President Barack Obama’s refusal in a White House briefing earlier this month to announce a “red line” regarding the Iran nuclear programme represented another in a series of rebuffs of pressure from Defence Secretary Robert Gates.

THE OBAMA rebuff was the culmination of a months-long internal debate between Barack Obama and Robert Gates over the "breakout capability" issue which surfaced in the news media last April.

Gates has been arguing that Iran could turn its existing stock of low enriched uranium (LEU) into a capability to build a nuclear weapon secretly by using covert enrichment sites and undeclared sources of uranium.

The European Union is failing to fulfil its environmental commitments in practically all areas, from protecting biodiversity to improving air quality in cities, according to official studies released this month.

THE WORRISOME trend of EU's inability to execute its environmental obligations is confirmed by the European Commission in its latest Environment Policy Review released on 2 August. Although many official environmental protection programmes have been launched and progress is evident in some areas, the EC says in the document that "further efforts are needed, in particular to tackle the loss of biodiversity".

The actions of a US military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373 have caused civilian deaths and have been heavily criticised.

WHEN Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the US provincial reconstruction team in Nangahar Province, Afghanistan arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologising to do.

Philips had to explain why a covert US military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373, hunting for Qari Ur-Rahman, an alleged Taliban commander...

An article by pro-Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was evidently an attempt to show Barack Obama’s administration that it risks an attack by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran unless the US takes a more menacing line toward Iran’s nuclear programme.

Instead of showing the risk of an Israeli attack on Iran to Barak Obama’s administration Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic provides new evidence that senior figures in the Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike and believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apocalyptic rhetoric about an Iranian nuclear threat as an “existential threat” is unnecessary and self-defeating.

Opportunistic food traders have been blamed for soaring food prices across the Middle East, adding to the financial burdens of families observing the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

“EVERY YEAR it’s the same story,” complains Abeer Salem, an Egyptian widow supporting two children. “Merchants know we have an obligation to feed our families and the poor during Ramadan. They exploit this by raising food prices.” Food inflation is as much a part of Ramadan as the traditional gathering of Muslims with their family and friends to share an iftar, the meal that marks the end of the daily fast. Consumption of certain food items, particularly meat, increases during the month as families spend more time at home ...

Abolition movements are gaining momentum in North Africa, but authoritarian regimes appear reluctant to remove capital punishment from the penal code.

“RULERS who could (abolish the death penalty) will not give it up easily,” says Nasser Amin, director of the Arab Centre for the Independence of the Judiciary and Legal Profession. Capital punishment is legislated in all North African countries. Libya and Egypt proscribe the death penalty for dozens of crimes ranging from murder to treason. Executions are carried out regularly by hanging or firing squad. Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have moratoriums on executions, though courts continue to pronounce death sentences for various offences. Hundreds of prisoners wait on death row.

38 countries will start observing the Convention on Cluster Munitions as of August, only two years after the treaty was first announced.

“This new instrument is a major advance for the global disarmament and humanitarian agendas, and will help us to counter the widespread insecurity and suffering caused by these terrible weapons, particularly among civilians and children,” noted UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Cluster munitions explode in mid-air to release dozens – sometimes hundreds – of smaller “bomblets” across large areas. Because the final location of these scattered smaller bombs is difficult to control, they can cause large numbers of civilian casualties.

The oceans are the lifeblood of our planet and plankton its red blood cells. Those vital “red blood cells” have declined more than 40 per cent since 1950 and the rate of decline is increasing due to climate change, scientists reported this week.

“Phytoplankton are a critical part of our planetary life support system. They produce half of the oxygen we breathe, draw down surface CO2, and ultimately support all of our fisheries,” said Boris Worm of Canada’s Dalhousie University and one of the world’s leading experts on the global oceans. “An ocean with less phytoplankton will function differently,” said Worm, the co-author of a new study on plankton published this week in Nature.

Plankton are the equivalent of grass, trees and other plants that make land green, says study co-author Marlon Lewis, an oceanographer at Dalhousie. “It is frightening to realise we have lost nearly half of the ocean’s green plants,” Lewis told IPS. “It looks like the rate of decline is increasing,” he said.

36-year-old Luo Fusheng left his hometown in China’s Jiangxi province a decade ago to look for work to help support his family. Unskilled and with limited education, Luo eventually ended up in the factory city of Shenzhen, where he now works as a security guard.

Luo Fusheng said in a telephone interview: “I only earn 1,000 yuan (150 US dollars) a month, but I rarely get it all. The employer always pays less for various reasons.

Exactly 25 years after French secret agents sank its flagship and killed one of its crew, Greenpeace has begun construction of a new Rainbow Warrior. The group’s leaders say its environmental campaigning is needed more than ever.

The new ship will be the group’s most environmentally friendly vessel in its almost 40-year history. Greenpeace leaders say that the third Rainbow Warrior is not just an example of environmentally-friendly engineering but a symbol of global campaigning against environmental abuse.