Region

Canada was to officially end its combat mission in Afghanistan on Thursday, after nine years of fighting which saw it lose 157 troops and spend more than $11 billion dollars. With popular support for the war sapped at home, most of the nearly 3,000 Canadian soldiers, based mainly in the dangerous battleground of Kandahar, have packed up and gone home.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon set an October target for rival Cypriot leaders to secure a broad accord on reunifying the divided Mediterranean island, after both parties agreed on Thursday to intensify talks. “I have every expectation that by October the leaders will be able to report that they have reached convergence on all core issues, and we will meet that month in New York.”

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.”

The extraordinary scene was captured by video yesterday of the police backing down from an attempt to detain a Senegalese national living in Madrid. The multiracial neighbourhood of Lavapies in Madrid was holding an assembly as part of the M-15 movement when, according to police a man attempted to board a train without a ticket and was stopped by staff who called the police.

A year after the first Gaza Freedom Flotilla was attacked by Israel in international waters leading to the deaths of nine activists, the Free Gaza Movement is organising a second flotilla which is currently experiencing difficulties in Greece as the government there is refusing to allow the boats to leave port, citing fears for the safety for the passengers on board.

Reporters Without Borders firmly condemns last week’s murder of journalist Luis Eduardo Gómez in Arboletes, in the northwestern department of Antioquia, and the threats that two journalists, Medellín-based Mary Luz Avendaño and Bogotá-based Gonzalo Guillén, have been getting in unrelated cases.

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.

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.