28/10/2016
OSLO, Oct 28 2016 – President Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the Soviet Union and recipient of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, has appealed to world leaders to reduce the dangerous tensions, which today threaten to plunge human civilization and the biosphere into an all-destroying nuclear war.
**President Barack Obama drops by VP Joe Biden’s meeting with former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev in the Vice President’s Office, West Wing | 20 March 2009 | The Official White House Photostream / Pete Souza | public domain | Flickr
In an October 10 interview with RIA Novosti, Gorbachev said: “I think the world has reached a dangerous point, I don’t want to give any concrete prescriptions, but I do want to say that this needs to stop. We need to renew dialogue. Stopping it was the biggest mistake.”
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27/10/2016
In another impassioned plea to the United Nations Security Council urging action to stop the bloodshed in war-ravaged Syria, the top UN humanitarian official stressed that since his last briefing to the body (on 29 September), 400 more Syrians had been killed and close to 2,000 injured in eastern Aleppo.
In western Aleppo City, Syria, children displaced from the al-Hamadaniyah neighbourhood stay at the Al-Shafii shelter, a mosque converted to a shelter. Photo: UNICEF/Khuder Al-Issa
“These are people just like you and me – not sitting around a table in New York but forced into desperate, pitiless suffering, their future wiped out […] peoples’ lives destroyed and Syria itself destroyed,” the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Stephen O’Brien, on 26 October 2016 told the 15-member body.
O’Brien further called on the members of the primary UN organ for maintenance of international peace and security to “[do] the right thing to stop the draining of the blood of Syrians.”
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26/10/2016
By Robert J. Burrowes*
DAYLESFORD, Australia, 26 October 2016 – Punishment is a popular pastime for humans. Parents punish children. Teachers punish students. Employers punish workers. Courts punish lawbreakers. People punish each other. Governments punish ‘enemies’. And, according to some, God punishes evildoers.
**Punishment of an offender in Hungary, 1793 | Author: Alavoine – Lily15 (uploader, feltöltő) | Public Domain | Wikimedia commons: “This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.”
What is ‘punishment’?
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26/10/2016
The United Nations food relief agency on 25 October 2016 said it is increasingly concerned about deteriorating food security and growing rates of child malnutrition in war-plagued Yemen, particularly in hard-to-reach areas.
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In the photo: Ahmed, 3 years old, receives treatment for moderate acute malnutrition in a hospital in Hajjah, Yemen. Photo: WFP/Abeer Etefa
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“Hunger is increasing every day and people have exhausted all their survival strategies. Millions of people cannot survive without external assistance,” said Muhannad Hadi, the World Food Programme (WFP) Regional Director for the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and East Europe in a news release.
He said the conflict in Yemen was taking a devastating toll, particularly on the most vulnerable, especially women and children.
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26/10/2016
With just two months left in 2016, and despite a substantial drop in the number of migrants and refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean, the number of people losing their lives has witnessed a three-fold overall increase this year, and in one particular route by more than five-fold, the United Nations refugee agency on 25 October 2016 said.*
Refugees and migrants rescued at sea by the Italian coast guards after adrift in the Mediterranean Sea disembarked at the port of Augusta in Sicily, May 2016. Photo: UNHCR/Patrick Russo
“From one death for every 269 arrivals last year, in 2016 the likelihood of dying has spiralled to one in 88,” William Spindler, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told journalists at the regular news briefing at the UN Office at Geneva (UNOG).
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25/10/2016
UNITED NATIONS (IPS) – When Antonio Guterres, the former Prime Minister of Portugal, takes office as the new UN Secretary General on January 1, his top management team is likely to be dominated by nominees from the five big powers, namely the US, Britain, France, China and Russia (P5).
**United Nations General Assembly hall in New York City.| Author: Patrick Gruban, cropped and downsampled by Pine | Originally posted to Flickr as UN General Assembly | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
As befits tradition, the current management team of mostly Under-Secretaries-Generals (USGs) will submit their resignations – providing Guterres with a clean state before he takes over.
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25/10/2016
By Johan Galtung*
24 October 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – The last one hundred years life expectancy has increased by about 25%-from near 80 to near 100-in some countries. But, instead of increasing playful childhood, education, work and retirement by 25%, the age of retirement has moved much less than the age at death.
Johan Galtung
That deprives masses of older people with experience and wisdom of productive work, of being useful, meeting others constructively; reducing them to being playful–bridge or golf as case may be–and just keeping alive.
Homo sapiens as homo ludens not homo faber.
Longer, but emptier lives.
A crime against humanity if there ever was any. However, with two clear remedies: continue working self-employed with pension as salary, or find meaning in dedication to something beyond oneself, some cause, volunteer work.
That should be planned well in advance before entering a “career” that peaks before, or at, retirement; the rest being downhill even steeply.
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25/10/2016
24 October 2016 – An assessment conducted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), together with the Haitian Government and its National Coordination for Food Security (CNSA), has determined that in the wake of Hurricane Matthew some 1.4 million people are in need of food assistance, 800,000 of whom are in a dire situation.
A man works to clear downed trees from his property near the western town of Leoganne, after Hurricane Matthew made landfall in Haiti. He lost his crops and livestock. Photo: UN/MINUSTAH/Logan Abassi
The emergency survey was conducted one week after the Category 4 storm, which devastated supplies and crops across the island.
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25/10/2016
24 October 2016 – Globally averaged concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surged again to new records in 2016, and, based on readings of the longest-established greenhouse gas monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, the United Nations weather agency predicts that carbon dioxide concentrations will not dip below pre-2015 levels for many generations.
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Photo: UNEP
“The year 2015 ushered in a new era of optimism and climate action with the Paris climate change agreement. But it will also make history as marking a new era of climate change reality with record high greenhouse gas concentrations,” said World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 