26/05/2015
“Africa leads the world in female representation in parliaments and the continent has one of the highest rates of female entrepreneurship. Let us be inspired by these successes and intensify efforts to provide Africa’s women with better access to education, work and health care and, by doing so, accelerate Africa’s transformation,” the UN Secretary-General said.
World Radio Day 2015 focuses on youth. Newscaster Lady Belinda Juaw at the community radio station Spirit FM 99.9 Yei in South Sudan, spreads information about the importance of voting, particularly for young women. Photo: Werner Anderson/Norwegian People’s Aid via Flickr CC 2.0 | Source: UN Women
Each year, Africa Day is an opportunity to celebrate the continent’s achievements and to reflect on its challenges, Ban Ki-moon on 25 May 2015 said, highlighting the courage and determination it took to make remarkable progress to end the Ebola outbreak and urging leaders to commit to ending violence against women and empower them.
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26/05/2015
Rome, May 2015 – Whether we categorize uneaten food as “lost” or “wasted” depends on when it falls off the food chain, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Imagine how everything we eat travels across a food chain, a complex journey that stretches from farm to table. Studies show that an astounding 1/3 of all the food we produce for human consumption never actually reaches our plates.*
- Most people see food waste in their everyday lives. At the end of the food chain, consumers may throw out excess food, let it spoil, or develop other behaviors that waste food unnecessarily.
- Food “loss” actually occurs earlier in the food chain and usually behind the scenes. Due to inefficiencies in food production and processing, food can lose nutritional value or even need to be discarded before it reaches the consumer.
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25/05/2015
By Roberto Savio*
Rome, 25 May 2015 – The victory of the Conservative Party and the debacle of the Labour Party in the recent British general elections is yet another sign of the crisis facing left-wing forces today, leaving aside the question of how, under the British electoral system, the Labour Party actually increased the number of votes it won but saw a reduction in the number of seats it now holds in Parliament (24 seats less than the previous 256).
Roberto Savio
If the proportional rather than uninominal system had been used, the Conservative Party with its 11 million votes would have won 256 and not 331 seats in Parliament (far short of the absolute majority of 326 needed to govern), while at the other extreme the United Kingdom Independence Party with nearly four million votes would have landed 83 and not just the one seat it ended up with – results that would be hard to imagine anywhere else and a good example of insularity.
To an extent, the recent British general elections mirrored the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 when Democratic candidate Al Gore won around half a million more popular votes than Republican candidate George W. Bush but failed to win the majority of electoral college votes on which the U.S. system is based.
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25/05/2015
By Uri Avnery*
23 May 2015
Uri Avnery
THE BATTLE is over. The dust has settled. A new government – partly ridiculous, partly terrifying – has been installed.
It is time to take stock.
The net result is that Israel has given up all pretense of desiring peace and that Israeli democracy has suffered a blow from which it may never recover.
ISRAELI GOVERNMENTS – with the possible exception of Yitzhak Rabin’s – have never really desired peace. The peace that is possible.
Peace, of course, means accepting fixed borders. In the founding declaration of the state, which was read out by David Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948 in Tel Aviv, any mention of borders was deliberately omitted.
Ben Gurion was not ready to accept the borders fixed by the UN partition resolution, because they provided only for a tiny Jewish state. Ben-Gurion foresaw that the Arabs would start a war, and he was determined to use this for enlarging the territory of the state.
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25/05/2015
By Robert J. Burrowes*
I sometimes read that drone strikes are counterproductive to western security interests because each person killed by a drone results in more new ‘terrorists’. See, for example, ‘The more civilians US drones kill in the Mideast, the more radicals they create‘.
**Minneapolis anti-war protest: ‘Stop Killer Drones’, 5 May 2013 | Author: Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States | Wikimedia Commons
However, this analysis completely fails to understand what is driving elite military policy, carried out by the United States elite and key elite allies within NATO and elsewhere.
In brief: drone strikes work precisely because they provoke violent responses which help elites to ‘justify’ their perpetual war to secure control of the world’s diminishing supplies of fossil fuels, water and strategic minerals while tightening control of domestic populations through expansion of the security and surveillance state.
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24/05/2015
Book Review by John Scales Avery*
This book ought to be required reading for college students everywhere in the world, and also for decision-makers. It shakes us out of our complacency and makes us realize that widespread, immediate and dedicated public action is urgently needed if we are to save human civilization and the biosphere from a thermonuclear catastrophe.
Richard Falk
David Krieger
The book is published by Paradigm Publishers, 2845 Wilderness Place, Boulder, CO 80301, USA. (www.paradigmpublishers.com).
On the back cover there are endorsements, with which I entirely agree, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and David Ellsberg.
“We are greatly privileged, like flies on the wall, to join this conversation between two remarkable stalwarts. Richard Falk and David Krieger, in the campaign for a nuclear-free world. It is unconscionable that so many of us seem to accept the prospect of our ‘mutually assured destruction’, the immoral massacre of millions of civilians, and to view with equanimity such a gross violation of international law…
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24/05/2015
Millions lost their homes when the earthquake rocked Nepal last month. As rainy season nears, UNHCR and its partners race to provide shelter
Dhan Bahadur Tamang sits amid the ruins of his home in Jhankridanda village, which collapsed during the earthquake last month in Nepal. UNHCR/Brian Sokol
Dhan Bahadur Tamang, 66, built his two-storey house 35 years ago on a ledge just above a winding dirt road. It is only three hours by car from Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, but so isolated by the nearly vertical mountains that it feels like another world.
From the front rooms, his view spread out over a steep terraced valley of wheat and potato fields encircled by layers of even steeper mountains. Travellers who stopped at the local teahouse often commented on the spectacular location. Today only three door frames remain upright, keeping watch over piles of stone and brick rubble like a trio of ghosts.
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24/05/2015
Geneva (UNHCR)* – The UN refugee agency on 19 May 2015 warned that time was running out for thousands of people in distress at sea and urged governments in the South-east Asia region to urgently rescue and disembark these vulnerable people.
© UNHCR | Indonesian fishermen have rescued hundreds of Bangladeshis and Rohingya from Myanmar this month, including these children.
“We estimate that nearly 4,000 people from Myanmar and Bangladesh remain stranded at sea with dwindling supplies on board.
This includes some 2,000 men, women and children stranded on at least five boats near the Myanmar-Bangladesh coasts for more than 40 days. Unconfirmed reports suggest the number could be higher,” UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards told journalists in Geneva on 19 May 2015.
In Myanmar, several hundred people have abandoned their journeys and returned to Rakhine state after paying smugglers on board an average of 200,000 to 300,000 kyat (US$182-US$273) each for re-entry.
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24/05/2015
By Kate Mayberry*
KUALA LUMPAR, May 2015 (IRIN)* – Faizal Ahmad (1) has just spent six months at sea, in an open boat crammed with 450 people, praying that Allah would deliver him to safety and a future free of persecution.
**Photo: S.H.Omi/UNHCR | A day or two before departing on a smuggler’s boat, a group of Rohingya gather at a safe house.
“The boat was very crowded,” the 29-year-old Rohingya Muslim from Myanmar explained through an interpreter. “It was hard to sleep or take exercise. Our legs were swollen; we were very weak. We prayed to Allah. We thought we would die at sea.”
A thin man with bushy, black hair, Ahmad rubs his legs as he talks; his muscles wasted away. “I can’t sit for very long,” he says as he shifts in his chair.
Ahmad has only been in Malaysia a week, but he knows he’s one of the lucky ones.
Thousands of people – many of them Rohingya – are thought to be adrift in the Andaman Sea and pressure is growing on the region’s governments to allow the boats to come ashore and avoid a humanitarian catastrophe.
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24/05/2015
By Vithal Rajan*
23 May 2015 – TRANSCEND Media Service – The British election results have been a surprise to everyone, especially to David Cameron, the Prime Minister.
**David Cameron in India | Author: Harry Metcalfe | Wikimedia Commons
He was quite prepared to put a brave face on it if he lost, but was hoping against hope that he might be given a second chance in another minority government, his Conservative party shored up by unflinching support from even more diehard Tories, the Ulster Protestant factions in Northern Ireland, and his new friends the Liberal Democrats.
Having secured an unexpected clear majority on his own, Cameron made an extravagant victory speech in front of No: 10 Downing Street, in which he promised everything to everyone.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 