26/06/2015
‘In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, survivors of conflict are rebuilding their shattered lives one loaf at a time. Their stories’
By Céline Schmitt*
25 June 2015 – For nearly a decade, the small and dusty town of Dungu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been under attack. But while many women and girls throughout the region have been kidnapped and terrorised by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), others have survived and are now rebuilding their lives.
Pascaline holds freshly baked croissants in her apron at Sister Angélique’s new bakery. | UNHCR/Kate Holt.
Sister Angélique Namaika, the 2013 Nansen Refugee Award laureate, has lived in Dungu since 2003. For more than a decade, she has been helping over 2,000 women to overcome their trauma, counter the stigma attached to rape, and learn to live again. With the Nansen prize money, Sister Angélique opened a cooperative bakery on 5 June 2015. I seized the opportunity to go back and see her again.
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25/06/2015
By Prof. Vandana Shiva*
23 June 2015, TRANSCEND Media Service – Science” is derived from the word score — “to know”. Each of us should know what we are eating, how it was produced and what impact it will have on our health.
The knowledge we need for growing food is the knowledge of biodiversity and living seed, of living soil and the soil food web, of interaction between different species in the agro-ecosystem and of different seasons.
Farmers have been the experts in these fields, as have ecological scientists who study the evolution of micro-organisms, plants and animals, the ecological web and the soil food web.
In industrial agriculture, the knowledge of living systems is totally missing, since industrial agriculture was externally driven by using war chemicals as inputs.
Soil was defined as an empty container for holding synthetic fertilisers and plants were defined as machines running on external inputs.
This meant substituting the ecological functions and services that nature and farmers can provide through renewal of soil fertility, pest and weed control, and seed improvement.
But it also implied ignorance of the destruction of the functions by the toxic chemicals applied to agriculture.
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25/06/2015
By John Scales Avery*
25 June 2015 – Do our Defense Departments really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud. For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. Civilians like ourselves are just hostages. We are expendable. We are pawns in the power game, the money game.
Nations possessing nuclear weapons threaten each other with Mutually Assured Destruction, which has the very appropriate acronym MAD.
What does this mean? Does it mean that civilians are being protected? Not at all.
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25/06/2015
By Robert J. Burrowes*
In an article I wrote a year ago, the following words appeared:
‘If a child is crying and you comfort them, you will (presumably unintentionally) scare them out of feeling their sadness when, in fact, their crying is a functional response to something not working out as the child wanted and for healing from this event….
… The same applies to fear, anger and all other feelings. Unfortunately, if we scare a child out of feeling their natural responses to events (by ignoring, comforting, reassuring, distracting, laughing at, ridiculing, terrorizing or violently controlling them when they express their feelings), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings and they will not be able to identify the appropriate way forward: this reduces their power to respond functionally and powerfully to events in their life.’
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23/06/2015
By Emily Hunter*
22 June 2015 – Staring out at the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean, I feel a sense of past and present colliding. Forty-four years ago in these same waters off Canada’s west coast, my father Robert Hunter and a group of Greenpeace co-founders sailed to stop nuclear testing on the Alaskan island of Amchitka. Today, we have just taken a similar passage on the west coast to disrupt Shell’s plans for drilling in the Arctic this year.
Greenpeace
For me, staring back at the same waves my father once encountered reminds me that we live a common story.
While these events are separated by time, they are essentially the same struggle. For these are the defining issues of our eras and we are the dreamers that believe we can change them.
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23/06/2015
By Leonardo Boff*
Leonardo Boff
23 Jun 2015 – I think that in trying to overcome the present crisis (if that is possible) two factors must be seriously considered, otherwise we risk losing everything that we hope for: the collapse of the capitalist order and the limits of the Earth that cannot be exceeded.
Naturally, this relies on hypotheses, but I believe they are well founded.
The first fact: the capitalist system has begun to collapse, which means it has reached its end in two ways: its end in the sense that it has achieved its fundamental purpose: to accumulate private wealth up to extreme limits.
As Thomas Piketty wrote in Capital in the XXI Century: «the few who are on top tend to appropriate a great portion of the national wealth». Today that tendency is not only national, but global.
The data varies from year to year, but in short, they are: that an ever smaller group has and controls the better part of the world’s wealth.
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23/06/2015
By John Scales Avery*
The threat of catastrophic climate change requires prompt and dedicated action by the global community. Unless we very quickly make the transition from fossil fuels to 100% renewable energy, we will reach a tipping point after which uncontrollable feedback loops could take over, leading to a human-caused 6th geological extinction event.
Photo credit: Greenpeace
This might even be comparable to the Permian-Triassic event, during which 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates became extinct.
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20/06/2015
By Uri Avnery*
20 June 2015
Uri Avnery
THERE WAS this guy who had an earth-shaking invention: an airplane that flies on water.
No more gas. No more pollution. No more astronomical prices. Just fill it up with water, and it will fly to the end of the world.
“Wonderful!” people cried out. “Show us the plans!”
“Plans?” the man said. “I have had the great idea. I leave it to the engineers to work out the technical details.”
The inventors of the “One-State Solution” remind me of this genius. They have a wonderful idea. But there are a few questions left open.
FIRST QUESTION: how can it be achieved?
The obvious answer is: by war.
The Arab world will mobilize its armies. Israel will be conquered. The victors will impose their will.
This may be possible within a few generations. I rather doubt it. In a world of nuclear arms, wars may end with mutual annihilation.
Well, if not war, then “outside pressure”.
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20/06/2015
By Don Murray*
Istanbul, Turkey (UNHCR)* – The world is facing a staggering crisis as the number of forcibly displaced people rises to record numbers – 59.5 million at the end of 2014, UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres on 18 June 2015 warned.
© Anadolu Agency/F.Yurdakul | Syrian woman holds two babies in her arms after fleeing crossing the Akcakale border gate in southern Turkey’s Sanliurfa province this week. | Source: UNHCR
“To those that think that it doesn’t matter because humanitarian organizations will be there and able to clean up the mess, I think it’s important to say that we are no longer able to clean up the mess,” he told reporters in Istanbul.*
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20/06/2015
“Most of the world’s refugees – 86 per cent — live in the developing world, compared to 70 per cent 10 years ago. Most of these countries have kept their doors open to people in search of safety, and have shown a generosity that is often well beyond their means,” says UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Kosovar refugees fleeing their homeland on 01 March 1999 | UN Photo/UNHCR/R LeMoyne
“I appeal to all Member States and our partners in civil society to do their utmost to support the nations and communities that have welcomed the forcibly displaced into their midst,” Ban said on occasion of World Refugee Day on 20 June 2015.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 
