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This working group is focused on discussions about global security.

The mission of this working group is to focus on discussions about global security.

Members

JAB455s jbk1712 Kathy Gilbeaux mdmcdonald Tjivekumba Kandjii

Email address for group

security-global@m.resiliencesystem.org

World's Displaced Hits Record High of 60 Million, Half of Them Children - UN

reuters.com - by Joseph D'Urso - June 18, 2015

Almost 60 million people worldwide were forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution at the end of last year, the highest ever recorded number, the U.N. refugee agency said on Thursday, warning that the situation could deteriorate further. . .

. . . "I believe things will get worse before they eventually start to get better," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said at a news conference in Istanbul.

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Obama uses war on Ebola to illustrate fight against non-conventional threats

WASHINGTON POST by Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson                             Feb. 13, 2015

WASHINGTON --If there is to be war, the fight against Ebola is President Obama’s type of war. The enemy fires no bullets and carries no bombs; it doesn’t use social media to recruit fighters and rally supporters. And the fighting can best be done by intelligent professionals who don’t try to kill people, but to save them.

On Wednesday, Obama celebrated the progress against the deadly virus since the administration launched a military and civilian effort in September. While the president emphasized it was too soon to declare “mission accomplished” — as President George W. Bush did about Iraq in 2003 — Obama said “we’re shifting our focus from fighting the epidemic to now extinguishing it.”

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Street Protests Loom as Shortages, Inflation and Oil Slump Hit Venezuela

       

Students block a street as they clash with national guards during a protest against the government in San Cristóbal on Wednesday. Photograph: Reuters

As President Nicolás Maduro tours the world in search of financing, the most conciliatory opposition leader says the time has come to mobilise on the streets

theguardian.com - by Sibylla Brodzinski - January 16, 2015

Even Venezuela’s most conciliatory opposition leader has had enough.

Amid sky-high inflation, an absent president, snaking queues outside supermarkets, and plummeting oil prices, Henrique Capriles said this week that the time was ripe to try to force a change.

“We are in a state of emergency,” he said on Monday. “This is the time to mobilise in the streets.”

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An American’s View from a Foxhole in Sudan

      

highcountryhealth.com - by C. Louis “pj” Perrinjaquet, MD - June 12, 2014

As may become clear if you continue reading… I’m a doctor not a writer.  But, just as I was compelled to volunteer the past 6 weeks in the Nuba Mts. of Sudan, I am compelled to write and tell the story of what is happening there. 

Since May 2011 when the government on Sudan in Khartoum launched a campaign “to exterminate the Nuba people like bugs”, the civilian population has been subjected to daily aerial bombardment and has been denied access to humanitarian aid.  Unable to plant crops people are starving to death or surviving on bugs and grass, risking death to venture outside their caves in search of food and water.

The one hospital in the entire Nuba Mts, Mother of Mercy in Gidel, staffed by one fulltime physician, Dr. Tom Catena,  have been spared bombardment… until last month.

The following is taken directly from my journal written when the events were fresh.

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Video - Sudan Targets Only Hospital in Nuba Mountains

nubareports.org - May 5, 2014

On May 1, 2014 the Sudanese Air Force dropped five bombs on the Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel - the only hospital in the war-torn Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan State. This is the first time the hospital has been targeted. Doctors and patients alike fear follow-up attacks as a government offensive to the north bears down on the region.

http://nubareports.org/sudan-targets-only-hospital-in-nuba-mountains/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Ly9iW1-t4

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Mob attacks Ebola treatment centre in Guinea, suspected cases reach Mali

BAMAKO/CONAKRY, April 4 (Reuters) - An angry crowd attacked an Ebola treatment centre in Guinea on Friday, accusing its staff of bringing the deadly disease to the town, Medecins Sans Frontieres said, as Mali identified its first suspected cases.

More than 90 people have already died in Guinea and Liberia in what medical charity MSF, or Doctors without Borders, has warned could turn into an unprecedented epidemic...

Please click HERE for more of this article

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Turkey Shoots Down Syrian Plane It Says Violated Air Space

Turkey shoots down Syrian plane

reuters.com - by Daren Butler - March 23, 2014

(Reuters) - Turkish armed forces shot down a Syrian plane on Sunday that Ankara said had crossed into its air space in an area where Syrian rebels have been battling President Bashar al-Assad's forces for control of a border crossing.

"A Syrian plane violated our airspace," Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told an election rally in northwest Turkey. "Our F-16s took off and hit this plane.

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Ecological Footprint of Consumption Compared to Biocapacity

This map compares each country's total consumption Footprint with the biocapacity available within its own borders.

Many countries rely, in net terms, on the biocapacity of other nations to meet domestic demands for goods and services. For example: Japan imports Ecuadorian wood to make paper; Europe imports meat fed on Brazilian soy; the United States imports Peruvian cotton; and China obtains lumber from Tanzania.

  • World Total Biocapacity: 1.78 gha per capita
  • World Ecological Footprint of Consumption: 2.7 gha per capita (i.e. we are using more resources than the Earth can provide.)

Currently less than 20 percent of the world's population living in countries that can keep up with their own demands.

What is a global hectare (gha)?

A global hectare is a common unit that encompasses the average productivity of all the biologically productive land and sea area in the world in a given year. Biologically productive areas include cropland, forest and fishing grounds, and do not include deserts, glaciers and the open ocean.

Data source: Global Footprint Network's 2010 Edition.

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Nasa-Funded Study: Industrial Civilisation Headed for Irreversible Collapse?

      

This Nasa Earth Observatory image shows a storm system circling around an area of extreme low pressure in 2010, which many scientists attribute to climate change. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system

(SEE LINKS TO SUPPORTING DOCUMENTATION BELOW)

theguardian.com - by Nafeez Ahmed - March 14, 2014

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

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Global Riot Epidemic Due to Demise of Cheap Fossil Fuels

      

A protester in Ukraine swings a metal chain during clashes - a taste of things to come? Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters

submitted by Mikayla McDonald

From South America to South Asia, a new age of unrest is in full swing as industrial civilisation transitions to post-carbon reality

theguardian.com - by Nafeez Ahmed - February 28, 2014

If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming. The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession. . .

. . . The recent cases illustrate not just an explicit link between civil unrest and an increasingly volatile global food system, but also the root of this problem in the increasing unsustainability of our chronic civilisational addiction to fossil fuels. . .

. . . Of course, the elephant in the room is climate change.

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