Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch BlogPeacemakers Trust posts news, reports or announcements of interest to people studying or working in the field of dispute resolution, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Inclusion of an item on the media watch blog does not imply endorsement or agreement of Peacemakers Trust with views expressed by authors of posted items.
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson heads east to Ottawa this week, to spend some of the political capital that he and the city have amassed during the successful run of the 2010 Games.
On his shopping list: a national housing strategy to help Vancouver’s homeless, and greater funding for transit, both from the federal and B.C. governments.
(...more)A new document aims to stave off conflicts between First Nations and mining companies looking to start operations on band territories.
(...more)Three weeks ago I blogged about bananas being packaged (in South Korea) in plastic wrappers. Extra packaging for a banana seemed odd. A week later I posted an update with an explanation from Starbucks: the plastic wrappers, they had told me, reflected Korean ‘cultural norms’ dictating that premium produce be individually wrapped.
OK, interesting answer.
But now, in a recent issue of MacLean’s magazine, there’s a story (by Kate Lunau) that gives a much more plausible explanation — and it’s about bananas being sold right here in Canada. According to Lunau’s story, retailers package banana’s for individual sale to help extend the very small window of time during which bananas are the pristine yellow colour that consumers demand, rather than either too green or too brown…
(...more)The Journal of Urban Technology has just released a special issue on The Architecture of War and Peace: Urban artefacts and social practices in contested spaces. Guest editor is Ralf Brand, write that the special issue ‘intends to tackle a “socio-material” blind spot in studies on so-called contested territories” including “cities, districts, or neighborhoods whose ethnic, ideological, religious, or linguistic diversity is not embraced as an asset but is a source of tensions, competing territorial claims, polarization, and seclusion.” Brand points out: “We cannot simply preach neighborliness between warring social groups when a wall literally prevents visual and acoustic encounters. Likewise, we cannot simply knock down a fence and hope people will automatically start liking each other.”
This report discusses the key linkages between environment, conflict and peacebuilding, and provides recommendations on how these can be addressed more effectively by the international community…
(...more)Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today paid tribute to one of his predecessors, U Thant, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, calling the third holder of the United Nations top post as a statesman of “great skill and quiet persistence,” who steered the world body safely through a decade of change.
(...more)NEW YORK – Cambodia’s respect for basic rights dramatically deteriorated in 2009 as the government misused the judiciary to silence government critics, attacked human rights defenders, tightened restrictions on press freedom, and abandoned its international obligations to protect refugees, Human Rights Watch said today in its new World Report 2010.
The 612-page World Report 2010, the organization’s 20th annual review of human rights practices around the globe, summarizes major human rights trends in more than 90 nations and territories worldwide…
“Cambodians who speak out to defend their homes, their jobs, and their rights face threats, jail, and physical attacks,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The only way that the Cambodian government will end its assault on civil society is if influential governments and donors demand real change and put the pressure on.”
(...more)JAKARTA – Recently, more than 115 world leaders gathered at the largest and most important United Nations meeting ever on fighting against global warming.
In fact, the United Nations Climate Change Conference through its Copenhagen Accord has failed to reach a deal on industrialized and emerging nations reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, although it has successfully set a goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius over the coming years, and developed nations made a financial commitment to help poor nations cope with the effects of climate change.
After all this time, most of the debate about climate change has revolved around countries’ relative responsibility for limiting the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and funding efforts to shift to low-carbon energy and other green technologies. Climate change is more than just an issue of energy efficiency or industrial carbon emissions; it is also about people, where and how they live, what they consume, and the rights and opportunities available to them.
It is therefore fundamental to reflect on how climate change will affect women, men, boys and girls differently around the world, within nations, and how individual behavior can undermine or contribute to the global effort to cool our warming world. Climate change will not only endanger lives and undermine livelihoods, it will also exacerbate the gap between rich and poor and amplify the inequities between women and men.
(...more)RANMALA, India – The villages of Ranmala, Nandagane, Shirgaon and Mengdewadi, in Pune, Sangli and Satara districts, western India, have one thing in common.
They are all headed by female sarpanches (village chiefs), and what a difference it has made.
(...more)Toronto-based Pinetree Capital bought a few million shares of Copper Mesa Mining Corporation, making it the largest share owner of a failing company currently embroiled in a lawsuit. The takeover raised the price of its penny stock upwards to between three and five cents.
Copper Mesa, however, got a lot more than what it bargained for.
Copper Mesa, until last year, was the owner of a couple of mining concessions in the Intag region of Ecuador. But the company ran into a strong, organized opposition from communities, local government and, eventually even the national government, which eventually stripped Copper Mesa of its concessions in the country. The company then had to shed itself of its mining projects in the US to pay off debts, leaving it as empty handed as when it was first aborted.
(...more)Scientific American has a cheery article on up their website right now, estimating the global impact of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. The result: sunlight is reduced, the planet cools, and the growing season shortens. Drought ensues. The ozone layer erodes. Global agriculture is decimated.
Aside from the way it will haunt your nightmares, it’s a very interesting article. It brings up come points that we all tend to forget…
(...more)As apart of a deal with Norway to preserve its rainforests, Guyana will step up oversight of its gold mining industry, which has been accused of causing significant environmental damage including deforestation and mercury and cyanide pollution.
(...more)Canada was the biggest obstructer at the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, according to the Climate Action Network (CAN) an organization made-up of 450 NGOs. On Friday CAN awarded Canada the ‘Colossal Fossil Award’ for doing the most to obstruct an ambitious climate change agreement and for doing the least to mitigate climate change.
(...more)Advance unedited version of the Copenhagen Accord signed December 18, 2009…
(...more)Asit Biswas loves to tell the story of the Phnom Penh Water Authority. It was 1993 and a new manager, Ek Sonn Chan, had been appointed to the then bankrupt utility. Of the water that it piped from its reservoirs, 72% disappeared without ever being paid for. Chan decided to chase down errant customers, among them all of Cambodia’s government agencies and the Army. When asked to pay up, the officer in charge pulled out a gun. Chan retreated but went back the next day with a handful of journalists in tow. The general once again pulled out his gun. Chan cut off the water supply. The next day the Army paid its dues, and all the other agencies followed. Today the utility is flush with cash, and there is clean drinking water–the kind that can be had straight from the tap–available through the city, around the clock.
(...more)Unchopping a Tree, part of Maya Lin’s last memorial entitled What is Missing?, debuted at COP15…
YouTube | What’s Missing Foundation
Maya Lin explains her last memorial, “What is Missing?”
YouTube | San Francisco Arts Commission
The Union of BC Indian Chiefs and Ecotrust Canada are happy to announce the publication of Living Proof: The Essential Data-Collection Guide for Indigenous Use-and-Occupancy Map Surveys, the much-anticipated follow-up to the popular Chief Kerry’s Moose: A Guidebook to Land Use and Occupancy Mapping, Research Design published in 2000
(...more)Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher speaks to Lumumba Diaping, the [G77] group’s main negotiator, about his expectations from the negotiations.
(...more)To many the Pacific is known as “The Liquid Continent!â€
Most of the Pacific island states are Small Island Developing States (SIDS) characterized by their smallness, narrow coral- and reef-islands which have very low average elevation above mean sea level. Most of our island countries are especially vulnerable because of their geological formation, and the destructive forces of human induced climate change are already causing havoc in our lives and lands.
The Pacific Indigenous Peoples have considered the developmental impact of not only climate change, but also the flawed solutions being employed to address it.
(...more)Climate-change activists at Copenhagen will argue that, far from solving the climate crisis, carbon-trading represents the unprecedented privatization of the atmosphere, and that offsets and sinks threaten to become a resource grab of colossal proportions. Not only will these ‘market-based solutions’ fail to solve the climate crisis, but the failure will dramatically deepen poverty and inequality, because the poorest and most vulnerable people are the primary victims of climate change—as well as the primary guinea pigs for these emissions-trading schemes.
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