Johansson is expected to meet with representatives of local and regional authorities, as well as with international non-governmental organizations operating in Greece to discuss migration management.
On Monday, the commissioner will visit the islands of Lesvos and Samos to address the issue of refugees.
The next day, Johansson will meet with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias, Minister of Shipping and Island Policy Ioannis Plakiotakis, and other senior officials in the Greek capital of Athens.
The European Union, UK and US on Saturday condemned the repression by Myanmar’s junta as “indefensible” after scores of anti-coup protesters were reportedly killed, as the country marked Armed Forces Day.
The online news site Myanmar Now reported late on Saturday that the death toll had reached 114, the bloodiest day so far since the start of the military coup.
A count issued by an independent researcher in Yangon who has been compiling near-real time death tolls put the total at 107, spread over more than two dozen cities and towns.
The total death toll since the coup by the military junta stood at 328 as of Friday, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a group that documents deaths and arrests. It had cautioned however that the actual number of casualties was “likely much higher”.
The United Nations said it had received reports of “scores killed, including children” as well as hundreds of people injured.
It condemned the violence as “shocking” and “compounding the illegitimacy of the coup and the culpability of its leaders”.
In a statement released on Facebook, the EU embassy in Myanmar said that “this 76th Myanmar Armed Forces Day will forever stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour. The killing of unarmed civilians, including children, are indefensible acts.”
The US embassy wrote on Facebook that “this bloodshed is horrifying.”
“Security forces are murdering unarmed civilians, including children, the very people they swore to protect,” it added. “These are not the actions of a professional military or police force.”
Both called for an “immediate” and “unconditional” end to the violence.
The British ambassador wrote in a statement released on Twitter that “the security forces have disgraced themselves by shooting unarmed civilians.”
“Dozens of innocent people have reportedly been killed, including children,” he added.
‘Shot in the head and back’
Armed Forces Day is a public holiday which marks the beginning of a revolt against Japanese occupation in World War II. This year, protesters referred to it by its original name, Resistance Day, and threatened to double down on their public opposition to the overthrow of the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi with more and bigger demonstrations.
The junta had tried to quell turnout for protests with a message broadcast on state television on Friday evening which warned: “You should learn from the tragedy of earlier ugly deaths that you can be in danger of getting shot in the head and back.”
Ei Thinzar Maung, one of the figures in the anti-coup protests, urged people to take to protest on Saturday. “I pray everyone will be safe tomorrow,” she posted on social media. “We will win this!”
“Now is the time to fight against military oppression,” she insisted.
Talking before a military parade in capital Naypyitaw on Saturday, coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing did not directly refer to protesters but referred to “terrorism which can be harmful to state tranquility and social security,” and called it “unacceptable”.
He also doubled down on the junta’s claim that Suu Kyi’s elected government failed to investigate irregularities in the last polls and that “the Tatmadaw (armed forces) unavoidably assumed the state responsibility by lawful means”.
The military has claimed there were irregularities in the voting rolls for last November’s election, which Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won in a landslide.
Aung Hlaing also repeated that his government will hold “a free and fair election” after “the accomplishment of the State of Emergency provision” but gave no further details.
The junta detained Suu Kyi on the day it took power, and continues to hold her on minor criminal charges while investigating allegations of corruption against her that her supporters dismiss as politically motivated.
… with assessing whether the European Union should label nuclear power … sustainable investment in the EU, based on whether they … on the draft document. EU countries are split over … said Greenpeace EU policy adviser Silvia Pastorelli. EU countries are also …
Instead, she helps families and senior citizens achieve “rightsizing,” a term she defines as “that perfect place between too much and too little.” While her work means she often assists clients before they move into a smaller apartment or assisted living facility, she says her job isn’t to make people get rid of the stuff they love.
“I help people identify the best things so that they can let go of all the other stuff that doesn’t matter so much,” she says.
That’s an important distinction considering that a senior citizen moving out of a longtime home will often have to give up 50-75 percent of their possessions before they get to their new place, she says. Now, she’s sharing some of the things she’s learned — and offering some tough, but fair, love and encouragement — in a new book, “Keep the Memories, Not the Stuff.”
Bryant started to realize just how difficult that process can be while growing up on a farm in North Dakota before she graduated from Hillsboro High School in 2000. Her grandparents died in 1992 and 1994, and her parents, then in their 40s, spent months emptying out two farmsteads full of stuff.
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</div> Bryant's own mother died in 2005, and her father moved out of the farmhouse into town — and at the age of 24, she had to sort through her late mother's possessions, trying to figure out what to do with everything and what she wanted to keep.</p> <p>After high school, she attended Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, and then pursued a master's degree in English and Great Plains studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She wasn't sure what she wanted to do for a career, so she started working in the student affairs office at a local university but quickly realized it wasn't her passion.</p> <p>That's when she heard about a job opening at a company that helped seniors who were downsizing or moving — and thought back on her own family experiences trying to do it alone. She says she figured the field could be the "perfect blend" of her skills, as well as her love of seniors and passion for organizing.</p> <p>"I thought, 'There's a real need out there for this,'" she says.</p> <div class="inline-element" readability="6.5">
An example of a room of “stuff” that Jeannine Bryant and her team at Changing Spaces SRS helped people sort through during a life transition in 2018. Special to The Forum
She started with the company, <a href="https://changingspacessrs.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Changing Space SRS in Lincoln, Neb.</a>, in 2008, and became a co-owner in 2010 and the sole owner in 2014 when the original owners retired.</p> <p>Along the way, she's become the author of two books, most recently "Keep the Memories, Not the Stuff," <a href="https://easyrightsizing.com/book/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">available to purchase online through her website</a> or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Memories-Stuff-Jeannine-Bryant/dp/B08TZ3HTRJ/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=keep+the+memories+not+the+stuff&qid=1616517190&sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Amazon</a>, and she also shares more advice on her website, <a href="https://easyrightsizing.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://easyrightsizing.com/</a>.</p> <p>Bryant says having too much stuff is something that affects just about everyone in America, driven by easy access to cheap products thanks to online shopping and mass production. It also means that families can find themselves saddled with callbacks to past trends and interests, such as a large number of collectible plates that none of the children want.</p> <p>That's why she says rightsizing is a good project for adults of all ages to take on — not just seniors who are moving out of their home or families clearing out an apartment after a loved one has died.</p> <div class="inline-element" readability="8.5">
Cover for “Keep the Memories, Not the Stuff,” a new book by Hillsboro, N.D., native and rightsizing expert Jeannine Bryant. Special to The Forum
What rightsizing even means varies, she says, and will change depending on how many things a person has to begin with, as well as their generational preference for keeping things or living more minimally, and what is important to them.</p> <p>In her latest book, Bryant says there are five categories that everything falls into when rightsizing: what to keep; what to give away to family or friends; what to sell; what to donate to charity; and what to throw away or recycle.</p> <p>But the task of sorting through a lifetime's worth of stuff is big enough, so she advises readers to just focus on the first two, at least to start: what to keep, and what to give away. Everything else, she writes, can become a distraction, and they'll be easy to finish once it's already been decided what to keep for yourself or family.</p> <p>Rather than obsessing over a possible sales price of that antique sewing machine, Bryant says people need to keep their eyes on the "big picture." </p> <p>"You need to decide, 'What am I keeping and what items do I want to give to my family members,' and then once you really internalize that and your choices, quite frankly, nothing else matters," she says.</p> <p>It's that "perspective shift" that she helps her clients make, and Bryant says it can feel like "tough love" working with people to realize some uncomfortable truths. That includes a big one: "Your stuff doesn't owe you anything." Just because a collectible cost $50 to buy doesn't mean it's worth $50, she says.</p> <div class="inline-element" readability="6.5">
Another full room that Jeannine Bryant and her team at Changing Spaces SRS helped clients sort through. Special to The Forum
Instead, she wants people to focus on the value or usefulness in terms beyond the dollar value. And that’s why her latest book offers another piece of tough-but-true advice: Your kids probably don’t want your stuff.
Bryant explains that people can feel pressured to keep something, even if they don’t personally want it. She advises readers to think about what they actually want, regardless of any else’s opinion — and stop trying to make relatives happy.
Still, she says it’s possible to help a grandkid or child see value in specific family heirlooms or keepsakes. Bryant recommends attaching a story or experience to prized possessions, such as pointing out the single item that came from the “old country” with an ancestor, to explain why it’s important to you — and why it might become a cherished item for them someday.
Similarly, sharing experiences can bond kids to their parents’ stuff, like rolling pins if baking is a family hobby, woodworking tools for craftier people or that classic car that you cruised in together.
“What is really being kept here is the experience, which created a memory in your loved ones’ mind,” she writes. “The object itself is merely representative of that experience.”
Ultimately, Bryant reminds readers that it’s all about the relationships to begin with — and that’s why we should aim to make our legacy about more than possessions.
“Give the kids your story not your stuff,” she explains in the book.
File – In this Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020 file photo, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz delivers his speech during the debate about Germany’s budget 2021, at the parliament Bundestag in Berlin, Germany. The center-left Social Democrats’ candidate to succeed German Chancellor Angela Merkel is backing the idea of a European Union army. But Olaf Scholz told weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that likely won’t happen in the near term.Markus Schreiber/AP
BERLIN (AP) — The center-left Social Democrats’ candidate to succeed German Chancellor Angela Merkel is backing the idea of a European Union army but says the creation of one likely won’t happen in the near future.
Olaf Scholz told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper that any EU force would need to be subject to the same parliamentary control as Germany’s army, which only can be deployed with approval from national lawmakers.
In interview extracts published Saturday, the newspaper quoted Scholz as saying that an agreement on military missions would need to “take place in European bodies that would certainly include the European Parliament as well.”
The idea of a European army has long been under discussion, with some of the bloc’s 27 member states in favor and others opposed. Scholz said establishing one was “not a topic for the short-term, though.”
Recent opinion polls for Germany’s Sept. 26 national election put the Social Democratic Party in third place, behind Merkel’s Union grouping and the environmentalist Green party.
EU-Africa relations should prioritise healthcare as part of a new partnership of equals, EU lawmakers said as they set out their priorities for talks on a strategic partnership between the two continents.
On Thursday (25 March), MEPs adopted their own blueprint that, they hope, will feed into the discussions on a new EU-Africa partnership by 460 votes in favour to 64 against.
The two blocs “must move beyond the donor-recipient relationship”, the Parliament report said, a mantra used increasingly often under Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission.
The report by Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, a French centrist MEP, calls for the EU to support African regional integration and domestic production to help reduce dependence on foreign imports as well as the African continental free trade area launched in January.
Speaking during the European Parliament debate on Wednesday, EU International Partnerships Commissioner Jutta Urpilainen said that the Commission was seeking “a joined-up approach and a renewed partnership with our sister continent Africa.”
However, talks between the EU and the African Union have been derailed by COVID-19, which was declared a global pandemic two days after the Commission published its strategy for a “sustainable partnership.”
At the heart of the Commission blueprint was a focus on the green transition, energy, and digital transformation. Those remain, with the EU executive anxious to ensure that the EU’s carbon adjustment mechanism will not hurt African exports. Additional priorities have also emerged in the wake of the pandemic.
The EU is one of the leading donors to the World Health Organisation-backed COVAX initiative, which has started to distribute COVID vaccines to African countries in recent weeks. MEPs want to build on this by stepping up EU-Africa collaboration on health research and innovation to boost local production of equipment and medicine.
“Our African friends are our allies and all Europeans have to grasp the importance and the opportunity that this partnership offers to us,” Zacharopoulou told lawmakers.
The French MEP added that this should begin by “reinforcing Africa’s healthcare systems; we also have to implement an EU-Africa Green Pact.”
The report also calls on international lenders, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to do more to relieve the debt burdens of African countries, which have been exacerbated by the pandemic, pushing a group of countries, including Angola, the Republic of Congo, and Zambia into debt distress.
The G20 leaders are close to giving the green light for the IMF to issue $500 billion of Special Drawing Rights prioritising developing countries, to sit alongside the G20’s pre-existing Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI).
With most of Europe and a number of African countries now facing a third wave of the pandemic there are growing concerns that a planned EU-AU summit, which the Portuguese government is keen to host as part of its six-month EU Council presidency, will again be delayed.
The EU’s plans to strike a ‘strategic partnership’ with Africa were one the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. After the European Commission set out its stall in a March 2020 strategic paper, summits were cancelled and it is unclear whether EU and African Union leaders will agree on an agenda with the ambition needed for a genuine ‘strategic partnership’ this year.
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Four spiritual festivals converge this weekend – Passover, Palm Sunday, Holi, the Hindu Spring Festival and the Aries solar Festival (full moon). The Tibetan in the Alice Bailey blue books, informs us that when the many different religious festivals occur together, it is a sign that the new Aquarian world religion is unfolding.
Saturday’s Passover (Pesach) is the festival of remembering when the Jewish people left the slavery in Egypt (left the Taurus Age) and began their long forty-year walk in the desert (for purification) , eventually entering Canaan, (Aries Age of the Law, the Ten Commandments). Passover begins Saturday evening at the sign of the first star.
Sundayis Palm Sunday, the Catholic festival of Christ completing His forty days and nights in the desert (note the number 40 in both stories). Palm Sundaybegins Holy or Passion Week. Palms (symbolizing peace, victory, respect) were waved, heralding the Messiah, the Promised One. In our days now, we await His return, the precipitation of the Aquarian Teacher to begin in 2025.
Sundayis also Holi, the joyful Hindu Spring Festival symbolizing good over evil. It is also the full moon, the esoteric Aries Spring Resurrection Festival, the first of the Three Spring Festivals, setting the spiritual template for the year.
The Aries solar festival (8 degrees Aries) is Spring’s first full moon. The Aries festival celebrates new life spring forth, the Easter festival. It is also about the Love of God and the Hierarchy for humanity.
Motherhood – “It was the morning of a normal working day before fighting escalated close to the hospital. I heard a mother screaming at the gate”, midwife Shrook Khalid Saeed told UNFPA, at the Al Shaab Hospital in the district of Crater, in Yemen.
By the time she arrived at the entrance to the hospital, hostilities in the area had flared and a gunfight had broken out. “Bullets were coming from all the corners of the street”, she recounted. “When I arrived at the gate, I found the pregnant woman lying down and crying for help. I pulled her and rushed her inside a car. That is where all of it happened. In a few minutes, she had delivered a healthy baby boy.”
Childbirth can be harrowing in even the best of times but the cascade of humanitarian crises in Yemen have made the journey to motherhood more dangerous than ever. The country’s long-running conflict has depleted the health system. Currently only half of all health facilities are functioning.
The pandemic has only aggravated the situation, with roughly 15 per cent of the health system shifted to deal with COVID-19 cases. Only 20 per cent of functioning health facilities are providing maternal and child health services.
Today, a woman in Yemen dies during childbirth every two hours, almost always from preventable causes. And now, the threat of famine looms.
Pregnant and breastfeeding women are especially vulnerable during times of food insecurity. Currently 1.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding women are acutely malnourished, and these numbers could double if humanitarian funding does not materialize.
“When I came to receive antenatal care at Al Shaab Hospital, I was very weak and pale. I could not stand straight”, 33-year-old Hafsa told UNFPA during Dr. Kanem’s visit. “My nutritional status was very poor. I was given medicines to supplement my diet, and I was advised to eat meat, vegetables and fruits.”
But good nutrition was beyond reach due to her family’s low income. When she delivered her daughter months later, the girl weighed only 1.8 kg. “The baby stayed in the hospital for a couple of days as I did not have enough breast milk to feed her”, Hafsa said.
Malnutrition puts both women in childbirth and newborn babies at serious risk.
“I’ve been in many maternity wards, and they are usually a place of joy. But in Yemen, I witnessed the devastation of malnutrition and hunger, with newborn babies on feeding tubes and mothers weakened by fear and exhaustion,” Dr. Kanem noted. “It is heartbreaking to see fellow members of the human family in such dire conditions.”
Violence at home
Women’s and girls’ vulnerability to violence has greatly escalated under the country’s crisis.
During Dr. Kanem’s visit, she spoke to women at a UNFPA-supported shelter.
One young girl, Alea*, told Dr. Kanem about being married off at age 13. Child marriage is increasingly being used as a coping mechanism by impoverished families.
“When I told my father, I do not want to get married, my father and grandmother beat me with a water pipe. They said by getting married I will have a better life”, Alea said. “My life only got worse. My husband started to sell all my jewellery and when I inquired about them, he would beat me. I then ran to my father’s house, but he also beat me and chased me back to my husband. I was left with nowhere to go.”
A nine-month-old girls is checked for malnutrition at a health centre in Sana’a, Yemen.
Escape to shelter
A neighbour helped Alea escape. She has been living at the shelter for over five months, attending training workshops and dreaming of returning to school.
“I spoke to young girls and pregnant women who had to flee for their lives and seek protection at UNFPA sites, which are among the very few safe spaces for women and girls”, Dr. Kanem said.
UNFPA is supporting eight such shelters and 51 women’s and girls’ safe spaces. Last year, UNFPA provided more than half of all health facilities in Yemen with essential life-saving medicines and reached more than 1.2 million women and girls with reproductive health services.
But much more support is needed. “The women and girls of Yemen deserve peace. For too long, they have been caught up in a conflict that is not of their making,” Dr. Kanem urged. “The world must act now.”
