Region

The tensions has increased in the Gaza Strip after an Israeli airstrike
killed at least 9 Palestinians and injured 11 others on Saturday evening.
Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Adham Abu Salmia said, the first airstrike on Rafah, south Gaza killed five members of the Islamic Jihad movement, while the others were killed in a separate strike.

Despite the big Egyptian efforts and intensive contacts led by senior
Egyptian intelligence service officials to activate the truce agreement and reach an informal mutual cease-fire between Palestinian militants and Israel, israeli aircrafts launched an airstrike on Gaza Strip, killed two men and also injured another.

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.

The often violent response to the Occupy Wall Street campaign that is growing in the United States and elsewhere is affecting the freedom to inform. Reporters Without Borders [campaigning for press freedom] condemns the arrests of reporters in recent weeks, especially in New York where the police assume the right to decide who are journalists.

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.

As Occupy London Stock Exchange celebrated a week of protest thousands gathered for a public assembly in the heart of London’s financial centre. The General Secretary of Britain’s largest trade union added his support. A second occupation was born in nearby Finsbury Sq. St Paul’s Cathedral closed its doors claiming health and safety issues and asking the camp to leave.

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 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.

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.