HAMBURG/LONDON (NNA) – More than two million people around the world have so far contacted Russian embassies to demand the release of the activists and crew on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, the environmental organisation Greenpeace says on its website. They were detained for peacefully protesting against oil drilling in the Arctic by the Russian energy giant Gazprom.

The detainees were recently moved to St Petersburg from Murmansk, where they had been held since their arrest. …

BEIRUT (NNA) – In the Shatila und Borj al Barajne refugees camps in Lebanon, children of Syrian refugees are trying to cope with the trauma they have suffered as a result of the horrific events in the civil war in their home country.

Every year, millions of children experience traumatic events. Most of them have to cope with their experiences and memories on their own. Even after years have passed, such unresolved traumas can evoke symptoms that profoundly disturb the development of children…

MAKILALA, Mindanao (NNA) – The Philippines is a south-east Asian country – growing by about two million people a year – in which fifty percent of the population lives under the poverty line. Hardly had it begun to recover after twenty years of the Marcos dictatorship when another corrupt president took over. There is only one thought on the mind of many of its people: rice. Now the country has managed a huge step forward: for the first time in almost forty years it will produce so much rice that…

BERLIN (NNA) – Civil society is showing insufficient engagement and is thereby endangering the future of following generations. But each individual person can also make the decision whether he or she is part of a development or of a problem. These challenging ideas were put forward by the founder of the Alternative Nobel Prize, Jakob von Uexkull, at a conference of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany earlier this year.

Von Uexkull was speaking as the chairman of the management board of the…

KARLSRUHE (NNA) – Following the devastating attack of the Islamist al-Shabab militants on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi, the emergency education department of the international Waldorf organisation Friends of Waldorf Education will open an out-patient centre for emergency education together with Kenyan trauma specialists this coming Monday.

The organisation said that the out-patient centre will support traumatised children and young people in coming to terms with their experiences…

BASEL (NNA) – The Swiss initiative calling for an unconditional basic income has overcome its first hurdle to have the measure introduced into law. One hundred thousand signatures were needed by October for parliament to debate the issue but by early August 130,000 signatures had been collected, the initiative said on its website. The signatures will be handed over to the Swiss parliament in October.

The popular initiative for an unconditional basic income (UBI), which in the view of its…

The people in the Chinese province of Sichuan cannot come to rest: after the devastating earthquake of 2008, in which 70,000 people were killed, the ground shook again in April of this year claiming another 200 lives. Now the region is being ravaged by floods and landslides. The members of the emergency education team of the international organisation Friends of Waldorf Education were in Sichuan at the end of June to work with the traumatised people. The teachers, above all, in the schools in…

TEREZIN (NNA) – The international organisation Friends of Waldorf Education has launched an urgent appeal in support of a Camphill community in the Czech Republic which has suffered severe damage as a result of flooding

Ceske Kopisty, which is located near Terezin, lies at the confluence of the rivers Elbe and Stara Ohre and was particularly badly affected by the recent floods. The village includes a biodynamic farm which supplies the community with vegetables. Many of the residents with…

In celebration of the recent 150th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s birth, well-known author Peter Selg has published a biography of the founder of anthroposophy. It is certainly a “magnum opus” – three volumes coming in at around 2000 pages – and contains new documentary material that sheds light on the last months of Steiner’s life. There has been a mixed response to the book in reviews published in various anthroposophical journals, as NNA correspondent Wolfgang G. Voegele, writes.

MAINZ…

ATHENS (NNA) – An end to austerity and the demand for true democracy are the focus of an “Athens Manifesto” adopted at the beginning of June at an alternative summit in the Greek capital.  Civil society activists from 22 countries had gathered in Athens to bring the protest movements from the different countries around the table to discuss transnational strategies.

“The cradle of democarcy is not its tomb” the press statement released after the summit proclaims. The Alter Summit in Athens had…