20/11/2015
19 November 2015 (IRIN*) – Alarm bells are ringing for a food emergency in Ethiopia. The UN says 15 million people will need help over the coming months. The government, wary of stigma and therefore hesitant to ask for help, has nevertheless said more than eight million Ethiopians need food assistance.
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Source: IRIN
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Extra imports to stem the crisis are already pegged at more than a million tonnes of grain, beyond the government’s means.
Inevitably, comment and media coverage compare the current situation with 1984 – the year Ethiopia’s notorious famine hit the headlines.
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The country of close to 100 million people is huge, spread over an area of more than a million square kilometres that ranges from semi-desert to swamp to mountain ranges and fertile farmland.
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20/11/2015
Rome, 20 November 2015
The focus on terrorism is obscuring the issues of refugees, and it is important to consider its impact on Europe, after the shock of Paris.
Of course, the impact of terrorism in the daily life of ordinary citizens is going to increase the culture of checks and controls in place since September 11, 2001.
Since the New York massacre, the 10,000 planes that take off daily carry citizens who go through vexing security checks, and cannot bring liquid on boards, etc.
Osama Bin Laden has changed totally our way of travelling. It is no small achievement, and Paris will increase that trend.
Let us not forget that we have ample literature from ISIS making it clear that its strategy is to get the West to react against the Muslim living in their countries, by erecting a wall of distrust and discrimination, so as to radicalise them as much as possible.
There are 44 million Muslims living in the West: if they felt shunned and discriminated against, they would be a formidable force, well beyond the 50,000 fighters who now carry the ISIS project of domination.
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20/11/2015
19 November 2015 – The United Nations General Assembly met today on tackling the global refugee crisis in the shadow of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, with top officials pleading that the door for genuine refuge not be slammed shut in the name of security.
Migrants and refugees from several countries arrive by special train in Berlin, Germany. Photo: UNICEF/Ashley Gilbertson VII
“How are we to balance security needs and moral and legal obligations to protect refugees and others in need of protection?” Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson asked the informal meeting, which had been scheduled before last week’s attacks, to discuss ways to advance and finance a ‘Comprehensive Response to the Global Humanitarian and Refugee Crisis.’
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19/11/2015
19 November 2015 – Indigenous peoples own, occupy or manage up to 65 per cent of the Earth’s land surface, yet they have largely been excluded from national plans prepared for next month’s United Nations climate change conference in Paris, according to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which is working to address the issue.
UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe (file)
Together with the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change, UNDP is bringing indigenous leaders and high-level government officials together, often for the first time, to ensure that the priorities of indigenous peoples, whose lands are often seized for intensive greenhouse gas-emitting development, are embedded in national proposals for the conference, widely known as COP21.
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19/11/2015
Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would help counter the extremism behind the “abhorrent terrorist attacks” in Paris, Beirut and the Sinai, a senior United Nations official on the Middle East peace process on 19 November 2015 said, referring to last week’s bloody attacks and the downing of a Russian plane in Egypt last month.
“These tragic events serve to reinforce the reality that the extremism and terrorism that has infected many parts of the Middle East is not constrained by borders,” Special Coordinator on the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov told the Security Council in the latest UN update on the situation.
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19/11/2015
New report from Transparency International shows lack of information and transparency in football and highlights corruption risks.
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**Map of the members of FIFA according to their confederation, on the 1st January 2006 (before this date, see this map): | Author: EOZyo | Based on Image:BlankMap-World6,_compact.svg | 19 September 2008 | Wikimedia Commons (Read details at end of article)
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19 November 2015 (Transparency International) – Most of the 209 national Football Associations that make up FIFA, world football’s governing body, publish little or no information on what they do and how they spend their money despite the fact that they received more than $1 million each from FIFA in 2014, according to a new report from Transparency International.
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19/11/2015
19 November 2015 – On World Toilet Day, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is urging broad action to renew efforts in providing access to adequate sanitation for all and work to comprehensively address the “vicious cycle” connecting poor sanitation and malnutrition, the theme of this year’s observance of the Day.
Children are using toilet facilities at a shelter in Hakha city, Myanmar, constructed with support from UNICEF. Photo: UNICEF/Kap Za Lyan
“Sanitation is central to human and environmental health as well as to individual opportunity, development and dignity. Yet today, worldwide, one in every three people lacks improved sanitation, and one in every eight practices open defecation,” said Ban Ki-moon in his message on the Day.
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19/11/2015
19 November 2015 – Marking World Philosophy Day, the head of the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) has stressed that sustainability calls for new ways of thinking about ourselves and the planet and as such, “philosophy and all the humanities will be essential.”
Sculpture “The Thinker” by Auguste Rodin. World Philosophy Day takes place every November. Photo: Hans Andersen | Source: UN News Centre
“The conviction that philosophy can make an essential contribution to human well-being, to addressing complexity, to advancing peace stands at the heart of World Philosophy Day,” UNESCO’s Director-General, Irina Bokova, said in her message for this year’s celebration.
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19/11/2015
Mawlids are festivals, commemorating the anniversary of a saint’s death – or, as Sufis believe, the day a saint was born for the heavens
By Belal Dardar*
19 November 2015 (Middle East Eye) – The mosque is covered with small lights. Loud religious songs play from speakers in every corner as circles of worshippers whirl around, repeating the word madad.
Lights, music, food and laughter illuminate the streets as Sufi and non-Sufi alike take part in a ‘mawlid’ (MEE/Belal Dardar)
There are simple tents in the streets and alleys around the mosque, full of people sleeping, eating, gathering and chatting.
Street vendors call out to passersby to buy fake jewelry and delicious desserts. Children wait in lines for their turn to get on the swing. It’s just a typical Egyptian Sufi mawlid.
The Arabic word mawlid means simply “anniversary” – the anniversary of a Muslim wali, a saint of sorts, one who serves as a meditator and intercessor in front of God.
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19/11/2015
By Dr. Vandana Shiva*
17 November 2015 (The Asian Age)* – ‘One Agriculture’ will starve the world and worsen the refugee crisis. The Gates Foundation, pretending to feed the world, is propagating the very source of half the climate problem.
Source: FAO
In 2008, before the climate summit in Copenhagen, I wrote the book Soil Not Oil.
It was a time when the intimate connections between climate and agriculture, air and soil were not being recognized in any forum, neither in the negotiations on climate change nor in the climate movement.
As we head into the Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris, agri-corporations are attempting to hijack climate talks once again.
Today we are faced with two crises on a planetary scale—climate change and species extinction. Our current modes of production and consumption are contributing to what climate change scientists term anthropogenic emissions—originating from human activity.
If no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, we could experience a catastrophic 4C increase in temperature by the end of the century.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 
