Six In The Morning

 Bangladesh completes garmet factory collapse probe

  Court set to decide whether to put building owners and several officials on trial for deaths of 1,200 workers in 2013.

28 Jun 2015 06:42 GMT

The investigation into the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh in 2013 has been completed.

Nearly 1,200 garment workers were killed when the Rana Plaza building came crashing down.

A court is about to decide whether it will put the building owners and a number of government officials on trial.

Meanwhile, survivors recall their tragic experiences as they continue to suffer from their injuries and feel neglected.

Al Jazeera’s Maher Sattar reports from Dhaka.

Greece is doomed

 

Matthew Yglesias  

Things seem to have reached Desperation O’Clock in Greece, where Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is now seeking a referendum as a way to avoid a choice between agreeing to the kind of austerity budget he promised to avoid and the Greek exit from the eurozone that he also promised to avoid. For the latest developments, you should probably check a dedicated financial news service like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, or the Financial Times. For a sophisticated and well-informed account of what Greece’s European partners have done wrong, you should read Karl Whelan. For an analysis of the specifics of Tsipras’ gambit, you should read Hugo Dixon.

But to understand the deeper causes of what’s been going on since Tsipras’ government swept to power in January, you really need to set the finance and economics aside and focus on the politics. Greece has been drawing dead this whole time, and the future outlook appears bleak for one simple reason – nobody else in Europe who holds power has any interest in making things anything other than painful for Greece.

 Pope Francis recruits Naomi Klein in climate change battle

  Social activist ‘surprised but delighted’ to join top cardinal in high-level environment conference at the Vatican



 Rosie Scammell Sunday 28 June 2015 00.11 BST

She is one of the world’s most high-profile social activists and a ferocious critic of 21st-century capitalism. He is one of the pope’s most senior aides and a professor of climate change economics. But this week the secular radical will join forces with the Catholic cardinal in the latest move by Pope Francis to shift the debate on global warming.

Naomi Klein and Cardinal Peter Turkson are to lead a high-level conference on the environment, bringing together churchmen, scientists and activists to debate climate change action. Klein, who campaigns for an overhaul of the global financial system to tackle climate change, told the Observer she was surprised but delighted to receive the invitation from Turkson’s office.

  Isis, a year of the caliphate: How powerful is the ‘Islamic State’ and what threat does it really pose to West?

     We pose the big questions to eight experts in the first in a four-part series

ADAM WITHNALL  , DANNY ROMERO   Sunday 28 June 2015

It is now one year since Isis declared the territories it controls as a single caliphate, but because of the dangers of travelling there we still know surprisingly little about this brutal militant group.

Across the Western world, academics, experts and officials are struggling to get to grips with an organisation that only seems set to grow in its importance and influence.

Here, we ask eight leading authorities on the so-called “Islamic State” just how strong the group really is – and how much of a threat it poses to the rest of the world.

Confronting the Past: America Finally Turns Its Attention to Rampant Racism

  Why is America only now having an honest debate about racism? The dead from Charleston are also the dead of a nation that has long refused to work through its past mistakes.

  A Commentary by Markus Feldenkirchen

The United State excels at dealing with the injustices of other countries. They often even help other countries to cope with their shameful past. Germany will always be grateful to the US for sending American troops across the Atlantic to defeat the Nazis. And for insisting that the Germans be held accountable for the crimes they committed. The Nuremberg trials gave Germans the opportunity to own up to what they had done. They could no longer deny it.

The US has been less successful, however, in conducting the same process when addressing the dark parts of its own past. This includes its treatment of Native Americans who were brutally repressed, or even killed, in order to clear the way for Western expansion. They were betrayed, neglected and disrespected. Today, they live on reservations in some of the saddest living conditions the civilized world has to offer.

Activists: IS fighters kill 200 civilians in Syrian town

 

 By HAMZA HENDAWI

BEIRUT (AP) – Islamic State fighters who launched a surprise attack on a Syrian border town massacred more than 200 civilians, including women and children, before they were killed or driven out by Kurdish forces, activists said on Saturday.

Kurdish activist Mustafa Bali, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Kurdish official Idris Naasan put at 40-50 the number of elite IS fighters killed in the two days of fighting since the militants sneaked into the town of Kobani before dawn on Thursday.

Clashes, however, continued to the south and west of the predominantly Kurdish town on the Turkish border on Saturday, they said, although the fighting in the south quietened down by nightfall.