News headlines in March 2009, page 17

For East Asia, the current economic crisis represents the end of an era of export-oriented industrialisation that began in the 1960s, when Korea and Taiwan embarked on a development process that tied their growth to the US market. Encouraged by the World Bank to make ''special efforts'' to turn their manufacturing enterprises away from the relatively small markets associated with import substitution toward the much larger opportunities flowing from export promotion, the Southeast Asian countries followed suit in the 1970s and 1980s, writes Walden Bello, professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

To justify itself, state terrorism creates terrorists: it sows hatred and harvests alibis. Everything indicates that this bloodbath in Gaza, which its creators claim was designed to eliminate terrorists, will result in a proliferation of them, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of ''The Open Veins of Latin America'', ''Memories of Fire'' and "Mirrors/An Almost Universal History".

There. A US official has finally said it. Susan Crawford, convening authority for the military commissions at Guantanamo, has admitted what Mohamed al-Qahtani, his lawyers and human rights groups have long said. Al-Qahtani, a Saudi Arabian man held in Guantanamo since 2002, was tortured there, writes Claudio Cordone, Senior Director at Amnesty International.

Food security is one of the major challenges we face in the world economic crisis. Now more than ever it is urgent that we not relegate the Millennium Development Goals to the back burner but rather fulfil this commitment to fight against extreme hunger and poverty that was signed by all UN member nations in 2000, writes Soraya Rodriguez, Spain's secretary of state for international co- operation.

The difference in retirement age between men and women -65 and 60, respectively- in Italy lies at the intersection of two major national problems: pension reform and the unequal treatment of women in the labour market. It is discriminatory, intolerable, and a colossal waste of the great untapped capital of Italy's female population, writes Emma Bonino, leader of the Transnational Radical Party, Senator, and Vice President of the Italian Senate.

The mainstream media in 2008 ran myriad diagnoses of the sickness of the US economy. Central bankers, politicians, and their economic advisors sought to explain the economy's swoon in medical terms: a heart attack, a seizure, on life support, on the operating table, writes Hazel Henderson, author of Ethical Markets: Growing The Green Economy and president of the independent Ethical Markets Media.

For a number of years, and with increasing frequency, the historic leaders of the Cuban revolution (first Fidel Castro and now his brother Raul, currently president) have expressed concern that the major danger facing the country's political system and the revolutionary process that they began half a century ago is disintegration from within, writes Leonardo Padura, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.

Caring for children, ailing relatives and neighbours, cooking and cleaning - all of it feels like 'work,' but without the regular paycheque.

Everyone concedes that the media got it wrong that day. But a decision by the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (TATT) to launch a formal investigation is raising fears that the incident is being used to clamp down on press freedom here.

Cuba's transport crisis finally appears to be coming to an end, after three years of substantial investments and reforms, although future economic growth could pose new challenges.