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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 19 | 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
Viewpoint by Jeffrey D. Sachs
This article was issued by Project Syndicate and is being republished with the author's permission.
NEW YORK (IDN) — Wars often erupt and persist because of the two sides’ miscalculations regarding their relative power. In the case of Ukraine, Russia blundered badly by underestimating the resolve of Ukrainians to fight and the effectiveness of NATO-supplied weaponry. Yet Ukraine and NATO are also overestimating their capacity to defeat Russia on the battlefield. The result is a war of attrition that each side believes it will win, but that both sides will lose.
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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair — A Tale of Two Cities 1859
Viewpoint by Joseph Camilleri
This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished with their permission.
MELBOURNE, Australia (IDN) — These opening lines of Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution, offer us a remarkable insight into humanity’s current predicament.
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Viewpoint by Dr Ram Puniyani
This article is the 19th in a series of joint productions of South Asian Outlook and IDN-InDepthNews, the flagship of the International Press Syndicate. The writer is a former professor of biomedical engineering and former senior medical officer affiliated with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (now Mumbai) and meanwhile a social activist and commentator.
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Viewpoint by Sergio Duarte
The writer is Ambassador, former United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affair, and President of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
NEW YORK (IDN) — The Charter of the United Nations consolidated important norms of international law. Its Preamble affirms the decision to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind”. At the time of its adoption, the world was deeply shocked by two successive wars that directly involved Europe and other regions. In spite of the lofty purposes expressed in the Charter, several armed conflicts in many parts of the globe have marked the seventy-seven years of the United Nations’ existence.
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Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden (IDN) — During the difficult years that preceded the British handover of Hong Kong to China the Chinese government's intense antipathy to opium and the still-fresh memories of the evil that eighteenth-century buccaneering Britain had inflicted on China and Hong Kong added an extra emotional charge to what, anyway, was a most complicated transition.
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NEW YORK (IDN | UN News) — UN Secretary-General António Guterres has urged authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to investigate the deadly armed group attacks in Djugu Territory, Ituri Province, on May 8.
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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — On its web page titled U.S. Relations with Sierra Leone, the State Department gushes with warmth and affection for the African country—once called the ‘Province of Freedom’—which remains among the world’s poorest countries, ranked 180th out of 187 countries in the United Nations' Human Development Index in 2011.
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Viewpoint by Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens
GENEVA (IDN) — 24 April 2022 saw renewed violence in the Darfur Provence of Sudan between Arab militias and the indigenous tribes of the area, the Masalit and the Fur. The violence began in 2003 and has caused some 300,000 deaths and some three million displaced. While most of the fighting was when General Omar al-Bashir was President, his overthrow by new military leadership has not fundamentally improved the situation.
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By Devendra Kamarajan
ABIDJAN, Côte d’Ivoire (IDN) — Government leaders meeting at the United Nations global conference on land have called on the international community to take urgent action to stem the loss of life and livelihoods that communities all over the world are experiencing due to the increasing and devastating impacts of desertification, land degradation and drought.
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By Niba Mirza *
HYDERABAD, India (IDN) — As of May 6, 2022, there have been 513,955,910 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, including 6,249,700 deaths, reported to WHO.
Though WHO also claims that the world’s true COVID-19 pandemic death toll is nearly 15 million. And as of May 4, 2022, a total of 11,562,157,794 vaccine doses have been administered.
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This article was issued by The Institute for International Political Studies - ISPI.
Viewpoint by Lucia Ragazzi
MILAN (IDN) — Since the war in Ukraine broke out in Europe, its consequences and side effects have been reverberating across African countries. Rising food and energy prices, supply disruptions, and inflationary pressures have created additional challenges on the road to a post-pandemic economic recovery the continent painstakingly embarked upon, in what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called a 'perfect storm'.
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This article was issued by World Politics Review (WPR) and is being re-published with their permission.
By Ayodeji Rotinwa
COTONOU, Benin (IDN) — During a February press conference announcing a new exhibition of newly repatriated treasures, Jean-Michel Abimbola, Benin’s minister of culture, was asked by a British journalist to address the common claim that European museums are better able to care for African artifacts than African ones. He responded curtly.
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By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY (IDN) — On May 21 when Australians go to the polls to elect a new government, the vast continent which was stolen from the indigenous people in 1788 and annexed to the British crown may have its ‘independent day’—not one that would declare itself a republic, but a day when ‘independent’ members of parliament may hold the balance of power in the lower house in Canberra.
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This article was issued by Common Dreams. It is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
By Jake Johnson
PORTLAND, Maine, USA (IDN) — The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported May 5 that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.
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Viewpoint by Prof. Dr Rolf J. Langhammer
Prof. Langhammer is a trade expert at Kiel Institute for World Economy (ifw). The following comment on the resilience of the Russian economy against the background of the discussion about an oil embargo was issued by the Kiel Institute Media Information.
BERLIN | KIEL (IDN) — Hopes that Russia will soon give in to the Ukraine war in the face of drastic Western sanctions are likely to be disappointed. Both the state budget situation and structural characteristics of the Russian economy create sound conditions for a prolonged persistence of a war economy based on autarky.
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This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished with their permission.
Viewpoint by Herbert Wulf
BONN (IDN) — At present, historical analogies are very often used to explain reasons for or against the causes of the war in Ukraine or to describe the horrors of this war with historical arguments. Some of these comparisons are downright perfidious, like equating Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin.
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Viewpoint by Olatubora Ayodeji
LAGOS, Nigeria (IDN) — It's very important to understand that Russia is the world's third biggest oil producer, behind the US and Saudi Arabia and of about five million barrels of crude oil it exports each day, more than half went to Europe before the sanctions were announced. Before the announcement, Russia accounted for about 8% and 3% of the UK and US oil demand respectively.
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