, former advisor to the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, National Science Foundation National Academy of Engineering, the Calvert Group, Fellow of Britain's Royal Society for Arts and the World Business Academy.

China Cuts Down the Foreign Fun

Imported television shows watched by millions will be canned during the country’s prime “golden time” hours, the government announced last week. Last month, popular prime time entertainment programmes were slashed by two-thirds. This was after programmes featuring time travel were all but banned last year.

Ex-IAEA Chief Urges Talks to Defuse Threat of Attack on Iran

Even as U.N. inspectors expressed disappointment about the results of their visit this week to Iran, a former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) urged all parties to make greater efforts to defuse rapidly rising tensions over Tehran's nuclear programme to avert war.

MEXICO: Keeping Traces of Antibiotics Out of Food

Orange juice and beef form part of the diet of many people in Mexico and other countries of the Americas. But the traces of antibiotics and fungicides they can contain pose risks to human health, and authorities in the region have begun to address the problem.

FM Radio Spells Change, Success for Mideast Women

Nisreen Awwad moves closer to the microphone as she signs off to her listeners, the words "Nisaa FM: music, change, success" displayed prominently over her left shoulder.

Afghan Refugees Hounded in Pakistan

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government recently launched a harsh crackdown on illegal Afghan immigrants who have been pouring across the border into Pakistan, going so far as to request federal government permission to deal with the situation, which has deep social and economic implications for the host country.

VENEZUELA-US: Joined by Black Gold

Venezuela and the United States claim they want to reduce their co-dependence on oil, as supplier and importer, respectively. But their mutually beneficial relationship continues with hardly a hiccup as the years go by, in spite of heated verbal confrontations.

Q&A: How to Reverse the “Feminisation of Poverty”

The phrase "financing for gender equality" may sound dry, but it lies at the heart of some of the most intractable problems faced by women around the world today – and whether the political will exists to allocate real resources to solving them or simply pay lip service.

Afghan Refugees Hounded in Pakistan

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government recently launched a harsh crackdown on illegal Afghan immigrants who have been pouring across the border into Pakistan, going so far as to request federal government permission to deal with the situation, which has deep social and economic implications for the host country.

Egypt-US Standoff Could Hit 40,000 NGOs

The ongoing crackdown by Egypt’s military rulers on a handful of civil society groups accused of receiving illegal foreign funds has far-reaching implications for the estimated 40,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in the Arab world’s most populous country.