Europe

Alicia, Pasqual and Albert were kidnapped by Al Qaeda in Southern Mauritania on the 29th of November 2009. They were travelling in the Solidarity Caravan, organised by the Barcelona Solidarity Action association, transporting support material for projects which are being carried out by 36 Catalan associations in Morocco, Mauritania, Gambia and Senegal. They were freed today.

After a week of negotiations, the main conclusions of the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Right of Mother Earth (Cochabamba, April 2010) have been incorporated in the document of United Nations on Climate Change, that now have been recognized as a negotiation text for the 192 countries which has been congregated in Bonn, during the first week august of 2010.

Muscovites have brought airports to a standstill with attempts to leave the Russian capital where the air has become unbreathable and visibility enormously reduced due to the dense smoke clouds from fires which in the last hours have been growing, due mainly to the very high temperatures of this summer; the highest registered in decades.

In 1999, preoccupied with questions about the fundamental nature of humanity and the most pressing issues of our time, filmmaker Jeremy Gilley launched Peace One Day and set out to find a starting point for peace. He had a mission: to document his efforts to establish the first ever annual day of global ceasefire and non-violence with a fixed calendar date.

Sir Richard Jolly, former Assistant General to the United Nations and co-director of UN intellectual history project, will give the Annual Erskine Childers Lecture entitled “Inequality and Millennium Development Goals.” at Friends House on Tuesday 15th June, 2010 at 6.30pm hosted by Uniting for Peace, Action for UN Renewal and World Disarmament Campaign.

After 6 months of metamorphosis into a democratic international federation the new-look World Coordination Team gets to work on supporting a grassroots social movement that connects the daily issues of violence experienced at home and work with global threats of war and nuclear weapons. “We aspire to do for war and violence what Greenpeace does for environmentalism”.

The only sustainable way to overcome the crisis is to reactivate the economy and create jobs, the general director of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Juan Somavia, affirmed on Monday.
Addressing the International ILO Assembly, he also said it was imperative to fight not just the fiscal deficit, but also the lack of decent jobs.

Foreign ministers of the European Union (EU) called on Israel to soften its blockade on the Gaza Strip and broaden the list of items allowed into the territory.
The extreme situation in Gaza was the focus of the agenda of the meeting of EU Foreign ministers, who failed to condemn explicitly the violent Israeli attack at a humanitarian aid flotilla bound for Gaza on May 31.

The 17th of May marked the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO). Events were held in tens of countries around the world to send a strong message that these forms of discrimination should be consigned to the dustbin of history. Portugal legalised same-sex marriage. Malawi sentences 2 gay men for the crime of homosexuality.

This year International Conscientious Objectors’ Day will be celebrated as usual in the UK with a small ceremony at the CO’s Memorial consisting of a lump of volcanic rock in Tavistock Square, London, close to the statue of Gandhi and the Hiroshima blossom tree. It commemorates those who refused to kill, even when they faced their own death for disobeying military orders.