Politics

Mayors for Peace announced that 4.037 member cities in 144 countries and regions have joined the campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons by 2020. Dr. Akiba, Mayor of Hiroshima and President of Mayors for Peace spearheads an international campaign for nuclear weapon states to stop considering cities as targets for weapons of mass destruction.

In Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Israel’s Foreign Minister has dismissed the prospect of Palestinian statehood within the next two years, by 2012. Avigdor Lieberman made the comment to reporters in Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is due in Washington next week for talks with President Obama.

Over sixty years have passed with Palestinians under occupation by the Israel government and the situation is continuously getting worse for the Palestinians. Far from giving up, local people gang together and insist on demonstrating for their rights. With international pressure an acceptable situation has to finally result, anything else is unthinkable.

Police in Toronto arrested over six hundred protesters taking part in demonstrations against the G20 global economic summit. Many of the arrests occurred on Sunday when police raided a University of Toronto building housing protesters. Amnesty International has called for an independent probe into the police crackdown.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of people streamed through Kinshasa on Saturday for the funeral of Floribert Chebeya, one of Congo’s top human rights activists. Chebeya was found dead in his car two weeks ago after being summoned to meet the chief of the national police. Supporters of Chebeya have called for an independent probe into his death.

“I have a dream”. Ask anyone where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. first proclaimed those words, and the response will most likely be at the March on Washington in August 1963. But in fact, he delivered them two months earlier, on June 23, in Detroit, leading a march down Woodward Avenue.
King said: “I have a dream that one day, …

When a hitherto ‘straight’ well-known individual breaks into a protest fast, it certainly raises eyebrows and draws attention to the particular issue. This is the case with the Diamond Industry, a certain Mr Rappaport, and a campaign to include Israel among the nations branded as part of the Conflict Diamonds debacle.

Gypsies have been universally discriminated against because, as nomadics, they were seen as strangers everywhere and that attitude is only slowly changing. Valery Novoselsky tells his story and how, despite that Israel is very keen on building up its resident population in general, for him it was the same story played out yet again.

Sir Richard Jolly, former Assistant General to the United Nations and co-director of UN intellectual history project, will give the Annual Erskine Childers Lecture entitled “Inequality and Millennium Development Goals.” at Friends House on Tuesday 15th June, 2010 at 6.30pm hosted by Uniting for Peace, Action for UN Renewal and World Disarmament Campaign.

The only sustainable way to overcome the crisis is to reactivate the economy and create jobs, the general director of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Juan Somavia, affirmed on Monday.
Addressing the International ILO Assembly, he also said it was imperative to fight not just the fiscal deficit, but also the lack of decent jobs.