29/01/2016
27 January 2016 – More than 6 billion people live in countries with a serious corruption problem.
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© AM Ahad | Source: Transparency International
She lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh – one of 114 countries that scores below 50 out of 100 in our 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index, indicating serious levels of public sector corruption.
Instead of going to school, she spends her days sorting bottles at a recycling factory.
Officially child labour is illegal in Bangladesh. Unofficially a bribe paid to the right official can mean exceptions are made.
Like all exploitation, child labour remains a sad reality in environments where citizens are trapped in poverty and corrupt officials can be paid off.
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29/01/2016
By Robert J. Burrowes*
29 January 2016
A new book, edited by Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes, both involved with The Transnational Institute, brings together a thoughtful collection of scholars, journalists and activists to explain the pre-eminence of the military and corporations in shaping the global response to the climate catastrophe as an ‘opportunity’. See ‘The Secure and the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World‘. Do you think that this catastrophe is an ‘opportunity’?
In a series of chapters both in the book and online, we are thoughtfully guided through a deeper understanding of how, for the security/military-industrial complex, ‘climate change is just the latest in a long line of threats constructed in such a way as to consolidate its grip on power and public finance.’
For corporations, the risk posed by climate change is an opportunity for profit as they promise us ‘food security’, ‘water security’, ‘energy security’ … even if it is at the expense of equity and justice and has ‘disastrous implications for the security of human lives and dignity’.
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28/01/2016
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26 Jan 2016 – The 2016 World Economic Forum, which concluded on Saturday (23 January), looked at a 21st century economy led by robots and artificial intelligence, against the backdrop of a more unstable and unequal world.
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HUBO, a multifunctional walking humanoid robot lifts a piece of wood in front of the logo on the opening day of the Annual Meeting 2016 of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Switzerland, Tuesday (January 19). [World Economic Forum/swiss-image.ch] | Source: EurActiv
Recent editions of the Forum have seen repentent bankers, business leaders and politicians seeking to make amends following the 2008 financial meltdown, which plunged the world into a series of unprecedented crises.
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28/01/2016
By Marianne Arens*
28 January 2016 (WSWS) – At a meeting in Amsterdam this week, European interior and justice ministers sought to outdo each other with suggestions as to how the influx of desperate refugees from the Middle East could be stopped. No measure was too brutal for consideration.
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© UNHCR/I. Pavicevic | Kids playing around on train tracks near Presevo, Serbia on January 20, 2016.
Proposals ranged from the hermetic sealing off of borders to the stationing of Frontex troops, even against the will of national governments, as well as the erection of concentration camps for hundreds of thousands of refugees.
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28/01/2016
By Roberto Savio*
ROME, 29 January 2016 – The rich and the powerful, who meet every year at the World Economic Forum (WEF), were in a gloomy mood this time. Not only because the day they met close to eight trillion dollars has been wiped off global equity markets by a “correction”. But because no leader could be in a buoyant mood.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is losing ground because of the way she handled the refugee crisis. French President Francois Hollande is facing decline in the polls that are favoring Marine Le Pen. Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy practically lost the elections. Italian President Matteo Renzi is facing a very serious crisis in the Italian banking system, which could shatter the third economy of Europe.
And the leaders from China, Brazil, India, Nigeria and other economies from the emerging countries (as they are called in economic jargon), are all going through a serious economic slowdown, which is affecting also the economies of the North. The absence of the presidents of Brazil and China was a telling sign.
However the last Davos (20-23 January) will remain in the history of the WEF, as the best example of the growing disconnection between the elites and the citizens.
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28/01/2016
An industrial sugar and ethanol plant in Sertãozinho, in the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo. The sugar cane industry in Brazil has shrunk under the government of Dilma Rousseff, due to the gasoline subsidy, which dealt a blow to its competitor, ethanol. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
Brazil’s energy mix is made up of 42 percent renewable sources, three times the global average.
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26/01/2016
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A group of Central American migrants walking along a trail in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala, at the start of their long journey across Mexico on their way to the United States. Credit: Courtesy Médecins Sans Frontières – Mexico
Although migrant rights activists put the greatest blame on the United States, complaining that Cuban immigrants are given privileged treatment across the border, they also accuse Mexico of fomenting the differences.
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26/01/2016
By Kristin Christman*
25 January 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – Ten thousand Americans are killed annually by drunk American drivers. Fourteen Americans were killed in December by two Muslims. So Donald Trump suggests banning — alcohol? No; he wants to ban Muslim immigrants. And Muslims don’t even drink.
**Trump speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland | Author: Gage Skidmore | Wikimedia Commons
Candidates’ tough talk is not about saving lives. It’s about ignorance. ISIS and Al Qaeda adhere to hijacked forms of Islam which reject Islam’s call for peaceful tolerance.
Furthermore, the ability of ISIS to attract global followers doesn’t even stem from its intolerant ideology, but rather from its determination to resist foreign and sectarian domination.
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26/01/2016
Facing a global epidemic in childhood obesity with the number of overweight children under five on track to jump from 42 million to 70 million over the next decade, a United Nations report on 25 January 2016 called on governments to reverse the trend by promoting healthy foods and physical activity.
Children play outdoors at a school in Curaçao, the Netherlands. Photo: UNICEF/Roger LeMoyne
The marketing of unhealthy foods and non-alcoholic beverages is a major factor in the alarming increase, which rose from 31 million in 1990 to 41 million in 2014, particularly in the developing world, with the greatest rise coming from low- and middle-income countries, according to the report by the Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity (ECHO).
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26/01/2016
Intra-Syrian talks that were scheduled to begin in Geneva on 25 January 2016 under United Nations sponsorship will now start on Friday 29 January, with the first priority being a broad ceasefire, humanitarian aid, and halting the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
A family flees an active conflict neighbourhood in eastern Ghouta, Syria, using a cart to carry their belongings. Photo: UNICEF/Amer Al Shami
But in announcing the new date, for which invitations will be sent out tomorrow, Special UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said he is under no illusions about the difficulties in ending a war that has killed over 250,000 people, sent over 4 million fleeing the country, displaced 6.5 million internally, and put 13.5 million people inside the country in urgent need of humanitarian aid.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 