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Published by The Non-profit International Press Syndicate Group
with IDN-InDepthNews as the Flagship Agency
Dear Reader,
We are pleased to send you Edition 35 | 2020 of BEYOND BREAKING THE NEWS, a flagship news product, now in the fifth year, meanwhile published every Monday by the Non-Profit International Press Syndicate Group, with registered offices in Canada, Germany, Japan and Singapore, and correspondents around the world. Previous editions are available on https://newsletter-archive.indepthnews.net. Read. Share. Publish; free of charge but mention us as the source. We would appreciate your Feedback.
Kind regards from the Non-Profit
International Press Syndicate
Viewpoint by M ElHaies
The writer is a consultant in CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program. This article is being republished courtesy of CPJ which first carried it on its Website on August 26.
NEW YORK (IDN) – Two weeks after the imprisonment of a high-profile Algerian journalist, a former reporter has been sentenced to prison for his online commentary, cementing fears that Algeria’s new president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, is on track to match his predecessor’s record of enacting restrictive policies toward the press even as he has promised democratic reforms.
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Viewpoint by Saber Azam
The writer is a former official of the United Nations and author of the recently released book, “SORAYA: The Other Princess”, a historical fiction that overflies the recent seven decades of Afghan history.
GENEVA (IDN) – The US internal serenity is essential to the political and economic stability of the planet. The last four years have been challenging for Americans, their allies, and the rest of the world.
Hardly in the US history, an election such as the forthcoming in November this year will be so crucial. Wizards predict that it would be a game-changer. If the winners of the country's leadership are Joe. Biden and Kamala Harris, many critical issues will be high on their agenda, and the crisis in Afghanistan will undoubtedly constitute one of them.
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Viewpoint by Sonali Kolhatkar
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.
LOS ANGELES (IDN) – The last four years have been deeply traumatizing to millions of Americans as we have watched our nation in the stranglehold of a maniacal, dictatorial and compulsively deceptive president. But it is worth examining the relationship that President Donald Trump has with his voters in order to understand why he won the 2016 election and why he continues to command such fervent loyalty a few months ahead of the next election. Willing to overlook his lies, improprieties, and corruption, Trump’s voters have a transactional relationship with the president that is practical, powerful, and surprisingly instructional to the rest of us.
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By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY (IDN) – China may have one nation and two systems, but in Australia, it looks like there is one nation and six systems. As the second wave of coronavirus spreads across the continent, the State Premiers have taken unilateral decisions to close borders to travellers from other states to the dismay of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Speaking at the Bush (Regional) Summit on August 28, Morrison bemoaned “Australia was not built to have internal borders, in fact the very point of federalism was not to have them”. While acknowledging that COVID-19 has touched people everywhere, he added, “We must not allow this crisis, this pandemic, to force us to retreat into provincialism. That’s not the answer”.
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By Tariq Rauf*
VIENNA (IDN) – The first nuclear explosive device was detonated at the Alamogordo Test Range in the New Mexico desert in the United States of America on July 16, 1945, and then on August 6 and 9 the US carried out the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the next seven decades, nine additional countries carried out some 2060 nuclear explosions, spreading radioactive contamination in the air, lands and space, and in the world's oceans, leading to long-lasting catastrophic consequences for the health and well-being of millions of innocent people.
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Viewpoint by Roberto Savio*
ROME (IDN) – On August 23, a respected Brazilian polling institute found that the country's president, Jair Bolsonaro, enjoys an approval rating of 51 per cent, the highest since he was elected. Brazil ranks second as the country with the highest number of coronavirus deaths (116,000), according to Wikipedia, after the United States where the death toll currently stands at 170,000.
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By Dominic Kirui*
This article was originally published on Waging Nonviolence and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
NAIROBI (IDN) – The Nairobi National Park is a rare gem that defines the Kenyan capital and it is the only national park in the world that shares a fence with a city. It boasts of abundant wildlife, including the “big five” animals – the lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant and buffalo – that can, in places, be viewed against a backdrop of city skyscrapers and planes coming in to land at the local airports.
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Viewpoint by Azu Ishiekwene
The writer is the Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of The Interview magazine based in Abuja, Nigeria.
ABUJA (IDN) – The headlines, especially in the Western press, suggest that Africa is back again in the news for the wrong reasons.
Misery has really never been too far away, but in the last few years, foreign journalists looking for stories of deaths, diseases and destruction on the continent have had to find another hobby, the trendiest of which is Trumpoline, a riveting show from the White House.
With violent conflicts receding, more orderly transfer of power, better business climate and growing prosperity, Africa has been rising.
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By Kester Kenn Klomegah*
MOSCOW (IDN) – Leaders of integrated associations and politicians, mostly from the Eastern region of Nigeria, are calling for a thorough constitutional review that will incorporate the diverse ethno-political interests and also offer equal representation in the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGR). Several archival reports made available and different interviews conducted by IDN vividly show rising tensions and the lack of strategic foresight in the current approach towards national integration before 2023, the end of President Muhammadu Buhari's administration.
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Viewpoint by Walden Bello *
“This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” — T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
NEW YORK (IDN) – The fix that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is in now illustrates the truth in the saying that the best-laid plans of mice and men are often unravelled by the least expected event.
In the case of the beleaguered Philippine president, the equivalent of the asteroid from outer space that killed off the dinosaurs was COVID-19, which threw him from the high horse he was riding in triumph after the midterm elections of 2019, which his partisans swept at all levels.
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By Santo D. Banerjee
NEW YORK (IDN) – UN Secretary-General António Guterres has in a message for the International Day against Nuclear Tests warned of resurgent nuclear menace and called for a complete ban on testing. Following is the full text of his message.
Commemorated annually since 2010 on the anniversary of the closure of the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, the International Day against Nuclear Tests takes on special meaning in 2020 in also marking 75 years since the first-ever nuclear test, code named “Trinity”, was undertaken in July 1945 in the United States.
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By Suresh Jaura
TORONTO (IDN) – Any student of world affairs may know the phrase “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” What the phrase means, of course, is that what happens in America affects the rest of the world, be it for good or bad.
It is no surprise, therefore, that citizens and the media in Canada are interested in the US Presidential election.
In fact, in Canada, there was more news coverage of the nomination of Harris by the Democratic Party's presidential candidate Joe Biden than Leslyn Lewis' bid for the 2020 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election, in which she finished third.
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Viewpoint by Philip Roscoe*
ANDREWS, Scotland (IDN) – When the infamous Zong massacre trial began in 1783, it laid bare the toxic relationship between finance and slavery. It was an unusual and distressing insurance claim – concerning a massacre of 133 captives, thrown overboard the Zong slave ship.
The slave trade pioneered a new kind of finance, secured on the bodies of the powerless. Today, the arcane products of high finance, targeting the poor and troubled as profit opportunities for the already-rich, still bear that deep unfairness.
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Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden (IDN) – Simon Rattle, the former chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and now conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, has said that El Sistema in Venezuela is “The most important thing happening in classical music today in the world”. Julian Lloyd Weber, the renowned cellist, has said, “It’s surely the most extraordinary musical phenomenon of our times”.
It seems like whenever I switch on Mezzo, the superb French TV classical and jazz channel, I see either conductors, Valery Gergiev, maestro of the Mariinsky or Gustavo Dudamel, chief conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gergiev, along with Rattle, are probably the world’s top conductors and Dudamel, close behind them but only 39 years old, is a graduate of El Sistema.
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By Ronald Joshua
GENEVA | BRAZZAVILLE (IDN) – While COVID-19 pandemic is playing havoc with the global economy and a frantic search continues for a vaccine, thanks to a concerted campaign of immunization, Africa is free of a highly infectious disease which mainly affects children under 5 years of age. It is a significant development marking the eradication of the second virus from the face of the continent since smallpox 40 years ago.
"Today is a historic day for Africa," said Professor Rose Gana Fomban Leke, Chairperson of the African Regional Certification Commission for Polio eradication (ARCC), which has declared the region free of polio,
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By Devendra Kamarajan
JOHANNESBURG (IDN) – The COVID-19 pandemic will push South Africa's overall GDP down by 7.9% in 2020 leading to major setbacks in addressing poverty, unemployment and inequality, the government's development priorities, according to new research by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The study expects the economy to recover slowly through 2024.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) – Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has been ousted from power, removed by troops unwilling to keep up a bloody fight against jihadists and religious extremists who have been gaining ground while charges of corruption against the government continue to pile up.
The “mutinous” army had been taking heavy casualties in the seemingly endless fighting despite vast quantities of international support, training and intelligence pouring in from the U.S., and France. The United Nations alone spends $11.2 billion annually on a peacekeeping mission with 16,600 peacekeepers.
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Viewpoint by Murray Scown, Kimberly Nicholas & Mark Brady*
UTRECHT | LUND | UPPSALA (IDN) – The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the European Union’s largest budget item. For the 60 billion euro a year it pays in subsidies, the CAP is expected to support farmer incomes, ensure a supply of quality food, protect biodiversity, tackle climate change and encourage young people into farming.
It’s hard to tell if the EU is succeeding in these aims because of a lack of transparency, complex reporting, and insufficient monitoring. But the success of the European Green Deal and a green recovery from COVID-19 depend on these subsidies being well spent.
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