10/01/2015
The number of Nigerian refugees seeking safety in Chad has almost quadrupled over the past 10 days after attacks by Boko Haram insurgents in northeastern Nigeria uprooted thousands, the United Nations refugee agency on 9 January 2015 reported.
A group of refugees in Diffa, Niger, after fleeing Boko Haram violence in Nigeria. Photo: OCHA/Franck Kuwonu
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that attacks in Borno state have uprooted about 7,300 Nigerians, forcing them into western Chad, where most are staying with local communities in villages around 450 kilometers north-west of the capital, N’Djamena.*
A spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the 3 January attack on the town of Baga alone caused 3,400 people to flee to Chad.
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09/01/2015
By Pepe Escobar*, 8 January 2015 (RT)
A pro-style jihadist commando attack in Europe’s heart. Cui bono?
**Demonstrators gather at the Place de la République in Paris, 7 January 2015 | Author: JeSuisGodefroyTroude | Wikimedia Commons
Careful planning and preparation, Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launcher, balaclavas, sand-colored ammunition vest stuffed with spare magazines, army boots, easy escape in a black Citroen…
And the icing on this particularly lethal cake: faultless Paris-based logistical support to pull it all off.
A former top French military commander, Frédéric Gallois, has stressed the perfect application of “urban guerrilla technique” (where are those notorious Western counter-terrorism “experts” when one needs them?)
Some said they spoke perfect French, while others maintained their command of the language was mangled and broken. Anyway, what matters is that they uttered the magic word: “We’re Al-Qaeda.”
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09/01/2015
Making an impassioned appeal for tolerance, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 8 January 2015 called for understanding among all communities to heal the tensions within societies – a particularly poignant plea following Wednesday’s horrific attack on the staff at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and in the face of ongoing sectarian violence across Africa’s Sahel region being fueled by Boko Haram.
Photo: UNESCO/Pilar Chang-Joo
“In far too many places, we have seen acts of extremism, unspeakable brutality and a deeply worrying escalation of tensions between communities and within societies. Addressing this discord in a manner that solves, rather than multiplies, the problem may be the greatest test our human family faces in the 21st century,” Ban told reporters at UN Headquarters.*
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08/01/2015
By Patrick Martin, 8 January 2015 (WSWS)*
One month ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the 500-page summary of its voluminous report on the torture of prisoners in secret CIA facilities overseas, conducted between 2002 and 2007. In grisly detail, the report documented such practices as waterboarding, systematic beatings, and hitherto unknown tortures like “rectal feeding.”
**Image: Waterboard on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: prisoners’ feet were shackled to the bar on the right, wrists restrained by shackles on the left. Water was poured over the face using the watering can | 7 December 2007 | Author: waterboardingdotorg | Wikimedia Commons.
But in practice, the report has been buried, its evidence of government criminality ignored, the perpetrators and organizers of torture going scot-free.
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08/01/2015
By RT*, 8 January 2015 — Tony Blair may face war crimes charges arising from the findings of a public inquiry into the role Britain played in the 2003 Iraq war, the House of Lords has been informed.
**President George W. Bush applauds former Prime Minister Tony Blair after presenting him Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009, with the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom during ceremonies in the East Room of the White House. | White House photo by Chris Greenberg | whitehouse.gov, President Bush Honors Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients | Wikimedia Commons
Lord Dykes of Harrow Weald, a Liberal Democrat peer, claimed the publication of the long-awaited findings of Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq war had been delayed to drag out the anguish of the ex-Labour Prime Minister.
Speaking in the House of Lords on Tuesday [6 Jan. 2015] , Dykes said the continued delay of Chilcot’s report was an “utter and total disgrace.”
“More and more people think it is some kind of attempt to prolong the agony for Mr Blair facing possible war crimes charges,” he added.
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08/01/2015
By Andre Vltchek*, 7 January 2015 – TRANSCEND Media Service
One more step, one more explosion of insanity, and all that humanity fought for, what it labored for and has been aiming at for years, centuries and millennia, may disappear in a monstrous series of blasts. Our planet might break into pieces, or it may get poisoned and become uninhabitable, forever.
Planets of the Solar System (Sizes to scale; distances and illumination not to scale) | Source: Planets2008.jpg | Author: WP | Wikimedia Commons
Hyperbolic? Not at all, given the track record of the Empire: war after war, invasion after invasion, with hundreds of destabilized countries, murdered leaders, and overthrown governments.
The storyline may be similar to that of the famous novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. We can foresee what may soon happen, we are warning that carnage is likely to take place in a very near future and on a grand scale, but our warnings, while registering, are not propelling almost anyone to action. But this may soon change.
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07/01/2015
By Roberto Savio*
San Salvador, 7 January 2015 – As a new year begins, new hopes and commitments are commonplace – yet, while optimism is crucial for interpreting the past because it demonstrates that humankind always find solutions, a degree of realism is required for looking forward into 2015.
Roberto Savio
Compassion and sympathy are called for in the year that has just begun because it brings with it a series of handicaps that justifiably dampen an enthusiasm. Without going into long-winded analyses, I have selected ten of those that are – for me – the most significant.
1. Europe has entered the new year with losing appeal, with anti-Europe parties on the rise everywhere, with many internal contradictions and with a noticeable North (Protestant). South (Catholic) divide.
Germans, Finns, Dutch and so on see economy as part of moral science. They consider debt a sin (in German sin and debt have the same root), the result of a profligate life, which must be redeemed through some process of adjustment, as painful as required.
This started with Greece, which spent well beyond its means and falsified the economic data it provided to the European Commission. Greece accounted for only 4 percent of the Europe’s GDP, but punishment was swift and severe and the social cost of its bailout has been brutal.
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07/01/2015
‘Israel’s continued settlement expansion is perhaps the largest barrier to peace with the Palestinians. Yet while often portrayed as religious zealots, most settlers move to occupied land for economic reasons – encouraged by government support.’
**Photo: Annie Slemrod/IRIN | Construction workers in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. Declared illegal by the UN, such Israeli settlements have expanded in recent years.
Jerusalem, 5 January 2015 (IRIN)* – Of all the hurdles to peace negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, perhaps the largest is the 150 or so Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
These communities, considered illegal by the UN, are fracturing Israel’s relationship even with its allies: The pro-Israeli head of the UK parliament’s foreign affairs committee this year declared that a decision to develop a new settlement “outraged me more than anything else in my political life”.
Despite an unofficial freeze on settlement planning, in late December the Jerusalem Planning and Budget Committee set the stage for approving building permits for some 400 homes on Palestinian land in Jerusalem, and approved a plan for 1,850 more homes in a neighbourhood that sits on the border.
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07/01/2015
Geneva, 7 January 2015 – The UN refugee agency UNHCR on 6 January 2015 reported* that war in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere had uprooted an estimated 5.5 million people during the first six months of 2014, signaling a further rise in the number of people forcibly displaced.
© UNHCR/J.Kohler | Syrians, for the first time, have become the largest refugee population under UNHCR’s mandate.
UNHCR’s new “Mid-Year Trends 2014” report shows that of the 5.5 million who were newly displaced, 1.4 million fled across international borders becoming refugees, while the rest were displaced within their own countries.
Taking into account existing displaced populations, data revisions, voluntary returns and resettlement, the number of people being helped by UNHCR stood at 46.3 million as of mid-2014 – some 3.4 million more than at the end of 2013 and a record high.
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07/01/2015
Geneva, 7 January 2015 – Thousands of refugees across Lebanon and Jordan have been struggling to keep warm and protect their shelters this week as severe winter storms bring plummeting temperatures, heavy snow, strong winds and lashing rain to the region, the UN Refugee agency (UNHCR) reported.
© UNHCR/A.McConnell | Syrian refugees remove snow from their shelters at an informal tented settlement in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon during a blizzard earlier today 7 Dec. 2015
UNHCR field staff say Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley was blanketed in snow on Wednesday [6 December 2015] morning, cutting off roads and affecting tens of thousands of refugees – many of whom live in makeshift shelters in more than 850 informal settlements set up in vacant lots, abandoned buildings, garages, sheds and on farmland.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 