What’s New January 2009

This page lists changes to this site for January 2009.

See below for other updates and to get notified of changes to the site.

I am pleased to announce that Global Issues now provides daily world news stories, provided by the international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS).

I have been reading, and linking to, news stories from IPS for around 10 years. I have been impressed with their coverage of issues from around the world that our mainstream often seems to ignore or devote little time to. It is therefore a great honor to be able to carry their feed and publish stories from them.

These stories update daily and the old news section on the global issues web site has been overhauled where you can browse headlines and read the news stories.

In addition, a separate web feed is provided at http://www.globalissues.org/news/feed if you wish to receive these via your preferred feed reader (sorry, email updates for daily news is not available).

I hope you find this news service useful.

An overview of the Climate Change Conference (also known as COP 14), held in Poznań, Poland, at the beginning of December, 2008. As with past conferences, this too was not without its controversies. For example, while the Adaptation Fund was launched the funding of it caused lots of disagreements. The conference came at a time when Europe seemed to weaken their usually strong stance on climate change action and on news that in recent years, emissions from industrialized nations had risen.

Recent violence in the Gaza Strip, or terrorism in Mumbai results in sustained and details media coverage for days and days. And rightly so. However, by comparison, African conflicts, where usually far more people are killed and displaced, receives a lot less coverage or background analysis to help understand those conflicts. Some 88% of conflict deaths in the last two decades have occurred in Africa, for example, yet the mainstream media coverage has been nowhere near the scale of other conflicts in Europe, Asia or the Middle East. Some additional graphs and notes added on this.

Some nations are now attempting to turn to Keynesian style macroeconomic policies to see if they can get out of their crisis. These policies involve massive stimulus packages in the hope it will boost the economy. Some notes on this and some financial service corruption were added.

Some notes added to the corruption section on how some corruption in the US in the 1930s was dealt with through the New Deal. Corruption is a huge problem in both poor and rich nations alike. As an extremely severe global economic and financial crisis takes hold, corruption is likely to increase. Many governments are trying to stimulate their economies to get out of the crisis they find themselves in. It is perhaps a critical, or at least opportune, moment to renew efforts to tackle corruption.

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