Top military commanders in Myanmar should be investigated and prosecuted for the “gravest” crimes against civilians under international law, including genocide, United Nations-appointed investigators on 27 August 2018 said.
UNHCR/Roger Arnold | Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar flee to Bangladesh after facing brutal persecution that UN officials have said may amount to crimes against humanity.
The development follows the release of a report into the circumstances surrounding the mass exodus of more than 700,000 Rohingya people from Myanmar, beginning in mid-August last year – events previously described by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
27 August 2018 – Uri Avnery, a self-confessed former “Jewish terrorist” who went on to become Israel’s best-known peace activist, died in Tel Aviv on 20 Aug 2018, following a stroke. He was 94.
As one of Israel’s founding generation, Avnery was able to gain the ear of prime ministers, even while he spent decades editing an anti-establishment magazine that was a thorn in their side.
He came to wider attention in 1982 as the first Israeli to meet Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. At the time, Arafat and the PLO were reviled in Israel and much of the west as terrorists.
Famously, Avnery smuggled himself past the Israeli army’s siege lines around Beirut to reach Arafat.
The migrants were Honduran, Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Ecuadorean and were kidnapped by human traffickers who vowed to help them cross the Mexico-U.S. border.
Mexican authorities have rescued almost two dozen kidnapped undocumented immigrants. | Photo: Reuters FILE | Photo from teleSUR.
27 August 2018 (teleSUR)* – Mexican authorities have rescued 22 undocumented immigrants, including eight children, six women and eight men, in the southern state of Chiapas, according to the Interior Ministry (Secretaria de Gobernacion).
27 August 2018 (UN Environment)* – This World Water Week, we spoke with 19-year-old Ben May, Founder and President at ThinkOcean and a student at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Global Environmental Education Partnership EE 30 under 30 award.
My fondest childhood memories are by the sea. There is nothing like diving and discovering the beautiful, mysterious underwater world, feeling the breeze from the ocean air or hearing the crashing of the waves.
We take the ocean for granted and often forget that 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water.
Humanity has already breached four of the nine ecological boundaries outlined in 2009 by Johan Rockström: climate change, loss of biodiversity, land-system change, and nutrient cycles.
Most of us are familiar with the threats of declining biodiversity, deforestation, and global heating. However, nutrient cycles remain less well understood by the general public and by environmentalists.
24 August 2018 (Norwegian Refugee Council)* – “Before, the locals saw me as a refugee and they would not trust me when I asked for loans or provide me with work.” After 18 years displaced in Somalia, Aisha and her family finally became fully integrated members of their host community.
Aisha’s eldest son, Asad (pictured in red shirt), hopes to become a teacher one day and become a good role model for his younger siblings. Photo: Saida Nur/NRC
“This place holds both some of my worst and some of my greatest memories,” Aisha Mohamed says as she reflects on her last 18 years in Garowe’s informal settlements. “Life in the bush has been a fearful one, but it was also here that I met my husband and raised my eight children.”
Geneva, 24 august 2018 (IOM)* – IOM, the UN Migration Agency, reports that 65,576 migrants and refugees entered Europe by sea in 2018 through 22 August, with 27,577 to Spain, the leading destination this year. This compares with 120,624 arrivals across the region through the same period last year, and 271,951 at this point in 2016.
Spain, with 42 per cent of all arrivals through the year, continues to receive seaborne migrants in August at a volume more than twice that of Greece and more than six times that of Italy.
Italy’s arrivals through late August are the lowest recorded at this point of a normally busy summer season in almost five years (see chart below).
25 August 2018 (Wall Street International)* – Why do people leave their homelands enmasse? Why does a steady stream of immigrants continue to attempt to cross the southern border of the United States illegally or to seek asylum in the United States? Are they simply criminals seeking to bring their “poisons” to the U.S.? Freeloaders hoping to take advantage of the welfare system in the U.S? Might there be reasons that most of the American public is unaware of?
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 