Interviews

*Creator of Eliminatewarforever weblog, David Elborn is a self-described ‘citizen of planet Earth’, and has travelled extensively to war-torn regions including Afghanistan. He has seen these disasters first-hand and has been highly passionate about the elimination of war for
over 20 years. He frequently speaks publicly about the issue.*
http://www.eliminatewarforever.org/

Silversmith Mr Chung Wei-wen is a Taiwanese working independently in the foothills above Taipei, producing silver accessories and teapots. Highly skilled and with strong demand for his artifacts, with his teapots he tries to reach into the mind of his clients with his more humanistic philosophy that pits itself against today’s profligacy and materialism.

Kevin Rudd came in like a lion and went out without a bleat, but many Australians felt cheated. After all he was elected by the entire nation so what was the Labor Party thinking about when they chucked him out? Whatever those thoughts were, the result was a hung parliament and an electoral hangover with the populace seeing reality as a green tinted spectacle.

The NPT conference continues in New York with expectations high among anti-nuclear organisations that an intention to move towards a Nuclear Weapons Convention – a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons – will be expressed in the final documents. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is closely following what different nations are saying about such a convention.

We have been talking to Hugo Novotny about the Parks of Study and Reflection and what is being lived in them by those who do the work of levelling, as well as those who develop a process in one of the four disciplines: the material discipline, the energetic discipline, the mental discipline and morphological discipline.

In the midst of conflict and hate, a new solidarity is born. Israeli citizens confront their own military and defend the rights of their Palestinian fellow countrymen. Two activists relate stories of occupation and non-violent opposition. The organization called Ta’ayush was founded by Israelis and Palestinians in order to end the Israeli occupation

The Congolese journalist, Caddy Adzuba, is in Spain to receive the award granted by ‘El Club de las 25’, a women’s journalists’ association, for her work raising awareness of the conflict in her country and how this violence is affecting women in particular. Despite receiving death threats, she is pressing forward with the project ‘A Loudspeaker for Silence’.

And this is powerfully resonant in Latin America. In other words, people feel the tremendous violence of the impossibility to live in minimal living conditions that equate to a decent life. And the worst of the situation is the injustice of the distribution of resources that cause suffering to a huge majority of people and is accepted as “the norm”.

Former boxing World Champion, Mensur Peljto is accompanying the World March for Peace and Nonviolence on its Balkan route between Istanbul and Geneva. As the only Bosnian member of the team, and given that most peace and nonviolence activists are unfamiliar with boxing champions, he was an unknown quantity but very quickly he won the hearts of everyone in the bus.

Given the rise of religious fundamentalism and blatant attacks on minorities especially minority women.  There is widespread practices of discrimination and social exclusion of women from Dalit (untouchable) communities, despite constitutional guarantees of equality and decades of targeted interventions by government.