News stories by Roberto Savio, page 2

ROME, Jun 21 (IPS) - Social Democrats, who had been steadily disappearing following the crisis of 2008, have been making a small comeback in the last year. Now they are in power in Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland and, most recently, in Denmark.

ROME, Jun 03 (IPS) - The terrible feeling I had on waking up and seeing the Italian voting results at the recent European elections was that my country was suddenly full of strangers. How could the majority of Italians reconfirm a government which has been the most inefficient in history, quarrelling on everything every single day and looking with total indifference to the looming problem of how to establish the next budget without clashing with the European Union or squeezing Italian citizens? Its irresponsible debate on the Italian finances has now led to a spread (difference of value) of 290 points with the Germans.

ROME, Mar 28 (IPS) - Since the powerful march of hundreds of thousands of students in 1,000 towns against climate change, an unexpected campaign of delegitimation, "demystification" and demonisation has started against Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who started the movement. After searching the media, social media and websites, this campaign can be divided into four different groups.

ROME, Mar 22 (IPS) - If we ever needed a proof, to see how the political system has become self referent, and unable to update itself, the last student march, in more than 1.000 towns, is a very good example. Of course, politicians referred to it in declarations, , and the President of the European Community, an old political fox with a lot of mileage, Juncker, even kissed the hand of Grreta Thunber ( a totally demagogic gesture). But however this unprecedented youth manifestation has given life to a new initiative on climate change. We are lucky that Greta's Asperger syndrome of GRETA, , brings little empathy and more determination, so is totally improbable that she will be co-opted by flattery and recognition …

GENEVA and ROME, Mar 12 (IPS) - For over 70 years, the UN system has been perceived as the guardian of peace and development in the world. However, multilateralism today is undeniably under strain. The effectiveness of global institutions and of global policymaking is questioned, and alliances are fraying.

ROME, Feb 21 (IPS) - Roberto Savio is founder of IPS Inter Press Service and President Emeritus.

I have been a member of the first international party: the Transnational Radical Party, founded in 1956 by Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino. Then in 1988, I was a witness of the large protest, in Berlin West, against the meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, a precursor of the “Battle of Seattle” in 1988, where 40.000 protesters disrupted the annual meeting of the two world’s financial institutions. I was even detained for a day by the police, even if was just a witness: my condition of foreigner made me automatically suspect.

ROME, Jan 17 (IPS) - After Teresa May's defeat in the British parliament it is clear that a new spectre is haunting Europe. It is no longer the spectre of communism, which opens Marx's Manifesto of 1848; it is the spectre of the failure of neoliberal globalisation, which reigned uncontested following the fall of the Berlin Wall, until the financial crisis of 2009.

ROME, Jan 08 (IPS) - Roberto Savio is founder of IPS Inter Press Service and President Emeritus

The person most qualified to write the foreword for this latest work by Riccardo Petrella, In the Name of Humanity, would actually be Pope Francis, who, using other words but speaking of values and making denouncements, has often argued what the reader will find in the following pages. I quote him, because words like "solidarity", "equality", "social justice" or "participation" – now used only by Pope Francis I – have now disappeared from today's political vocabulary.

I was called to this task because I have spent my life in favour of information that would give citizens the tools to be conscious actors. But the reason why from a "professional" I have become an "activist" in the campaign for world governance is precisely because I see information as directly responsible for the drift in which we find ourselves.

Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian Nobel laureate honoured for her work in neurobiology, once gave a splendid conference with the title "The imperfect brain". There she explained that man has a brain that is not used completely, while the reverse is true for the cockroach. In the growing fog that envelops the planet and its inhabitants, looking at things from the point of view of a cockroach would probably give us a new perspective. Also because the cockroach survived the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, it is 300 million years old, and it is distributed around the planet in over 4,000 species. All things that give it a great advantage over man.

ROME, Sep 14 (IPS) - Roberto Savio is co-founder of IPS Inter Press Service and President EmeritusThis testimony to Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General, comes a month after his death. Much has already been written, and it is now superfluous to recall his efforts for peace and international cooperation. It is better to place his figure in a crucial context: how the great powers progressively reduced the figure of the UN Secretary-General and charged a high price from those who tried to keep the system's independence.