23/08/2014
**180 degree rotated map of the world| Released into the public domain by its author, Vardion. | Wikimedia Commons
By Roberto Savio*
Roberto Savio
Rome, 24 August 2014 – In 1980, I had a debate at the United Nations with the late Stan Swinton, then the very powerful and brilliant director of Associated Press (AP). At one point, I furnished the following figures (which had been slow to change), as an example of Western bias in the media:
In 1964, four transnational news agencies – AP, United Press International (UPI), Agence France Presse (AFP) and Reuters – handled 92 percent of world information flow. The other agencies from industrialised countries, including the Soviet news agency TASS, handled a further 7 percent. That left the rest of the world with a mere 1 percent.
Why, I asked, was the entire world obliged to receive information from the likes of AP in which the United States was always the main actor? Swinton’s reply was brief and to the point: “Roberto, the U.S. media account for 99 percent of our revenues. Do you think they are more interested in our secretary of state, or in an African minister?”
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23/08/2014
“I had not then learned the measure of “man’s inhumanity to man,” nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain.” ― Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (1853).
Those words were written by Solomon Northup in “Twe lve Years a Slave” more than 150 years ago, but they ring as true today as they did then.*
Shackles used to bind slaves. UN Photo/Mark Garten
“More than a century after being banned in the developed world, and decades after being outlawed in the newly emerging developing world, modern forms of slavery—forced labour, human trafficking, forced sexual exploitation—still exist, and unfortunately risk growing in extent and profitability in the world today.”
These statements are part of chapter “Conclusions” of the International Labour Organization (ILO) Report Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour. The Chapter is here reproduced.
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23/08/2014
23 August 2014 — The night of 22 to 23 August 1791, in Santo Domingo (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) saw the beginning of the uprising that would play a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.
Photo from UNESCO
International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition is intended to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of all peoples. In accordance with the goals of the intercultural project “The Slave Route“, it should offer an opportunity for collective consideration of the historic causes, the methods and the consequences of this tragedy, and for an analysis of the interactions to which it has given rise between Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean.*
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23/08/2014
By Mike Pflanz*, (UNICEF) — Nyakuoch Keat’s nine-month-old son Bhan had been running a fever for days and was listless and unresponsive to his mother’s attempts to cheer him up. His condition worsened, to the point where he was not holding down any food and even seemed to lose consciousness at times.
Photo from UNICEF
There appeared to be very few options for Bhan and Nyakuoch, who live in South Sudan in a cluster of mud-and-thatch huts far removed from health services even when there is no war, which there is now. The nearest doctor was in the village of Kiech Kuon, a two hour walk away across flooded fields and swamps.
But since fighting broke out in December 2013, the clinic there has been closed, with staff fleeing the conflict and government supplies of medicines, equipment and salaries drying up.
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23/08/2014
Over 20,000 people risked their lives in sea crossings in the Indian Ocean in the first half of this year, many of them Rohingya who fled Myanmar, according to a new report released on 22 August 2014 by the United Nations refugee agency.
Fishermen manoeuvre a boat in a waterway near Sittwe in Mynamar. People risking their lives to leave Myanmar and cross the Bay of Bengal board boats in locations like this. Photo: UNHCR/V. Tan
The report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on irregular maritime movements in South-east Asia also notes that several hundred people were intercepted on boats heading to Australia.*
Produced by a newly-established Maritime Movements Monitoring Unit at UNHCR’s Regional Office in Bangkok, the report focuses on departures from the Bay of Bengal and elsewhere passing through South-east Asia, and highlights the abuses people are facing on their journeys, and developments related to Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders policy.
It shows that more than 7,000 asylum-seekers and refugees who have travelled by sea are at present held in detention facilities in the region, including over 5,000 in Australia or its offshore processing centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 