International

In Bangladesh, the group completed the legalization process for ownership of the land which is about 55 kilometers from Dhaka, at Bitipara, Gazipur, and the members are now laying the brick-and-concrete foundations for the Centre of Studies. What is taking place in Bangladesh is being repeated across Asia with like Parks in various stages of completion.

Pakistani humanists organized a forum for dialogue on the “Existing Political Situation and Alternatives in Pakistan”, on 22nd October, 2011. The event was held at Hamdard Hall, Lahore, where around 60 people from Lahore participated, that figure including several lawyers. The seeds of a new Humanist Party were planted!

Ayyaantuu News Online reported October 28, 2011 that from mid-October, the Ethiopian army – under the control of the Ethiopian Prime Minster Meles Zenawihas – started forcefully relocating thousands of families in the rural areas around Obole in the restive Ogaden region in southeastern Ethiopia where government forces are engaged in fighting rebels of the ONLF

Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, explains in a TED session how inequality harms society, not just the poor but also the rich. Not a moment too soon, in order to add to the discussion taking place globally by the Occupy/Indignados/ArabSpring movement about setting the basis of a new society.

The winds of change are blowing across the globe. What triggers such change, and when it will strike, is something that no one can predict.

Last Jan. 18, a courageous young woman in Egypt took a dangerous step. Asmaa Mahfouz was 25 years old, part of the April 6 Youth Movement, with thousands of young people engaging online in debate on the future of their country.

Lunchtime at the HSBC building Central Hong Kong – gone was its strangely grimy sterility once only broken by smoothly ascending escalators that carry what appear to be robotised humans into its underbelly; the grey flagstone base now replete with a growing tent city, tables of foodstuff, sofas, gaudy banners, quietly disposed youngies at laptops or in small bands, talking.

In 1967, a year before his assessination, Martin Luther King gave a speech called “Beyond Vietnam” in which he proclaimed: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

The cultivation in Afghanistan of opium poppies – the crop used to make heroin and other drugs – has increased by seven per cent this year because of continued insecurity and higher prices, a United Nations-backed survey reveals.

The United Nations human rights office called on Israel to stop attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank, citing a spike in violence in recent weeks resulting in serious physical injury, property loss and damage.

We interviewed Yordos, a young Greek who came in these days to Madrid to participate in the 15O, and to strengthen ties with the Spanish indignant. He sayd to us: “…We don’t have to wait for others to decide for our lives and how those should be. The squares are waiting for us and I am sure that we people, through debate and dialogue, can find the ways to improve our lives.”