News

Postal strike in Vancouver.
(Photo: Guilhem Vellut/Flickr/CC)

Federal cutbacks announced in the 2010 and 2011 budgets will result in more than 60,000 job losses, says a study released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA, one of the focal points of Social Watch in that country). Any additional cuts in the upcoming federal budget would result in even more job losses.

CAP president S.M. Mohamed Idris
showing a huge gourd.
(Source: New Strait Times)

Do you want to know the secret of growing big and healthy vegetables without a drop of chemical fertiliser? The Consumers Association of Penang's (CAP, one of the focal points of Social Watch in Malaysia) teaches you how to do it at its organic garden on Jalan Mesjid Negeri.

Using its own vermicompost and fertilisers, CAP has produced bottle gourds weighing 4kg and measuring 46cm within 40 days. "Panchakavya organic growth promoters and earthworm fertilisers were used to grow these bottle gourds," said CAP education officer N.V. Subbarow.

Project Rakeeb's symbol.

The third round of the elections in Egypt was a meaningful democratic exercise, with relatively few reports of violence or intimidation. The main irregularities were the widespread active political campaigning in and around polling centers, which resulted in sporadic violence, and the denial of access to observers, according to Project Rakeeb, a watchdog program run by two civil society organizations.

Women working in a rice field in
Palung. (UN Photo/John Isaac)

Gender equity is a key element of any genuine program towards sustainable development. Analysis included on the Social Watch Report 2012 and the national contributions to the study prove, once again, the stagnation of the fight against these disparities, with disastrous consequences on the struggles against poverty, climate change and food security.

Social Watch Report 2012, which includes citizen contributions from 66 countries and several exhaustive global analysis, will be launched in Porto Alegre, Brasil, on 26 January.

Jordanian authorities are planning to abolish the regulation that prevents married women from getting their passports without their husband’s endorsement, a move welcomed by Jordanian Women’s Union (JWU), national focal point of Social Watch.

Civil Status and Passports Department (CSPD) director general Marwan Qteishat said the department is reviewing the 1969 Passport Law, which stipulates that a husband’s consent is needed in order for his wife to obtain a Jordanian passport, reported The Jordan Times.

Mirjan van Reisen

Despite great attention paid to the Arab Spring, a ghastly silence prevails about the largest African ‘open air prison’: Eritrea is so isolated from the outside world that many inhabitants haven’t even heard about the revolutions in Libya or the uprising in Syria, wrote Mirjam van Reisen, founding director of the Europe External Policy Advisors (EEPA), a member organization of Social Watch network and based in Brussels.

Photo: Anjo de Batalha/
Creative Commons

Genetically modified mosquitoes created by British company Oxitec are in fact not “sterile”, far from what their manufacturer said: their offspring have a 15 percent survival rate in the presence of the common antibiotic tetracycline, according to a confidential document obtained by three civil society groups, Third World Network, Friends of the Earth US and GeneWatch UK.

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture, called on Bahraini authorities to guarantee the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and the safety of demonstrators, including that of human rights defenders, following the repression by security forces yesterday of a peaceful demonstration to call for the release of political prisoners.

The CCPA's website shows by the cent
the income of the CEO Elite 100 and the
average workers' earning since January 1st.

On January 3rd at 12.00 o’clock, each one of the “CEO Elite 100” —the best paid executives of companies listed in the Toronto Stock Exchange— had already got 44,366 dollars, the amount that an average Canadian wage earner would obtain after working full-time the entire year, revealed the CCPA, one of the members of Social Watch in that country. To make the inequity even worst, only one woman is member of this privileged club 

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