International

Over the past year, the world has watched with great interest as the Arab Spring has dissolved decades of repression. Citizens weary of injustice have stood up and demanded control of their destinies. I wish that oppressed people everywhere in Africa could benefit from the dramatic changes we are witnessing in North Africa.

The United Nations committee entrusted with helping countries tackle terrorism has voiced concern at the close connection between terrorists and transnational organized crime, including the illegal movement of nuclear, chemical, biological and other potentially deadly materials.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas handed over a request to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, asking the United Nations to admit the state of Palestine as a full member. Then he told the General Assembly “I call upon the distinguished members of the Security Council to vote in favour of our full membership.”

In the midst of the current stampede to slash federal spending, U.S. Congress might want to take a look at two unnecessary (and dangerous) “national security” programs that, if cut, would save the United States over a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade.

The crisis in the economic system has been well anticipated by those who noticed the complex and esoteric way in which modern Monetarism creates scarcity through taking money out of a hat to lend it, but not making enough to repay with interests. Speculation then concentrates it. Challenges to such bizarre and poverty creating system are not tolerated. Oct 15th Wake Up Day.

In a closed envelope delivered to UN secretary-general with little hope, the Palestinian Authority submitted on September 23rd its demand to the United Nations to recognise Palestine as an independent State, while giving time to the Security Council to consider what it had repeatedly claimed but it will now reject due to the U.S. “veto”:

The US Air Force is standing down its plan to launch a nuclear-capable missile on the United Nations International Day of Peace. It’s a very small step, but it is a step in the right direction. It’s possible that the Air Force planners didn’t know about the International Day of Peace or even that there is such a day.

Mayors for Peace is proud to announce that its membership has surpassed the 5000 mark, making Mayors for Peace not only the fastest growing association of local governments in the world, but also, by far the largest international, direct-membership association of local governments.

Nonviolence is a beautiful theory but it doesn’t work in the real world, critics have long argued. It is—they maintain—passive, weak, utopian, naïve, unpatriotic, marginal, simplistic, and impractical. In spite of these widely-held assumptions, however, people around the planet go on building one nonviolent people-power movement after another.

Message from Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-François Julliard