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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 37 | 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 P.I. Gomes*
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago (IDN) – The annual observance of UN Day for South-South Cooperation on September 12 was anticipated by a Virtual High-Level Event hosted by the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSCC) on September 10, 2020.
The event, chaired by UN Secretary-General Special Envoy for South-South Cooperation and Director, UNOSCC, Mr. Jorge Chediek, was a further milestone of achievements by UNOSSC as it marked the launch of the Volume 3 publication on Good Practices in South-South & Triangular Cooperation for Sustainable Development. This Volume contains 200 good practices from 35 member states, 23 UN entities and other developing partners.
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Viewpoint by Aseel Naamani and Ruth Simpson*
This article was originally published on openDemocracy. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IDN-InDepth News.
BEIRUT (IDN) – Recent events in Lebanon tell a story of interwoven crises, culminating in the explosion in Beirut on August 4. To overcome the crisis in the long-term, recovery efforts must be participatory and take a bottom-up approach, based on communities’ needs, while protecting shared spaces and cultural heritage.
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By Kalinga Seneviratne
This article is the 43rd in a series of joint productions of Lotus News Features and IDN-InDepthNews, flagship agency of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate. Click here for previous reports.
SINGAPORE (IDN) – When India's Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation foreign ministers' meeting in Moscow on September 10, Wang noted that it was "normal for India and China to have differences as two neighbouring major countries".
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Viewpoint by Tommaso Jucker*
BRISTOL, United Kingdom (IDN) – Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased abruptly in the past two years, after having been on a downward trajectory for more than a decade. With the country’s president Jair Bolsonaro notoriously enthusiastic about expanding into the rainforest, new deforestation data regularly makes global headlines.
But what fewer people realise is that even forests that have not been cleared, or fully “deforested”, are rarely untouched. Indeed, just 20 percent of the world’s tropical forests are classified as intact. The rest have been impacted by logging, mining, fires, or by the expansion of roads or other human activities. And all this can happen undetected by the satellites that monitor deforestation.
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Viewpoint by Robert Blasiak*
STOCKHOLM (IDN) – The MV Wakashio ran aground on a coral reef in Mauritius in late July 2020, leaking 1,000 tonnes of oil into the crystal blue waters of a lagoon, threatening mangrove, seagrass and mudflat habitats. Since then, dozens of dead dolphins and porpoises have washed ashore. Anger has grown and sadness has deepened.
But this is a different story – it starts two years ago in the same place in Mauritius, and I am walking down a muddy path in a mangrove forest. A guide is telling me about how the community has removed invasive species, cleaned up waste and planted mangroves.
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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) – Police in America, whose mottos claim to “protect and serve” us, have been openly declaring allegiance with the forces of white supremacy. It is no coincidence that this has become a hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency.
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Viewpoint by Simon Sweeney*
YORK, United Kingdom (IDN) – The UK government seems to be doubling down on threats to leave the European Union without a deal unless the EU gives in on issues of state aid and fisheries. These two concerns are as important in Brussels as they seem to be in London.
In the latest attempt to ramp up the drama as the deadline to reach an agreement nears, the UK has said it plans to revisit the withdrawal agreement it has already signed with the EU on the terms of departure. This will include changing the plan agreed with the EU in December 2019 on how trade will move between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
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By Rosemary DiCarlo UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs
Following are extensive excerpts from Ms DiCarlo's briefing to the Security Council on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on peace and security.
NEW YORK (IDN) – It is sobering to realize that the risks the Secretary-General identified to this Council on 2 July are manifesting in a number of countries across the world.
But we are also witnessing resilience, innovation and inclusive political action to mitigate the impact of some of them.
I would like to begin by highlighting three heightened risks.
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By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) – As global temperatures continue to hit new highs, the choice, according to the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, is between "business as usual, leading to further calamity, or using the recovery from COVID-19 to provide a real opportunity to put the world on a sustainable path".
Speaking at the launch of the report United in Science 2020 on September 9, he emphasized that there is "no time to delay" if the world is to slow the trend of the devastating impacts of climate change, and limit temperate rise to 1.5 degree-Celsius. "Whether we are tackling a pandemic or the climate crisis, it is clear that we need science, solidarity and decisive solutions," he said.
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Viewpoint by George Lakey *
This article was originally published on Waging Nonviolence and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
PHILADELPHIA (IDN) – The warning drums for a contested election are beating louder and louder. At a recent campaign stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Trump once again laid the groundwork for not stepping down by saying, “The only way [the Democrats] are going to win is by a rigged election.”
The concern for what Trump might do in the absence of a landslide Biden victory has even led one bi-partisan group of experienced legal and political minds to run a “war-game” type experiment called the Transition Integrity Project.
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Viewpoint by John Scales Avery *
COPENHAGEN (IDN) – Why did Prof. Noam Chomsky call the US Republican Party “The most dangerous organization in the history of the world”? He did so because the party is characterized by climate change denial and by support for giant fossil fuel corporations. According to the 2018 IPCC Report, the world has only a very short time left in which to stop the extraction and use of fossil fuels. If we collectively fail to do this within a decade or so, feedback loops may be initiated which will make human efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change useless. Much of the world could become uninhabitable, and a very large-scale mass extinction could be initiated.
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Will there be more genocides that the world will ignore until it is too late?
Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden (IDN) – One of the cruellest men ever to have lived died on September 2 in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Kaing Guek Eav, popularly known as “Duch”, was 77 and had been convicted of mass torture by the UN/Cambodian war crimes court. He was the only one of the five defendants to admit his crimes. In July 2010 in a trial I witnessed first-hand he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
According to Seth Mydans, the New York Times’s correspondent in Cambodia at the time of the rule of Pol Pot who founded the guerrilla movement, the Khmer Rouge, “he was a schoolteacher before the Khmer Rouge came to power. He took his revolutionary name from a children’s book about an obedient schoolboy named Duch. ‘I wanted to be a well-disciplined boy who respected the teachers and did good deeds’, he told the court.
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Viewpoints by Franz Baumann, Fmr. UN Assistant Secretary-General, United Nations and Christopher Ankersen, Global Affairs, New York University.
NEW YORK (IDN) – "Adlai Stevenson, President Kennedy’s Ambassador to the United Nations, rebutted UN critics by recounting Adam's marriage proposal to Eve. When she hesitated, Adam asked 'is there somebody else?' Stevenson concluded that much good had been done, also some harm, but there was nothing else. That was then," recalls Dr Franz Baumann, and adds: "What about now?"
The following is the first of two rounds of Dr Baumann's stimulating exchange with Dr Chris Ankersen posted on PAIRAGRAPH – A Hub of discourse between pairs of notable individuals. The second round will be launched in the next days also on the link: https://pairagraph.com/dialogue/f47ba870e06d4df2b0cccef483592d82.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK | JOHANNESBURG (IDN) – “Theatre will rise again,” declared James Ngcobo, artistic director of the renowned Market Theatre in Johannesburg. “COVID hasn’t stifled our passion, just moved it into another space.”
This month, Ngcobo is spotlighting speeches from some of Shakespeare’s iconic plays, mostly written for male characters but acted here by women. Reversing the roles, he says, will provide the actors with artistic challenges in dramas that were written more than 400 years ago but are still relevant today.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK | DAKAR (IDN) – Can a fish and peanut-based economy ramp up to become a world-class industrial powerhouse when money is tight and oil discoveries may not bring the hoped-for rewards?
That’s the question for Senegalese people to consider as hopes placed in their president, Macky Sall, and his “Plan for an Emerging Senegal” sputter forward.
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By Kester Kenn Klomegah
MOSCOW (IDN) – Despite Western and European countries and many reputable international organizations calling for objective investigations that will inevitably establish facts about the alleged "poisoning" of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Russian officials have categorically turned down and confidently played against such suggestions.
He is a Russian opposition politician and anti-corruption activist. He came to international prominence by organizing demonstrations and running for political office, to advocate reforms against corruption in Russia, President Vladimir Putin, and Putin's government.
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Viewpoint by Ben Phillips*
This article was originally published on openDemocracy. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IDN-InDepth News.
LONDON (IDN) – 2020 isn’t just the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s also the year when protest has gone viral. Covid-19 has both supercharged our inequalities and shone a sharper light on them, exposing the reality that the status quo cannot hold. It has opened up a moment of opportunity, and young people are showing how we can seize that moment by building up a movement.
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