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 

Begining of the works for the installation fo a APR1400 nuclear reactor near Busan Republic of Korea. It's the same kind of non tested device that Malaysian government plans to buy, according to Korean activists (Photo: KEPCO)

The government of Malaysia continues studying the introduction of nuclear energy, in spite of the warnings launched by 14 national civil society groups and others from Korea, Australia and specially Japan after the Fukushima tragedy. An alliance formed by groups of nearby countries, along with three based in Malaysia --the Third World Network and the Consumers Association of Penang (member of Social Watch) and the national chapter of Friends of the Earth International--, called on the Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s government to stop its nuclear power development plan.