Ecobreves – MEXICO: Promising Invention for Spinal Injuries

Mexican researchers have synthesized a polymer that promises to restore the electrical connections in a damaged spinal cord, which could help injured people recover mobility.

“Politicians and Executives Have Obsolete Ideas of How Nature Works”

If they could, our politicians and business executives would try to squeeze the last drop of fertility out of our soils to make the last dollar or peso by over-exploiting nature, says the straight-talking U.S. conservationist and investor Douglas Tompkins.

BURMESE OPPOSITION LEADER WEAK AFTER REFUSING FOOD FOR FOUR WEEKS

Detained Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is malnourished after having refused food supplies for over four weeks in protest against her unlawful detention, sources from her party, the National League for Democracy party (NLD), report, writes Zin Linn, a former political detainee in Burma is presently the media and information director of the National Coalition Government of Union of Burma. In this analysis, Linn writes that the military junta that rules the country has stated that she is not staging a hunger strike, while the NLD has stopped short of using the term. The leader of the NLD, which swept the 1990 parliamentary elections, Suu Kyi has spent 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest. The junta refused to accept the results of the vote. There is clear evidence of growing divisions among Burma\'s military brass over the treatment of Suu Kyi and how to protect the army\'s future political role in Burma. The split is largely between pragmatists who understand the need for political and economic reform, and the hardliners who want to hang on to power regardless of the pressure for change from inside and outside of the country. Suu Kyi knows that time is running out. Her current protest is a brave wake-up call to the whole nation, especially the men in uniform who support a pragmatic approach to rebuilding the ruined nation.

CUBA: THE MASS MEDIA INTO QUESTION

The shortcomings of the Cuban media are due not to a lack of professional ability or to technical or financial deficiencies but rather to entrenched ways of thinking. As in other sectors -agriculture, the service industry, and home construction- there is a clear need for a less centralised and less uniform model, writes Rafael Hernandez, a political commentator and editor of the journal Temas in Havana. In this article Hernandez writes: the national debate that developed in September and October 2007 after the July 26 speech by then interim president Raul Castro showed not only that is there unmuzzled criticism of the government by Cuban civil society but also that channelling it through the Cuban media reinforces the general attitude towards the government. This debate revealed that Cubans disagree strongly with the mass media, which they criticise for not reflecting their national reality or giving sufficient space to Cuban public opinion, for its repetition of slogans, and for its \"excessive politicisation\". Democratic debate, with complete clarity and confidence on the part of the state, cannot be limited by the fear that there might be an attempt from outside the country to take advantage of the situation, Raul Castro stated on July 26 - \"because sooner or later the truth will come out\". The implementation of this policy will make it possible for the real Cuba, a vibrant and diverse civil society in contrast to its usual representation as uniform mass, to fully express itself.

Time Running Out for Mexico City's Garbage

The capital of Mexico, home to nine million people, has a gigantic dump that is on the verge of collapse and emits two million tons of climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually.

MONTREAL PROTOCOL: A Global Partnership for Global Benefits

The elimination of some of the substances that deplete the ozone layer could also mean reducing emissions of up to 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, writes expert and UNEP official Silvie Lemmet.

Ecobreves – HONDURAS: Adiós to Controversial Forestry Agency

The much-criticized Honduran forestry development agency, Cohdefor, officially halted operations on Monday, Sep. 15, after more than three decades, and ceding the way for the new governmental body, the Forest Conservation Institute (IFC).

Ecobreves – BRAZIL: Amazon Boat Runs on Solar Power

The first solar-powered boat is already navigating rivers in the Brazilian Amazon. Weighing 250 kilograms and a capacity to carry four people, the Siesuí 1 serves a hotel on the Araçá River in the northwestern state of Amazonas.

Ecobreves – CHILE: Progress on Native Forest Law

Chile's Ministry of Agriculture opened the registration period until Sep. 29 to run for a post on the Consultative Council of the Law on Native Forest Recovery, published in the Official Newspaper of Jul. 30.

Ecobreves – VENEZUELA: Transit and Garbage on the Electoral Agenda

The combined problem of garbage and transit in Caracas awaits solutions in the final stretch of municipal and regional elections to take place in November across Venezuela.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WEST

The Russian incursion into Georgia after Georgian troops broke into South Ossetia was actually modest compared with NATO\'s behaviour towards Yugoslavia and Kosovo. The Russians wanted to back up the compelling independence claims of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Stalin incorporated into Georgia. As American author and political analyst George Friedman recently pointed out, the invasion was primarily a response to the threatening military encirclement of Russia carried out by Washington, writes Gunnar Garbo, former editor, MP, and Norwegian Ambassador, presently a writer and activist. In this article, Garbo writes that when Khrushchev installed missiles in Cuba, the world felt itself pushed to the brink of atomic war, and yet today, Western leaders are demanding that Russians see the installation of our missiles along their border as tokens of friendship. For many years, US leaders have been building up a global preponderance of military might. Now they have to recognise that Russia is once again a regional power which they can\'t continue to humiliate without bringing on a new Cold War. This can only be avoided if the US finally starts treating Russia on equal terms. It should stop taking steps that create the same fears and suspicions in Moscow which similar Russian actions would have produced in Washington.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF INFAMY

Spanish radio personality Federico Jimenez Losantos has called Barack Obama a hollow caricature and said that comparing him to Paris Hilton is insulting to her. McCain, he says, has done nothing since he left Hanoi, but his wife Cindy is more interesting because she\'d be a good lay, writes Joaquin Roy, \'\'Jean Monnet\'\' professor and Director of the European Union Centre of the University of Miami. More of his remarks: Castro should hold off on dying and live on with his artificial anus, suffering a prolonged and agonising death from Parkinson\'s disease. After him on the \"kill\" list would come Hugo Chavez, the missing link. How does he get away with this? In this analysis, Roy writes that anything goes. It is believed that whatever is shown on TV is true and credible. Few know that Jimenez Losantos was tried and found guilty of slandering impeccable figures of the right like Ruiz Gallardon and Jose Antonio Zarzalejos, ex-editor of the newspaper ABC. And no one has the courage to sue for significant damages, American style as opposed to the 36-100,000 euro fines imposed by the Madrid courts for slander. No one is bringing criminal charges for defamation of character despite the fact that it is clearly defined in the criminal code. At present, the newspaper barons that are protecting this systematic operation are not giving it a second thought.

Environmental Sustainability at a Crossroads

Latin America needs new sources of wealth and of employment, but sustainable development will require increasingly greater environmentally clean economic expansion, write Ricardo Sánchez, regional director of the UN Environment Program, and Mexican social development expert Enrique Provencio.

Ecobreves – MEXICO: Teachers Lacking in Natural Sciences

An assessment of science teachers of secondary schools in Mexico shows that they know very little about physics, chemistry or biology.

Ecobreves – HONDURAS: United Front Against Illegal Logging

The Honduran National Human Rights Commission signed a pact with civil society groups and the government as part of a shared strategy to halt illegal logging and lumber trafficking.

Ecobreves – BRAZIL: Alternative Fertilizers to Fight Inflation

The Brazilian government has decided to set aside 4.8 million dollars to develop alternative fertilizers, given the brutal hike in prices of conventional fertilizers.

Ecobreves – ARGENTINA: Massacre of American Rhea

An environmental group in Argentina has denounced the massacre in recent weeks of several hundred ñandú, or American rhea, a cousin of the ostrich that is increasingly threatened in the central province of Córdoba due to the expansion of soybean cultivation.

Courts the Battleground for Fight Against Brazil’s Paper Mills

The massive resistance against building up an international-scale paper industry in Brazil has shifted to the judicial arena.

Climate Change Imposes New Conditions for Policy

If the raw material export sector and the governments of Latin America insist on depredatory productive systems, it will be unlikely that natural resources will be able to sustain future development, writes Chilean environmental leader Sara Larraín in this exclusive column for Tierramérica.

WAITING IN CUBA

Since the formation of the country in the 19th century, Cubans have always had to wait for the arrival of something that would complete them or improve their lot (political independence, better government, economic development, etc), writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban author and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages. The growing desire to emigrate is one of the most tangible reflections of the exhaustion of the process of waiting. What is painful about the case of Cuba is that the process is also directly compromising the essence of today\'s society and above all the future society, because a considerable number of the emigrants of the last two decades were young professionals who found themselves unmotivated, disinterested, and distrustful and decided to shift their hopes to areas where their chances seemed better. This exodus of the young, the intelligent, and the educated is without a doubt bleeding Cuba\'s present and future. It is also a cause, among others, of the aging and the shrinking of the population of the island. The art of waiting that their ancestors practised does not seem to be an option that the youngest Cubans wish to pursue any longer. What remains to be known is whether Cuban society can infinitely prolong its wait as it sees so many of its sons and daughters carried away.

THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUAL UNDER TOTALITARIAN REGIMES

The role of the writer in politics has been a subject of intense debate since French novelist Emile Zola published in 1898 \"J\'accuse\", his indictment of the French army\'s wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus for treason. The most recent chapter was related to the life and work of the renowned Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died on August 4, writes Mario Soares, ex-President and ex-Prime Minister of Portugal. Between World War I and II numerous French as well as German, British, American, Latin American, and other writers had a considerable effect on the political opinions of the public. One of the most influential was Romain Rolland, author of \"Jean Christophe\" and \"L\'Ame Enchantee\", a French pacifist and communist sympathiser who was read throughout Europe. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from Russia and became the dissident most loathed by the world\'s communist parties. I remember clearly the polemic that erupted in Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution freed us from the dictatorship and how Portuguese communists attacked us socialdemocrats for defending Solzhenitsyn in keeping with our creed.