20/05/2012
Geneva – A record number of African migrants fled to Yemen this year, with 43,000 people having reached the Middle Eastern country in only four months, the UN refugee agency reports.
Somali refugees wait on Yemen’s Red Sea coast for transport to Aden. Photo: UNHCR/R.Nuri
“All those who had decided to make the crossing exposed themselves to extreme risks and dangers at every stage of their journey,” a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Andrej Mahecic, said.
“They faced shocking levels of abuse and violence by smugglers, as well as arbitrary arrests and detention, closed borders and forced returns, trafficking, lack of access to shelter, water, food or medical assistance,” he added.
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18/05/2012
United Nations senior officials stressed the importance of establishing a new paradigm for growth that ensures social inclusiveness, job opportunities for all, and more accountability from the financial sector to tackle the ongoing global economic crisis.
*UN Photo/The Global Fund
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“It is time to recognize that human capital and natural capital are every bit as important as financial capital,” said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 17 May in his remarks to the General Assembly’s high-level thematic debate on The State of the World Economy and Finance and its Impact on Development, taking place at UN Headquarters in New York.
“Let us face the facts: the old model is broken. We need to create a new one – a new model for dynamic growth,” Ban, one of the meeting’s co-chairs, said. “A new paradigm based on stable economies and decent jobs and opportunities for all,” the UN reports.
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18/05/2012
By Nick Beams, 18 May, (WSWS*) — Leaders of the G8 major economies meet over the next two days with the threat of a global financial crisis hanging over their heads as the turmoil in the eurozone worsens.
**Eurozone. Author Glentamara. Source Europe_countries.svg
Every day brings the bankruptcy of Greece and its exclusion from the eurozone a step closer, with incalculable consequences for the European and global financial system as fears grow over the viability of the banking system in a number of countries.
It is a measure of the depth of the crisis that three and half years after the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers brought the world economy to the brink of disaster an entire country now faces bankruptcy. The global financial system again faces the prospect of collapse, despite the provision of trillions of dollars of bailouts and the supply of an ocean of cheap funds since 2008.
Global share markets fell sharply yesterday with the FTSE All-World equity index down a further 1 percent and predictions that stocks will fall further today [18 May].
Yesterday [17 May] the credit rating agency Moody’s lowered its ratings on 16 Spanish banks, with a three-notch downgrade for the three major Spanish lenders. The decision followed a move by the agency last week to downgrade the rating of 26 Italian banks.
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15/05/2012
Gland, Switzerland — An ever-growing demand for resources by a growing population is putting tremendous pressures on our planet’s biodiversity and is threatening our future security, health and well-being, reveals the 2012 edition of WWF’s Living Planet Report – the leading biennial survey of the Earth’s health.
**We have lost 97% of our wild tigers in just over a century; only 3,200 remaining | Source: WWF
Produced in collaboration with the Zoo-logical Society of London and Global Footprint Network, this year’s report was launched on 14 May from the International Space Station – by ESA astronaut André Kuipers, who provided a unique perspective of the state of the planet from his European Space Agency mission.
“We only have one Earth. From up here I can see humanity’s footprint, including forest fires, air pollution and erosion – challenges which are reflected in this edition of the Living Planet Report,” said Kuipers in launching the report during his second mission into space.
“While there are unsustainable pressures on the planet, we have the ability to save our home, not only for our benefit, but, above all, for generations to come,” he said.
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15/05/2012
A group of United Nations (UN) independent experts today called on the European Union (EU) to take the lead in promoting the adoption of a global financial transaction tax that would offset the costs of the current economic crisis and protect basic human rights, the UN reports.
*Youth protesting in New York, as part of Occupy Wall Street movement. Photo: David Shankbone
“Where the world financial crisis has brought about the loss of millions of jobs, socialized private debt burdens and now risks causing significant human rights regressions through wide-ranging austerity packages, a financial transaction tax (FTT) is a pragmatic tool for providing the means for governments to protect and fulfil the human rights of their people,” said the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Magdalena Sepúlveda.
According to a news release from the UN office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR), estimates suggest that at its lowest rate the FTT would yield about $48 billion across the Group of Twenty major economies, with higher rates offering up to $250 billion per year to offset the costs of the enduring economic, financial, fuel, climate and food crises.
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14/05/2012
By George Monbiot – TRANSCEND* – Why the private sector should be subject to freedom of information laws.
**Wall Street area from Brooklyn | Photo by Hu Totya | Wikimedia Commons
Modern government could be interpreted as a device for projecting corporate power. Since the 1980s, in Britain, the US and other nations, the primary mission of governments has been to grant their sponsors in the private sector ever greater access to public money and public life.
There are several means by which they do so: the privatisation and outsourcing of public services, the stuffing of public committees with corporate executives(1), the reshaping of laws and regulations to favour big business. In the UK, the Health and Social Care Act extends the corporate domain in ways unimaginable even five years ago.
With these increasing powers come diminishing obligations. Through repeated cycles of deregulation, governments release big business from its duty of care towards both people and the planet. While citizens are subject to ever more control – as the state extends surveillance and restricts our freedom to protest and assemble(2,3) – companies are subject to ever less.
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14/05/2012
By Shahira Amin*
Cairo, 14 May, 2012. As Egypt prepares for presidential elections in less than two weeks’ time, the country is on the brink of chaos. Tensions have been brewing for more than a year and the patience of Egyptians is wearing thin. They yearn for stability and many feel betrayed by the country’s de facto military rulers who have held power since Mubarak was toppled in February 2011.
“The ruling military generals who promised us stability have only delivered brutality and repression,” complained 24-year-old activist Tarek Ali at a protest two weeks ago outside the Defence Ministry in Abbasia.
The violent confrontations between pro-democracy activists and security forces that have erupted sporadically during the transitional period have been the focus of local media, but once again there has been a stark contrast between the independent media coverage of the deadly violence and that shown on Egyptian State TV.
Democracy activists accuse state television of launching a vicious defamation campaign against them — one which, they say, has largely succeeded in turning public opinion against them.
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14/05/2012
While the United States is reported to have intensified its drone attacks on revolutionary Yemen, the United Nations informed that five million Yemenis – or nearly a quarter of the population– are severely food insecure. Meanwhile, at least 800,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition.
*Photo Credit: Email4mobile
Moreover, the use of the heavy weaponry, land-mines and detonating unexploded ordnance in Yemen have claimed the lives of 27 children and maimed 32 others so far this year, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported.
Across the country, some 76 schools have been occupied by families displaced by the conflict, and updated data on nutrition indicates a rise in the number of acutely malnourished children to 967,000 – almost one in four – a UNICEF spokesperson, Merixie Mercado, said.
“Stunting rates, a sign of chronic malnutrition, are at 60 per cent, with the children at risk of irreversible physical and cognitive damage,” she added.
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12/05/2012
By Andre Damon (WSWS)* – Amid deepening poverty and unemployment for masses of American working people, the largest US corporations once again posted record profits last year.
**The New York Stock Exchange. Photo by: Arnoldius | Wikimedia Commons
Fortune magazine released its ranking of the 500 biggest US corporations Monday, which showed that they received a record-breaking $824 billion in combined profits in 2011, up 16 percent from 2010.
But despite having more money than ever, companies are refusing to invest and hire. Instead, they are paying out record bonuses to executives and hoarding what remains in cash.
The average CEO took home $12.14 million in 2011, up from $12.04 million in 2010 and $10.36 million in 2009, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute published earlier this month.
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11/05/2012
Egypt’s parliament on May 6, 2012, approved amendments to the Code of Military Justice that failed to end the unprecedented expansion of military trials of civilians, despite pleas for reform from the legal and human rights communities, a major human rights group deplored.
**Photo by EGY-ARMY-MID11 | Wikimedia Commons
According to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, in 2011 more than 12,000 civilians, including children, faced unfair military trials which fail to provide the basic due process rights of civilian courts, more than the number of military trials of civilians during 30 years of rule by former president Hosni Mubarak.
The military has continued to try civilians before military tribunals in 2012 despite promises to limit the practice. More than 300 civilians arrested since May 4 in Cairo during the clashes near the ministry of defense in Cairo are now also scheduled for military trials, HRW report adds.
“It’s shocking that this elected parliament has failed to take the basic step of protecting Egyptian civilians against an inherently unfair military justice system,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Parliament’s failure to ban a major abuse of the military government betrays campaign promises to deliver justice to all Egyptians.”
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 