Commentary: An overwhelming number of crises means the international community cannot respond well.
WASHINGTON — Humanitarian crises in the world today — Syria, Iraq, Central African Republic, South Sudan and now Gaza — all demand immediate and massive humanitarian response.
The crises are not only large-scale, affecting millions, but the conflicts also are complex, each with unique political realities and on-the-ground difficulties.
They are not alone among crises competing for our attention. They are simply the biggest, pushing off the front pages other crises where human needs remain urgent: Darfur, Central America, Pakistan, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia.
Genova – July 2001 – had a big impact on my life, probably on anybody's life here in Italy. Several hundred thousand protested the gathering of Heads of State – the G8 – and were brutally beaten by police who had been instructed, on Bush's orders, to “be tough this time”. Some of my Italian friends, Ivan and Vitale, were there and they returned shocked at the unprecedented violence that had been unleashed, by all accounts unprovoked. At the time, I said war has just been declared on the people and I wrote, enraged, that the kind of progress the mighty are talking about is not really the progress we want. At the time, one of the recurring taints thrown at the emerging global movement for justice was that it had not come up with any positive proposals.
Fast forward to Azores – January 2003 – the passage from one year to the next. Wind outside, logs crackling in the fireplace. Someone asks the question: What is it we really want? If we don't want Bush's war, we don't want “their” globalization, what can we do about it? Good question. Difficult. Susan suggests that Justice is the major problem. Prohibitionism and the non-separation of Church and State, to be exact. Agreed, but what can we do about it and what about all those other areas of life that are messed up too? We started listing them up – justice, the economy, the energy monopoly, scientific progress, the environment, health, education, ideas in the straitjacket called intellectual property, the way society is organized and how the media manages not to inform us of what's important.
Areas for Change (List Only)
Church and State Justice Economy Energy Science Environment Health Education Human Potential Intellectual Property Laws Social organization Public Media and information Privacy versus Transparency
…the folks at the Open Source Ecology project say you only need about 50 machines such as a wind turbine, cement mixer and sawmill to get things going. And they should know since they are currently building and creating open source industrial machines and sharing the designs online without cost.
Bellingcat will bring together both critically acclaimed and emerging citizen investigative journalists using open source information to investigate, collaborate, and report on worldwide issues that are being underreported and ignored.
Open source information, which is information freely available to anyone through the Internet—think YouTube, Google Maps, Reddit—has made it possible for ANYONE to gather information and source others, through social media networks. Think the Syrian Civil War. Think the Arab Spring.
A plan to split California into six separate states? Wait, what? The billionaire venture capitalist behind the idea said he had collected enough signatures to get the proposal on the 2016 ballot, Reuters reports.
The Tory Prime Minister is said to have held a meeting with a rising star, who was tipped for promotion, and told him: “You have to clean up your sexual act”
The extraordinary claims. … go to the very heart of claims that there was an Establishment cover-up to protect politicians , judges and police officers involved in a sick paedophile network.
Americans are losing confidence in all three branches of government, as confidence in the Supreme Court and Congress has dropped to record lows and the White House has hit a six-year dip, according to a new poll.
In a Gallup poll released Monday, 30 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the Supreme Court, 7 percent in Congress and 29 percent in the presidency.
