18/11/2015
17 November 2015 (RT) – Following the ISIS outrages in Beirut and Paris, John Pilger updates this prescient essay on the root causes of terrorism and what we can do about it.
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Photos of the victims of the Khmer Rouge, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum | Author: Adam Carr | English Wikipedia
In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”.
As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on that ruined country, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.
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18/11/2015
By Robert J. Burrowes*
18 November 2015 – As expectations build for a global consensus to emerge from the United Nations climate conference in Paris, starting on 30 November 2015, that could agree to taking action to limit any rise in global temperature to 2 degrees celsius, I would like to explain why these expectations are misplaced. And what we can do about it.
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Source: UNEP
The essence of the problem is that most people and organizations are asking elites to take action on their behalf rather than taking action themselves.
Not only is this a fearful and powerless approach, it reinforces the widespread delusions that elites have the power in this regard and that they are responsive to our pleas.
Neither of these is true.
We have the power and elites only respond when we create the circumstances that compel them to do so. And not otherwise. Hence, it is the action that we take, as individuals, communities and organisations, that generate the outcomes we want.
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18/11/2015
By Belén Fernández – TeleSUR*
Where was the global sympathy when a terror attack left at least 44 people dead and 239 others injured in Lebanon?
**Photo: Great Pyramid of Giza lit up by images of the flags of Lebanon, France and Russia in solidarity with victims of recent terrorist attacks, 16 November 2015 | Author: Wikiilluminati| Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.| Wikimedia Commons
14 Nov 2015 – As news arrived yesterday of terror attacks in Paris that ultimately left more than 120 people dead, U.S. President Barack Obama characterized the situation as “heartbreaking” and an assault “on all of humanity.”
Presidential sympathy had been conspicuously absent the previous day when terror attacks in Beirut left more than 40 dead.
Predictably, Western media and social media were much less vocal about the slaughter in Lebanon.
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18/11/2015
Is it editors, journalists or audiences to blame?
18 November 2015 (openDemocracy) – “A life is a life” said Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reflecting on the disparity between blanket media coverage of the atrocities in Paris last Friday and what he perceived as a distinct lack of attention to the loss of life in other parts of the world
Flickr/Moyan_Brenn, CC BY 2.0
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Pointing to last week’s suicide bombs in Beirut in which 43 people were killed and the 95 people killed in Turkey last month, Corbyn argued that “our media needs to be able to report things that happen outside of Europe as well as inside.”
This echoed a similar claim earlier this year that western media focused on the terror attacks in Paris back in January but paid scant attention to the massacre of many hundreds of people by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria.
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18/11/2015
‘The Nigerian government plans to start closing camps for those displaced by the Boko Haram conflict by the end of December, forcing thousands of people to return to the very places they fled. With much of northeastern Nigeria still very insecure and infrastructure lacking, many are scared. Is it too soon?’
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**Photo: Fragkiska Megaloudi/IRIN | IDPs in northeastern Nigeria often share overcrowded rooms.
By Fragkiska Megaloudi*
MAIDUGURI/YOLA, 17 November 2015 (IRIN) – Memuna* was four months pregnant when Boko Haram attacked her village on the outskirts of Bama, some 60 kilometres southeast of the Borno State capital of Maiduguri.
Her husband was killed during the September 2014 raid. She was captured and thrown into a cage by the militants after becoming separated from her five children.
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18/11/2015
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Over 25,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of mud – full of dangerous metals like manganese and mercury – quickly overtook the nearby mining community of Mariana in Minas Gerais state.
At least seventeen people were killed.
Hundreds more have been displaced by the wall of sludge released in the dam collapse.
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Posted in Latin America & Caribbean, Market Lords, Mother Earth, The Peoples |
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18/11/2015
Widespread adoption of products labelled “biodegradable” will not significantly decrease the volume of plastic entering the ocean or the physical and chemical risks that plastics pose to marine environment, accord to a United Nations report released on 17 November 2015.
Plastic bottles and garbage waste from a village in Timor-Leste wash on the shores of a river and then spill into the sea. UN Photo/Martine Perret
The report, entitled Biodegradable Plastics and Marine Litter. Misconceptions, Concerns and Impacts on Marine Environments, finds that complete biodegradation of plastics occurs in conditions that are rarely, if ever, met in marine environments, with some polymers requiring industrial composters and prolonged temperatures of above 50°C to disintegrate.
There is also limited evidence suggesting that labelling products as “biodegradable” increases the public’s inclination to litter.
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18/11/2015
United Nations Security Council held an already scheduled debate on conflict prevention on 17 November 2015 amid added urgency fueled by last week’s terrorist attacks in Beirut and Paris, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressing that counter-terrorism must also tackle such root causes as bad governance, injustice and exclusion.*
**Photo: People who earn their living by collecting and sorting garbage and selling them for recycling, Payatas, Manila, Philippines. | Author: Kounosu | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license. | Wikimedia Commons.
‘Yet our responses have not caught up to these realities. We are not yet properly integrating UN action across the inter-dependent pillars of our work: peace, development and human rights,” he added, calling for a global recovery plan for the Middle East similar to the multi-billion dollar Marshall Plan with which the United States rebuilt Western Europe after World War Two.
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18/11/2015
17 November 2015 – The United Nations refugee agency today expressed its shock and horror at the attacks in Paris and the killing of so many innocent people but warned against the scapegoating of refugees, in the wake of the deadly attacks.
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A volunteer on the Greek Island of Lesvos gathers a baby girl in her arms, moments after her family arrived in an inflatable boat. Photo: UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis
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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), António Guterres conveyed his solidarity with the Government and the people of France, as he did with the Government of Lebanon, following the recent Beirut attacks.
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18/11/2015
MIAMI, Florida, 17 November 2015 (IPS) – We humans are acutely aware of risks. From our earliest times, the risks we faced were from hunger, predatory animals, extreme environmental conditions and, as our numbers grew, from other human tribes.
Fast forward to our growing mastery of nature, technological prowess and the Industrial Revolution.
The risks humans faced changed beyond those always present in extreme environmental conditions.
The technologies we developed against such risks – advancing our energy, shelter, food and health systems – also created new risks, often unforeseen for decades.
Conflicts with other humans grew as the human family colonized every part of our planet, stressing ecosystems and driving other species to extinction.
Today, in the 21st century, new risks dominate our political and social issues from terrorism, barbarous attacks on civilians as in Paris, nuclear meltdowns and weapons, financial crises, desertification and famines, disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas, Greenland and Antarctica, water shortages, polluted air, rising sea levels, new pandemics and drug-resistant diseases.
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