Dear friends,

For once, this email isn’t asking you to do anything at all. It’s merely sharing the news–the amazing news–that arrived about 45 minutes ago at 350 headquarters.

Rajendra Pachauri is the U.N.’s top climate scientist. He leads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which every five years produces the authoritative assessment of climate science. Their last report, in 2007, helped set the target of 450 ppm (parts per million of CO2) that many environmental groups and national governments have adopted as their goal for Copenhagen.

As you all know, that number is out of date. When Jim Hansen and other scientists looked at phenomenon like the Arctic ice melt of the last two summers, they produced new data demonstrating that 350 is the bottom line for the planet.

But it’s been hard to get that news out to the powers that be.

So today it comes as enormous and welcome news that Dr. Pachauri, from his New Delhi office, said that 350 was the number.

“As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) I cannot take a position because we do not make recommendations,” said Rajendra Pachauri when asked if he supported calls to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 350 parts per million (ppm).

“But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal. What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target,” he told Agence France Presse in an interview.

It’s your work that has made this breakthrough possible. In fact, Pachauri specifically cited the last big piece of news for 350: the decision of 80+ small island nations and less developed countries to endorse the 350 target.

“I think this is a good development,” said Pachauri. “Now people — including some scientists — see the seriousness of the impacts of climate change, and the fact that things are going to get substantially worse than what we had anticipated.”

This news makes it much easier for all of us to push hard leading up to the International Day of Climate Action on the 24th of October (signup to start or attend an event at www.350.org) , and the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen this December.

It’s clear now that science is powerfully on the side of the 350 target. Now we need the political world to follow suit. You will make that happen in the next two months. Oct. 24 is officially 60 days away, and we’re building just the momentum we need to make it count.

Thanks for all you do,

Bill McKibben

P.S. Once you’ve spread this news around your networks (click here to share it on twitter or here to share it on facebook), please go celebrate. And speaking of celebrations, our friends at The Age of Stupid report that the Global Premier of their new epic climate change film takes place on September 21–you can find details on local screenings here: www.ageofstupid.net

For your information, the Karen Human Rights Group has interviews with several child soldiers who escaped during violence against the Karen people, and found safety with them. Here is a video with information about the experience of the Karen people inside Burma:

Burma Video

Canadian Friends of Burma, Ottawa, August 15, 2009

Next Tuesday’s deportation of a Burmese refugee and former child soldier Nay Myo Hein has been halted following the intervention of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan who have agreed to let the 25 year old Saskatoon resident stay in Canada on humanitarian grounds.

Minister Van Loan has issued a stay of deportation and Minister Kenney has granted Nay Myo Hein a temporary resident permit which crucially paves the way for Nay Myo Hein’s permanent residency in Canada. CFOB especially thanks Minister Kenney for his vital role in Nay Myo Hein’s case and consistent support for the democratization process in Burma.

CFOB Executive Director Tin Maung Htoo calls “this compassionate gesture from Canada is a major sigh of relief for our supporters of the Burmese democracy movement.”As someone who at the age of 13 escaped from forced service in the Burmese military and spent the next eight years in hiding Nay Myo Hein would have faced grave danger if forcibly returned to Burma, in particular because since coming to Canada two years ago he has participated in demonstrations against the Burmese military and become an active member of the exiled Burma democracy movement.

Canadian Friends of Burma, which independently verified Nay Myo Hein life story, is extremely pleased that Minister Kenney has granted Nay Myo Hein a temporary residency permit.

CFOB wishes to thank all the people who came forward to assist Nay Myo Hein, especially, the hard work of Nay Myo Hein’s Saskatoon lawyer Chris Veeman who worked tirelessly to help his client after being contacted on very short notice.

CFOB would like to give special thanks to the Saskatoon Burmese community and all those who sent letters and made phone calls in support of Nay Myo Hein.

For media contact, CFOB board member Kevin McLeod at 613-746-4963 and to contact CFOB Executive Director Tin Maung Htoo please call 613-297-6835

The Canadian Friends of Burma (CFOB) is federally incorporated, national non-governmental organization working for democracy and human rights in Burma since 1991. Contact: Suite 206, 145 Spruce St., Ottawa, K1R 6P1; Tel: 613.237.8056; Email: cfob@cfob.org; Web: www.cfob.org

On the other side is just the quiet kitchen. The horrible afront of a safe place to eat and act and live. The fierce treachery of inequality.

So what can our own government do to turn things around today? Over the next 100 months, they could launch a Green New Deal, taking inspiration from President Roosevelt’s famous 100-day programme implementing his New Deal in the face of the dust bowls and depression. Last week, a group of finance, energy and environmental specialists produced just such a plan.
Addressed at the triple crunch of the credit crisis, high oil prices and global warming, the plan is to rein in reckless financial institutions and use a range of fiscal tools, new measures and reforms to the tax system, such as a windfall tax on oil companies. The resources raised can then be invested in a massive environmental transformation programme that could insulate the economy from recession, create countless new jobs and allow Britain to play its part in meeting the climate challenge.

Goodbye new airport runways, goodbye new coal-fired power stations. Next, as a precursor to enabling and building more sustainable systems for transport, energy, food and overhauling the nation’s building stock, the government needs to brace itself to tackle the City. Currently, financial institutions are giving us the worst of all worlds. We have woken to find the foundations of our economy made up of unstable, exotic financial instruments. At the same time, and perversely, as awareness of climate change goes up, ever more money pours through the City into the oil companies. These companies list their fossil-fuel reserves as “proven” or “probable”. A new category of “unburnable” should be introduced, to fundamentally change the balance of power in the City. Instead of using vast sums of public money to bail out banks because they are considered “too big to fail”, they should be reduced in size until they are small enough to fail without hurting anyone. It is only a climate system capable of supporting human civilisation that is too big to fail.

Oil companies made profits when oil was $10 a barrel. With the price now wobbling around $130, there is a huge amount of unearned profit waiting for a windfall tax. Money raised – in this way and through other changes in taxation, new priorities for pension funds and innovatory types of bonds – would go towards a long-overdue massive decarbonisation of our energy system. Decentralisation, renewables, efficiency, conservation and demand management will all play a part.

Read the whole article here.
And if you’re American, I’d suggest supporting Obama – his plans match this urgency with rational tactics while John McCain would burn through the next 100 months making more coal mines, and cutting taxes for the big winners in this our race toward extiction.

Went to this great session at Ontario Library Ass’n conference about e-IFL FOSS. Thought you might be interested.

Here are my notes:

OK – what is eIFL-FOSS? Electronic Information for Libraries: Free and Open Source Software.

From their website: “eIFL-FOSS advocates free and open source software (FOSS) use in libraries in developing and transition countries.” Access in these countries is mainly via university and academic libraries, but there is some country-wide access in some places. “eIFL-FOSS aims to raise awareness and understanding of FOSS, to facilitate eIFL.net member engagement with FOSS development communities, and to undertake projects of special significance to eIFL.net members. To this end, eIFL-FOSS: Has created a network of library FOSS champions; Promotes understanding of FOSS through case studies, briefing notes, and discussion; Has created a project supporting evaluation of and migration to a FOSS integrated library system (ILS).”

Bess spoke first about the concept of “free” software (versus “information imperialism”). Free means: “you are free to run the program; you are free to study and adapt the program to your needs; you are free to redistribute; you are free to improve the software and release your improvements (and the whole community benefits).”

Examples given about commercial software being unsuitable to many libraries (former USSR countries can get software in Russian but not in their own language, for ex.), including one about Linux available in Dzonka language in Bhutan!

An academic librarian in Ghana tells Bess, “students in Ghana can view artifacts from Britain” – through the British Library’s online collections – “more easily than they can artifacts from their own heritage.”

There was a fierce discussion at conference Bess was at about importance of open source software in countries where access to basic food and medication is scarce. I.e. software doesn’t solve these problems! No, but…where will skilled workers receive training/find relevant information?

Comment from librarian from Africa: “If knowledge/information is available to all it will be part of the solution!” “The empowerment of citizens depends on equal access to information worldwide!”

Barriers to FOSS programs: technical and language, economic, HR, socio/political, etc.

What does eIFL-FOSS do? Negotiates price/availability of e-resources/databases with publisher (reduced price dependent on country GDP); library consortium-building/developing; raising awareness about open access; eIFL-IP (intellectual property and copyright issues in libraries); knowledge sharing (e-newsletter, conferences); OSS for libraries. Sometimes also involved in creating supporting documentation for software, pilots/case studies.

EIFL receives core funding from the Open Society Institute and some other funding from various foundations including the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Other guys’ notes:
http://superconference2008.blogspot.com/2008/02/session-418-open-source-and-libraries.html
eIFL-FOSS blog:
http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-foss/foss-blog/

Looking back to the Million Penguins project, which wrapped up in March of last year, puts Costory in some more perspective. Million Penguins was a joint effort between Penguin Books and the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University in Leicester – the students were the Moderators, hmm… The novel was authored by some 1500 collaborators while the process was blogged by Penguins. The process blog is some of the most interesting stuff, to my mind, as you watch these book industry dudes sway from pretentious lit.crit. to Doubting Thomas, to flumoxed, laughing, bewildered, apologetic, honest, happy, over it.

All to the good, but Problem #1: why put an end to the process? Locking down a version for release and sale – hell yes, I’d expect that, though they haven’t announced any kind of publication yet, far as I know. But then I’d have thought they’d re-open a Beta version with a new call for editors and adapters and, why not, keep it evolving. Often community development doesn’t move fast and decisive like inside a strict hierarchy. It takes more mess and longer to get to the goal, but the whole point is that it’s iterative, evolving in response to found bugs, new readers, new contexts over time, gradually becoming stable and flexible enough to hold up the Internet (eg; Apache). So while the Penguin project was much lauded (and lambasted), hyped and misunderstood, it seems to me that 1 year’s worth of work means it was only at best well begun, and then worried by authorial anxiety before being safely sealed up. Sad, sort of.

Plus, Problem # 2: there’s the whole license issue, making it well, not open source at all:

By posting your submission on the Wiki Novel and the Site, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, distribute and display any content you submit to us in any format now known or later developed. If you do not want to grant us these rights, please do not submit your content to us.

As Lise Treutler pointed out a while back on Indyish, Margaret Atwood joined in on the Million Penguins project but called it “Writing without responsibility” – Thing is, this is not a feature of open source, but of the way Penguin organized their experiment. No one is attributed for their work, and Penguin keeps all the content. Kind of the opposite of true open source where names, acknowledgment and reputation are super important BECAUSE public ownership and visibility redefines the context.

Costory is less shiny, branded and publicist-y than Million Penguins, and it’s closer to the core of what the open source license theorists and activists have been thumping about for decades but it’s still limited a bit, in terms of it’s ability to activate exponential effects, by the license chosen. Unlike the Penguin project, everything on the site is licensed NonCommercial Attribution Share Alike.

In neither case is the fiction fantastic, but call me crazy, I have a lot of hope for the next evolution of this experiment with collective authorship. I think when it’s done right this process can provide inspiration and empowerment to distributed artists. A Costroy with an inspiring foundation, a dedicated leader, and licensed so that everyone who participates can sell copies (crazy sounding? but that’s how Linux works, and those are the original Million Penguins =) could become a perpetually refilling and refining resource of art and income. So Indyish is keeping an eye out and fingers crossed, even if it takes another decade.

Here is an email from Asma Jahangir, head of the Pakistani Human Rights Commission and the UN’s Special Rapporteur for freedom of religion worldwide. Now under house arrest in Lahore, she’s one of many Pakistanis urgently asking the world community to raise our voice:

There is a strong crackdown on the press and lawyers… The Chief Justice is under house arrest (unofficially). The President of the Supreme Court Bar (Aitzaz Ahsan) and 2 former presidents, Mr. Muneer Malik and Tariq Mahmood have been imprisoned for one month under the Preventive Detention laws…

There are other scores political leaders who have also been arrested. Yesterday I was house arrested for 90 days… the President (who has lost his marbles) said that he had to clamp down on the press and the judiciary to curb terrorism. Those he has arrested are progressive, secular minded people, while the terrorists are offered negotiations and ceasefires.

Lawyers and civil society will challenge the government and the scene is likely to get uglier. We want friends of Pakistan to urge the US administration to stop all support of the instable dictator, as his lust for power is bringing the country close to a worse form of civil strife…

–Asma Jahangir
Lahore, Pakistan

(still from Avaaz:)

General Musharraf claims that martial law is necessary to combat extremist terror. But it just doesn’t add up. Musharraf retains strong links with the Pakistani Taliban (see PS below). His emergency powers are being directed only against the democratic opposition, free press and judiciary – just days before a scheduled ruling on whether Musharraf could run for president while remaining army chief. In an August poll, too, Pakistanis rated “ensuring an independent judiciary, free press and free elections” as their top priority.

Right now, leaders around the world are deciding how to respond. The General is dressing up his crackdown in the rhetoric of “anti-terrorism” because Musharraf and his military supporters depend on foreign military aid and international recognition to maintain their legitimacy. That’s why we have to speak out now.

The world can’t ignore the threat of chaos in Pakistan, or the voices of our fellow democrats there. Let’s come together as we did on Burma, and move our governments to act. In these crucial early days, the voice of the world’s people has tremendous power. Let’s use it. Sign the petition and tell your friends today -

http://www.avaaz.org/en/emergency_pakistan

With hope,

Paul, Pascal, Galit, Ricken, Graziela, Ben and the whole Avaaz team

PS for more background on Pakistani polls and Musharraf’s links to the Pakistani Taliban, see: http://www.avaaz.org/blog/en/pakistan

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29 @ 7:30pm
Concordia University: Henry F. Hall Bldg – Room H-110
1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal QC

Screening by donation, and open to the public.
Film info and trailer available at: http://www.cinemapolitica.org/films/60

A CO-PRESENTATION OF: Cinema Politica (Concordia University), Save Darfur Canada & The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS)

************************************************************************************************************
SYNOPSIS:

THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK exposes the tragedy taking place in Darfur as seen through the eyes of an American witness who has since returned to the US to take action to stop it.

Using the exclusive photographs and first hand testimony of former U.S. Marine Captain Brian Steidle, THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK takes the viewer on an emotionally charged journey into the heart of Darfur, Sudan, where an Arab run government is systematically executing a plan to rid the province of it’s black African citizens. As an official military observer, Steidle had access to parts of the country that no journalist could penetrate. He was unprepared for what he would witness and experience, including being fired upon, taken hostage, and being unable to intervene to save the lives of young children. Ultimately frustrated by the inaction of the international community, Steidle resigned and returned to the US to expose the images and stories of lives systematically destroyed.

USA / 2007 / 85 min – Eng / no subtitles

An INTERNATIONAL FILM CIRCUIT release of a BREAK THRU FILMS production in association with GLOBAL GRASSROOTS & THREE GENERATIONS.

________________________________________________________________________________

AWARDS

WINNER: SEEDS OF WAR AWARD Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
WINNER: FULL FRAME/WORKING FILM AWARD Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
WINNER: WITNESS Award SilverDocs Film Festival 2007
WINNER: Lena Sharpe / Women in Cinema Persistence of Vision Award / Seattle International Film Festival 2007
WINNER: Adrienne Shelly EXCELLENCE IN FILMMAKING Award /Nantucket Film Festival.

Directors: Annie Sundberg & Ricki Stern
Producers: Annie Sundberg, Ricki Stern, Gretchen Wallace, Jane Wells
Editor: Joey Grossfield
Music: Paul Brill
Cinematographers: Jerry Risius, William Rexer, Tim Hetherington, Phil Cox, Annie Sundberg, John Keith Wasson
Producers: Ira Lechner & Eileen Haag, Cristina Ljungberg, The Fledging Fund
Associate Producers: Seth Keal, Jed Alpert, Ted Greenberg
Assistant Editor: Kristin Rodriguez

———————————————-
ps. From Wikipedia on Darfur:

On October 16, 2006, Minority Rights Group (MRG) published a critical report, challenging that the UN and the great powers could have prevented the deepening crisis in Darfur and that few lessons appear to have been drawn from their ineptitude during the Rwandan Genocide. MRG’s executive director, Mark Lattimer, stated that: “this level of crisis, the killings, rape and displacement could have been foreseen and avoided … Darfur would just not be in this situation had the UN systems got its act together after Rwanda: their action was too little too late.” [132] On October 20, 120 genocide survivors of the Holocaust, the Cambodian and Rwandan Genocides, backed by six aid agencies, submitted an open letter to the European Union, calling on them to do more to end the atrocities in Darfur, with a UN peacekeeping force as “the only viable option.” Aegis Trust director, James Smith, stated that while “the African Union has worked very well in Darfur and done what it could, the rest of the world hasn’t supported those efforts the way it should have done with sufficient funds and sufficient equipment.” [133]

Human rights advocates and opponents of the Sudanese government portray China’s role in providing weapons and aircraft as a cynical attempt to obtain oil and gas just as colonial powers once supplied African chieftains with the military means to maintain control as they extracted natural resources.[134][135][136] Political China has offered Sudan support threatening to use its veto on the U.N. Security Council to protect Khartoum from sanctions and has been able to water down every resolution on Darfur in order to protect its interests in Sudan.[137] There has been further evidence of the Sudanese government’s murder of civilians to actually facilitate the extraction of oil. The U.S.-funded Civilian Protection Monitoring Team, which investigates attacks in southern Sudan concluded that “As the Government of Sudan sought to clear the way for oil exploration and to create a cordon sanitaire around the oil fields, vast tracts of the Western Upper Nile Region in southern Sudan became the focus of extensive military operations.”[138] Sarah Wykes, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, an NGO that campaigns for better natural resource governance, says: “Sudan has purchased about $100m in arms from China and has used these weapons against civilians in Darfur.”[135] There are additional concerns that Chinese oil companies are devastating the environment further inhibiting the local population’s ability to survive. This includes the clearing of forests for timber exports that increases vulnerability to erosion, river silting, landslides, flooding and loss of habitat for plant and animal species.[139]

Calls for sustained pressure and possible boycotts of the Olympics have come from French presidential candidate François Bayrou[140], actor and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow, Genocide Intervention Network Representative Ronan Farrow[141], author and Sudan scholar Eric Reeves[142] and The Washington Post editorial board[143]. Sudan divestment efforts have also concentrated on PetroChina, the national petroleum company with extensive investments in Sudan.[144]

On the opposite side of the issue, publicity given to the Darfur conflict has been strongly criticized in the Arab and Muslim world as exaggerated. Statements to this effect in the Arab press take the view that “the (Israeli) lobby prevents any in-depth discussion and diverts the attention from the crimes committed every day in Palestine and Iraq.”[145] and that Western attention to the Darfur crisis is “a cover for what is really being planned and carried out by the Western forces of hegemony and control in our Arab world.” [146] While “in New York, … there are thousands of posters screaming ‘genocide’ and ’400,000 people dead,” in reality only “200,000 have been killed.” Furthermore, “what has been done” in Darfur is “not genocide,” simply “war crimes.”[147] Another complaint made is that “there is no ethnic cleansing being perpetrated” in Darfur, only “great instability” and “clashes between the Sudanese government, rebel movements and the Janjaweed.” [148]

Counting deaths

Accurate numbers of dead have been difficult to estimate, partly because the Sudanese government places formidable obstacles in front of journalists attempting to cover the conflict.[149] In September 2004, the World Health Organization estimated there had been 50,000 deaths in Darfur since the beginning of the conflict, an 18-month period, mostly due to starvation. An updated estimate the following month put the number of deaths for the 6-month period from March to October 2004 due to starvation and disease at 70,000; These figures were criticized, because they only considered short periods and did not include violent deaths. [150] A more recent British Parliamentary Report has estimated that over 300,000 people have died, [151] and others have estimated even more.

In March 2005, the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland estimated that 10,000 were dying each month excluding deaths due to ethnic violence. [152] An estimated 2 million people had at that time been displaced from their homes, mostly seeking refuge in camps in Darfur’s major towns. Two hundred thousand had fled to neighboring Chad.

In an April 2005 report, the most comprehensive statistical analysis to date, the Coalition for International Justice estimated that 400,000 people in Darfur had died since the conflict began, a figure most humanitarian and human rights groups now use. [153]

On 28 April 2006, Dr. Eric Reeves argued that “extant data, in aggregate, strongly suggest that total excess mortality in Darfur, over the course of more than three years of deadly conflict, now significantly exceeds 450,000,” but this has not been independently verified. [154]

A 21 September 2006 article by the official UN News Service stated that “UN officials estimate over 400,000 people have lost their lives and some 2 million more have been driven from their homes.”[155] This now appears to be the official UN figure.

Amnesty International yesterday said the junta was still receiving military equipment from China, Russia, Ukraine, and India.

The Burmese generals claim to have released all but 500 of the Buddhist monks and other demonstrators detained since last month’s pro-democracy protests. But the senior British diplomat, briefing journalists yesterday on condition of anonymity, gave a “conservative estimate” that 2,000 to 2,500 were still being held and more were being picked up.

“There are substantial night-time raids going on. They have scooped up hundreds of people,” the diplomat said.

British officials and human rights activists believe there are four main detention centres in Rangoon: a racecourse, the city’s institute of technology, the Insein prison, and the Mingladon detention facility.

But the diplomat said detainees were increasingly being dispersed around the country, particularly to centres the regime calls New Life camps – gulags where detainees are used as forced labour.

“We are hearing from people who have been locked up directly … the conditions in which they are being held: in excrement-smeared rooms, hundreds to a room, not fed, interrogated,” he said.

The official death toll of the crackdown is 10, but the diplomat said: “We believe it is very many multiples of that.”

The protesters are being tried in secret, facing a minimum sentence of two years. British officials believe those found guilty of participation in the protests would face more than seven years in jail, and the leaders could be imprisoned for 20 years.

The diplomat said the monks’ treatment had outraged a profoundly religious nation. “The anger is quite extraordinary when you scratch the surface. In fact you barely need to do that,” he said. “We are still seeing incidents of low-level resistance with rocks and bricks being thrown at the police at night.”

Burma’s streets are quiet–no mass demonstrations, no riot police. But the calm is an illusion. Change is coming to Burma, and we are all a part of it.

Here’s where we stand: The regime has massacred, tortured, and intimidated its critics at home, and continues its night arrests and brutal interrogations. But while it has momentarily silenced the domestic opposition, its attacks on the revered Buddhist monks ignited an anger amongst the Burmese people that cannot be extinguished. Contacts inside Burma tell us that the demonstrators are steadily regrouping, even in the face of the deadly crackdown.

And around the world, the roar has grown deafening–so powerful that governments are scrambling for ways to bring new pressure to bear on the junta. Government leaders and the media have publicly credited the outcry of global civil society. Look at the statistics in the box on the right to see how, working alongside allies around the world, Avaaz members have begun to make a difference.

Many Burmese members of Avaaz have written in. Here’s a note from one of them–Trisa, now living abroad:

I am one of the 8888 uprising generation. Since the September uprising in Burma, I can’t get good night sleep. I can’t contact my remaining families and friends if they are ok… The voice of the world is very powerful. I have heartfelt thank you for all the supporters. Your voice can change our lives!

And here’s a note from an Avaaz member, Lynn in London, who joined a group of Burmese monks to hand-deliver the Avaaz petition–contained in a big red box–to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, on the steps of 10 Downing Street last week:

When I put my hand on the red box, which held the 753,000 signatures from around the world collected by Avaaz, I imagined the outrage of the many people from every country in the world, every culture, every race, and every religion, contained within this box which was about to be presented to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I thought about what it might mean for these Burmese monks whose religious brothers far away had been hurt and mistreated by the crackdown, to know that in every country in the world, people were supporting them.

And here’s what May Ng, a Burmese writer, editorialized on the news site Mizzima after seeing our petition:

As their voices have been heard and their faces have been seen, Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Burma will no longer be alone. Avaaz.org, whose mission is to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people shape global decisions, will make sure that Burmese people will have a voice over their own fate from now on.

Avaaz will share the struggle of the Burmese people until the struggle is won. Our goals are constant: transition, dialogue, reconciliation, and democracy. We will also continue to take action together on many urgent issues, from climate change to peace in the Middle East to human rights–but we will not turn from the cause of the Burmese people. We believe that every human life has equal value, whether in Berlin, Beijing or Rangoon.

As Aung San Suu Kyi once urged, we will use our freedom to promote theirs.

With hope,

Ben, Ricken, Paul, Galit, Graziela, Iain, Sarah, Pascal, and Milena–the Avaaz team

PS: 52 years ago today, the UN charter enshrined “the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” Twelve years ago today, Aung San Suu Kyi was imprisoned. And today, in key cities around the world, protesters held a new wave of protests; the first shipment of supplies, paid for by Avaaz members, left for Burma–and the junta agreed to re-admit Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N. envoy who is working to build a dialogue between the regime and the opposition, earlier than previously announced. It’s been a long struggle, but the most important ones always are.

PPS: If your friends haven’t yet signed the petition, urge them to sign at: http://avaaz.org/en/burma_hope_lives/6.php

PPPS: Some further reading:

Voices from within Burma:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7058610.stm
and
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/-/world/east-asia/myanmar-burma/
and
http://www.mizzima.com/MizzimaNews/Interview/01-Oct-2007.html

Avaaz’s Paul Hilder “People Power can win”:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/paul_hilder/2007/10/people_power_can_win.html