'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
– More than 1,500 public and private business delegates and state leaders agreed on 20-21 February in Egypt to mobilise massive investments for the implementation of Africa’s largest trading bloc which was created last year by 26 African countries with a total of 620 million consumers and a combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) nearing 1,2 trillion dollars.
– The continued decline in oil prices is threatening to have a direct and indirect impact on several fronts, including development aid, migrant workers and remittances, voluntary contributions to UN agencies, humanitarian assistance to refugees and infrastructure-building in the Gulf countries.
**Photo: Challenger 2, Warrior, AS90, MLRS and Stormer of 1 YORKS battle group | Author: Sgt Mark Webster RLC | Licensed under the Open Government Licence v1.0 (OGL). | Wikimedia Commons
Still, the drop in oil revenues is unlikely to have any immediate impact on uninterrupted arms supplies to the Middle East – even as military conflicts and insurgencies in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Libya show no signs of de-escalation.
“The military intervention in Yemen by a coalition of Arab states, which began in 2015, was facilitated by high levels of arms imports” by several countries in the coalition, says a new report released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
L’Alfàs del Pi, Spai, 22 February 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service
Two ideas – España Una Grande Libre: Spain One Great Free-status quo and España Una Comunidad de Naciones: Spain a Community of Nations.
Johan Galtung
In addition, one fact: the forces in Catalunya in favor of independence.
A vast gap. And a dangerous one: when status quo is maintained, and-or independence obtained, by violence, relations can remain bad for a long time. The Iberian Peninsula’s history provides enough examples.
Both sides in the present controversy have important arguments.
A separate inner identity in terms of language, shared history and geographical attachment calls for separate outer identity as statehood, independence, for one. And this concerns not only you but all of Spain, a democracy, and the majority favors status quo, for the other.
Both arguments, and there are more, have a solid ring of truth.
The Need for a New Economic System by John Scales Avery is an important book for everyone concerned over the future of humanity.
The urgent voice of the book stems from Dr. Avery’s seeing the discontinuity between the loving care that people bestow on their children and their failure to reduce the harm to their children from a destructive economic system, climate change, resource depletion, and war.
This book of advocacy demonstrates the need for solutions to problems created under the present economic system. Political-economic analyses of the causes of the problems and of solutions are outside of the scope of the book.
Scattered through the book are a few general policy suggestions. At the center is Avery’s assessment sector by sector of the critical problems that must be solved to avert disasters.
20 February 2016
RIGHT AFTER the foundation of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: “You have done good by my people. Utter a wish and I shall grant it!”
Uri Avnery
“I wish that Israel shall be Jewish, democratic and encompass all the country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan,” Ben-Gurion replied.
“That is too much even for me!” God exclaimed. “But I will grant you two of the three. You can choose between a Jewish and democratic Israel in a part of the country, a democratic state in all of the country that will not be Jewish or a Jewish Israel in all of the country that will not be democratic.”
God has not changed his mind.
WHILE I am writing this, Binyamin Netanyahu is totally absorbed in enacting a new law, a law that would be a watershed in the history of Israel.
The public looks on in a bemused way, as if it were happening in Kamchatka.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 