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Published by The Non-profit International Press Syndicate Group
with IDN-InDepthNews as the Flagship Agency
Dear Reader,
Happy New Year ! We are pleased to send you Edition 02 | 2021. This weekly is the flagship news product of the Non-Profit International Press Syndicate Group with registered offices in Canada, Germany, Japan and Singapore, and correspondents around the world. Feel free to share and re-publish articles pro bono mentioning the source. Previous editions are available on https://newsletter-archive.indepthnews.net. Your feedback is most welcome.
Kind regards from the Non-Profit
International Press Syndicate
Viewpoint by Temesgen Kahsay
The author is an Assistant Professor at the Norwegian School of Leadership and Theology. The following appeared first in 'African Arguments' on January 12, 2021.
OSLO (IDN) – We’re told the war is not with ordinary Tigrayans. Yet as thousands suffer and our compatriots remain silent, that’s how it feels.
As a child growing up in the then Ethiopian city of Asmara in the 1980s, my parents used to ask me what I wanted to be when I was older. My answer was always that I either wanted to be a fighter pilot or army general. The reason was simple. My father was a soldier in the Ethiopian army under the Derg regime and I too wanted to kill the nation’s “enemies”.
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Viewpoint by Roberto Savio*
ROME (IDN | OtherNews) – A decision on the debt issue is now expected from the next G20 Summit in Rome, in November. But before that, the Global Health Summit called by the G20 together with the EU in May will be the occasion to verify what will happen with vaccines.
However, in the same month, Portugal has called the very important Social Summit of the European Union. Portugal has taken the much more substantial chairmanship of the EU, and this is a very positive contribution to a positive 2021. Portugal is today probably the most civilised country of Europe, a place of tolerance, harmony and civic engagement, much like Sweden in the ‘80s. And it is the only credible country on the issue of immigration.
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Viewpoint by Roberto Savio*
ROME (IDN | OtherNews) – For 2021, Italy has been given chairmanship of the Group of 20, which brings together the world’s 20 most important countries. On paper, they represent 60 percent of the world’s population and 80 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
While the shaky Italian government will somehow perform this task (in the general indifference of the political system), the fact remains that this apparently prestigious position is in fact very deceiving: the G20 is now a very weak institution that brings no kudos to the rotating chairman.
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By Jamshed Baruah
GENEVA (IDN) – Most of the world’s states can become a party to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and comply with the Treaty without making any changes to their existing policies and practices, says Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor (NWBM). But 42 states around the world currently engage in conduct that is not compatible with the new ban on nuclear weapons. In fact, Europe stands out as the region with the most states that act in conflict with the UN Treaty.
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Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden (IDN) – Trump wants to get in. Scotland wants to get out. That sounds a bit odd. Let me explain. A few days ago, the first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, said she’d heard that one of the White House’s planes had asked for permission to land in Glasgow airport a day before the inauguration of the new president, Joe Biden. She said she had refused it. The surmise was that Donald Trump wanted to escape to one of his favourite golf courses, near where his mother was born.
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Viewpoint by Sergio Duarte
The author is Ambassador, President of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.
NEW YORK (IDN) – Seventy-five years ago, in January 1946, the United Nations General Assembly met for the first time after the signature of the Charter. Its first resolution was adopted on the 24th of that month. The developments mentioned and commented below come to mind as we recall the outcome of that inaugural session of the Assembly.
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By Kwame Buist
NEW YORK (IDN) – The process of recovery from the coronavirus pandemic offers the chance to change course and put humanity on a path which is not in conflict with nature, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said January 11, urging greater efforts by everyone to protect biodiversity and step up action to counter climate change.
Guterres was addressing world leaders at the virtual One Planet Summit hosted by France, which came in the run-up to the UN Climate Change Conference scheduled for November in Glasgow, Scotland.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) – While corruption trials continue for Algerian officials ousted in nation’s ‘Arab Spring’ 2010-2012, on the eve of elections, social media leader Facebook has barred Ugandan President Museveni, and the Nigerian Nobel Laureate has decried the rise of armed groups as a threat to sovereignty.
Responding to the recent rise in student kidnappings and massacres, Wole Soyinka said in an interview, Nigeria’s sovereignty has been taken over by armed groups. He asked President Muhammadu Buhari to do more to stop terrorists, bandits and other criminal elements.
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Viewpoint by Somar Wijayadasa*
NEW YORK (IDN) – On January 6, Americans and the world watched in disbelief, horror and disgust as President Donald Trump’s fiercest supporters, stoked by the commander in chief himself, stormed, smashed windows, and desecrated the Capitol building that hasn't been breached since the War of 1812, when British soldiers burned Washington.
It was indeed a shocking day in American history. Invoking the famous words spoken by President Franklin Roosevelt following the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said that this day “will live forever in infamy and will be a stain on our democracy”.
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By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) – As the UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly pointed out, humanity is faced with a "defining moment", a warning that is highlighted in the 30th-anniversary edition of the Human Development Report (HDR), The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene. Though humankind has achieved incredible progress, we have taken the Earth for granted, destabilizing the very systems upon which we rely for survival.
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By Ramu Damodaran
The writer is Chief, United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) hosted in the Department of Global Communications. This OpEd first appeared in the UNAI Weekly Newsletter – January 8.
NEW YORK (IDN | UNAI) – Graffiti is terse but truthful and even if I failed in identifying the specific trigger for a carefully executed scrawl on a boulder by the water in New York, that read “Beware of Locals,” it resonated with lessons the last 75 years of the United Nations, and the very last one in particular, have offered, that there is no purely “local” any longer and that those who see themselves as insulated from or immune to the world beyond are eminently bewareable.
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Viewpoint by Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY (IDN) – While protestors were occupying Washington DC’s Capitol Hill and ransacking the Congress Chambers – the centre of American power – President-elect Joe Biden addressing the nation said that the attempted insurrection was “not what we are”, perhaps unintentionally conveying the first 'lie' of his presidential reign beginning January 20. In fact, this is what America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is masters of doing overseas.
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By Santo D. Banerjee
NEW YORK (IDN) – “Challenges of Maintaining Peace and Security in Fragile Contexts” were the focus of Secretary-General António Guterres' remarks at the Security Council virtual open debate on January 6. The debate was organized by Mr Kais Saied, the Security Council's Presidency for the month of January.
He called for a Global Ceasefire, which he said, goes hand-in-hand with a flagship initiative of the African Union. The United Nations also remains committed to supporting the African Union’s ambitious Agenda 2063.
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Viewpoint by Richard Hanania*
This is the second of a four-part series. Click here for Part 1
NEW YORK (IDN) – No other state was considered a fundamental threat to the U.S. over the issue, with a mix of external pressure and internal incentives leading them to ultimately develop more rigorous patent laws and enforcement. Many corporations, the parties most directly affected, treat the problem as the price of doing business.
Perhaps, then, the threat is that China seeks to remake the world in its own image? This is a popular trope among the national security establishment.
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Viewpoint by Richard Hanania*
This is the first of a four-part series.
NEW YORK (IDN) – Across the political spectrum, there is widespread agreement that America must get serious about the threat posed by China. As the Trump administration comes to a close, the State Department has just released a document called ‘The Elements of the China Challenge’. A distillation of conventional wisdom among national security experts and government officials, it argues that the U.S. needs a concerted effort to push back against Beijing. On its first page, the document tells us that “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has triggered a new era of great-power competition.”
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