15/08/2015
The situation in Burundi continues to deteriorate amid ongoing killings, arrests and detentions in the latest post-election turmoil to afflict the country, the United Nations human rights office on 14 August 2015 reported.*
**Photo: People demonstrate in Bujumbura against a decision by Burundi’s ruling party to nominate President Pierre Nkurunziza to run for a third term (April 2015). Photo: Desire Nimubona/IRIN
“We urge all sides to resume dialogue before the situation spirals completely out of control,” warned Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), as she addressed reporters today in Geneva.
“Burundi has been slipping closer to the edge with every high-profile attack and killing, and we call on leaders on all sides to take concrete steps to renounce the use of violence and to resolve differences peacefully,” she continued.
“Where violations and abuses have occurred, there need to be prompt investigations with a view to bringing the perpetrators to account and justice for victims.”
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15/08/2015
By John Scales Avery*
The direct and indirect costs of war
15 August 2015 – The costs of war, both direct and indirect, are so enormous that they are almost beyond comprehension. Globally, the institution of war interferes seriously with the use of tax money for constructive and peaceful purposes.
**The Apotheosis of War (1871) by Vasily Vereshchagin | oil on canvas | Source/photographer: CD-ROM “Государственная Третьяковская галерея”. Издание 2-е; Допол. Издательство: AlexSoft, 2004 | Current location: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Link back to Institution infobox template wikidata:Q183334| Wikimedia Commons
Today, despite the end of the Cold War, the world spends roughly 1.7 trillion (i.e. 1.7 million million) US dollars each year on armaments. This colossal flood of money could have been used instead for education, famine relief, development of infrastructure, or on urgently needed public health measures.
The World Health Organization lacks funds to carry through an antimalarial program on as large a scale as would be desirable, but the entire program could be financed for less that our military establishments spend in a single day.
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12/08/2015
12 August 2015 – Marking International Day of Youth, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed that no one knows better than young people the issues at stake in today’s rapidly changing world or the best way to respond, and declared: “That is why I am calling on young people to speak out – and I am urging leaders to listen.”
To reap a demographic dividend, countries must empower, educate and employ their young people. Photo: PANDI/ UNFPA Colombia
As the world changes with unprecedented speed, young people are proving to be invaluable partners who can advance meaningful solutions, the Secretary-General stated in a message issued for the Day, observed each year on 12 August.
“Youth movements and student groups are challenging traditional power structures and advocating a new social contract between States and societies. Young leaders have contributed fresh ideas, taken proactive measures, and mobilized through social media as never before,” said Ban.
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12/08/2015
HARGEISA, Somaliland, 11 August 2015 (IRIN)* – Qader and Abdi are two weeks into their journey. Carrying only one empty plastic water bottle each, flattened, with no liquid to return it to its cylindrical shape, the two men figure they will be walking for another month-and-a-half before they reach the sea. From there, they will take a smuggler boat the short distance to Yemen, where another 600-kilometre walk lies ahead before they may reach their final destination, Saudi Arabia.
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**Photo: J.Björgvinsson/UNHCR | Exhausted survivors of the Gulf of Aden crossing wait for help on a beach in Yemen (file photo)
The pair – members of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, which activists charge is systematically disenfranchised by the government – are walking along an uncrowded road connecting the capital of Somaliland, Hargeisa, to a northern port city.
They walk because they cannot afford the roughly $150-200 that a series of smugglers would charge to take them from the Ethiopian border east through Somaliland to the port of Bosaso in the neighbouring semi-autonomous region of Puntland.
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12/08/2015
As Yemen plunges deeper into conflict, which has left millions in need of humanitarian aid and wrecked healthcare systems, the country now finds itself in the midst of a major food crisis, a United Nations expert on 11 August 2015 said as she expressed concern over possibly deliberate starvation of civilians.
A boy pushes a wheelbarrow filled with jerrycans in Sanaa, the Yemeni, capital. Photo: UNICEF/NYHQ2015-1291/Yasin
“As the conflict continues to escalate, over 12.9 million people in Yemen are now surviving without adequate access to basic food supplies, including six million who are deemed severely food insecure,” warned Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, in a press release issued on 11 August.
The situation facing children in the country is particularly alarming, she stressed, with reports suggesting that 850,000 of them face acute malnutrition – a figure that is expected to rise to 1.2 million over the coming weeks, if the conflict persists as its present level.
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12/08/2015
By Robert J. Burrowes*
12 August 2015
In a recent letter to US President Barack Obama twelve Nobel Peace laureates declared their support for the long history of US elite violence against Native Americans and enslaved Africans, as well as the US imperial violence around the world that has butchered tens of millions of people over the past 200 years. See ‘US: An End to Torture: Twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates write to President Barack Obama asking the US to close the dark chapter on torture once and for all. Obama responds‘.
The letter to Obama was signed by ex-President José Ramos-Horta (Timor-Leste, prize recipient in 1996), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (South Africa, 1984), Leymah Gbowee (Liberia, 2011), Mohammad ElBaradei (Egypt, 2005), Jody Williams (USA, 1997), Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh, 2006), F.W. De Klerk (South Africa, 1993), John Hume (Northern Ireland, 1998), Oscar Arias Sanchez (Costa Rica, 1987), Bishop Carlos X. Belo (Timor-Leste, 1996), Adolfo Perez Esquivel (Argentina, 1980) and Betty Williams (Northern Ireland, 1976).
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11/08/2015
By David Swanson*
11 August 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – After marking the destruction of Nagasaki and the police-murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson on August 9th, Americans have options for what to commemorate on August 10th. I’m inclined to think that August 10th should be formally recognized as Gulf of Tonkin War Fraud Day. But I’m not sure, because another event is in even more need of remembrance.
Source: TMS
It was the day after the death blow to Nagasaki, 70 years ago, that the victors of the most awesomest war ever chose to create a division of Korea along the 38th parallel — a line that would be revered as a holy thing when North Korean troops later came across it, but dismissed as “imaginary” when U.S. troops crossed it heading north.
The Korean war was to World War II what the anthrax letters were to 9-11 — without it sanity had a real chance; militarism was being scaled back drastically until the Korean war created the excuse for the permanent imperial war economy; but almost nobody even recalls what happened.
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10/08/2015
A United Nations human rights committee has completed its annual evaluation of the situation affecting millions of people living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and has cited Israel’s policy of settlement expansion as a primary driver of the escalating violence in the area.
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Suffering displacement, injury and even death, children continue to bear unacceptable consequences of the recent escalation of violence between Israel and Gaza. Photo: UNICEF/NYHQ2014-1012/D’Aki
In a press release issued on 10 August 2015 to mark the end of its five-day fact-finding visit to Amman, Jordan, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people and other Arabs of the occupied territories, said that a series of meetings with civil society groups and Palestinian officials had revealed that the “root cause” of the escalating violence in the Territories is “the continuing policy of settlement expansion and the climate of impunity relating to the activities of the settlers.”
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10/08/2015
By Catherine Shakdam*
10 August 2015 (RT)* – The US and Turkey have come to a tentative agreement in Syria, whereby Ankara is opening its territories to American troops in an attempt to defeat terror. Or is it that terror needs military backing to depose Syrian President Bashar Assad? It is difficult to tell these days.
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**Two destroyed tanks in front of a mosque in Azaz, Syria. From March 6 to July 23, a battle between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian government was fought for control over the city of Azaz, north of Aleppo, during the Syrian civil war. | Author: Christiaan Triebert | Source: Flickr: Azaz, Syria | Wikimedia Commons
America’s neocons simply will not tolerate peace to drive the global narrative!
As the ink has been left to dry on the much-awaited and let’s just say it, the most significant political agreement of this decade, if not the century – the Iran nuclear agreement – Washington announced it would actively engage its military in Syria. It is almost as if America had to have at least one war going this summer for its hawks to be assuaged.
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10/08/2015
By Johan Galtung*
Jondal, Oslo, 10 August 2015 – TRANSCEND Media Service – Norway, on top of the UN indicator of good life for years, is now hit by two different crises; one for the less developed aspect and one for the more developed. Yet the citizens are protected by a massive oil slick, the biggest sovereign fund in the world, the Government Pension Fund for an aging population when oil dries out. For only 5 million inhabitants, $178,000/capita, and growing.
**The oil platform Statfjord A with the flotel Polymariner. | Since the 1980s oil production has helped to expand the Norwegian economy and finance the Norwegian state | Author: User:Jarvin Jarle Vines | Wikimedia Commons
First crisis: Third World monoculture—oil/gas–hit by the world markets; from over $ 100 per barrel to under 50 recently.
A crisis of over-supply and also of under-demand, less than expected: toxic fossil fuels do the same to the lungs of Planet Earth as smoking to the lungs of humans. Green alternatives strong in Germany, China, coming in USA.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 