Friends of the Earth International wrote an account of the climate meeting organised by the Venezuelan government in July, which is abridged, from the FOEI website, below. read the Margarita Declaration the meeting adopted here.
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World
Today the struggle for people of conscience appears to be less about convincing people that Israel is committing war crimes against Palestinians or grossly violating international law. Instead, the struggle has become about convincing the world that Palestinians are human beings too.
The ongoing televised genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli army makes one wonder what the situation would have been like if global powers and mainstream voices saw Palestinians as human beings.
Under the unfortunately red-hot slogan: “Stand up for Peace — In Solidarity”, about 300 participants and many day guests from nearby Berlin and Brandenburg came together from July 23 to 27 for the Ninth Summer University of the European Left.
Constructive, concentrated, and communicative, people from at least 32 countries worked together during this unique annual event of the Party of the European Left and Transform! Europe.
“This political force should be liquidated,” said Pavlo Petrenko, Ukraine’s justice minister, quoted in the July 9 edition of Capital (Kiev’s equivalent of the Australian Financial Review).
Petrenko was referring to the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU). For a time in the 1990s, it was the most supported party in Ukraine and it still won 13% of the vote at the 2012 parliamentary poll.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has decided to cancel his visit to Israel, where he had planned meetings with government officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, teleSUR English said on August 6.
Correa cancelled the visit in protest against the atrocities being committed by Israeli forces against the people of Gaza.
Israel's latest military onslaught, Operation Protective Edge, resumed on August 8 with fresh bombings that killed a child and injured 15 other Palestinians, teleSUR's Gaza correspondent Noor Harazeen reported that day.
It came after Israel refused Palestinian demands to lift its crippling siege — an essential move to give the battered Gaza Strip any hope of recovery.
The United States launched a second round of bombings in northern Iraq on August 8. Earlier on Augus 7, the US jet fighters bombed areas close to the Kurdish town of Erbil.
The US government has said they would be limited to a defensive response, but with the second round, the bombings appears to have intensified.
The US military is using an armed drone and four warplanes to bomb artillery positions and a vehicle convoy near the beleaguered city of Irbil, the Pentagon said.
Cuba calls for US to end covert operations
The Cuban government has called on Washington to halt hostile covert operations against it, the Morning Star said on August 7.
An Associated Press investigation revealed that a US government program had sent young Latin Americans to Cuba on political missions posing as AIDS-awareness workshop organisers.
Many commentators have written about the growing divide in the United States between capitalists and workers (and other producers) ― although they eschew the terms “capitalists” and “workers”.
They prefer to talk about levels of income and wealth abstracted from the role different classes play in the production process.
Nevertheless, their figures give an insight into the real growing disparity between the two main classes under the capitalist system, which was first brought to national attention by the Occupy movement in 2011.
In an article titled, “Arrest Gideon Levy and Haneen Zoabi,” Matti Golan, a columnist for the Israeli business daily Globes, has called for the establishment of camps modeled after the internment camps the United States established in World War II.
Golan wrote that Levy, a dissident Israeli journalist who writes for Haaretz; Palestinian member of the Knesset Zoabi and Amira Hass, Haaretz’s other dissenting journalist; should all be rounded up since they are “agitators.”
Palestine solidarity activists in Britain declared victory on August 4 after the National Executive Council of the Nation Union of Students voted to pass a motion in solidarity with Palestine, and for an arms embargo against Israel, Electronic Intifada reported the next day.
The NEC motion condemned Israel’s lethal assault on and blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The following statement by the Network in Defence of Humanity -- in defense of Palestine and encouraging people to join the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign targetting Israel -- has been signed by Bolivian President Evo Morales, former Honduran president Mel Zelaya, Nobel peace prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, Cuban musician Silvio Rodriguez and many more (see list below).
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