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News for a Sustainable World
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 20 | 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
By Thalif Deen*
NEW YORK (IDN) — The destruction of a 12-storeyed building in Gaza City on May 15—which was home to several news organizations including the Associated Press (AP) and Al-Jazeera—has triggered a loaded question: was it a deliberate Israeli airstrike to silence the media or was it an avoidable accident?
Norman Solomon, Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, D.C., told IDN Israel has doubled down on its ongoing war crimes against Palestinian people by bombing media offices in Gaza.
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Viewpoint By Sugeeswara Senadhira
COLOMBO (IDN) — Today marks an important landmark in Sri Lankan history. Twelve years ago, when the three-decade-old conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was brought to an end, the members of the Armed Forces were widely respected and honoured for the valiant role they played in defeating one of the most ruthless terrorist outfits in the world.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — Controversy is dogging the latest project of the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon, as it prepares to set up its African headquarters in Cape Town, South Africa.
Amazon would be the anchor tenant of the River Club—a nine-story business and residential complex with a hotel, gym, restaurants, conferencing, schools and event space.
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Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden (IDN) — Poets as diverse as William Blake and Yehuda Amichai have sung the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem, a land without strife or rancour, war or bitterness, envy, acquisitiveness or hatred. Israel, Fatah and Hamas, in the midst of the present chaos and carnage, have the historic opportunity to take a giant step towards making the present-day Jerusalem acquire, at least in some of its aspects, the earthly prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — A silent generation of young Ghanaians seems to have found its voice.
Joshua Boye-Doe, among the nation’s active social media users, put it this way: “This is the right time for us to come together as one people to speak and let [government] know that we are tired.”
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — A prolonged dry season is being blamed for inadequate power supplies to West African countries from Ivory Coast to Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso, threatening businesses and the world’s largest cocoa economies.
Consumers, unions and business leaders in Ivory Coast are sounding the alarm about waves of blackouts that are hitting major cities, including the economic capital Abidjan and its five million residents.
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By Shastri Ramachandaran*
There is no dearth of novels and films that conjure up images of a dystopia of the dead and the dying. The reality in India though is indescribably grimmer than anything imagined or picturised in fiction or films. Not even the most authentic and devastating accounts of the plague and Spanish flu in Europe can prepare one to cope with the nightmare that Covid’s second surge has turned out to be in India, writes Shastri Ramachandaran in a heart-rending report.
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By Asia Pacific Report News desk
TAHITI (IDN) — A collective of community groups in Tahiti, trying to preserve a historical-cultural icon at Tautira, have condemned the Tahitian government for “deliberately trying to destroy our heritage”.
The iconic Tahua-Reva is the community’s sacred mountain on the southeastern tip of Tahiti-Iti, the smaller section adjoining the main island of Tahiti.
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By Caroline Mwanga
NEW YORK | SANTO DOMINGO (IDN) — The three-day Virtual Thematic Sessions of the Latin America and the Caribbean Climate Week 2021 (LACCW2021), which wrapped up on May 14, hosted by the Government of the Dominican Republic, are reported to have provided important momentum for a successful UN Climate Change Conference COP26 from November 1 to November 12 in Glasgow.
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Viewpoint by Tariq Rauf*
“And so … ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”, President John Kennedy, 20 January 1961.
VIENNA (IDN) — For the better part of a year, diplomats from more than 180 countries have been feuding over the appointment of the Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) located in Vienna, alongside the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) bans nuclear explosions “by everyone, everywhere: on the Earth's surface, in the atmosphere, underwater and underground”.
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Viewpoint by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and Izumi Nakamitsu
Ms Mlambo-Ngcuka Executive Director of UN Women and Ms Nakamitsu is UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. This OpEd was first published on May 6.
NEW YORK (IDN) — For all of us, but especially women, the pandemic is a reminder that traditional notions of “security” that fuel the weapons industry cannot protect us from dangers and challenges we routinely face.
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Viewpoint by Simone Galimberti
The writer is Co-Founder of ENGAGE, a not-for-profit in Nepal. He writes on volunteerism, social inclusion, youth development, and regional integration as an engine to improve people’s lives. He can be reached at simone_engage@yahoo.com
KATHMANDU, Nepal (IDN) — A life insurance policy for humanity, this is how Audrey Azoulay, the UNESCO Director-General defined the scope of all efforts focused on addressing climate change and the persistent degradation of our biodiversity.
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Interview by Kester Kenn Klomegah*
MOSCOW (IDN) — Africa Vaccine Manufacturing Initiative (AVMI) primarily aims at promoting the establishment of sustainable human vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa. Since its establishment, AVMI together with multiple and different partners, have been advocating for the establishment of vaccine development and manufacturing in Africa.
With the outbreak of coronavirus, AVMI has embarked on public education on the risk of the pandemic and further been persuading African leaders about the need to seriously prioritize the manufacturing of vaccines instead of depending on external supply.
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By Sugeeswara Senadhira
The writer is Media Advisor at the Presidential secretariat.
COLOMBO (IDN) — Genocide is the intentional destruction of a particular group through killing, serious physical or mental harm, preventing births and/or forcibly transferring children to another group and this term has been applied to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada, particularly in the final reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry.—The Canadian Encyclopedia.
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By Caroline Mwanga
NEW YORK (IDN | UN News) — Independent rights experts of the United Nations have urged businesses in Myanmar to fulfill their human rights responsibilities and pressure the military junta to halt grave human rights violations against its own people.
According to UN News, some businesses have reiterated their public support for the rule of law and human rights and cut ties with the junta in the aftermath of the 1 February coup.
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The writer is the Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP newspaper based in Abuja, Nigeria.
ABUJA (IDN) — These days, it seems all right to play with fire. The blaze started as a solitary spark in Mali in August when the streets, the elite, and jihadists banded to remove President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.
The former president had discarded election results and written a version that tightened his grip on power. How he thought he could reinvent the Mansa Musa legend in a country riven by violence and poverty only he can tell.
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By Robert Johnson
BRUSSELS (IDN) — “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared in a blunt interview with The Economist in November 2019. Europe stands on “the edge of a precipice”, he said, and needs to start thinking of itself strategically as a geopolitical power; otherwise, we will “no longer be in control of our destiny.”
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