Currently viewing the tag: "security"
Two days after peaceful demonstrations across Tibet turned violent in the capital Lhasa, the Reuters news agency has reported that the violent clashes between protesters and Chinese security forces have spread to neighboring provinces. Supporters of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, say they have confirmed at least 80 deaths among demonstrators. Xinhua, China’s official state-run media organization, reports only 10 civilian deaths and a number of policemen injured.
International media reports say that sources in the Tibetan exile community, from India to New York, have confirmed that at least 30 civilian demonstrators were killed by Chinese security forces as they moved to end a demonstration in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on Friday. Demonstrations had begun on Monday, and for four days, reports suggest the majority of demonstrations were peaceful.
In the wake of the assassination of Pakistan People’s Party leader Benazir Bhutto, stability seems to be the key goal among top rivals in secular political leadership. The PPP has announced that in keeping with Ms. Bhutto’s wishes, her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, a 19-year-old student at Christ Church College, Oxford, will take the helm of the party, with her husband, Bilawal’s father, managing day-to-day affairs until Bilawal finishes his studies.
Fmr. Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, whose father was executed in the process of a military coup in the 1970s, and who has said she remained “broken” by what had happened to her during 5 years in military prison, was assassinated Thursday, while campaigning to restore free elections to her country. She had been the first woman elected PM in a Muslim country and had sworn she would combat radical fundamentalism and end the cycle of military takeovers.
In many parts of the world, people are presently facing the question, on a societal scale, of whether or not free and open democracy can coexist with measures taken to protect against extremism. The question is an old one and goes to the root of whether it is possible, as a matter of natural law, to vote away one’s rights or to vote against democracy.
Darfur, beset by years of bloody internecine violence, with the Khartoum-backed janjaweed militia killing civilians in numbers the US government has officially declared to be genocide, is still struggling to find a real beginning for peace. For years, human rights groups have pleaded with the international community to intervene, with or without the support of the Khartoum government. Finally, in August, the UN Security Council ordered the world’s largest peacekeeping mission to secure Darfur.
As land and water become scarce and as competition for these vital resources intensifies, we can expect mounting social tensions within societies, particularly between those who are poor and dispossessed and those who are wealthy, as well as among ethnic and religious groups. Population growth brings with it a steady shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person. That decline, which is threatening to drop the living standards of more and more people below survival level, could lead to unmanageable social tensions that will translate into broad-based conflicts.
On March 16, 2003, some 10,000 participants [met] in Japan for the third World Water Forum to discuss the world water prospect. Although they [would] be officially focusing on water scarcity, they [would also] indirectly be focusing on food scarcity because 70 percent of the water we divert from rivers or pump from underground is used for irrigation.
As world water demand has tripled over the last half-century, it has exceeded the sustainable yield of aquifers in scores of countries, leading to falling water tables. In effect, governments are satisfying the growing demand for food by overpumping groundwater, a measure that virtually assures a drop in food production when the aquifer is depleted. Knowingly or not, governments are creating a “food bubble” economy.
In the wake of Mozambique’s long civil war, lasting from 1976 to 1992, a group of artists, sponsored by Christian aid, set up the Transforming Arms into Tools (TAE) project in the nation’s capital, Maputo. Sculptors use decomissioned weapons, and parts of weapons to make art, expressing the possibility of finding new ways to secure and advance civil society.
Amnesty International (Amnesty/AI) has published a new report examining the international arms trade, and its findings indicate there is little control on the expanding web of private interests seeking to profit from a proliferation of dangerous weapons. The report also illustrates the ways in which this scattering of dangerous weapons has led to severe human rights abuses.
Water is one of the “fundamental building-blocks of life”, as is often said in science, in biology classrooms, in medicine, theology, environmental policy debates, and in cosmology and space exploration. It is also a commodity whose economic reality is increasingly defined by chronic scarcity and often intensely uneven distribution.
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