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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 32 | 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 Ibrahim Thiaw
UN Under Secretary General and Executive Secretary to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Mr Ibrahim Thiaw, responds to the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land.
BONN (IDN) — We have known for over 25 years that poor land use and management are major drivers of climate change, but have never mustered the political will to act. With the release of the IPCC special report on climate change and land, which makes the consequences of inaction crystal clear, we have no excuse for further delay.
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By Niba Mirza*
HYDERABAD (IDN) — The COVID-19 pandemic has completely upended and transformed the world we live in. It has caused many disruptions and posed serious threats to lives and livelihoods universally. Organizations and societies have responded and coped with the pandemic differently and innovated at various levels to deal with COVID-19.
These innovations include social innovations, communications innovations, business innovations, medical innovations, financial innovations and other innovations which help us better prepare for the next normal.
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By David Robie
The writer, Dr David Robie, is editor of Asia Pacific Report, founding editor of Pacific Journalism Review and former director of the Pacific Media Centre.
AUCKLAND (IDN) — Pacific journalism educators are worried that the global covid pandemic has threatened media development programmes in a vast region of island microstates at a time when expertise in health and climate change reporting has never been greater. The news media industry in some countries has recognised this need and is trying to boost resources and human skills.
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Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden (IDN) — By any reasonable measure violence should have had its day. Throughout our long history violence and war have solved little. In most cases, if not all, war could have been pre-empted by deft diplomacy and non-violent action.
Take Afghanistan where after America’s longest ever war the US and its allies are finally withdrawing their troops.
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By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY (IDN) — Japan was the first Asian country to host a summer Olympic Games in 1964 and this year became the only Asian country to host it twice. The Olympics that concluded on August 8, included very few sports that could be called Asian, and the question begs whether Japan had done enough to promote more Asian sports in the latest Olympic Games.
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By António Guterres, UN Secretary-General
NEW YORK (IDN) — Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 Report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible.
The internationally agreed threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius is perilously close.
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By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK (IDN) — Lalibela, a holy site for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and home to 13th century rock-hewn churches—a world heritage site—has been caught between the warring forces of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the central government in Addis Ababa, according to reports from the region.
In a statement issued by the UN agency UNESCO, Lalibela’s historic role as a place of pilgrimage, devotion and peace was underscored. “It should not be a place for instigating violence and conflict,” their statement read.
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By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK (IDN) — Fred Kajjube, aka Lumbuye, a controversial blogger, social media activist and critic of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has been arrested in Turkey and extradited to Uganda where he was picked up by police at the airport. His whereabouts currently are unknown, according to several news reports,
Human rights and political activists have expressed fears for his safety.
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By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK (IDN) — One thing the head of the agency leading Africa's response to the coronavirus pandemic is sure of. He owes his life to the vaccine that beat the virus.
"I want to be very clear that without [the vaccine] I wouldn't be here," said Dr. John Nkengasong at a weekly briefing announcing the deployment of recently acquired doses.
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By Stéphanie Fillion, Passblue
NEW YORK (IDN) — The presidency of the Security Council is always a high time for a country’s diplomacy, but for India right now, it’s more than that. In August, the country is going to try to show the world why it deserves a permanent seat in the United Nations’ most important body. According to T. S. Tirumurti, India’s ambassador to the UN, the Covid-19 pandemic has once again highlighted the need for major reforms of the Council and India’s long quest for permanency in it.
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By UN News
NEW YORK (IDN) — The world needs the continued moral leadership of the people of Hiroshima, the top United Nations disarmament official said, commemorating the 73rd anniversary of the atomic bombing that devastated the city while lamenting that after decades of momentum towards a nuclear-free world, “progress has stalled.”
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By MATSUI Kazumi, Mayor of the City of Hiroshima
Every year on August 6, the City of Hiroshima holds a Peace Memorial Ceremony to pray for the peaceful repose of the victims, for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and for lasting world peace. During that ceremony, the Mayor issues a Peace Declaration directed toward the world at large. This is part of Hiroshima's effort to build a world of genuine and lasting world peace where no population will ever again experience the cruel devastation suffered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY (IDN) — In the Asia-Pacific region which is home to about 60 percent of the global population, some 1.6 billion people primarily rely on open fires or simple stoves fueled by kerosene, coal, or biomass such as wood, dung and agricultural residues for their daily cooking needs, that impacts on climatic change and health hazards.
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By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK (IDN) — A coalition of news outlets says it has unearthed evidence that Rwandan authorities are among the governments using a powerful surveillance tool to spy on thousands of activists, journalists and politicians through their cellphones.
The spyware, developed by Israeli hackers for a company called the NSO Group, has dubbed the piece of computer programming with the name Pegasus. It reportedly extracts information from cellphones with a single text message that can’t be traced back to the government using it.
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Viewpoint by Bill Dahl*
This is the fourth in a series of four articles. Click here for the third in the series.
QUERETARO, Mexico (IDN) — In my last piece, we touched on the third critical challenge regarding the climate crisis; creativity. In the first piece in this series we addressed the first challenge; cognition. In the third article, we explored the third obstacle to mounting a successful strategy to address the climate crisis; creativity. In this, the final piece in this series, we explore the intersection where all three crises (cognition, collaboration and creativity) collide with chronology—C-5.
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By Kester Kenn Klomegah*
MOSCOW (IDN) — The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced that it would allocate US$1 million to an international program that promotes free media in developing countries over the next five years.
The funds will go toward UNESCO’s International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC) at US$250,000 per year in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, as well as in post-Soviet countries, from 2022-2025, according to the Foreign Ministry's official statement.
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By Josefa Babitu*
SUVA, Fiji (IDN) — It might have been just a bronze medal to some people but for the Fijiana team—especially Sesenieli Donu—it was the fruit of sacrifice and a token of appreciation for her village of Vatukarasa in Nadroga.
After an intense competition for the bronze medal with Great Britain at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in Japan, the country’s women sevens rugby team bagged their first ever medal after defeating their former coloniser on July 31.
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Interview with Mr. Tetsuo Saito, Vice Representative, Komei Party
By Katsuhiro Asagiri
TOKYO (IDN) — Hiroshima and Nagasaki mark the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on August 6 and 9 for the first time since the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) came into force on January 22. The survivors of atomic-bomb (Hibakusha) and various civic groups made active contributions to this historic achievement.
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Viewpoint by Yossef Ben-Meir and Ellen Hernandez
Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is President of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco. Professor Ellen Hernandez teaches in English at Camden County College in the United States.
MARRAKECH (IDN) — When community meetings are held to determine priority development projects in villages, in neighborhoods, in schools, in agricultural fields—wherever they may take place—we want to speak the language that is spoken there, spoken every day. The idea of a person or a community of people exploring what they most want in their lives should be as real and as connected to their notion of “self” as possible.
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Viewpoint By Sugeeswara Senadhira
With increasing Chinese influence in Sri Lanka, the Indian government is lately trying to use Sri Lanka's "non-implementation" of the 13th amendment to the constitution to provide more autonomy to Tamil areas of the island as agreed 34 years ago, in the infamous Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement, to interfere in Sri Lanka's internal affairs. But as Presidential international media advisor Sugeeswara Senadhira argues, since India could not deliver their side of the promises made in the agreement, it should be left for the historians to handle.
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