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Die entscheidenden dänischen Tarifverhandlungen, die den Rahmen für Löhne und Arbeitsbedingungen festlegen, haben begonnen. Im Fokus stehen Forderungen nach höheren Löhnen sowie die Sorge vor wirtschaftlichen Unsicherheiten, die etwa 16 Prozent der Bevölkerung betreffen.

Mindössze öt évvel a koronavírus és a Covid-19 vuhani felbukkanása után ismét túlzsúfolt kórházakról és közegészségügyi veszélyről szóló híradások érkeznek Kínából. Az idei télen a humán metapneumovírus okoz erős járványt az ázsiai országban – írta a Házipatika portál az Independent közlése alapján.

Zum ersten Mal seit zwei Jahrzehnten hat Tschechien das NATO-Mindestziel von zwei Prozent des Bruttoinlandsprodukts (BIP) für Verteidigungsausgaben erfüllt. Dies teilte das tschechische Verteidigungsministerium mit.

Auseinandersetzungen über die sechsmonatige EU-Ratspräsidentschaft Polens gehen weiter. Die Oppositionspartei PiS (EKR) kritisiert die Entscheidung der Regierung, das informelle Gipfeltreffen der EU-Staats- und Regierungschefs in Brüssel statt in Warschau abzuhalten.

„Wen rufe ich an, wenn ich mit Europa sprechen möchte?“, soll der verstorbene amerikanische Stratege Henry Kissinger einmal gescherzt haben. Obwohl Kissinger dies wahrscheinlich nie gesagt hat, wurde das Zitat sinnbildlich für Europas Platz in der Welt.

On le surnommait le « Rocard grec ». Premier ministre socialiste de 1996 à 2004, Kóstas Simítis a permis à la Grèce de rejoindre la zone euro et de moderniser le pays. Il est mort le 4 janvier. Quatre jours de deuil national ont été décrétés.

- Le fil de l'Info / Une - Diaporama, Grèce, Courrier des Balkans, Politique, Personnalités

Displaced Palestinians walk through the Nour Shams camp in the West Bank. Credit: UNRWA/Mohammed Alsharif

By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 7 2025 (IPS)

When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.

Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions have collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.

While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”

The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.

For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”

Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed.

“The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”

After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, and how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”

Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”

The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.

For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television.

“There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”

The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.

While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”

Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise.

Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.

The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric — unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.

Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.

When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A Szlovák Hidrometeorológiai Intézet (SHMÚ) elsőfokú meteorológiai figyelmeztetést adott ki kedden (1. 7.) 10:00 óráig számos nyugati, közép-szlovákiai és keleti járásra (délen Nagykürtöstől a Kassa-vidéki járásig) a jegesedés előfordulásának a veszélye miatt. A Tátra hegyvidékein a szélviharok miatt lesz érvényben 10:00 óráig másodfokú riasztás (90-105 km/ó-s szél, 135-160 km/ó-s széllökések), majd elsőfokúra mérsékelik a figyelmeztetést (70-85 km/ó-s szél, 110-135 km/ó-s széllökések). Néhány északi járásban elsőfokú figyelmeztetés lesz érvényben délelőtt 9:00 óráig az erős szél miatt (45 km/ó-s szél, 65-70 km/ó-s széllökések).

Les négociations cruciales sur le travail au Danemark ont officiellement débuté lundi 6 janvier, et devraient impacter 16 % de la population, dans un contexte de demandes d’augmentation des salaires et d’incertitudes économiques.

Les partis d’opposition italiens ont contesté le prétendu contrat de sécurité de 1,5 milliard d’euros conclu par la Première ministre Giorgia Meloni avec l’entreprise d’Elon Musk SpaceX, exigeant des éclaircissements au parlement.

The face of Bangladesh’s founding father, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, will soon be erased from the country’s currency. Credit: Kumkum Chadha/IPS

By Kumkum Chadha
DELHI, Jan 7 2025 (IPS)

History seems to be chasing Bangladesh even while the interim government is grappling with real issues of administering a country thrown into chaos.

In July last year, this south Asian country faced an upheaval when a students’ movement drove out Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from office.

Protestors took to the streets over a quota system for government jobs. Their angst—disproportionate benefits to descendants of freedom fighters.

Once political parties and fundamentalists jumped in, the focus shifted, with protestors demanding Hasina’s resignation.

Hasina was forced to leave the country she had ruled for 15 years. She landed in India for what was then flagged as a temporary refuge: “For the moment only,” as India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar had then told the Indian Parliament.

Back home in Bangladesh, an interim government headed by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge of governing a country clearly at a crossroads—in other words, a toss-up between Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s legacy or charting a new course without the baggage of history.

It is against this backdrop that one must examine the new narrative of the interim government to reprint Bangladesh’s currency notes.

Initiated by the Central Bank of Bangladesh, the new notes will no longer carry the customary picture of Bangabandhu as Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as the former leader who led the country to independence is known. In common parlance, Bangabandhu means Friend of Bangla people.

“Phasing out” is how officials from Bangladesh Bank explained the move, while 70-year-old Alamgir, a witness to the War of Liberation, called it “an altered history,” in other words, pressing a delete button on Bangabandhu’s legacy.

To say that the sins of a daughter have adversely impacted her father’s legacy may be a bit of a stretch because even on his own, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a controversial figure.

A folk hero turned dictator, he failed to address the real issues of Bangladesh. Instead, he became authoritarian and suspended rights. As Prime Minister, his daughter Hasina followed in her father’s footsteps.

Hence the anger of the people that spilled to the streets last year took a toll both on Sheikh Hasina and the legacy.

For starters, the current generation, many in the forefront of the students’ protest in Bangladesh, resent the undue space accorded to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman through the years, particularly when Hasina ruled. Not only do they want to erase his imprint, but they also intend to rewrite and, if possible, clean up the bloody chapters of history.

In this context, is the currency note redesign the first substantive step taken by the interim government headed by Yunus?

Fazal Kamal, former editor of The Independent and Bangladesh Times, does not think so.
“It is not the government that has taken the initiative. It is an intense reaction from among the people of Bangladesh to Hasina’s insistence on ensuring Mujib’s seal on everything. It is this overkill that Bangladeshis want to end. The interim government is only going along,” he told IPS.

Given the hullabaloo, it must be pointed out that this is not the first time that Mujibur Rahman’s mugshot, if one may be allowed to use the term, has been taken off currency notes.

In 1976, a year after Bangabandhu and some of his family members were assassinated, the series of notes that were introduced did not have his image. It was only in 1998 that he made a comeback on the taka and has remained since. A taka is a basic monetary unit in Bangladesh.

Therefore, when Farid Hossain, who has served as Minister at the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi, calls the currency issue “much ado about nothing,” he is not off the mark.

“On ground, people want governance—they want law and order and currency, which can buy more rather than which image it carries,” Hossain said, adding that the move is indicative of the interim government “giving in to pressure” from the radicals.

To many, Hasina’s ouster is nothing short of a “second independence.” Yet there is a large segment that is against what Hossain has termed “wholesale erosion” of history and legacy: “Today Bangladesh faces an ideological divide and the narrative that was buried years ago seems to have resurfaced.”

In other words, today’s generation in Bangladesh wants to resurrect the real face of Mujibur Rahman and strip him of the legacy draped in grandeur. And in this, the interim government has been an active player.

“The intention of the interim administration is to take the country away from its historical legacy. The current regime has pandered to its unruly student followers who have been crushing every symbol of history,” says political analyst Syed Badrul Ahsan.

As for succumbing to pressure, the interim government is in the eye of a storm on another issue—the tricky and sensitive issue of Hasina’s extradition.

Bangladesh has sent a note verbale to the Indian government saying that it wants Hasina back for a judicial process. A note verbale is a diplomatic communication from one government to another.

There has been a persistent demand, as Kamal points out, for leaders of the previous regime to be brought back and tried. Call it vendetta politics if you will but the popular sentiment seems to be that Hasina should be sent to the gallows.

Though India and Bangladesh have an extradition treaty in place, it exempts political vendetta.

Article 6 of the treaty states that extradition may be denied if the alleged offence is of a political nature. That Hasina is being tried for her political offences is a given: “A note verbale is not enough. The interim government does not have a mandate. It is there to administer and steer reforms and not indulge in politicking. But it seems to be taking up the side issue of radicals and seems to be giving in,” Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, former Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh, told IPS.

Dismissing the extradition request as “mere rhetoric resulting from domestic pulls and pressures,” the former ambassador says India is unlikely to accommodate its neighbor on this issue.

He also did not rule out Yunus using this as a “pressure tactic” to tell India to restrain Sheikh Hasina from making political statements from Indian soil.

For record, in a virtual address last month, Hasina stated that Yunus was running a “fascist regime” that encouraged terrorists and fundamentalists. Interestingly, the extradition request had followed soon after.

Both issues seem to be hanging in the air—the new currency notes are yet to be printed and on Hasina’s extradition, the Indian government is silent.

As for Mujib’s legacy, his statue can be vandalized, his images defaced and his daughter’s sins denigrate his legacy, but Bangabandhu’s footprint from history, however controversial, cannot be erased.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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• India Bangladesh Relations on the Edge?
• Bangladesh’s Chief Advisor Addresses UNGA Calling for International Cooperation, Freedom and Rights
• Rizwana Hasan Vows to Ensure Justice for Those Killed During Bangladesh’s Quota Reform Movement

Les accusations de corruption pleuvent sur lui. Alors que les citoyens manifestent pour réclamer sa démission, le maire de Tirana, Erion Veliaj, est sous enquête de la SPAK. Lâché par le Parti socialiste, cet ancien protégé du Premier ministre Edi Rama pourra-t-il échapper à la case prison ?

- Articles / Une - Diaporama - En premier, Une - Diaporama, Courrier des Balkans, PS Albanie, Albanie, Défense, police et justice, Politique

Les accusations de corruption pleuvent sur lui. Alors que les citoyens manifestent pour réclamer sa démission, le maire de Tirana, Erion Veliaj, est sous enquête de la SPAK. Lâché par le Parti socialiste, cet ancien protégé du Premier ministre Edi Rama pourra-t-il échapper à la case prison ?

- Articles / Une - Diaporama - En premier, Une - Diaporama, Courrier des Balkans, PS Albanie, Albanie, Défense, police et justice, Politique

Oubliez l’Europe. Si Henry Kissinger était encore en vie, il se demanderait qui appeler pour joindre l’Allemagne, la Belgique ou même la Bulgarie.

Am Montagabend (6. Januar) wurde ein geplantes Treffen zwischen Bratislava und Kyjiw in Brüssel zur Entspannung der Spannungen im Gasstreit abgesagt. Zuvor hatte die ukrainische Delegation mitgeteilt, dass sie nicht teilnehmen könne, wie Euractiv erfahren hat.

In Venezuela wurden über 120 Ausländer wegen Terrorverdachts nach der Präsidentenwahl verhaftet. Darunter sollen sich auch Schweizer befinden. Die Festgenommenen sollen an «destabilisierenden Aktionen» beteiligt gewesen sein.

A Finsider szerint kibertámadás érte a földhivatal informatikai rendszerét. A portál azt írta: figyelmeztették az alkalmazottakat, hogy ne kapcsolják be a számítógépeiket. A belügyi tárca hétfőn (1. 6.) annyit közölt, hogy a járási hivatalok kataszteri osztályai kedden nem lesznek nyitva – adta hírül a DenníkN.

Das geplante Live-Interview zwischen AfD-Chefin Alice Weidel und Elon Musk auf X verstößt nicht gegen EU-Vorschriften zur Moderation von Inhalten. Dennoch könnte es die laufende Untersuchung gegen Musks Plattform erheblich beeinflussen, so die EU-Kommission.

In today’s edition of the Capitals, find out more about the Spanish government being divided over the idea of a shorter working week, President Rumen Radev slamming Borissov for prolonging the political crisis, and so much more. 

The post Bickering over EU presidency levels up in Poland appeared first on Euractiv.

Zuletzt mussten die New Jersey Devils viermal in Folge als Verlierer vom Eis. Nun kehren sie auf die Erfolgsstrasse zurück. Auch dank einem starken Spiel ihres Torhüters Jacob Markström.