11/07/2014
By Baher Kamal*, Cairo, July 2014 – A couple of years ago, some Egyptian media hailed reports by the UN World Health Organisation and the UN Human Settlements Programme on slums, by saying that the United Nations considers Egyptian “cemetery-slums” or “grave slums” as the best ever of their kind in this country of 95 million inhabitants.
A tomb retrofitted as a residence in the City of the Dead, Cairo, Egypt. | Author: Rgoogin | GNU Free Documentation License | Under Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License | Wikimedia Commons
But such statement was anything but accurate–in fact if Cairo’s large “cemetery-slum” , which is known as “City of the Dead”, could be somehow considered slightly better of than others, is just because it has been absorbed by the capital and therefore can in a way benefit from some of public facilities, such as water, power and public transport.
Apart from not being accurate, what probably these media did not expect is that the number of the current 10 million slum dwellers is estimated to grow to up to 28 million, i.e. one of four Egyptians by 2015.
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11/07/2014
11 July 2014 – Half the world is under 25 years of age – nearly 90 per cent of them in developing countries, according to UN figures. However, half of those employed from the group are either unemployed or in UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s words, “stuck in low-wage, dead-end jobs.”
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Young people contributing to a workshop on climate change in Iguiwaz, Morocco. Photo: UNDP/CBA Baptiste de Ville d’Avray
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With 1.8 billion young people around the world – the largest generation of youth in history – senior United Nations officials marked World Population Day with calls for a renewed commitment to helping young people improve their lives and the common future.*
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“Action is urgently needed,” Secretary-Genera
l Ban Ki-moon said in his
message for the Day, stressing that too many young people are denied a right to a quality education, a decent job, and participation in the political life of their societies.
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10/07/2014
Human Wrongs Watch
By Paul Craig Roberts*, TRANSCEND Media Service, July 2014 — A person might think that revulsion in “the world community” against Washington’s wanton slaughter of civilians in eight countries would have led to War Crimes Tribunal warrants issued for the arrest of presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and many officials in their regimes.
The Apotheosis of War (1871) by Vasily Vereshchagin | Wikimedia Commons
But the vocal part of “the world community”–the West–has become inured to Washington’s crimes against humanity and doesn’t bother to protest. Indeed, many of these governments are complicit in Washington’s crimes, and there could just as well be arrest warrants for members of European governments.
The one exception is Russia.
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09/07/2014
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It’s a shame therefore, that the report — though right about the urgency to act — is endorsing some technologies that are not sustainable, fast to deploy, or safe. It’s simply not possible to produce the amount of bioenergy the report calls for in a sustainable way, for example.
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09/07/2014
Human Wrongs Watch
By John Scales Avery*, TRANSCEND Media Service — Why is the military-industrial complex sometimes called “The Devil’s Dynamo”?
The military-industrial complex involves a circular flow of money. The money flows like the electrical current in a dynamo, driving a diabolical machine.
Photo source: ICAN
Money from immensely rich corporate oligarchs buys the votes of politicians and the propaganda of the mainstream media. Numbed by the propaganda, citizens allow the politicians to vote for obscenely bloated military budgets, which further enrich the corporate oligarchs, and the circular flow continues.
The Industrial Revolution and Colonialism The devil’s dynamo of today has lead to a modern version of colonialism and empire. It is therefore interesting to look at the first global era of colonialism: In the 18th and 19th centuries, the continually accelerating development of science and science-based industry began to affect the whole world.
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09/07/2014
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, introducing a new United Nations-backed report outlining pathways major industrial economies can use to cut their carbon emissions by mid-century, on 8 July 2014 called for broad cooperation and “bold” action or the world will face dangerous and irreversible climate disruption.*
Source: UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
“We know that we are not on track, and time is not on our side,” Ban warned during a Headquarters press conference to launch the Deep Decarbonization Pathway Project report, produced by leading research institutes in 15 countries, is the first global cooperative program to identify practical pathways to a low-carbon economy by 2050.
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05/07/2014
Afar/Johannesburg, By Jaspreet Kindra, (IRIN)* – Momina Ali is a teenager in one of the toughest and hottest places on earth – Ethiopia’s Afar region where average annual temperatures hover around 35 degrees Celsius. Increasingly intermittent rainfall in her village, Anderkelo, means that every three or four days Momina takes a day off school to search for water.
Momina Ali, 13 has to take a day off from school to search for water | Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN
In future the chances are that Momina’s treks for water could take even longer, depending on how rising temperatures affect the rains around her village and hence its water table.
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In 2015 global policymakers aim to take decisions which may affect the futures of people like Momina. The outcome of the December 2015 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
meeting in Paris, new development goals, and the successor to the Hyogo framework on natural hazards will be key.
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05/07/2014
Four years after the massive earthquake that devastated Haiti, it is time to move from a largely humanitarian approach to a development based drive, a United Nations human rights expert on 4 July 2014 said, while calling for durable solutions for the internally displaced and the vulnerable segments of the population of the island nation.*
The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has partnered with Haitian Agencies to combat cholera by providing clean water. UN Photo/Logan Abassi
“It is high time to focus on a development approach for the achievement of durable solutions for the displaced,” said the Chaloka Beyani, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs) at the end of his first mission to Haiti.
“Durable solutions are reached only when the needs related to displacement no longer exist, which is medium to long term complex development led process for all IDPs and not just those living in camps or sites,” he said in a press release detailing his recently completed week-long visit, which included visits to IDP camps and sites as well as the Canaan neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince.
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03/07/2014
Human Wrongs Watch
Bonn, 2 July 2014 — Speaking in Bonn, Germany, Egyptian political satirist Bassem Youssef discusses the unsustainability of fear, saying “Satire was our weapon to dissect through the lies and rhetoric that were used to control the people.”*
Bassem Youssef (right). Photo: Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum
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Fearing for his own safety, political satirist Bassem Youssef chose to cancel his hugely popular weekly talk show, “Al Bernameg.” Speaking to a full house at the World Conference Center in Bonn on the occasion of the
2014 Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum, he named fear to be the key reason behind his decision.
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“Fear sells, fear intimidates, fear makes humans go against their best judgment,” commented Youssef, whose program had also been broadcast on Deutsche Welle’s Arabic television channel.
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03/07/2014
Human Wrongs Watch
Bonn, 2 July 2014 — British journalist and WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison, who helped NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden get to safety on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, discussed the “Battle against unaccountable power.”*
WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison | Photo: Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum 2014, Bonn.
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According to WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, the U.S., with the help of its partners and allies, has constructed “a huge global intelligence, diplomatic and military net that tries to see all, know all, govern all, decide all. It reaches all, and yet it is acting without impunity. This is the greatest unaccountable power of today – the United States and our Western democracies.”
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Speaking at the
2014 Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany, Harrison says that over the past few years, WikiLeaks has done a lot of work “to expose this system,” and that one of “the things that scares this unaccountable power the most is the amount of source documents that we do produce.”
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 