17/03/2012
By Ernest Corea* IDN-InDepth News – Washington DC – Compelling advice against a hasty, unilateral decision by Israel to “bomb, bomb, bomb” Iran has come – from Israel. The advice is significant not only for what was said, but for who said it.
**Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu | Wikimedia Commons
Meir Dagan, former head spook of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad delivered the back-off counsel against impulsive military action. Presumably, his sense of caution is supported by information not in the public domain.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Dagan in an interview taped for broadcasting by the CBS network said he does not think Israel should strike Iran’s nuclear industry anytime soon, an attack that would have to include “a large number of targets.” In keeping with Mossad’s reputation, he suggested going for “regime change” instead.
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17/03/2012
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is warning that more than a million children below the age of five in the Sahel are facing a disaster amid the ongoing food crisis in the drought-prone region of Africa.
*A young mother and with her malnourished child at a screening centre in Gamdji. UN Photo/WFP/Phil Behan
They are among the some 15 million people estimated to be at risk of food insecurity in countries in the Sahel, including 5.4 million people in Niger, three million in Mali, 1.7 million in Burkina Faso and 3.6 million in Chad, as well as hundreds of thousands in Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, according to UN figures.
The agency noted that it has so far received $24 million against an emergency appeal of $119 million for 2012.
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11/03/2012
By Peter Schwarz – WSWS* – In his novel 1984, George Orwell coined the term “Newspeak” for an ideologically charged language that stands reality on its head. The word “haircut” as applied to the write-down of Greek government debt should be added to the vocabulary of Newspeak.
**Credit photo: Ggia | Wikimedia Commons
What is publicly presented as the financial markets’ “sacrifice,” a “waiver” by private creditors, giving up over half of the value of their Greek bonds, is in fact a financial gift to the banks.
The debt swap agreed Thursday [9 March] night by nearly 86 percent of the creditors will not prevent the bankruptcy of the Greek state. It merely postpones it by shifting the cost of such a bankruptcy from the private to the public sector, on which about three-quarters of the Greek debt will fall.
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11/03/2012
Bangkok (IRIN*) – Japan is widely regarded as well-prepared for disasters, being used to frequent tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes and volcanic activity, but a year after the calamitous events of 11 March 2011, the lessons from the multi-disaster still resonate.
**Photo:Japanese Red Cross | IRIN
“The learning from the Great East Japan Earthquake will be a vital contribution to preparing the world to meet the challenges of disaster risk in the urbanized, globalized world of the 21st century where a natural hazard can trigger a chain of catastrophic events,” UN Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, Margareta Wahlström, said.
On that day, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck 70km east off the coast of the Tohoku region in northeast Honshu, Japan’s largest island, followed by tsunami waves up to 40m high.
Soon after, explosions and radioactive leaks rocked the nearby Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini nuclear power plants, adding a new calamity for authorities to deal with while complicating the safety of aid workers on the ground.
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11/03/2012
Yemen has been facing a new wave of internal displacement, with tens of thousands of civilians fleeing tribal clashes in the north and fresh fighting between Government troops and militants in the country’s south.
Credit:UN
The situation is particularly difficult in the Haradh governorate, north of the capital, Sana’a, where, according to Yemeni authorities, sporadic tribal clashes have displaced some 52,000 people over the past three months, the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Adrian Edwards, said in Geneva.
“That figure is in addition to the estimated 314,000 Yemenis already displaced in the country’s north and unable to return to their homes in the Sa’ada governorate.”
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07/03/2012
By Andre Damon – WSWS* – Three and a half years after the eruption of the financial crisis, the Wall Street speculators responsible for the crash continue to rake in billions of dollars while benefiting from ongoing government bailouts and a de facto amnesty for their crimes.
Image: Jsquish | Wikimedia Commons
The 40 highest-earning hedge fund managers took home a combined $13.2 billion last year, with the top 10 averaging more than $200 million each, according to a survey published last week by Forbes magazine.
Raymond Dalio, the head of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, made $3 billion. Close behind was James Simons of Renaissance Technologies, who took in $2.1 billion. Third was the well-known corporate raider Carl Icahn, who pocketed $2 billion.
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06/03/2012
Geneva – A groundbreaking report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) identifies more than 300 banks, pension funds, insurance companies and asset managers in 30 countries with substantial investments in nuclear arms producers.
The 180-page report, Don’t Bank on the Bomb: The Global Financing of Nuclear Weapons Producers, provides details of financial transactions with 20 companies that are heavily involved in the manufacture, maintenance and modernization of US, British, French and Indian nuclear forces.
Nuclear disarmament campaigners are appealing to financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear arms industry.
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04/03/2012
By Shahira Amin
Cairo – The women of Egypt were at the vanguard in the eighteen day January 2011 mass uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak. But since then, they have been sidelined and pushed back into the shadows.
*Photo credit: Mariam Soliman | Wikimedia Commons
As they struggle for greater equality, women are becoming increasingly concerned that the gains they’ve made in recent years may be reversed. This, as a rising tide of Islamism and a ruthless military regime threaten to silence their voices and undermine their rights.
Islamists took a commanding lead in recent parliamentary elections winning more than 70% of the seats—a worrying prospect for women seeking gender equality. For despite their promises to support the revolutionary goals of freedom, democracy and justice and to press for a secular agenda, the Islamists are calling for the implementation of Sharia Law.
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04/03/2012
Beirut – Bahrain has routinely convicted hundreds of opposition activists and others of politically motivated charges in unfair trials, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a new report. The government should void the convictions in trials before Bahrain’s military and civilian courts that fell far short of international fair trial standards, Human Rights Watch said.
The 94-page report “No Justice in Bahrain: Unfair Trials in Military and Civilian Courts” documents serious due process violations in high-profile trials before Bahrain’s special military courts in 2011 – including one trial of 21 prominent political activists and another of 20 doctors and other medical personnel – and in politically motivated trials before ordinary criminal courts since 2010.
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04/03/2012
Analysis by Julio Godoy – IDN-InDepth News* – Paris – If you ask the French ministry for foreign affairs about the country’s position on a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, the spokesperson will surely refer you to the statements by the French ambassadors before the UN both in New York and Geneva, and will repeat that France supports the global application of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Nuclear explosion | Wikimedia Commons
Indeed, France has since the mid 1990s officially supported the objectives of the resolutions adopted by the Review Conference of the Parties to the NPT, in particular those referring to the creation of a nuclear-weapons free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, and openly calls for the implementation of the conference’s specific resolution of 1995.
But when it comes down to the facts, this apparently solid French position turns out to be a mere lip service to the cause of a NWFZ in the Middle East, in particular if the project questions Israel’s nuclear weapons policy, and asks the Jewish state to subscribe to the mentioned resolution.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 