TWO DAYS ago, the State of Israel celebrated its 70th birthday. For days we heard about nothing else. Innumerable speeches full of platitudes. A huge festival of kitsch.
Uri Avnery
Everyone agreed: It was a historic moment, when David Ben-Gurion got up in a small hall in Tel Aviv and declared the foundation of the state.
Everybody still alive from then was asked this week: Where were you at that moment? What did you feel, when history knocked on the door?
WELL, I was alive. And I did not feel anything.
I was a soldier in the new army, which was not yet called “Israeli Defense Army ” (its official name in Hebrew). My company had a small encampment of pup tents in Hulda, a kibbutz south of Tel Aviv.
We were to attack an Arab village called al-Kubab, near the town of Ramleh, that night.
18 April 2018 — There is a threat to the future of humanity so silent that few people notice it, so pervasive that many families have suffered from it and so dangerous that it may soon be the leading cause of premature deaths worldwide.
Martin Khor
If climate change has now become more obvious and visible as the No.1 risk to our civilisation, antibiotic resistance will soon rival it as the gravest threat to human life and health.
Many friends have told me of how their relatives have contracted infections while staying in hospitals and could not be cured with a normal dose of antibiotics. Some of them have died.
For example, the mother of a close friend of mine died from MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) after a visit to the hospital for an unrelated minor ailment.
MRSA is an antibiotic-resistant pathogen that causes a variety of serious infections. It is well known for being spread in hospitals, but it is also a problem elsewhere in the community.
New York, 17 April, 2018 –Yemeni government officials have tortured, raped, and executed migrants and asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa in a detention center in the southern port city of Aden, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities have denied asylum seekers an opportunity to seek refugee protection and deported migrants en masse to dangerous conditions at sea.
20 April 2018 — The arrival of pre-Monsoon rains in southern Bangladesh have exposed alarming level of risks for Rohingya refugees, United Nations humanitarian agencies said, urging immediate funding to ensure support and protection can be provided to hundreds of thousands in desperate need.
UNICEF/Sujan | A Rohingya refugee child sits next to buckets collecting rainwater at a makeshift refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. With the arrival of rains, the challenges have multiplied for hundreds of thousands of refugees in the area.
“The arrival of the rains first marks the start of what is going to be an incredibly challenging period for the refugees and those working to support them,” said John McCue, an official at the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), in Cox’s Bazar, where more than 700,000 refugees are residing.
Panama City, 20 April, 2018 (UN Environment)* — Efforts to reduce dangerous air and climate pollutants by Latin American and Caribbean countries could reap immediate and long-term benefits for health, food security and the climate according to the first ever Integrated Assessment of Short-lived Climate Pollutants (SLCPs) for the region.
Short-lived climate pollutants – which include black carbon (or soot), methane, ground level (tropospheric) ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – all have a global warming potential hundreds to thousands times that of carbon dioxide. Black carbon and ozone also seriously impact human and plant health.
**Photo:The Palace of Westminster, seat of both houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom | Author: Alvesgaspar | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
There is no more foul a stench than the stench of hypocrisy, and there is no more foul a hypocrisy than the British government painting Bashar al-Assad as a monster when in truth he and the Syrian people have been grappling with a twin-headed monster in the shape of Salafi-jihadi terror and Western imperialism.
Both are committed to destroying Syria as an independent, non-sectarian state, and both are inextricably linked.
The US-France-UK raid on Syria is less mission accomplished than situation worsened.
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17 April 2018 (openDemocracy)* — The previous column in this series examined the kinds of attack that the United States and its partners might mount against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria after the reported chemical-weapons attack in Douma on 7 April. It stated:
**Photo shows Tomahawk missile being fire from the USS Philippine Sea and the USS Arleigh Burke at IS targets | 23 September 2014 | Source: United States Department of Defense | Author: U.S. Navy photo | public domain | Wikimedia Commons: “This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.”
(Greenpeace International)*— Today, we’re celebrating a huge moment in the global movement for a plastic-free future: more than one million people around the world have called on big corporations to do their part to end single-use plastics.
Bucharest (IOM)* – IOM, the UN Migration Agency, is today (19/04/2018) kicking off an innovative multi-country project to provide resettled refugees with the building blocks to start their new life in Europe.
Skills profiling tool for refugees resettled to the UK, Germany, Portugal or Romania. | IOM
Initially targeting 500 Syrian refugees, the LINK IT project aims to link pre-departure and post-arrival support to facilitate the social and economic integration of resettled refugees in four European countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal and Romania.
Rome, 18 April 2018 (FAO)* – The body charged with keeping global trade in plants and plant products safe has adopted several new phytosanitary standards aimed at preventing destructive agricultural and environmental pests from jumping borders and spreading internationally.
A male Gypsy Moth, a voracious tree pest capable of defoliating millions of acres of forest in a single year. |Source: FAO.
The standardized norms developed by the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) cover a range of strategies and techniques used to prevent the introduction and spread of plant diseases and pests to new environments, thereby avoiding their often-devastating impacts on biodiversity, food security and trade.
