International

Thousands of people flocked to a Washington arena Wednesday to celebrate the 76th birthday of Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who urged followers to mark the occasion by practicing compassion. “Happiness — it is not money, it is not material things, it is not power. It is (inside), full of self-confidence.”

A social phenomenon exploded almost fifty years ago: young people began to make their voice heard and took control of the social space. Different cities witnessed the simultaneous uprising as this clamour became the visible form of the much-discussed Gasset y Ortega thesis on generational dialectics as the driving force of history with extraordinary empirical evidence.

Here we are publishing the Opening Adress given by Dunja Mijatovic, from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), as Representative on Freedom of the Media, on the occasion of the inaugurative plenary sesion of the 2011 Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum held recently in Bonn, Germany, and focused on Human Rights.

Through authors like Rita Levi, Maturana, Piaget, Vigotsky, Husserl, Freire and, fundamentally, Silo, the Chilean teachers Rebeca Bize and Mario Aguilar have developed a solid theoretical foundation for a new humanist education in “Pedagogy of Intentionality, Educating for an Active consciousness”. The book was presented in Buenos Aires, in the National Library.

Some news need no comment, like this one by which nothing less than the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia decided now to express ‘concern’ about Gaza as if the inhuman situation of its children and the elderly were not know to them.

Eastern Africa is experiencing what is described as the “most severe food crisis in the world today”, at least 10 million people affected in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda. The alert comes from UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which adds that Somalia is one of the hardest-hit countries in the region, with deaths reported in some areas.

The five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council – China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States – met in Paris on June 30 and July 1, 2011 to deal with an issue that carries with it the survival of the planet: nuclear disarmament. The conference was a follow up to the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York in May 2010.

Apparently every body is keen to save the planet Earth. But hardly a few ever think of changing lifestyle which is too heavily based on an over-consumption of energy and so many other things.

Japanese children have been shown to be contaminated with radioactive caesium just weeks after the government raised the acceptable level of contamination in schools which provoked angry responses from parents. At the same time it is revealed that the UK government attempted to minimise the importance of the accident in order to prevent a backlash against nuclear energy.

Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s movement for democracy in Burma is hanging in the balance this week, with the regime threatening a brutal response to her call to free political prisoners. Activists have appealed to the world for help, saying international pressure is crucial to tipping the balance. Avaaz calls people to sign a petition