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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22/08/2014
By Meri Pukarinen*, 20 August 2014, Greenpeace — Who wants to dig up entire villages, destroy livelihoods and lock in emissions making climate catastrophe a certainty? Surely some corrupted failed state in the developing world? Think again. This is the aim of the self-proclaimed global climate leader: Europe.
Photo: Greenpeace
Massive lignite deposits lie at the border of Germany and Poland in the Lusatia region. This brown coal haven is being eyed by Vattenfall – a company owned by the Swedish state, and the Polish Energy Group PGE which has the ear of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Dozens of villages are threatened by bulldozing with some 6000 people losing their homes and livelihoods to make way for these lignite mines.
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22/08/2014
By Russia Today* (RT), 22 August 2014 — Police in Chile used water cannons and tear gas in Santiago as they clashed with outraged students demanding the government to speed up the process of national education reform. Tens of thousands took to the streets to join the largely peaceful protest.
2011–13 Chilean student protests | Uploaded by Flickr upload bot | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Throngs of students flooded the streets of Chile’s capital and other cities on Thursday to protest the slow-moving reform of the country’s education system. Tensions have boiled over for expanded free education and more public universities in recent years, changes to a system largely unchanged since the end of General Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian rule.
Branded as the “National March for Education,” the action was called for by numerous student and teacher groups, and was spread on social media under such hashtags as #PorLosQueVienen and #YoMarchoEl21.
There are conflicting reports as to the exact number of students that came out, with police estimating around 25,000 people in Santiago, while student organizers round the number to 80,000 people. On Twitter, some boasted of a 300,000-strong turnout. Other marches took place around Chile as well.
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22/08/2014
BALI, 20 August 2014 (IRIN)* – Amid increasing documentation of attacks on people engaged in environmental activism, experts are calling for a global protection regime to defend and support campaigners subjected to harassment and abuse.
**Photo: Amantha Perera/IRIN | Baun has come under sustained attack for a decade
“We need to come up with an umbrella organization that looks after environmental activists’ rights and is in a position to launch rapid action that assists those in trouble, like what we see with media organizations,” Emilienne de Leon, a board member of the
International Network of Women’s Funds (INWF) told IRIN.
(INWF’s mission is to “strengthen the political and financial capacity of Women’s Funds to empower women and girls and redistribute resources to transform their lives and communities”.)
During the first week of August activists, donors and researchers gathered in Bali, Indonesia, for the world’s first international summit on climate and women; a large part of the discussion was centered on attacks on people campaigning to protect the environment.
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22/08/2014
The top UNICEF field officer in Gaza on 21 August 2014 reported today that at least nine more Palestinian children have been killed there in the last 48 hours, bringing the total to 469 since early July, saying that there is not a single family in the tiny enclave that has not been touched by the current violence.
- On 12 August, Mohamed Badran, 8, lies on a cot in an ambulance in Gaza. He lost one eye and lost sight in the other during a blast that reportedly killed his father and eight members of his family. Doctors say that Mohamed continues to ask why they “switched the lights off.” Photo: UNICEF/NYHQ2014-1157/El Baba
“The impact is has truly been vast, both at a very physical level, in terms of casualties, injuries, the infrastructure that’s been damaged, but also importantly, emotionally and psychologically in terms of the destabilizing impact that not knowing, not truly feeling like there is anywhere safe place to go in Gaza,” Pernilla Ironside, Chief of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Gaza field office told a press conference today at UN Headquarters.
“Children need to have that sense of security,” she added.
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21/08/2014
Uri Avnery
THE TROUBLE with war is that it has two sides.
Everything would be so much easier if war had only one side. Ours, of course.
There you are, drawing up a wonderful plan for the next war, preparing it, training for it, until everything is perfect.
And then the war starts, and to your utmost surprise it appears that there is another side, too, which also has a wonderful plan, and has prepared it and trained for it.
When the two plans meet, everything goes wrong. Both plans break down. You don’t know what’s going to happen. How to go on. You do things you have not planned for. And when you have had enough of it and want to get out, you don’t know how. It’s so much more difficult to end a war than to start a war, especially when both sides need to declare victory.
That’s where we are now.
HOW DID it all start? Depends where you want to begin.
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21/08/2014
WHO/M. Seeger
But Charles did not always think that way. He is one of the many Liberians who, at the beginning of the outbreak, did not believe that the disease existed.
“I thought it was a lie (invented) to collect money because at that moment I hadn´t seen people affected in my community,” the singer says.
His opinion changed some weeks ago when a group of people blocked a street in Monrovia because a man was lying on the ground with symptoms of Ebola.
“At that moment, I started to believe. I began to see that other countries were being affected, that many people were starting to change their minds,” he says.
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21/08/2014
20 August 2014 – East and Southeast Asia remain the world’s largest markets for synthetic drugs, and the methamphetamine problem is showing signs of accelerating, according to senior policy, law enforcement and justice delegates at a special regional conference organized by UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Global SMART Programme which started today in Yangon, Myanmar.
Image: UNODC
Growing demand in East and Southeast Asia for methamphetamine is being met by large-scale production in China, Myanmar and several other countries in the region. Information presented at the conference confirms continued high, and rising, demand and supply of methamphetamine.
“Organized crime groups are well positioned to take advantage of regional integration agreements to expand the trafficking of synthetic drugs and precursor chemicals” said Jeremy Douglas, UNODC Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
“Capacities to ensure the rule of law vary greatly across the region, and this evolving and growing threat diverts increasing amounts of scarce state resources away from efforts to develop and improve governance. It can’t be ignored that the billions generated for organized crime exceed the size of several national economies in the region. Where is the money going?” added Douglas.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 