Good news! an efford in providing cheap drugs in the developing world.

GSK, the world's second biggest pharmaceutical company is to radically shift its attitude to providing cheap drugs to millions of people in the developing world. Read this news at The Guardian

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline should be congratulated for breaking industry ranks and taking a major step toward helping poor people in developing countries to get better access to medicines, says international agency Oxfam. Read this at Oxfam International

Is this the begining of a change?

Will other pharmaceutical companies join them?

One.org petition and good news (Food crisis)

The financial crisis threatens to push 90 million more people into extreme poverty according to a report this month from UK Department for International Development.
For a crisis of this scale, we need a comprehensive global solution.

www.one.org
Last G20 Summit looks as though it made some real progress for the world’s poorest. Integrated into the leader’s agreement is recognition of the need to address extreme poverty as part of the global recovery. Instinct tells me that some of the vague language will take hard work to clarify, but this morning, as I re-read statements and news from yesterday, I have a sense of hope and cautious optimism.

Highlights include:

Resources: The G20 announced US $50 billion for low-income countries—although we are concerned this includes existing funding—and a further US $100 billion in lending for development banks.

Reform: Developing countries will have some greater representation in the international financial institutions, and election to World Bank/IMF leadership will be based on merit.

Regulation: The G20 announced they would take action to regulate of illicit tax havens.
On top of that, all G20 countries re-affirmed their commitment to the Millennium Development Goals and commitments made at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit.

Coming out of this summit, we need to work to ensure that money going to developing countries is given as grants, not loans that trigger another debt crisis. Also, much more needs to be done on the green agenda in the interests of developing countries at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen later this year.

But before we do, I want to thank you for your part in helping make this happen. Together, in the last few months, we’ve succeeded in encouraging Gordon Brown to invite the African Union to the G20, which sources say made a big difference in the final discussions. We also helped encourage President Obama to show global leadership on poverty. He remarked yesterday: “We are protecting those who don’t always have a voice at the G-20, but who have suffered greatly in this crisis. The United States is ready to lead in this endeavor.”

These are important achievements. I hope you are feeling the same sense of progress as I am, and are encouraged to continue this fight.

I can’t thank you enough,

Roxane Philson, ONE.org

P.S. To share your thoughts on the G20, get more detail on what they are doing for developing countries, and coverage from inside the G20, visit the ONE Blog:http://www.one.org/blog/g20-the-london-summit/?id=894-4038914-k.jhXhx&t=2

P.S.2 I remember that the F.A.O already warned us last year about this alimentary crisis to come. They stimate that 12billion $ should be given to minimize the impact. (only 2 have been given).
A related article: http://www.un-ngls.org/spip.php?article511

Kindness is the key to happiness

Last weekend I came across these lines that made me smile.

These lines where well explained on The Guardian weekly review. The authors of this reflexion are Adam Phillips (psychoanalyst) and Barbara Taylor (historian, specifically a historian of ideas).
They make the case for putting altruism above individualism.

I could find a shorter review at
The Guardian/ The Observer on line paper.


Between them ( Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor) they explore the concept of "kindness", its status among human attributes and the value that has been ascribed to it over the years. "Kindness" is a rough equivalent of the Christian non-erotic love, or charity, though it was embraced as a virtue and a source of pleasure by Cicero, for one, and by the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, before it was extolled famously by St Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians. Charity, except in the limited context of organisations such as Oxfam or Mind, is not an attribute much favoured today, being thought inimical to equality and the recognition of rights.

The Guardian/ The Observer on line paper.


Nice link to another reflexion on this:
Love is the Answer - Love is the Answer - Love is the Answer
http://heraldoflight.wordpress.com/pensees/

2 billions out of 12 (so far) for the food crisis

Last October Ofman International published that:
"Five months after countries pledged to give more than $12bn (£6.9bn) to address the global food emergency, less than $1bn has been given.... The number of malnourished people in the world rose by 44 million in 2008. Nearly one billion people are now going hungry. When you consider the speed of the world's response to the credit crisis, the delay in acting is shocking."

This news by the Word Bank.

Read more at this link with the news given by The Guardian

But, one good news we can say today is that:
The European Parliament: MEPs adopted a compromise agreement between Parliament, Council and Commission allowing for adoption in first reading of the regulation establishing the 1 billion euro food facility.
The report by Gay MITCHELL (EPP-ED, IE) which says that the Commission's proposal for a 1-billion-euro fund to address the food crisis is a major, and very timely, contribution to meeting this urgent challenge. The report sets out that the total financial reference amount for the implementation of this Regulation over the period 2008-2010 will be €1 billion. The legislative resolution was adopted with 561 votes in favour, 24 against and 34 abstentions.

Read more at the European Parliament web site

Read more at the Oxfam web site

Good News about death penalty! Iran

According to a statement by Hossein Zabhi, Assistant Attorney General for Judicial Affairs, a recently-issued directive instructs all judicial officials, when passing sentence, to apply the regulations of the Amnesty and Clemency Commission, which would allow the commutation of death sentences of juvenile offenders firstly to life imprisonment, and then in a second stage to 15 years.

In his interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency, Hossein Zabhi referred to all types of crime currently punishable by execution.

Iran was one of last remaining countries in the world that imposes the death penalty on juveniles aged under 18 at the time of the crime.

This news by Amnesty International.


The news by BBC News.

The Guardian October´s report reveals more countries abolishing death penalty
The world is moving closer to the final abolition of the death penalty, according to the latest figures published to coincide with World Day against the Death Penalty yesterday. At present, five countries are responsible for almost all the state executions carried out in the past year.

UN advises people (western people) to eat less meat in order to tackle global warming.

The UN´s Food and Agriculture Organization (F.A.O.) estimates that 18% of the greenhouse gas production comes from the meat industry. As a comparative data, the transport industry is considered responsible of the 16%.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which last year earned a joint share of the Nobel Peace Prize, said that people should then go on to reduce their meat consumption even further. Even he went further by saying that people should have one meat-free day a week if they want to make a personal and effective sacrifice that would help tackle climate change.

On top of that, most health authorities considered, from long a go, that most western people’s health would improve if there were less meat in their diets.

You can read more on this at:
TheGuardian

NaturalNews

Olympic hangover – Self criticism would be seemly for the press

Press release 25 August 2008

Olympic hangover – Self criticism would be seemly for the press

It is hypocrisy of the worst kind, when the press wonders why there hasn’t been more about the human right in China during the Olympics. The truth is, that the 20,000 sports reporters in Beijing were untamable about the sports performances. They have been acting like a bunch of students from a continuation school on a picnic.

China could not dream of a better coverage of the Olympics. Associations to the media coverage during the Olympics in Berlin in 1936 seem obvious. It must be the media’s duty to inform the millions of people who are interested in the Olympics, partly about the sports results, but also about the Olympics being held in a totalitarian dictatorship with a massive violation of the human rights.
The sports journalists have failed totally – critical questions to athletes, the appearing politicians and the Chinese authorities have been almost absent. Even when Ussain Bolt during his 3 legendary races, was wearing an orange bracelet, which could have been a silent signal that there is something wrong with the human rights in China. Maybe it was a coincidence, but it is remarkable that the journalists avoided asking him. Self censorship seems to be looming large.

There have been many actions in Beijing by activists, who have tried to hang up banners etc. They have all been arrested and sent out of the country. Also these actions have only been mentioned sporadically. Many have used orange as a signal color, we don’t know how many, because the journalists, who were supposed to keep an eye on this, have just been interested in sports, and according to IOC rules it’s not allowed to display political symbols, and therefore they can’t tell why they wear orange.

TheColorOrange.net group in Denmark has applied the Chinese authorities for permission to demonstrate in the ‘permitted’ areas. Even though we have sent 10 reminders and personally went to the Chinese Embassy in Copenhagen, they won’t respond to our request for a visa and the permission to legal demonstration. The authorities say that 77 have applied, and 77 have been denied. But it is probably only the top of the iceberg. How many have they ignored totally like us? Why aren’t there any questions about that?
All media have apparently sent one or two journalists to cover the critical part of the Olympics, and that has – of course, triggered some critical on-the-spot reports, but they have been few and sporadic.

Operation successful – the Patient Died. We have to admit that our ambitions to get the athletes and others to use the color orange in front of the cameras to focus on the human rights in China, has only partially succeeded. Even though some athletes, including Ussain Bolt, have been wearing an orange bracelet, the interest from the press has been nearly gone. It is at this point, that we from TheColorOrange.net group have made a mistake. We thought that the sports journalists were interested in other things beside sport, and that they would catch every opportunity to bring a story about athletes, who may have been criticizing China. This confidence in the journalists has appeared to be an Achilles’ heel to our project about using the color orange during the Olympics 2008.
On the other hand, we, the grassroots all over the world have managed to put human rights on the agenda ahead of the Olympics, where most of the articles have had a focus critical to China.

TheColorOrange campaign has been very successful, besides the 16 days where the frenzies Olympic fever was going out of control. All over the world local groups have carried out Orange activities. There have been 270,000 hits on our website, and the Orange project has been mentioned in more than 20,000 media.

“Maybe in the future the color orange will be used as a symbol in defense of human rights, both inside and outside China. So in the end we are satisfied with the project”, says the initiator of the Color Orange, Jens Galschiot, and concludes: “We shut down the project now, but we will leave our website www.TheColorOrange.net in function, so it can be used as inspiration to others, who want to use the color orange as a symbolic color.”