1 Moody’s downgrades Greece to Caa3 (San Francisco
Chronicle) President Barack Obama and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi are
discussing ways to keep Greece in the eurozone. Greece has suffered its fourth
ratings downgrade this week, as Moody's investors service slashed the country's
rating from Caa2 to Caa3, or just above default.
The agency said Greece was likely to default on its
remaining privately held debt due to its impasse with lenders. "Events of recent
months have illustrated the distance between what Greece's official creditors
will demand as a condition of continued support over the coming years, and what
Greece's institutions are able to do to meet those demands. This creates
significant difficulties for the achievement of a long-lasting support
agreement," it said.
Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said a deal
with lenders could be reached after Sunday's referendum, while blaming
creditors for the country's bank closures. "This is a very dark moment for
Europe. They have closed our banks for the sole purpose of blackmailing what?
Getting a "Yes" vote on a non-sustainable solution that would be bad
for Europe," he said.
The European Central Bank's governing council has
decided to maintain emergency liquidity funding for Greek banks at the same
levels as before, a banking official said. The ECB has been keeping Greece's
banks on life support while the country's left-wing government has negotiated
for a bailout deal with creditors. Without the money, Greece could default and
wind up leaving the euro.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/The-Latest-Markets-take-in-stride-Greek-failure-6359832.php
2 World’s 2.4bn lack sanitation facilities (Khaleej
Times) Some 2.4 billion people - one out of every three inhabitants of the
planet - still have no access to sanitation facilities, the World Health
Organisation (WHO) and Unicef has said. Of those, 946 million continue to
defecate outdoors, a very problematic practice, because in many places it
creates a continuous source of disease and pollutes the water supply.
"Until everyone has access to adequate
sanitation facilities, the quality of water supplies will be undermined and too
many people will continue to die from waterborne and water-related
diseases," said Maria Neira, director of the WHO Department of Public
Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health.
The UN, which refers to adequate sanitation as an
entire system that hygienically separates human excrement from the population,
set as one of its Millennium Development Goals the reduction by half of the
number of people without access to such a system by 2015. That means that 77
percent of the world population should now have access to sanitation, a goal
that will not be met by some 9 percentage points, or 700 million people.
According to Unicef and WHO, the lack of progress in
this area also threatens to undermine child survival and the health benefits
that were expected to be achieved by improving access to drinking water,
another Millennium Development Goal that, in this case, has fortunately been
achieved.
3 A book club that terrified the Angolan regime
(Simon Allison in The Guardian) As a group of young Angolans gathered in the
capital Luanda for their regular book club, authorities clearly felt the act of
reading was so subversive that it was tantamount to a rebellion, and state
security forces immediately intervened. Thirteen of the readers were arrested
in a raid last week, along with two others for good measure. All have been
detained and distributed across various prisons in the city.
This incident reveals much about modern Angola,
where the exercise of basic rights – to assembly, to protest, the right to read
– has become a subversive act. Some of those arrested have a political history:
rapper Luaty Beirao has been arrested for protesting in the past, and Manuel
Nito Alves was jailed for two months in 2013 for printing T-shirts critical of
the president.
On the reading list were two books that give Angolan
authorities sleepless nights. The first was Gene Sharp’s seminal From
Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which
describes itself as “a blueprint for nonviolent resistance to repressive
regimes”. The second was Angolan journalist Domingos da Cruz’s book, whose
title translates as “tools to destroy a dictator and avoid a new dictatorship”.
Da Cruz himself was among those arrested.
Since March 2011, the country’s youth movement has
been calling for protests aimed at bringing down the president, Jose Eduardo
dos Santos who has ruled Angola for 35 years. That a book club has become the
definition of rebellion shows just how paranoid and insecure the state has
become: fifteen young men are now in prison, because they dared to discuss a
future different from the one Dos Santos has decreed.
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