06/08/2012
By Rebecca Johnson, ICAN*, 6 August 2012 — Sixty-seven years ago, on August 6, the first uranium bomb was exploded above Hiroshima with the force of 15 thousand tons of TNT. Tens of thousands were killed by the blast and fireball that engulfed the city, and a similar number died of radiation sickness and injuries in the days and months that followed; in total 140,000 dead by 1945’s end.
Source: ICAN
Three days later, Nagasaki was shattered by a plutonium bomb. This was the same design that the United States had tested in the New Mexico desert three weeks earlier, causing the Manhattan Project’s lead scientist Robert Oppenheimer to reflect that he had become a “destroyer of worlds”.
Over the next 40 years, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, Soviet Union, Britain, France and China) amassed some 70,000 nuclear weapons with a combined explosive force of 15 million tons.
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06/08/2012
London, (IRIN*) – Is the world ready to face water shocks? For water shocks are certainly coming; water shocks, in fact, are already here.
**Photo: Marcus Benigno/IRIN
A meeting of ecologists, policymakers and water professionals gathered recently at London’s Chatham House to contemplate the prospect. Asia, they heard, was the continent where problems were already most acute.
Pavel Kabat of Vienna’s Institute for Applied Systems Analysis told IRIN: “We have been worried about water in other parts of the world – it’s still a very important issue in Africa – but we were forgetting that the because of the economic growth and the population growth, the surge in food demand will come in Asia.”
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04/08/2012
By EurActiv* — Moves to firm up the Commission’s cyber protection will come in the next weeks in response to a “war of attrition” in cyber space rather than any specific attack, a Commission spokesman has told EurActiv. Meanwhile, sources say Brussels is reluctant to point the finger at China.
Grid wars | EurActiv
But Brussels will not point the finger at China – EurActiv has learned separately – following the recent disclosure of a serious attack against the EU Council last June, which a Bloomberg investigation pinned to China, alleging links to the nascent superpower’s People’s Liberation Army.
“We were not informed of any targeted attack,” Antony Gravili, the spokesman for Maroš Šefčovič – the commissioner responsible for inter-institutional relations – told EurActiv in reference to the reported attack against the Council.
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04/08/2012
The United Nations refugee agency and its partners are scaling up efforts to reverse the “alarming” rates of malnutrition, disease and death in two camps hosting Sudanese refugees in South Sudan, even as they struggle to cope with logistical problems amid the rainy season, the UN reports.
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A new arrival in South Sudan’s Yida camp gets her arm measured as part of malnutrition screening. Photo: UNHCR/V. Tan
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There are some 170,000 Sudanese refugees currently in South Sudan, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), with more arriving from Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states every day after fleeing conflict and food shortages.
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03/08/2012
“While the US and the Iraqi government insist that security gains have been made in recent years, UN and independent analysts characterize the situation as having stabilized at an unacceptably high level of violence, albeit now concentrated in more specific areas.”
Photo: Heba Aly/IRIN – Iraqi Security Forces are often the target of attacks
Baghdad, (IRIN*) – Assessments of security trends in Iraq vary wildly depending on who you speak to, how you count the statistics, and which period of time you study. But one thing is clear: bomb blasts, targeted killings or improvised explosive devices are still a daily occurrence in Iraq.
Last week’s coordinated attacks – leaving more than 100 people dead – set a record for the highest number of deaths in a single day in more than two years, displaying the continued ability of insurgent groups to strike. A double bombing in the capital on 31 July brought July’s death toll to 245, according to a count by Associated Press.
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03/08/2012
As former UN secretary general Kofi Annan stepped down on 2 August as Joint UN-Arab League Special Envoy, France announced that the Security Council will consider this month the plight of millions of Syrians in need of humanitarian aid, and that the UN mission will likely disappear, the UN reports.
**The new Za’atri camp opened by Jordan for Syrian refugees can eventually host up to 113,000 people. Photo: UNHCR/A.McDonnell
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With “military logic winning the day” in Syria and the United Nations observer mission there unlikely to be renewed, the Security Council will consider the plight of the three million Syrians in need of humanitarian aid, the Permanent Representative of France, which hold’s the body’s rotating presidency for August, said.
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03/08/2012
By Martin Khor, South Centre* — The reputation and credibility of banks, regulators and the banking system in Western developed countries, already battered by the twists and turns of the financial crises, have reached new lows with the LIBOR scandal, which is still evolving and more wrong-doing involving not merely banks, but regulators too, may and perhaps will yet come out.
**The Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) gets its name from the City of London. Credit: Simdaperce.
US media reports indicate that the US Justice Department has undertaken criminal investigations.
As Mr. Simon Johnson, Ms. Yves Smith and other specialist blogs are bringing out, the LIBOR affair shows widespread market rigging that could not have succeeded as it did without widespread collusion and conspiracy across banks and their trading (and compliance) desks.
Other specialist blogs bring out criminal conspiracy involved in rigging the market, and the need to identify, prosecute and punish not merely the traders, but those at the top.
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02/08/2012
By Roberto Savio*
San Salvador, Bahamas – Someday we will have to think over the impact the fall of the Berlin Wall had on the world for both winners and losers.
**Image: Lower Manhattan. Credit: Ibagli | Wikimedia Commons
In those years after the fall, Francis Fukuyama wrote the famous book The End of History where he stated that with the end of communism, capitalism was going to become an eternal reality.
He recently wrote in the New York Times (NYT) an article asking for limits to the excesses of corporations, the same corporations to which this newspaper dedicates several pages in its analyses.
The winners of the fall of communism were politicians, who had military power and new technologies at their disposal. The world of corporations (when finance was still a part of it) played a fundamental, albeit indirect role, until then.
And the defenders of the West (we are talking about 1988, which seems so far away today) presented a model of capitalism that today is disappearing.
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01/08/2012
Human Wrongs Watch
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic*
Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina – Footage and photos of fighting raging in Syria for many months now keep flowing into media outlets all over the world, with political solutions being sought in vain and suffering of civilians being shown on screens or in papers each and every day.
**Burial of 775 identified victims in 2010. Credit: Juniki San | Wikimedia Commons.
The United Nations (UN) is declaring, almost every day, that it is putting its efforts to prevent human catastrophe in the town of Aleppo, where literally hundreds of thousands of people are trapped with almost no way out, while the Christian quarters of the capital of Damascus are also under fire by government forces for the first time.
Amnesty International launched an appeal to the UN Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court and impose an arms embargo as many atrocities were committed against civilians, peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders, including children.
The fate of Syrian civilians was an issue strongly pronounced by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week in Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, where the world organisation failed so much in its mission.
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01/08/2012
By Eric Ruder, Socialist Worker*— While working people continue to suffer declining living standards, Bankzilla is feasting on massive profits.
Source: Socialist Worker
The year is 2009. Home values were in free fall, and tent cities were springing up in cities like Seattle and Reno as a wave of foreclosures began to wash over U.S. homeowners.
The unemployment rate was shooting up, and anxiety stalked the lives of tens of millions of people who wondered if their job might be next on the chopping block.
Stock trader Steven Schonfeld, on the other hand, wasn’t worried at all.
He told a Wall Street Journal reporter that he had “earned” $200 million the year before and his net worth was around $1 billion. He had just moved into a $90 million mansion near Long Island Sound, with its own nine-hole golf course. No one could use the golf course if he wasn’t home. “It’s not a private golf course,” Schonfeld explained. “It’s a personal golf course.”
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 