'Unseen' News and Views
LONDON, 10 May 2016 (IRIN) – Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be attending the upcoming World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul and Russia is refusing to be bound by the results of a process it says failed to include its views.
Russian president with German Chancellor | SOURCE : IRIN
A Russian statement, obtained by IRIN, says any outcomes of the summit would not be legitimate grounds to change the UN’s emergency aid setup.
– Greece is again in the media, because a new negotiation is due between the embattled country and its creditors. The North-South divide of Europe is coming back with force (while the East-West relationship is increasingly looking as beyond repair).
**Wolfgang Schäuble and Angela Merkel in the German Bundestag, 2014 | Author: Tobias Koch | Source: OTRS | Wikimedia Commons
The German minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble, has come back with his peculiar view of the economy as a branch of moral and ethical discipline, and not as a reading of reality.
Antwerpen, Alfaz, 12 May 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – We are dealing with mass migration, basically into EU, and European nationalisms, many in favor of exits from the EU.
Johan Galtung
Why this mass migration, maybe to the point of Völkerwanderung, mainly into EU–but then what kind of EU–and why the European nationalisms now found one way or the other in many member states?
The forecast for migration from Africa into Italy in 2016 is about 100,000; 28,000 already arrived in the first quarter, with 1,000 drowning in the Mediterranean (INYT, 6 May 2016). Big numbers. They knew the risks they were taking, so the push away from Africa and the pull towards Italy, and beyond, must have been considerable.
Better think in terms of 50 million migrants over 50 years, from regions considered uninhabitable to inhabitable regions. There seem to be five major causes underlying this basic world asymmetry:
By Robert J. Burrowes*
Daylesford, Australia, 12 May 2016 – A previously little-known law firm called Mossack Fonseca, based in Panama, has recently been exposed as one of the world’s major creators of ‘shell companies’, that is, corporate structures that can be used to hide the ownership of assets. This can be done legally but shell companies of this nature are widely used for illegal purposes such as tax evasion and money laundering of proceeds from criminal activity.
**These are the countries, where country leaders, politicians, public officials, or their close family/associates are implicated in the Panama Papers. | Author: JCRules | 3 April 2016 | Brown: Countries of people implicated | Grey: Countries without people implicated (excludes businesspeople and celebrities) | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. | Wikimedia Commons.
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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.”
Child refugees in Idomeni, Greece, March 2016. Photo: UNICEF/Tomislav Georgiev
– 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.
– 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.
But now this is denial of the reality.
‘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’
Johan Galtung
5 May 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service
Dear Members of the Iceland Allthing Foreign Affairs Committee,
I have been asked to come to Iceland to answer that question; thanks indeed for inviting me to address you.
And to apologize, as a Norwegian, for our occupation of Iceland 1262-1386 instead of sending mediators to help settle your civil war.
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
“We must remember that El Niño is not a one-off event but recurring global phenomena that we must address for future generations and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” said ECOSOC President Oh Joon at the opening of a special meeting on Impacts of the 2015/16 El Niño phenomenon: Reducing risks and capturing opportunities at UN Headquarters in New York.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 