04/06/2015
3 June 2015 (RT)* – WikiLeaks has published 17 secret documents related to a controversial trade agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors between the US, EU and 23 WTO members. NGO Global Justice Now called the leak “a dark day for democracy.”
The documents released by the transparency group are allegedly associated with TiSA (Trade in Services Agreement) negotiations, which have been taking place in secret since early 2013.
The participants of the talks include 24 WTO members, such as the US, EU and other countries including Turkey, Mexico, Australia, Pakistan and Israel.
According to WikiLeaks, the economies of the member countries now comprise two-thirds of global GDP.
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04/06/2015
3 June 2015 (RT)* – The National Union of Students (NUS) has passed a motion to boycott Israeli goods in solidarity with the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to exert economic pressure on Israel over its actions in Palestinian territory.
**Photo: Destroyed house in Gaza City, December 2012 | diario fotográfico ‘desde Palestina’, photographer | Wikimedia Commons
The motion – an amendment of an original titled “Solidarity with Palestine” – was passed Tuesday with 19 votes in favor, 14 against and 1 abstention by the union’s elected national executive committee.
The motion was scheduled to be debated at the NUS annual conference in April, but was postponed due to a shortage of conference time.
The Solidarity with Palestine movement is designed to put economic pressure on Israel to change its policy and acknowledge its actions in Gaza.
During the summer of 2014, Israel’s Operation Protective Edge caused the death of more than 2,000 Palestinians.
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04/06/2015
‘Mass jubilation as 2,000 young couples are wed in a ceremony sponsored by the Turkish state agency, “Tika”‘
A total of 4000 men and women wed in a mass wedding ceremony in Gaza on 31st May 2015 (MEE/Mohammed Asad)
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2 June 2015 (Middle East Eye) – In a relatively unfamiliar spectacle, a long procession marched through the streets of besieged Gaza on Sunday.
It was not the typical sight of crowds setting out in a funeral procession to lay Gaza’s latest dead to rest, as has so often been the case in past years.
Nor was it an angry crowd demanding the end of the Israeli siege on the Strip. This crowd was celebrating a mass wedding involving 2000 brides and 2000 grooms, an event which dwarfed the mass wedding of 400 Palestinians that had taken place in Gaza just a month before and which had been funded by the UAE and supported by the wife of Mohammed Dahlan.
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03/06/2015
By Oliver Salge*
2 June 2015 — Six years ago, on the first of June, 2009, I was speaking with well-known companies about the problems cattle-ranching in Brazil is causing to the Amazon rainforest. I told them about how they contribute to rainforest destruction in the Amazon region and called on them to act against this.
Photo: Greenpeace
That same day, Greenpeace activists took action at the headquarters of the German sports clothing company, Adidas in Bavaria.
They handed over a groundbreaking report linking forest destruction caused by cattle ranching to the leather producers where Adidas was buying their leather for shoes.
That Greenpeace report, Slaughtering the Amazon, was the result of years of research and it linked the ongoing deforestation of the Amazon rainforest with the international market for beef and leather.
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03/06/2015
This year’s World Environment Day’s theme, ‘Seven Billion Dreams. One Planet. Consume with Care’, to b e celebrated on 5 June, encourages people to rethink their lifestyles and, through conscious consumer decisions, decrease humanity’s collective impact on nature’s resources.*
Photo: UNICEF/Wathiq Khuzaie
According to UNEP’s International Resource Panel (IRP), if unsustainable consumption and production patterns persist, by 2050 we will be using three planets- worth of natural resources to maintain our ways of living.
This means that it will take three years for the Earth to regenerate the resources we use in one year.
By 2050, humanity could be devouring about 140 billion tonnes of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year – three times its current appetite – unless economic growth rate is decoupled from the rate of natural resource use.
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01/06/2015
Doubt: Petroleum interests and paid denialist employ scientific doubt to rationalize non-action, but this is a trick. Scientific knowledge is built on doubt. Every process in nature involves multiple influences, no observer knows all the factors, and everything science knows is framed by a margin of doubt.
Nevertheless, science has observed enough to know that global warming is real, and that the primary cause is human activity.
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01/06/2015
By Uri Avnery*
30 May 2015
Uri Avnery
A FORMER cabinet minister, an intelligent person (nonetheless) asked me the other day: “Let’s assume that your plan is realized. A Palestinian state will come into being side by side with Israel. Even some kind of federation. Then, in a few years, a violently anti-Israel party will come to power there and annul all the treaties. What then?”
My simple answer was: “Israel will always be powerful enough to forestall any threat.”
That is true, but that is not the real answer. The real answer lies in the lessons of history.
HISTORY SHOWS us that there are (at least) two kinds of peace agreements. One kind, the stupid one, is based on power. The other, the intelligent, is based on common interest.
The most notorious of the first kind is the Treaty of Versailles that followed World War I.
It was signed four years before I was born, but as a child I was an eye-witness to its results.
It was a “dictated” peace. After four years of fighting, with millions of victims, the victors wanted to inflict the maximum of damage on the vanquished.
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01/06/2015
By Roberto Savio*
Rome, 31 May 2015 – It is astonishing that every week we see action being taken in various part of the world against the financial sector, without any noticeable reaction of public opinion.
The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, the world’s largest stock exchange per total market capitalization of its listed companies | Wikimedia Commons
It is astonishing because at the same time we are experiencing a very serious crisis, with high unemployment, precarious jobs and an unprecedented growth of inequality, which can all be attributed, largely, to speculative finance.
It is calculated that we will need to wait until at least 2020 to be able to go back to the levels of 2008 – so we are talking of a lost decade.This all began in 2008 with the mortgage crisis and the bursting of the derivatives bubble in the United States, followed by the bursting of the sovereign bonds bubble in Europe.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 