Peace In Movement

6 billion Others: Meaning of Love

2010-04-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

6 billion Others: Meaning of Love

6 billion Others, a Yann Arthus-Bertrand video exhibition about thousands of men and women testimonies from all around the world.

A GoodPlanet.org project.

Muhammad Yunus (8 March 2009)

2010-03-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

Muhammad Yunus spoke on Abolishing Poverty The Human Rights Priority. This lecture was a collaboration between the Centre for Social Impact, Business for Millennium Development, World Vision and the Sydney Peace Prize.

Professor Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, fuelled by the belief that credit is a fundamental human right.

His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves.

Grameen Bank has lifted millions out of poverty by disbursing $6.6bn in millions of tiny loans to the poor.

Rethinking How to Feed the World

2010-03-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

29.01.2010
Global food demand will double between now and 2050 as the world's population reaches 9.2 billion.

How can the increased demand for food be met in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner?

William H. Gates III, Co-Chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USA
Ellen Kullman, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, DuPont, USA
Nguyen Tan Dung, Prime Minister of Vietnam; Chair, 2010 ASEAN
Patricia A. Woertz, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), USA; Co-Chair of the Governors Meeting for Consumer Industries 2010; Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010

Moderated by
Prannoy Roy, Chairman, New Delhi Television (NDTV), India

Note: The first ten seconds of the video include Indian translation but the whole conference is in English.

The Hunger Project

2010-03-15T05:25:00.000-07:00

Follow women in Asia, Africa and Latin America as they make the journey from extreme poverty to dignity and self-reliance.

The Hunger Project is a global movement with a vision and commitment to end hunger by organising the necessary leadership, training, and education.

The organization focuses on chronic, persistent hunger as distinct from the acute famine emergencies that make the news. Less than 10 percent the world's undernourished people are hungry because of famine.

Chronic, persistent hunger is not due merely to lack of food. It occurs when people lack opportunity to earn enough income, to be educated and gain skills, to meet basic health needs and have a voice in the decisions that affect their community.

A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story

2010-03-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a South African psychologist who was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Human Rights Violations Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, recounts the gripping story of her encounter with Eugene de Kock - a man known as "Prime Evil" for his relentless pursuit and extermination of anti-apartheid activists.

She argues that a victim who puts revenge aside can gain a more satisfying measure of power by becoming a "gatekeeper to what the outcast desires - readmission into the human community."

Nomd Boy: Somali Documentary1960's

2010-03-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

From video source:

NOMAD BOY - SOMALI DOCUMENTARY 1960's

Documentary proposed by Abdisalam Aato and Olol Film Productions(ololfilm.com), bartamaha.com.

And Said M. M. Shire "Suugaan".

Guinean HipHop: Fonike (short version - english subs)

2010-03-14T12:49:00.000-07:00

A lesson of raw hiphop talent given by the young (fonike) rappers from Conakry in Guinea.

A Guinean HipHop documentary.

Filmed by French moviemaker: J.LENOIR

Can music heal Africa wounds?

Blind Faith In South Africa

2010-03-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

South Africa
June 2003

The 'Boeremag', or Afrikaaner Army, are determined to bomb their way back to a white South Africa. But just why did a small army of 4000 they think they could succeed?

Remark: there is some sound technical problems, it is from the source.

At former British prison: Somali pirates tell their side

2010-03-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

MANDHERA, Somalia — Their exploits have turned the inky-blue waters of the Indian Ocean into a perilous gantlet for ships and an unlikely security challenge for world leaders. But behind the bare brick walls of a desolate former British colonial prison here, five jailed Somali pirates didn't seem very fearsome at all.

One looked to be in his late 40s, his brambly hair stained a deep henna orange, his milky eyes staring into the middle distance. A slightly younger man clutched a faded sarong to his matchstick waist and spoke in barely a whisper.

The leader of the pirate crew, 38-year-old Farah Ismail Eid, wore such a hungry look that a visiting government official, unsolicited, folded a pale $10 bill into his sandpaper palm.

That a few hundred men like these have wreaked so much havoc in the seas off of East Africa is a testament to the sheer power of guts and greed. It's also a stark illustration of the all-consuming anarchy ashore in Somalia, where, after 18 years of conflict, jobs are scarce, guns are plentiful, men will risk everything for a payday — and their government is too weak and corrupt to stop them.

The men behind bars, however, offered another explanation for piracy.

Their story is also rooted in greed — not of their brazen colleagues with the million-dollar ransoms, they say, but of foreign companies that they say have profited from Somalia's lawlessness by fishing illegally in their waters since the 1990s.

In a long interview with McClatchy at the jailhouse in Mandhera, an austere desert fortress in the autonomous northern region of Somaliland, where British forces held Italian POWs during World War II, Eid related what amounts to the pirates' creation myth, in which overfishing by European and Asian trawlers drove Somalia's coastal communities to ruin and forced local fishermen to fight for their livelihoods.

"Now the international community is shouting about piracy. But long before this, we were shouting to the world about our problems," said Eid, a bony-cheeked former lobsterman with a bushy goatee. "No one listened."

Of course, the pirates' journey from vigilante coast guard to firing automatic weapons at cruise ships — as one band did over the weekend — is a reminder that good intentions don't last long in desperate Somalia..

Poverty in Africa: In your Eyes

2010-03-14T06:37:00.000-07:00

Poverty in Africa is widespread. Most African nations are poor, with some of them being among the poorest countries in the world.

Ghana is the second poorest country in the world, with less than 0.01% of the overall worldwide wealth. African nations typically fall toward the bottom of any list measuring small size economic activity, such as income per capita or GDP per capita, despite a wealth of natural resources. The bottom 25 spots of the United Nations (UN) quality of life index are regularly filled by African nations.

According to wikipedia, in 2006, 34 of the 50 nations on the UN list of least developed countries are in Africa. In many nations, the GDP per capital income is less than $200 U.S. per year, with the vast majority of the population living on much less. In addition, Africa's share of income has been consistently dropping over the past century by any measure.

In 1820, the average European worker earned about three times what the average African did. Now, the average European earns twenty times what the average African does.

Although GDP per capita incomes in Africa have also been steadily growing, measures are still far better in other parts of the world, such as Latin America, which suffers from many of the same disadvantages.

To look for more, check that link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Africa

"From Dust": The Untold Story After The Tsunami

2010-03-14T05:46:00.000-07:00

From Dust is a cinematic expose of a government's response to a natural disaster.

Filmed in Sri Lanka after the devastating Asian tsunami.

it reveals the ulterior motives behind a new law that prevented survivors from rebuilding their homes along the islands coastline.

Has the world failed Haiti?

2010-03-14T05:41:00.000-07:00

Tens of thousands of people died in a matter of seconds when a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti last Tuesday. Now world focus turns to providing aid for the survivors.

UN officials fear that Haiti faces humanitarian disaster unless relief is distributed effectively, but aid workers are encountering difficulties getting respite to those who need it most.

With just one airport, aid trickles into Haiti. Once on the ground, relief distribution also becomes problematic because the country's already poor infrastructure has been devastated by the quake.

The US has been actively involved in helping distribute aid, working closely with the UN and the Haitian government.

Barack Obama, the US president, has pledged at least $100mn to rebuild Haiti - one of the largest relief campaigns in US history.

He has asked his two predecessors in the White House to lead America's fundraising campaign for Haiti.

But after decades of neglect, are world powers returning for an increased role in this poor country? And what price would Haitians pay for increased foreign assistance?

Inside Story presenter Imran Garda is joined by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, a professor of Africology at the University of Wisconsin, Leara Rhodes, an associate professor of Journalism at the University of Georgia and author of the book Democracy and the Haitian Media, and Todd Kent, an assistant professor of political science and a scholar at the Bush School of Homeland Security.

Superstitions

2010-03-14T05:37:00.000-07:00

According to Britannica Encyclopedia, sperstition is belief, half-belief, or practice for which there appears to be no rational substance. Those who use the term imply that they have certain knowledge or superior evidence for their own scientific, philosophical, or religious convictions. An ambiguous word, it probably cannot be used except subjectively. With this qualification in mind, superstitions may be classified roughly as religious, cultural, and personal.

In Accordance with wikpedia, the etymology is from the classical Latin superstitio, literally "a standing over", hence: "amazement, wonder, dread, especially of the divine or supernatural" The word is attested in the 1st century BC, notably in Cicero, Livy, Ovid, in the meaning of an unreasonable or excessive belief in fear or magic, especially foreign or fantastical ideas. By the 1st century AD, it came to refer to "religious awe, sanctity; a religious rite" more generally.

Occupation of East Timor

2010-03-14T05:33:00.000-07:00

On December 7, 1975 Indonesia secretly - but with the complicity of the Western powers including the US, the UK, and Australia - invaded the small nation of East Timor. Two Australian television crews attempting to document the invasion were murdered.

In 1993, with the Indonesian army still occupying the country, John Pilger and his crew including director David Munro, slipped into East Timor and made this film. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese - 1/3 of the population - had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military. The C.I.A. has described it as one of the worst mass-murders of the 20th century.

Pilger tells the story using clandestine footage of the countryside, internment camps and even Fretlin guerillas, as well as interviews with Timorese exiles, including Jose Ramos Horta and Jose Gusmao, and Australian, British, and Indonesian diplomats.

Nixon had called Indonesia the "greatest prize in southeast Asia" because of its oil reserves and other natural resources. Even though Indonesia had no historic or legal claim to East Timor, it was convenient for diplomats to declare that East Timor, just gaining its independence from Portugal, would not be a viable state.

However the lie was given to this argument when Australia and Indonesia signed the Timor Gap Oil Treaty and carved up the huge oil and gas reserves in the seabed off East Timor.

None of the politicians from that period - President Ford, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Moynihan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Gough Whitlam - has clean hands. The Indonesian military used US and British planes to bombard the island, while the defense ministers proclaimed ignorance.

As Pilger gets an Austrlian diplomat to admit, East Timor was considered "expendable."

But no one watching the massacre in the Dili cemetery can excuse the geopolitical machinations that led to this genocide.

Prisoners of a White God

2010-03-14T05:32:00.000-07:00

A documentary film about a mountain ethnic group in South East Asia, the Prisoners of a White God, tells the story about a researcher, who investigates the activities of christian fundamentalist missionaries and international development among the Akha peoples.

Prisoners of a White God received the Grand Prixes at RAFF Film Festival, at Ecofilm Festival, at Festival of the Mountain Films, at "It's Up To You" Film Festival and the Main Prize at Ekotopfilm in 2008!

Published Date: 2008
Producer: Tomas Ryska
Duration: 00:51:47
Language: Czech (English Subtitles)
Genre: Tribal / Thailand and Laos
Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-Share
Copyright: © fPcN Czech Republic: www.uwip.org

A World Without Water

2010-03-14T05:29:00.000-07:00

A World Without Water (2006)
Director: Brian Woods
Release Date: 29 April 2006 (UK)
Genre: Documentary

The world is running out of its most precious resource. True Vision's timely film tells of the personal tragedies behind the mounting privatisation of water supplies.

More than a billion people across the globe don’t have access to safe water. Every day 3900 children die as a result of insufficient or unclean water supplies. The situation can only get worse as water gets evermore scarce.

Ghosts of Cité Soleil (2006)

2010-03-14T05:27:00.000-07:00

Directors: Asger Leth
Milos Loncarevic (co-director)
Writer: Asger Leth (writer)
Release Date: 20 July 2007 (UK) more
Genre: Documentary - Action -| Drama -| Music - Romance - War

* Cast :

Winson '2Pac' Jean ... Himself
Wyclef Jean ... Himself
James 'Bily' Petit Frère ... Himself
Éleonore 'Lele' Senlis ... Herself

* Plot :

In the slum of Cité Soleil, President Aristide's most loyal supporters were ruling as kings. The five major gang leaders were controlling heavily armed young men; the Chiméres.

The Secret army of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. "Ghosts of Cité Soleil" is a film about Billy and Haitian 2pac. Two brothers. Gang Leaders of the Chiméres.

Shakespeare Behind Bars (2005)

2010-03-12T17:12:00.000-08:00

Take Shakespeare's final play The Tempest with its violent seas, windswept island, crucial connection to nature, and underlying theme of forgiveness, and bring it into a prison, the ultimate venue of confinement. The result is an extraordinary story about the creative process and the power of art to heal and redeem--in a place where the very act of participation in theatre is a human triumph and a means of personal liberation.

In Hank Rogerson's revelatory trip into and around this prison production, we embark on a year-long journey with the Shakespeare Behind Bars theatre troupe. Led by Shakespearean volunteer director Curt Tofteland, whose innovative work with Luther Luckett inmates began in the mid-1990s, the prisoners cast themselves in roles reflecting their personal history and fate. Their individual stories, including information about their heinous crimes, are interwoven with the plot of The Tempest as the inmates delve deeply into the characters they portray while confronting their personal demons.

SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS is a tremendously moving film, where the protagonists are not merely defined by their crimes but are afforded dignity and a fresh chance to look truth in the eye, and embrace it.

SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS is written and directed by Hank Rogerson and produced by Jilann Spitzmiller. Rogerson and Spitzmiller are a husband and wife team that has collaborated on projects for 15 years, including the award-winning documentary HOMELAND for ITVS and CIRCLE OF STORIES, also for ITVS, which was part of the Sundance Online Film Festival in 2003.

Produced by Philomath Films in association with the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and the BBC, with major funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The film has received other major support from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, and was selected for the first-ever Sundance Institute Documentary Story and Edit Lab, as well as the Sundance Documentary Composer’s Lab in 2004.

The Rat Children

2010-03-03T11:21:00.001-08:00

In Pakistan, microcephalics-babies born with abnormally small heads are known as 'rats' and credited with god-like powers.

Believers will give them money in the hope of blessings, but unscrupulous gangs of beggars are now exploiting this ancient tradition for their own ends. They kidnap young 'rat' children - or frighten parents into handing them over-and then force them into a lifetime of begging on the streets.

They are lucrative-so much so that some people allege that normal babies are benig deliberately deformed to look like microcephalics. Why else, they ask, are there so many such children in Pakistan? And until something is done to combat the myth, the helpless 'rat' children will be condemned to a life of abuse.

Truth In Advertising

2010-03-03T11:19:00.001-08:00

"Truth In Advertising" is a short movie that can be described as "dry comedy"; it shows the dark side of the world of advertising.

The Director Tim Hamilton who co-wrote also the scenario, give a satire about teamwork and hierarchie.

The charachters tell what they think, not what they should say.

The short movie is rated [R] Restricted, because of the verbal abuse.

Hovering Pyramid Over Kremlin Russia: UFO? Or Government Hologram?

2010-03-03T11:17:00.001-08:00

Recent footage of a pyramid hovering over the Red Square in Moscow has gone viral. The footage was shot from a passing car.

While some say it is a ufo, sceptics dismiss the ufo theory and say that if the images were for real, the public would have reported sightings to police - who are making no comment.

Another clip filmed during daylight shows a fuzzy grey object on the skyline near Red Square.

Sceptics however say that if the images were for real, the public would have reported sightings.

The Other Side of AIDS

2010-03-03T11:16:00.001-08:00

The Other Side of AIDS is a 2004 documentary film by Robin Scovill. Through interviews with prominent AIDS denialists and HIV-positive people who have refused anti-HIV medication, the film makes the claim that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and that HIV treatments are harmful, conclusions which are rejected by medical and scientific consensus.

In accordance with wikipedia, the film was reviewed in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter in 2004, and received additional attention in 2005, when Scovill's three-year-old daughter died of untreated AIDS.

The Other Side of AIDS was shown at the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival in 2004, where it received special mention in the International Documentary category. The film had its international premiere at the 2004 Vancouver International Film Festival, and also played at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema in Argentina.

Outrageous: Woman Drops Baby

2010-03-03T11:13:00.001-08:00

Video has been released that allegedly shows a drunken Northern Territory mother throwing her baby onto a footpath.

The woman allegedly threw her 10-month-old child onto the concrete after her partner left on a bus without her, the NT News reports.

The Darwin Magistrates Court heard that the woman was drunk and had been arguing with her partner before the incident at Palmerston bus exchange.

Nanny abuse caught on camera

2010-03-03T11:12:00.001-08:00

A couple said they did everything possible to make sure their child was in safe hands.

Mom drags child on leash

2010-03-03T11:11:00.001-08:00

Police say she was observed by customers and employees at a store on Broad Street, dragging a small child around by a backpack leash.

The child had visible marks on the neck from the incident.