International

The second day at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn and a continuously rising temperature. After the first panels on the opening day and exchanging cards with journalists from all over the world, the second day gave us vibrant meetings and high emotional intensity. Women were the protagonists.

Ednaldo Figueira, a blogger, politician and owner of the local newspaper O Serrano, was gunned down on 15 June in Serra do Mel, a town in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte. He headed the Serra do Mel branch of the Workers Party (PT), the party of President Dilma Rousseff and her predecessor, Lula da Silva, and posted regularly on the Serra do Mel blog.

After six years of non-violent struggle against the Israeli separating wall by the people of Bil’in, the army has begun to dismantle a section of the West Bank Wall. In turn, the demonstrations continue to pressure for a new route which will not separate farmers from their land.

On Monday night Ireland suffered the most violent incidents in a decade between Protestants and Catholics, who clashed in the city of Belfast some even firing guns, according to Irish police. In the images broadcast by television there were hundreds of youths throwing stones and Molotov cocktails in the Short Strand area.

In a moment in which new forms of media and diffusion of news are challenging the old established forms and the news agenda of the day can be suddenly altered by a fragment of video taken on a mobile phone, the Global Media Forum convened today to consider the challenge for the Media in the field of Human Rights in a Globalized World.

Speaking at the 4th Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany, this year focusing on the role of the media in the defense of human rights, Pia Figueroa, Director of Pressenza attacked multinational media corporation for their selective approach to defending human rights and spoke about the role of the media in attacks on human rights in Latin America.

On June 19th in Madrid, as in many other places, people gather to denounce and express their rejection of the many situations of economic violence they are being subjected to: the euro accord, cuts in health and education, corruption … The demonstration was cheerful and enthusiastic like all other multitudinous events of the 15M movement.

The resounding victory of “yes” to the referendum to repeal the privatization of water, the nuclear plants and a shameful law “ad personam” which would allow Berlusconi to not present himself at trials against him under the guise of a “legal impediment” was an act of civil disobedience, which involved 27 million Italians.

Here we publish a summary of the measures repealed by great majority during the Italian referendum.

Nuclear:

The repeal of the rules on nuclear power has prevented the installation of new plants in Italy, preventing a return to a kind of energy that had already been rejected in the referendum of 1987, shortly after the Chernobyl accident.

Steven Starr from Physicians for Social Responsibility writes about the dangers of creating so much radioactive waste in the world’s 440 nuclear reactors, the ongoing situation in Fukushima and the legacy of the radioactive exclusion zone around Chernobyl. “It is time to admit that nuclear power is neither a “safe” nor “clean” method to produce energy.”