ROME, 5 May 2016 (IPS) – Just an ordinary citizen living in a Middle East and North of Africa country and requiring a birth certificate for your new-born daughter? No problem—just take something with you, either some cash, a pack of cigarettes or buy a glass of tea with milk and a lot of sugar.
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Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 | Credit: Transparency International
Or a rich Middle-Eastern and want to strike a good business deal? No problem again –all you need is to carry with you an envelope full of banknotes or ask for the bank account of the concerned high government official, preferably abroad.
You may say that paying bribes is a worldwide practise that may have different names—commission, compensation, gratification, or maybe just a little present. You would be right. In fact, Transparency International (TI)estimates that more than 6 billion people live in countries with “a serious corruption problem.”
7 May 2016 (RT) – UK Prime Minister David Cameron is not having a good week. Just as the UK is discussing its future within the EU, another sensitive dossier landed on Downing Street’s lap: unaccompanied Syrian refugee children.
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Child refugees in Idomeni, Greece, March 2016. Photo: UNICEF/Tomislav Georgiev
As a “responsible Western nation,” one which values human life, and human dignity – or so we have been told – the UK is now debating whether or not it should allow Syrian children war refugees, aka Syrian war orphans, to step onto British soil as asylum seekers.
LUSAKA, 6 May 2016 (IPS) – Agriculture is the primary sector of all economies. It is the sector responsible for granting food and nutrition security to all human beings. Consequently it is responsible for social stability and health. And it provides work opportunities to families, men, women and youth, and largely contributes to the country Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Photo: Courtesy of WFO
However, this would never be possible without the support of our partners and friends from the public and private sectors, from local and international arena, who believe in our daily work and in our central role for the socio-economic well being of this planet.
ROME, 6 May 2016 (IPS) – When the blasphemous anti Islam cartoons published in 2006 by a Danish newspaper left 205 people dead, the then Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Ekmeleddin Mehmet Ihsaoglu, went to see Javier Solana who was responsible for foreign affairs of the European Union.
Television report on Islamophobia Conference at the UN, Geneva
The position of the EU was that there was no islamophobia at all, and this was an isolated incident. Since then, this has been more or less the position of the European institutions.
‘Why not make a Reykjavik Mediation Center, politically and internationally independent, and on Iceland’s location between West and East, USA and Russia? Look at the map. For Reykjavík to invite USA and Russia, with Kiev and Donetsk. Maybe also Brussels, in the sense of NATO and EU. Issue: the conflict in and around Ukraine–meaning “at the border”, between two nations, Catholic-Ukrainian and Orthodox-Russian; with much hatred and violence’
The international community must boost efforts to build the capacity for disaster risk management and readiness to prevent El Niño weather extremes from causing humanitarian crises in affected countries and impeding their development, the President of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on 6 May 2016.
Drought associated with the El Niño phenomenon has severely affected Arsi, Ethiopia. Photo: OCHA/Charlotte Cans
New data reveal that a record 96,500 unaccompanied refugee and migrant children applied for asylum across Europe in 2015, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on 6 May 2016 said, calling for urgent measures to protect these children from the serious risks of abuse, exploitation and trafficking.
Refugee children on the border of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Serbia. Photo: UNICEF/Tomislav Georgiev
“Unaccompanied children are falling between the cracks,” said Marie Pierre Poirier, UNICEF Special Coordinator for the Refugee and Migrant crisis in Europe, in a press release.
