Nobel laureate wants global environment court

Yahoo – AFP, October 24, 2017

Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman calls for a global tribunal to
prosecute executives of multinational corporations who damage the environment (AFP
Photo/Orlando SIERRA)

Tegucigalpa (AFP) - Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkul Karman proposed in Honduras on Tuesday the creation of a global tribunal to prosecute executives of multinational firms who damage the earth.

Karman, of Yemen, made the suggestion in the Central American country that Amnesty International last year described -- along with its neighbor Guatemala -- as the most dangerous in the world for environmentalists.

"A world court should be created that could punish all these multinational corporations" that damage the environment and contribute to climate change, Karman said through a translator.

She spoke at a press conference with Shirin Ebadi of Iran, a fellow Nobel laureate who won the peace prize in 2003.

As part of the Nobel Women's Initiative, they aimed "to gather a first-hand account of the ongoing violence against women land defenders" in Honduras and in Guatemala, where they travelled later Tuesday, the group's website says.

The murder of Berta Caceres, 45, gunned down last year, highlighted the threat to Honduran activists and sparked international outrage.

Caceres opposed plans by the company Desarrollos Energeticos to build a hydroelectric dam across a river on which indigenous communities depended.

Rachel Vincent, advocacy and media director for the Nobel Women's Initiative, said Honduras has the world's highest rate of murders for human rights and land defenders.

Since 2009, 123 activists have been killed, she said.

In comments to AFP, Karman said a special international court is needed "to fight against corruption and money laundering and against all those involved in destroying the environment and exploiting the climate in a damaging way."

She said such a tribunal could be similar to The Hague-based International Criminal Court which investigates and tries people charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Karman said the court she proposes would handle cases in which human rights and environmental activists or anti-corruption fighters are "found dead."

She also said the investigation of Caceres's murder must be deepened "to discover all those who benefited from this crime."

Eight people were arrested, among them an employee of Desarrollos Energeticos.

The Nobel laureates met Austra Berta Flores, the mother of Caceres, on Saturday.

In Guatemala, they are to join two other Nobel Peace Prize winners, Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu and Jody Williams of the United States.

Colombia's FARC rebels will launch as political party on September 1

Yahoo – AFP, July 24, 2017

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize for reaching an historic deal with the FARC

Colombia's leftist FARC rebels announced Monday they will launch as a political party on September 1, a major step as the group transitions into civilian life as part of a historic peace agreement.

"We will publicly launch the party on September 1 in the Plaza de Bolivar," in Bogota, guerrilla commander Carlos Antonio Lozada told AFP after a news conference by the group, almost a month after it completed its disarmament.

Lozada, whose real name is Julian Gallo, said the group had been working on the details of the "great political-cultural act."

"We made peace to participate in politics," FARC chief negotiator Ivan Marquez said.

The FARC political party's policies and name will be decided at a congress at the end of August.

The disarmament last month by the roughly 7,000 members of Colombia's biggest rebel group under the 2016 peace accord brought a complete end to a half-century-old civil conflict between the FARC and the government.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for reaching the historic deal with the FARC that was signed last November.

The accord was narrowly rejected by Colombians in a referendum last year before it was redrafted and pushed through congress.

The country's only remaining rebel group, the smaller ELN, is currently following the path set by the FARC to negotiate a peace deal aiming to disarm and demobilize.

The civil conflict has left 260,000 dead. About 60,000 Colombians remain unaccounted for and seven million have been displaced in the conflict.

Colombia's President Santos receives Nobel Peace Prize

Yahoo – AFP, Pierre-Henry Deshayes, with Gael Branchereau in Stockholm, December 10, 2016

Nobel Peace Prize winner Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos poses with
 his award in Oslo on December 10, 2016 (AFP Photo/Haakon Mosvold Larsen)

Oslo (AFP) - Colombia's peace deal between the government and the Marxist FARC rebels is a model for war-torn countries like Syria, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said Saturday as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

The peace accord, signed on November 24 to end five decades of conflict, is a "model for the resolution of armed conflicts that have yet to be resolved around the world."

"It proves that what, at first, seems impossible, through perseverance may become possible even in Syria or Yemen or South Sudan," Santos said during a lavish ceremony at Oslo's City Hall, decked out in red, orange and white roses and carnations imported from Colombia for the occasion.

After a first peace deal was rejected in a popular vote on October 2, the rebels and government negotiated a new accord to end the conflict, which has killed more than 260,000 people, left 45,000 missing and forced nearly seven million to flee their homes.

"The Colombian peace agreement is a ray of hope in a world troubled by so many conflicts and so much intolerance," he said.

Yet in an interview with AFP just hours before Saturday's prize ceremony, Santos acknowledged that the hardest part of the country's peace process was yet to come.

The period ahead "is a more difficult phase than the (negotiation) process itself, and will require a lot of effort, perseverance and humility," he said.

"A lot of coordination efforts will also be needed... to bring the benefits of peace to the regions that have suffered the most in the conflict," he added.

He also said he could offer no guarantees there would be a peace deal in place with Colombia's second-largest rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), before the end of his mandate in 2018.

"I will do my best but to establish a time frame is always counter-productive in negotiations of this sort," he said.

In a speech at the ceremony, Berit Reiss-Andersen, deputy chairwoman of the Nobel committee, urged "all sides in Colombia to carry on the national dialogue and continue on the road to reconciliation.

"Hopefully, a similar negotiated disarmament agreement with the ELN guerrilla will soon be in place as well."

The Nobel prize consists of a gold medal, a diploma and a cheque for eight million Swedish kronor (824,000 euros, $871,000), a sum Santos promised to donate to the victims of the war.

The 2016 Nobel Prize laureates (AFP Photo/Paz PIZARRO)

Dylan's snub

Later on Saturday, another ceremony will be held in Stockholm where the Nobel laureates in the sciences, economics and literature will be honoured -- a ceremony marked by the notable absence of this year's literature laureate, Bob Dylan.

The first songwriter to win the prestigious award, he has declined to attend the glittering ceremony due to "pre-existing commitments".

The no-show has created a stir in Sweden, where it has been perceived as a slight towards the Swedish Academy that awards the literature prize and the Nobel Foundation.

Announced as the winner on October 14, Dylan waited almost two weeks to publicly acknowledge the accolade, a silence one Academy member termed "impolite and arrogant".

Dylan did ultimately say he was honoured to win, but then informed the Academy in mid-November that he would not be travelling to Stockholm to accept his prize.

"A slap in the face," remarked editorialist Lena Mellin at one of Sweden's biggest dailies, Aftonbladet.

"Anyone who has ever received a prize, even if it's just for being the best neighbour in the apartment building, knows that the least one can do is go and accept it," she wrote.

On social media, opinions were mixed.

"If it were me, I would probably... collect a Nobel Prize and $900,000. But it's Bob, and that's part of what makes him Bob," wrote fan Evan Sarzin on the singer's Facebook page.

"He is 75, give him a break," argued another, Karen Lunebach.

The singer-songwriter has sent a thank-you speech to be read at the gala banquet at Stockholm's City Hall, attended by around 1,300 guests and the Swedish royal family.

And just before that, American rock star Patti Smith will sing Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" during the formal prize ceremony at Stockholm's Concert Hall.

According to the Nobel Foundation, his prize should be presented to him in person sometime in 2017, either in Sweden or abroad.

Have a look at @JuanManSantos Nobel Diploma! #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/vXoU54m6rq

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) December 10, 2016

Juan Manuel Santos: Colombia rebels' archfoe turned peacemaker

Yahoo – AFP, Alina Dieste, October 7, 2016

Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos came to power in 2010 (AFP

Photo/Guillermo Legaria)

Bogota (AFP) - Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Prize Friday, is a son of a powerful family who staked his legacy on troubled efforts to make peace with the communist FARC rebels.

The Nobel Committee hailed the two-term president's "resolute" bid to end Latin America's longest conflict -- despite a shock referendum defeat last weekend for the peace accord he has championed.

"I prefer an imperfect accord that saves lives to a perfect war that keeps sowing death and pain," Santos had said as he signed the historic deal last month with his erstwhile mortal enemy, the FARC guerrilla leader Timoleon "Timochenko" Jimenez.

Juan Manuel Santos (AFP Photo/Gustavo IZUS,

Tatiana Magarinos)

Voters rejected the deal to end five decades of conflict by a razor-thin margin in Sunday's referendum -- a move the Nobel committee warned could plunge the country into fresh civil war.

The 65-year-old Santos, a career politician, led a major offensive against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as defense minister from 2006 to 2009.

But after becoming president in 2010, he changed tack and negotiated for a settlement with the guerrillas.

"I was never a hawk or a dove. I've always been a standard-bearer for peace," he told AFP in an interview before the September deal.

'Do the right thing'

Santos defied fierce opposition to the talks from some former allies.

"I am not looking for applause. I just want to do the right thing," he once said.

He won reelection in 2014 in a vote widely seen as a referendum on the talks. But his popularity rating has since plunged.

Santos said receiving the Nobel Prize would be "a great stimulus" for efforts to achieve peace.

"We are very, very close, we just need to push a bit further," he told the Nobel Foundation in a telephone interview.

He accepted the prize "not in my own name, but in the name of all Colombians, especially the millions of victims," he added later in a televised address.

"I will dedicate all my strength to this cause for the rest of my life."

'Political courage'

UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi hailed Santos's "political courage" and voiced hope the impasse could be overcome.

A former hostage of the FARC, Ingrid Betancourt -- a Franco-Colombian former politician who was held in the jungle for six years -- said it was a "just" reward for Santos, but added that the rebels should have shared the Nobel.

Since Santos launched peace negotiations four years ago, his predecessor, ex-president Alvaro Uribe, has become his main critic, arguing that the peace accord offered the rebels impunity for their crimes.

Both Uribe and FARC leader Timochenko congratulated Santos on the award, however.

Santos "made war as a means to achieve peace," Santos's brother-in-law and adviser, Mauricio Rodriguez, told AFP recently.

"He weakened the FARC to make them sit at the negotiating table," he added.

The peace drive "required courage, audacity, perseverance and a lot of strategy -- those are Santos's strengths."

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (left) and FARC leader Timoleon 

Jimenez, aka Timochenko, shake hands after signing a historic peace agreement 

in Cartagena, on September 26, 2016 (AFP Photo/Luis Acosta)

'Extreme center' politician

Santos was born in August 1951 in Bogota into a rich, powerful family entrenched in Colombian politics and the media.

He has described himself as politically in the "extreme center."

He was educated at a top naval academy in the Colombian city of Cartagena and later at the London School of Economics.

Santos began his career as a journalist, winning a Spanish award for his coverage of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua as a young man.

The work he did along with his brother Enrique in Nicaragua "had a profound impact on us both," Santos once said.

In 1991 he switched to politics, and has served in various ministerial posts.

An admirer of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela, Santos is said to be an early riser and late sleeper. He survived prostate cancer in 2012.

His source of strength, he says, is his family -- "my saints," he has called them, playing on his surname which means saints in Spanish.

He and his wife Maria Clemencia Rodriguez have three children.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos wins Nobel Peace Prize for "resolute" efforts to end over 5 decades of war https://t.co/9f5Lf5eDGU pic.twitter.com/0XB1ve9yDe

— AFP news agency (@AFP) October 7, 2016

Related Articles:

Santos to donate Nobel prize money to Colombia conflict victims - New


THE OLD SOUL 2013 TOOLKIT" – Jan 13, 2013 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Caroll)  (Text version)

"... The Change in the Way Things Work

Now I'm going to be very cautious with number five, and I'm going to change a paradigm of the way we channel. For 23 years, we have given you information in the soup of potentials that we read around you as the highest probable potential that exists. These things eventually become your reality because they are your free choice, and we know what you're thinking. We know what the potentials are because we know what the biases are, and we see all of humanity as a whole. Potentials are energy, and it gives us the ability to project your future based on how you are working these potentials. We have done this for a long time. Twenty-three years ago, we told you about many things that were potentially going to happen, and now they are your reality.

But now I'm going to depart from that scenario and I'm going to give you a potential on Earth that is not the strongest. I am going to tell you about a Human Being who has a choice. This potential is only about 50 percent. But I'm going to "read a potential" to you that you didn't expect. It's about a paradigm that is starting to shift.

Let's talk about North Korea. There's a young, new leader there. The potential is that he will never, ever hear this channel, so I can talk freely about him. He is facing a dilemma, for he is young and he knows about the differences in the energy in his land. He feels it. The lineage of his departed father lies upon him and all that is around him expects him to be a clone of this lineage. He is expected to continue the things that he has been taught and make North Korea great.

But he's starting to rethink them. Indeed, he wants to be a great leader, and to be heard and seen, and to make his mark on North Korea's history. His father showed him that this was very important. So he ponders a question: What makes a world leader great?

Let's ask that question to someone in an older earth paradigm from not that long ago. He will be an expert and a successful one. So this is a valid exercise, asking someone from the past who knows. We will ask that question to a man who you know and whose name is Napoleon. For us, this was yesterday and some of you were there. 

If you asked Napoleon, "What makes a world leader great?", he will say, "the size of the army, how much area can be efficiently conquered with a given amount of resources and men, how important the leader appears will then be based upon how many citizens call him emperor or king, the taxes he can impose, and how many fear him." Not only was that Napoleon's reality, but he was right for the energy he was part of at the time. So Napoleon went back and forth between world leader, general and prisoner. He accomplished almost everything he set out to do. His expertise was obvious, and you remember his name to this day. He was famous.

What makes a world leader great? What I am showing you is the difference in thinking between then and now. There are some choices that this evolving young Human Being has that could change everything on the planet if he wanted. His father would tell this boy that what makes a world leader great is the potential of his missile power, or how close he can get to having a nuclear weapon, or how he stands up against the power of the West, or how he continues to aggravate and stir drama as a small country - getting noticed and being feared. His father would tell him that this is his lineage and that is what he's been told all his life. His father did it well and surrounded himself with advisors who he then passed on to his son.

Now, there's a 50 percent chance of something happening here, but this is not a strong potential, dear ones. I'm bringing this forward so you can watch it work one way or the other. For if the son continues in his father's footsteps, he is doomed to failure. The energy on the earth will see it as old and he will be seen as a fool. If, however, he figures it out, he could be the most famous man on the planet... which is really what his father wanted.

If Kryon were to advise this man, here's what I would tell him. He could be the greatest known leader the current world has ever known, for what he does now will be something the world will see as a demarcation point from the old ways. Not only that, but what he does now will be in the history books forever, and because of his youth, he has the potential to outlive every other leader on the planet! So he's going to have longer fame than anyone ever has.

I would tell him this: Tell the border guards to go home. Greet the south and begin to unify North and South Korea in a way that no past prophet ever said could happen. Allow the two countries to be separate, but have them as two parts of a larger Korean family with free trade and travel. Start alliances with the West and show them that you mean it. Drop the missile programs because you will never need them!

This will bring abundance to the North Korean people that they never expected! They will have great economic sustenance, schools, hospitals and more respect than ever for their amazing leader. The result would be fame and glory for the son, which the father had never achieved, something that the world would talk about for hundreds of years. It would cause a United Nations to stand and applaud as the son walked into the Grand Assembly. I would ask him, "Wouldn't you like that?"

Doesn't this seem obvious to most of you? He could achieve instant fame and be seen as the one who made the difference and started something amazing. But watch him. He has a choice, but it's not simple. He still has his father's advisors, but one of which he's already dismissed. He may get it, or he may not. There is a 50 percent chance. But I'll tell you that if he doesn't do it, the one after him will. Because it is so obvious. 

We show you this to tell you that this is the evolvement of the Human species. It is the slow realization that putting things together is the answer to all things, instead of separating them or conquering them. Those who start promoting compromise and begin to create these energies that never were here before will be the ones you're going to remember. Dear ones, it's going to happen in leadership and politics and in business. It's a new paradigm...."

Nobel protester sought to draw attention to 'murdered Mexican students'

Yahoo – AFP, 11 Dec 2014

Security staff blocks a man holding a Mexican flag on stage during the Nobel

Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 2014 (AFP Photo/Odd Andersen)

Oslo (AFP) - A young man who disrupted the Nobel prize ceremony in Oslo by waving a Mexican flag streaked with red said Thursday he did it to denounce the alleged killing of students by Mexican authorities.

The protest by the 21-year-old at the presumed massacre of 43 Mexican students came as Pakistan's Malala Yousafzai and India's Kailash Satyarthi displayed their peace prizes to rapturous applause on Wednesday.

The security breach was especially serious since child rights activist Malala, who was lucky to survive a Taliban assassination attempt in October 2012, remains a target for Islamist extremists.

The Mexican protester, Adan Cortes Salas, said he was sorry for having frightened anyone and for any repercussions the security services may face, but did not regret his actions.

"My message was... 'help to Mexico'," Salas told NRK television in Norway during an interview conducted in a detention centre. "Our government is killing students."

Thorbjoern Jagland (L), chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee, and Nobel
 Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai (R) look on as a man displays the flag of
Mexico during the awards ceremony in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 2014 (AFP
Photo/Cornelius Poppe)

Salas, a student and asylum seeker who entered Norway in late November, said he simply dressed well and walked into the ceremony at Oslo city hall as if he belonged there.

He wore glasses and a camera around his neck, and held the Mexican flag as he approached the two laureates on stage. He said he asked them for an opportunity to speak on the microphone.

He was grabbed by security agents shortly afterwards and escorted away. He has since agreed to pay a fine of 15,000 krone ($2,000, 1,700 euros) and has been handed over to immigration police.

Salas told VG newspaper that his actions had not been planned for very long, saying he found out the ceremony was occurring while he was in town and decided on the protest.

Police have apologised over the incident, with Oslo police chief John Fredriksen saying "it shouldn't have happened."

Mexican media said he was a left-wing militant who wanted to draw the world's attention to the disappearance of 43 students in southern Mexico caught up in the country's bloody drug war.

Security blocks a man holding a Mexican flag on the stage next to Nobel Peace

Prize laureates Malala Yousafzai (L) and Kailash Satyarthi (R) during the award

ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 2014 (AFP Photo/Vegard Wivestad Grott)

Prosecutors have confirmed that one of the missing students was among charred remains found in a landfill and nearby river in Guerrero state.

The identification by an Austrian medical university bolstered suspicions that the students were slaughtered by a drug gang after they were delivered to hitmen by corrupt police.

The two Nobel laureates appeared unperturbed by the protest at the ceremony.

"There was nothing to be scared of," Malala said in a press conference Thursday.

"There are problems in Mexico, there are problems even in America, even in Norway. So the problems are always there in every country and it's really important that children raise their voice, children come forward," she added.

Related Article:

Malala, Satyarthi receive Nobel Peace Prize

Nobel Peace Prize laureates Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai's pairing had

the extra symbolism of linking neighbouring countries that have been in conflict

for decades (AFP Photo/Cornelius Poppe)