“When people hear it from their peers who say ‘we’re fucked,’ that will be really powerful.”
Extinction Rebellion Tell the Truth Protest, London February 22 2019. | David Holt via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.
7 May 2019 (openDemocracy)* — In one mad sunny week over the Easter weekend, Extinction Rebellion brought public attention to the problem of climate change in a way that had rarely been achieved before. The group’s most ambitious demand – to cut greenhouse gas emissions completely by 2025 – is unlikely to be met.
Inflation historical data demonstrate that the elderly have experienced a gradual loss of their economic rights since Mauricio Macri became president in 2015.
Argentines protest in front of the Health Ministry to request the regularization of medicine purchases in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jan. 26, 2018. The right sign reads “I died without medicines”. The left sing reads “You cut off my retirement and now you go for the medicines.” | Photo: EFE | Photo fromteleSUR.
8 May 2019 (teleSUR)* — In Argentina, the essential drugs average price increased by 710 percent between May 2015 and April 2019, an inflation process which mainly affected 6,983,377 people over 60 years of age.
A new European Union-funded FAO, IFAD and WFP initiative seeks to empower rural women and men, boys and girls for food security, better nutrition and sustainable agriculture.
.
Women working in a vegetable garden in the village of Ndiama Peulh, Senegal.
ROME (FAO)* — Three United Nations agencies on 8 May 2019 launched a new European Union-supported global initiative to address the root causes of rural gender inequalities and thus strengthen efforts to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
9 May 2019 (UN Environment)* — From Lagos and Lahore to London, it’s the poorest people who are most affected by air pollution. The poor tend to be priced out of the leafy suburbs where there are fewer highways and air quality is better.
Photo by Joshua Okunfolami, Wikimedia Commons
Air pollution is caused by harmful particulates and gases released into the air. It leads to premature death from heart disease, stroke, and cancer, as well as acute lower respiratory infections. Indoor and outdoor (ambient) air pollution caused an estimated 7 million deaths globally in 2016, according to the World Health Organization.
The World Bank (WB) on 8 April 2019 reported that migrants remittances to low- and middle-income countries reached a record high in 2018.
According to the WB study, officially recorded annual remittance flows to those countries reached 529 billion dollars last year, an increase of 9.6 percent over the previous record high of 483 billion dollars in 2017.
KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY, May 7 2019 (IPS)*– Over the last four decades, growing concentration of market power in the hands of oligopolies, if not monopolies, has been greatly enabled by ostensibly neo-liberal reforms, worsening wealth concentration and gross inequalities in the world.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
The ‘counter-revolution’ against Keynesian and development economics four decades ago, which inspired the Washington Consensus, claimed to promote economic liberalization, including market competition, but strengthening property rights entitlements, especially for intellectual property, has been far more important.
Such oligopolistic and monopolistic trends have recently accelerated in much of the world, while already feeble anti-trust efforts have lagged far behind.
There is much diversity. Let us praise that mega aspect of our world as multipolar, passive but peaceful, coexistence of civilizations:
Johan Galtung
Anglo-American; Latin American-Caribbean; Islamic; African pre-, post-colonial; European from Ireland to Russia Far East; West Asian Islamic; with Israel Jewish; Iran Persian; South Asian, SAARC, Hindu and Islamic with India; Southeast Asian, ASEAN, Buddhist, Christian, multi-cultural; Northeast Asian daoist-shinto with China and Japan; Asian-Pacific, multi-cultural, with Maoris, Aborigines, Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians from one rim to the other.
14 civilizations. Others stop counting at 8, 10. Around that.
What a wonderful, diverse, polyphonic world! Not monophonic US or European all over, as they both have wanted and maybe still want.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will sign a decree that will allow shooters, hunters, and gun collectors to roam around the streets with loaded weapons.
.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro will sign a gun decree allowing transportation of loaded weapons. | Photo: Reuters | {hoto from teleSUR.
.
6 May 2019 (teleSUR)* — Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro will sign a decree Tuesday relaxing rules of carrying weapons for collectors, hunters, and sports shooters, known by the acronym CAC.
.
“I’m going to sign [the decree] on Tuesday at 4 p.m. You can rest easy. CAC will not have a limit on the amount of ammunition and they will also be able to transport the loaded weapon,” Bolsonaro told a supporter Sunday [5 May 2019].
On Dhaka’s streets and stages, women tell their stories – about issues from violence to sexuality to working conditions. And they demand to be heard.
Tassafy Hossain, Dhaka, 2019. | Photo: Muhmmad Murtada, British Council
6 May 2019 (openDemocracy)* — Tassafy Hossain is smiling broadly when we meet backstage at the feminist arts festival Women of the World (WOW) in Dhaka in March. She talks with enthusiasm about the packed programme that she co-curated, including theatre performances featuring disabled actors, and talks from leading women’s rights activists in Bangladesh.
LONDON, 6 May 2019 (Pressenza)* —The almighty geopolitical and technological row going on about allowing or not the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to set up the 5G infrastructure in Western countries, for fear of backdoor espionage by the Chinese government, has already cost his post to the UK Secretary of State for Defence Gavin Williamson.
**
He was accused of leaking to the press that the UK Government was preparing to disregard the US paranoid advice and go ahead with Huawei installations.
The relationship between the UK Government and Huawei is long and convoluted, which has been comprehensively researched by True Publica.
In summary, the usual financial interests have been given priority over other concerns since David Cameron’s was Prime Minister.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 