Activists from around the world will defy the terrorists to attend the World Social Forum in Tunis on March 25, determined to make the occasion a beacon for free speech, justice and equality.
If you are in the top 1 percent of the global wealth stakes, our economic system works exceptionally well. Since the financial crisis in 2008, most of the wealth created in the world has ended up in your bank accounts.
By next year, you could own more wealth than the rest of the world put together.
This is not just a global phenomenon. The growing gap between rich and poor is a reality for seven out of ten people on the planet.
30 March 2015 (RT)* – Australia and Denmark, despite previous American objections to the move, say they will join a new Beijing-backed investment bank that some in Washington say could supplant the US-dominated International Monetary Fund.
**Pudong in Shanghai in January 2014 | Author: Yhz1221 | Wikimedia Commons
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Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey expressed their country’s willingness to join AIIB as a founding member, but have attached tough conditions to their membership.
“The government has discussed the AIIB extensively with China and other key partners inside and outside the region,” Abbott and Hockey said in a joint statement.
“Key matters to be resolved before Australia considers joining the AIIB include the Bank’s Board of Directors having authority over key investment decisions, and that no one country control the bank,” they said.
Cairo, 29 March 2015 (Human Wrongs Watch)— The creation of an Arab, NATO-style joint military force, the urgency of freeing the Middle East from nuclear weapons and a future inter-Arab common market are some of the key decisions adopted by the Arab leaders in their 26th Summit held Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt ton 28, 29 March 2015.
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The Arab region | Author: kobe bryant | Wikimedia Commons
The summit declaration emphasises the need to free the Middle East from nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction and calls on Israel to join the NPT (Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty), as well as to submit all its nuclear facilities, and those of Iran, to the comprehensive safeguards regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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Israel is the sole nuclear military power in the region. According to military experts, its arsenal amounts to 230 nuclear bombs. This figure would exceed the combined nuclear arsenal of India, with 80-90 atomic heads, and Pakistan with similar numbers. (1).
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According to the final declaration of the Arab summit, Arab states will join the new joint military force on a voluntary basis.
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The joint force is set to intervene military to face eventual challenges threatening the security and safety of any member state at the official request of its authorities.
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Diplomatic sources close to the summit stressed that Iraq expressed strong opposition to this resolution and renewed its rejection of any military intervention of any state in the affairs of any other country.
MAGUINDANAO, the Philippines,, 25 March 2015 (IRIN)*– Humanitarian agencies are struggling to cope with a growing number of people displaced by fighting in the southern Philippine region of Mindanao.
**Photo: Ana Santos/IRIN | More than 120,000 people have been forced to flee the latest fighting in Mindanao
The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, says more than 120,000 have sought shelter in public buildings or informal camps since fighting broke out in January between government forces and rebels from the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), a splinter group of the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
As hundreds of millions of people across the globe go hungry, the nuclear-armed nations spend close to US$300 million a day on their nuclear forces. (ICAN)*
Source: ICAN-International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
The production, maintenance and modernization of nuclear forces diverts vast public resources away from health care, education, climate change mitigation, disaster relief, development assistance and other vital services.
Globally, annual expenditure on nuclear weapons is estimated at US$105 billion – or $12 million an hour.
The World Bank forecast in 2002 that an annual investment of just US$40–60 billion, or roughly half the amount currently spent on nuclear weapons, would be enough to meet the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals on poverty alleviation by the target date of 2015.
‘When last we met Mercy, she was arriving in her foster home, the child of a woman who had died of Ebola infection. See how Mercy’s getting on, in school for the first time, a child embraced by a family joined by love, if not blood.'(UNICEF)*
After Mercy Kennady, 9, lost her mother to Ebola, she made international news when she was found crying, scared and alone, wandering the streets of Liberia. Her journey has taken her from being orphaned, facing stigma and undergoing quarantine to starting anew in the loving home of a foster family.
In November 2014, Mercy waved farewell as she left a UNICEF-supported interim care centre in Monrovia. Children exposed to Ebola stay at the centre for the duration of the virus’s 21-day maximum incubation period, receiving support while waiting to make sure they have not contracted the disease.
When his village in Nigeria was attacked, 10-year-old Ibrahim witnessed his father’s brutal murder. Then the insurgents came after him. Ibrahim’s story.
The crescent-shaped scar on Ibrahim’s head is a visible reminder of his ordeal. UNHCR/Hélène Caux
By Hélène Caux*
25 March 2015 — Thirty-three-year-old Sarratou will never forget the day when dozens of heavily armed men ambushed her village in Nigeria’s Borno State. It was 10 o’clock in the morning and she was at home with three of her four children. The gunshots rang in their ears as they hastily embarked on a 12-kilometre trip on foot towards the Cameroon border.
At the time, her husband and their eldest son, 10-year-old Ibrahim, were caring for their cattle on the outskirts of the village. Although they tried to flee, there was no escape. “My husband got too tired. He was exhausted and could not continue running,” Sarratou says. “Boko Haram caught up with them, and they cut the throat of my husband, in front of our son.”
27 March 2015 (RT)* – One of the poorest and most violent countries in the Middle East, Yemen is also an area of strategic importance for regional players – and some of the world’s most dangerous terror groups. RT explains the underlying reasons behind the nation’s conflicts.
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**Large areas of Yemen are controlled by armed rebel groups rather than the national government. | Author: GeoEvan | Wikimedia Commons
Strategic location
The territory that lies within Yemen’s borders is one of the most ancient cradles of civilization in the Middle East, once known as ‘Arabia Felix’ – Latin for “happy” or “fortunate” – in ancient times. The lands of Yemen were more fertile than most on the Arabian Peninsula, as they received more rain due to high mountains.
But because of declining natural resources, including oil, Yemen and its population of about 26 million are now very poor.
Rome, 27 March 2015 — The United Kingdom has been accused of “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis – and the accusation comes from no less than the House of Lords, not usually considered a place of critical analysis.
**An important vote: the House of Lords voting for the Parliament Act 1911 | Author: Samuel Begg (died 1919) | Source: The Rise of the Democracy, by Joseph Clayton, Project Gutenberg eText 19609 | Wikimedia Commons
In a scathing report, the upper house of the U.K. parliament has said that the United Kingdom, like the rest of the European Union, has sleepwalked into a very complex problem without looking into the possible consequences, letting bureaucrats taking critical political decisions.
It said that it was only when the conflict was well entrenched that political leaders decided to negotiate the Minsk ceasefire agreement, reached by Angela Merkel of Germany, Francois Hollande of France, Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, with the notable absence of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 