Social Watch news

Sources
Report by Rana Husseini for The Jordan Times 2011
Report on Shorfa.com

"We are very optimistic,” Amneh Zu’bi, president of the Jordanian Women's Union (national focal point of Social Watch), about the recommendations launched by the National Dialogue Committee (NDC) created by the government to reinvigorate the political life in the country. Among those suggestions, the NDC proposed an increase in female representation in Parliament and political parties.

Source  Agenda Global

The detection of a lethal new strain of E. coli clearly reveals that society has become increasingly vulnerable to bacteria and viruses that are resistant to antibiotics. Therefore, in efforts to curb the epidemic, policymakers and the WHO should step in to deal with it. Martin Khor analyzes this issue in his last column.

(Photo: Free Gaza Movement.)

Sources
International Solidarity Movement
PNGO: http://bit.ly/muPYVc and http://bit.ly/jntOK6

Convened by the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO, focal point of Social Watch), hundreds of people gathered in Mina, the port of Gaza City, to honour the nine Turkish activists killed by Israeli forces that attacked the Freedom Flotilla on 31 May 2010. At the same time, the organisation made its complaints to the authorities in Ramallah about the new legal restrictions to its activities imposed by the government of President Mahmoud Abbas.

WfC empowering their fellow
countrywomen. (Photo: WfC)

Sources
Women for Change
Women in Touch newsletter
IPS report

Women for Change (WfC, focal point of Social Watch in Zambia) has been working for months to increase the participation of citizens, women and men, in the campaign towards the general elections to be held next September.

Protest in Athens, May 25 (Photo:
Christina Kekka/Creative Commons)

Sources
KOPIN

KOPIN newsletter
Hellenic Platform for Development

The Hellenic Platform for Development has lost half of the dozen non governmental organisations that used to integrate it. Many of them had to shut down due to the lack of finance to maintain their staff and to continue their operations, warned KOPIN, national focal point of Social Watch in Malta, which expressed its solidarity with that network.

(Photo: Associated Press)

Sources: IPS, Al Jazzeera, Los Angeles Times

Thousands poured into the streets of Rabat, the capital of Morocco, on Sunday Jun. 5 and also in Casablanca to condemn the death of a protester and to demand the country-wide government crackdown on peaceful demonstrations reaches an end. The protesters are part the February 20 Movement, led largely by young people demanding pro-democracy reforms and an end to government corruption and repression – as well as an end to poverty and inequality.

Minister René Castro.
(Photo: Costa Rican
Government)

Source InDepth News Report 

South-South cooperation “is meaningful and effective in terms of regional integration and unity in global negotiations. In relation with civil societies, the conventional North-South split is fast becoming meaningless after the 'Arab Spring'," Social Watch co-ordinator Roberto Bissio pointed out at a high level conference in the European Parliament in Brussels.

Sources
Foco
ENCASUR

Thanks to the intervention of civil society, climate change has moved from being a technical and scientific problem to being a strongly political one that questions the world development model in a fragile planet, concluded activists at the event “Latin America: Advances, Regressions and Perspectives in the Struggle for Climate Justice” held on May 13, in Buenos Aires.

Sources NSI-INS
            Agenda

The North-South Institute (NSI, focal point of Social Watch in Canada), with support from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), has convened the 2011 NSI Forum, that will take place in Ottawa on Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st under the title “The Future of Multilateral Development Cooperation in a Changing Global Order”.

There is great uncertainty about the future of the world economy and developing countries should prepare now for the next crisis, according to prominent experts at a finance seminar in Geneva last week. When it happens, commodity prices are likely to collapse, and many poor countries may face new debt crises, warned former Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, Charles Soludo.

This is Martin Khor’s report about the seminar.

Bracing for an unknown future
By Martin Khor

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