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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
Download Sustainable Development Observer
Dear Reader,
We are pleased to send you Edition 17 | 2022. 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
UNITED NATIONS (IDN) — The devastating war in Ukraine—now moving towards the third month—has triggered several threats of the “nuclear option”.
The battle, which began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, is between one of the world’s major nuclear powers and a neighboring non-nuclear country.
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Viewpoint by John Burroughs
This article was issued by Common Dreams and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. The author is a Senior Analyst for the New York City-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy.
NEW YORK (IDN) — Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin provided a revealing and disturbing glimpse into a darker element of US policy at a press conference held on April 25 at the Poland/Ukraine border. The press event followed a trip to Kyiv by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Austin.
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By Ghazal Vaisi
The author is an Iranian-born international affairs analyst focusing on the evolution of authoritarianism in the modern world. Her writings have appeared in the Middle East Institute, Independent Farsi, and Iran International.
NEW YORK (IDN) — Nuclear talks between Iran and the West have stalled as the US continues to refuse Iran's demand that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) be removed from the Foreign Terrorist Organization's (FTO) list.
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Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
This article builds on a column of 1974 the author wrote for the New York Times. It was the most prominent article printed that day on the op-ed page. Over a long career, he has developed those ideas and the following is the result.
LUND, Sweden (IDN) — A famous Fleet Street press lord once pinned up a notice in his paper's newsroom. It read: “One Englishman is a story. Ten Frenchmen is a story. One hundred Germans is a story. One thousand Indians is a story. Nothing ever happens in Chile.”
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This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished with their permission.
Viewpoint by Ramesh Thakur
CANBERRA, Australia (IDN) — In the 2020 election, President Donald Trump’s supporters looked beyond manifest character flaws to domestic and foreign policy results but opponents couldn’t overlook his character to assess any policy achievements. Joe Biden became president as much because Americans voted against Trump as for Biden. The buyers’ remorse evident in opinion polls suggests that perhaps voters should have been careful what they wished for.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — Business consultant Athol Williams said he witnessed high-level corruption under the presidency of Jacob Zuma—but a good portion of it emanated from a U.S. company with connections to U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, according to a new report.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — In one of the deadliest explosions in years, fire and blast shook south-eastern Nigeria, Imo state, possibly the result of illegal oil refining of stolen crude or “kpofire”.
News reports described charred bodies left scattered among burnt palms, cars and vans after the weekend explosion which killed more than 100 people at an illegal depot on the border of Nigeria's Rivers and Imo states.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — Kenya's former president Mwai Kibaki leaves a mixed legacy of economic reforms and a new constitution alongside a controversial election which led to deadly violence and entrenched corruption.
His death at 90 years of age was announced by his successor, President Uhuru Kenyatta. A British-educated economist, Kibaki assumed the presidency after four decades as a lawmaker, government minister and then vice president to his predecessor, Daniel arap Moi.
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By Jamshed Baruah
NEW YORK (IDN) — In the face of dramatic reversals in global progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), urgent action is required by the international community to improve developing countries’ access to affordable finance.
Inaugurating the four-day Forum on Financing for Development (FfD Forum) on April 25, ECOSOC President Mr. Collen V. Kelapile, Botswana's Permanent Representative to the UN said: “…The ambition of sustainable development for all is facing perhaps its greatest threat since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda seven years ago.”
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By Thalif Deen
NEW YORK (IDN) — World military spending hit a new all-time high last year reaching a staggering $2.1 trillion—for the first time ever.
The five largest spenders in 2021 were the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom and Russia, together accounting for 62 per cent of expenditure, according to the latest figures released on April 25 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
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This is the second in a series of three articles. Please click here for Part 2.
Viewpoint by Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake *
An Unsinkable Aircraft carrier? Asset stripping a strategic island
COLOMBO (IDN) — Former US Under Secretary for South and Central Asia, Alice G. Well, a few years ago called Sri Lanka a "valuable piece of real estate" in the Indian Ocean, and the country not long ago turned down a Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Compact and a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).
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This is the second in a series of three articles. Please click here for Part 1.
Viewpoint by Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake *
Sri Lanka a theatre of US proxy war in the Indian Ocean Region?
COLOMBO (IDN) — Like Lebanon, once known as the Paris of the Middle East, Sri Lanka is a relatively wealthy country in South Asia and listed as a lower Middle-Income Country (MIC). The strategic island is ahead of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Afghanistan on the SAARC regional poverty count.
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This is the first in a series of three articles.
Viewpoint by Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake *
Debt cancellation, not asset stripping is the need of the hour!
COLOMBO (IDN) — In Cherry Blossom lined Washington DC in the glare of global media April 18-23 Sri Lanka became the poster child of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF), Spring Meetings. The strategic Indian Ocean island’s pathetic plight featured on major media and television channels that craft the global narrative, with images of people in queues amid food, fuel, and medicine shortages due to its crashing currency, soaring cost of living and ‘Arab Spring’ style protests.
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Viewpoint by P.I. Gomes
Dr P.I. Gomes is retired Ambassador of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana to the Kingdom of Belgium and the European Union and former Secretary-General of ACP Group of State, now the Organisation of African, the Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS).
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago (IDN) — Recent events of the Russia-Ukraine war bring in their wake untold upheavals across Europe.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has joined other human rights groups in protesting plans by the United Kingdom to dump migrants and asylum-seekers who cross the Channel thousands of miles away to Rwanda as the government tries to cut the record numbers of people making the perilous journey.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK | DURBAN (IDN) — Record-breaking levels of rainfall threaten a new round of flooding and landslides in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal. Already, the calamity has taken over 400 lives, left some 40,000 homeless, with an economic cost yet to be tallied.
Weather forecasters and climate scientists, speaking to the Daily Maverick news outlet, are predicting a repeat of such events, potentially sooner than expected.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — When Patrick Lyoya, a Congolese immigrant, died at the hands of a police officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, his life was cut down by violence much like the home-grown executions Congolese have been facing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for years. Close to a thousand summary executions take place in the DRC each year.
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By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY (IDN) — While images of the war devastation in Ukraine have saturated the news bulletins around the world, a much more severe human disaster is unravelling in many other parts of the world that could throw over one-fifth of humanity back into poverty.
“We have all seen the tragedy unfolding inside Ukraine: cities flattened; people suffering and dying in their homes and in the streets; the fastest displacement crisis in Europe since the Second World War," UN Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out in an address to the UN Security Council on April 5.
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Viewpoint by Massimiliano Colella
The author is the chief executive officer of Evercare.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (IDN) — With public debt reaching record highs both in developed and emerging markets—and with even more financial volatility following the COVID-19 pandemic—government budgets have been stretched thin. Underfunding in healthcare versus competing priorities has led to heavily burdened systems in emerging markets that are often struggling to keep up with increasing demands.
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By Rodney Reynolds
UNITED NATIONS, (IDN) — After more than two years of on-again, off-again pandemic lockdowns, the United Nations will soon return to normal—and re-open to the public.
The move comes amid reports of new infections from Covid-19, with mandatory masks still in force in New York city’s public transit systems, including buses and subways.
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This article was issued by CNN and is being republished with the author's permission.
Viewpoint by Jeffrey D. Sachs
NEW YORK (IDN) — There is only one answer to the war in Ukraine: a peace deal.
The two-pronged US strategy, to help Ukraine overcome the Russian invasion by imposing tough sanctions and by supplying Ukraine's military with sophisticated armaments, is likely to fall short. What is needed is a peace deal, which may be within reach. Yet to reach a deal, the United States will have to compromise on NATO, something Washington has so far rejected.
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By Radwan Jakeem
NEW YORK (IDN) — More than 40 former government officials and leading nuclear non-proliferation experts have expressed strong support for an agreement that returns Iran and the United States to comply with the 2015 nuclear deal. The accord between Iran and the major world powers, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231.
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