May 30, 2024

DWF NEWS List of Articles for 5/30/24 

International Poll: Public Supports a World Parliament & World Law

Andreas Bummel

Gaza & Ukraine Wars Causing Massive Pollution, Environmental Damage

Richard Marcantonio & Josefina Echavarria Alvarez

AP & WSJ headline cover-up: War crime becomes 'tragic mistake'

Israel's Tents Massacre in Rafah Is a Heinous War Crime

Seraj Assi

Discover the truth about Israel-linked billionaires today

Follow the Money: How Israel-Linked Billionaires Silenced US Campus Protests

Alan Macleod    Mint Press

US Foreign Policy "Wars Forever"

US Endgame in Ukraine -- War Without End, Amen

Patrick Lawrence

UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF UNITY IN DIVERSITY

(English translation from Spanish)

Leopoldo A. Cook A.

International Poll: Public Supports a World Parliament & World Law

Andreas Bummel

EXCERPTS

An international survey carried out by the market research firm YouGov on behalf of the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation in 2023 indicates that a majority of the public in 13 of 15 countries covered by the study approves of the creation of a world parliament. ...

The survey question further elaborated that:

...the Parliament would meet to handle global issues like global peace, climate change, and emergency situations like pandemics. The Parliament would be part of a global legislative system that under certain circumstances would pass legally binding laws to govern the world as a whole. Would you support or oppose the founding of a World Parliament?

... The most support was recorded in Kenya, where an overwhelming majority (81%) approved of a world parliament, with 52% strongly approving and 29% somewhat approving of a global parliament. ...

Next on the list, are India (78% in favor and 10% opposed), South Africa (73% and 21%), Tunisia (71% and 13%), Indonesia (68% and 13%), South Korea (65% and 18%), Japan (63% and 13%), Turkey (59% and 17%), Argentina (58% and 20%), Germany (56% and 26%), France (53% and 27%), Brazil (50% and 24%) and Poland (49% and 25%). At the bottom of the 15 country poll are the United Kingdom (41% and 37%) and the United States (38% and 42%), which were also the only cases where more respondents “strongly disapproved” than “strongly approved” the notion.

A previous extensive study on sentiments on global democracy, by Farsan Ghassim, a fellow at Oxford University, found majority support in the United Kingdom and the United States. The recent YouGov survey, as well as an earlier study conducted in 2020 by the Global Challenges Foundation, show consistently broad public support for binding global decision-making over voluntary international agreements only.

According to a UN General Assembly resolution adopted on Sept. 1 2023, the UN Summit of the Future will approve of an “outcome document” that includes a chapter on “transforming global governance”. READ MORE

Gaza & Ukraine Wars Causing Massive Pollution, Environmental Damage

Richard Marcantonio & Josefina Echavarria Alvarez

EXCERPTS

(THE CONVERSATION, 05/27/2024) – As wars grind on in Ukraine and Gaza, another location ravaged by conflict is taking steps to implement a historic peace agreement. From the mid-1960s through 2016, Colombia was torn by conflict between the government, leftist guerrilla movements and right-wing paramilitary groups. Now the government and rebels are working to carry out a sweeping accord that addresses many critical sectors, including environmental damages and restoration.

University of Notre Dame researchers Richard Marcantonio and Josefina Echavarria Alvarez study peace and conflict issues, including their effects on the environment. They currently are advising negotiations between the Colombian government and several rebel factions over wartime damage to soil, water and other natural resources. They explain that while Colombia’s transition from war to peace has been difficult, the accord offers a model for addressing the ravages of war in places such as Gaza and Ukraine.

Integrating the environment into peace accords isn’t easy. Resources such as energy, clean soil and water are vital for life, which is precisely why military forces may seek to control or destroy them. This is happening in both Ukraine and Gaza.

Peace negotiators tend to focus on social, political and economic issues, rather than environmental reparations. But leaving environmental damage unresolved until after a peace accord is signed keeps people who have been displaced and marginalized by conflict in precarious positions.  READ MORE

Headline cover-up by AP & WSJ: War crime only a 'tragic mistake'

Israel's Tents Massacre in Rafah Is a Heinous War Crime

By Seraj Assi

EXCERPTS

Last night (5/27/24) Israeli forces pounded a tent camp housing displaced people in a designated safe zone in north Rafah, killing at least 45 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and injuring hundreds others.

It was one of the most heinous assaults on Palestinian civilians in recent memory. Media reports show that Israel blitzed the tent camp with seven massive U.S. bombs, weighting 2,000 pounds each. According to eyewitnesses, the intensive bombing, which targeted Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan area, was a deliberate attack on Palestinian refugees sheltering in tents. The bombarded refugee tents, marked as Block 2371, had been designated by Israel as a “safe area” for civilians.

Widely circulated footage shows a night of unspeakable horror: bodies burned to ashes, charred and blackened beyond recognition; beheaded children, decapitated and ripped apart by U.S. bombs; parents clutching their dead and burned children, screaming in horror; rescuers pulling people’s charred remains from the burning tents; wounded victims transformed to the hospital with horrific and gruesome injuries.  

READ MORE 

Discover the truth about Israel-linked billionaires today

Follow the Money: How Israel-Linked Billionaires Silenced US Campus Protests

Alan Macleod    Mint Press

EXCERPTS

America’s universities are on fire. A protest movement against the violence in Gaza and U.S. colleges’ complicity in them has swept the nation, with encampments on college campuses in 45 of America’s 50 states. The crackdown has been swift; thousands of students have been arrested, charged, fined, lost their degrees, or even deported. ...

Why have overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against a foreign power’s actions been met with such a heavy-handed response? A MintPress News investigation finds that those same elite institutions have deep financial and ideological ties to the state of Israel, are funded by pro-Israel billionaires who have demanded they take action to crush the student movement, ...

The movement began on April 17 at Columbia University, where a modest Gaza solidarity encampment was established. Protesters .. were shocked as university president Minouche Shafik immediately called in the NYPD – the first time the university had allowed police to suppress dissent on campus since the famous 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

.. Billionaire businessman and sports executive Robert Kraft ... publicly announced he was cutting the university off from his lavish funding over its failure to suppress the protests effectively enough. ...

... Another billionaire benefactor pulling his Columbia funding is Leon Cooperman. The hedge fund manager suspended his donations in October, citing student support for Palestine. “These kids are fucking crazy. They don’t understand what they’re doing or what they’re talking about,” he fumed, adding that they “have to be controlled.”

...hostility is no doubt in part due to the university’s big-money donors pulling out en masse since October 7. Chief among these is Israeli shipping magnate Idan Ofer, ... Ofer is a crucial player in Israeli intelligence. As a previous MintPress News investigation revealed, his family’s Zodiac Maritime cargo ships have regularly been used to secretly ferry Israeli commandos around the Middle East for assassination operations. ...

Another billionaire apparently “stunned and sickened” by Harvard’s pro-Hamas positions is former Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner. Apart from Wexner’s exceptionally close and well-publicized connections to child sex traffickers and Israeli intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein, Wexner is a major donor to Israeli causes. ...

Nowhere, however, has the elite backlash to student protests been as bitter as at the University of Pennsylvania. Leading the charge to suppress pro-Palestine sentiment on campus there has been Marc Rowan. The billionaire investor demanded that his side must “exact a price” on students ... “These kids who are marching, they don’t think about it because there’s been no price to pay,” he explained, suggesting that they should never be allowed to work again: ...

Rowan strongly opposed UPenn’s hosting of a Palestinian literature festival in 2023, demanding that college president Liz Magill and UPenn board chair Scott Bok be fired. After October 7, Rowan and his allies succeeded in forcing both from their jobs.  READ MORE

US Foreign Policy: "Wars Forever"

US Endgame in Ukraine -- War Without End, Amen

Patrick Lawrence

What happens when a powerful nation cannot afford to lose a war it has already lost?

EXCERPTS

Let us pause for a sec to bring to mind all those who have died in the war that erupted in Ukraine a year and a few months after Joe Biden refused, even mocked, Vladimir Putin’s honorable diplomatic demarche. All the maimed and displaced, all the towns and cities destroyed, all the farmland turned into moonscape.

And the all-but-complete peace accord, negotiated in Istanbul a few weeks into the war that the U.S. and Britain rushed to scuttle. And of course all the billions of dollars, somewhere north of $100 billion now, not spent on improving Americans’ lives but spent instead on arming a regime in Kiev that steals aid extravagantly while fielding an army with professed neo–Nazis.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s dapper spokesman, told Faulconbridge and Osborn the other day that Russia didn’t want “an eternal war,” a forever war in the American idiom. This is a good thing not to want.

Neither Biden nor Zelensky, on the other hand, wants this war to end: They cannot afford it for a variety of reasons. This is the reality. They are the main impediment to peace. They have painted the conflict as some kind of cosmic confrontation between good and evil, and in so doing they have also painted themselves into a corner.      READ MORE 

UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF UNITY IN DIVERSITY

(English translation from Spanish)

Leopoldo A. Cook A.  

Here I propose some ideas that I believe are shared by most organizations that advocate for world peace, environmental sustainability, equity and justice.

Many of the differences in visions that our organizations may have among themselves correspond more to the cyclical, momentary, moment in which the proposal is located, than to substantive differences.

Unity in Diversity is necessary.

There are many organizations with visions of a democratic world. In addition to the proponents of the Constitution for the Federation of the Earth-- also known as the Earth Constitution (EC), there are many other organizations, such as the First Universal Constitution (PCU), the Humanists, the World Democratic Federalists, the Pentagon of the Peace, the Greens, Ananda Marga / PROUT, the Venus Project, many Buddhists, the Good Living Movement, the Bahai, the Community of World Citizens, the World Citizens Assembly, the World Social Forum, the People's Organization of the Earth, and so many others, that we have a lot in common regarding the global vision.

The Constitution for the Federation of the Earth (EC) offers concrete infrastructure support. Many movements, such as the Humanist Movement, Bahai, PROUT, offer the “soul” of the new civilization.

Others offer some social aspects, such as the vision of the Venus Project, and the Self-Sufficient Economic Units of PROUT, which complement the Electoral Districts economically and socially.

We believe that progress can be made in three major phases:

1.     Empowerment of favorable conditions that favor a vision of humanity as a single global society. Personal growth. Need for peace, for a sustainable economy with equity. Creation of rapprochement mechanisms between the many organizations that agree on some of these aspects. We are currently advancing in this phase.

2.     Federated Democratic World Government, through the ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of the Earth (EC), moving to the First Operational Stage: Promote regional mechanisms of rapprochement, multipolarity, redefinition of the concept of national “sovereignty”, disarmament, successive integrations regional, reaching a Democratic Federated World Government. It is the Universal Free Planetary Republic that proposes the World Constitution for the Federation of the Earth (EC).   

3.     Long-Term Planetary Vision. As a planned evolution from the previous phase, until reaching a kind of equal, collaborative and supportive multi-ethnic world federation. Unity in Diversity. It is the Universal Human Nation of the Humanist Movement. It is the long-term vision of most movements.

The conditions are in place to accelerate phase 2, with the World Constitution for the Federation of the Earth (EC) as the first fundamental step towards civilizational change. It is not enough to have a long-term vision, it is necessary to give it a concrete face in the short and medium term.

 Leopoldo A. Cook A.

+58424-273.8997

Vice Presidente América Latina y el Caribe

Constitución Mundial