'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
“Biodiversity is life. Biodiversity weaves the web of life. It is not corporate ‘intellectual property’. It is not a financial asset of those whose greed drives biodiversity extinction and loss.”
— Dr Vandana Shiva
To celebrate World Biodiversity Day, Navdanya International presents Biodiversity Is Health.
We break down how all levels of biodiversity have a direct and tangible tie to human health. Continue reading
– So busy as they are with strengthening military alliances and devoting billions of taxpayers’ money to double their war budgets and subsidise fossil fuels, European Governments seem not to care about the reiterated alerts that their continent faces a serious risk: the reduced availability -and the more polluted– drinking water.
It is estimated that more than one third of the European Union will be under “high water stress” by the 2070. Credit: Bigstock
Two specialised bodies –the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), and the European branch of the World Health Organization (WHO)– have warned that plans to make water access possible in the face of climate pressures “are absent” in the pan-European region. Continue reading
– A class war is being waged in the name of fighting inflation. All too many central bankers are raising interest rates at the expense of working people’s families, supposedly to check price increases.
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Workers’ share of national income, 1970-2015
Forced to cope with rising credit costs, people are spending less, thus slowing the economy. But it does not have to be so. There are much less onerous alternative approaches to tackle inflation and other contemporary economic ills. Continue reading
Geneva, 25 May 2022 (UNEP)* – Paint reformulation is entirely possible, and the industry can produce paint without added lead. However, a lack of technical knowledge; a lack of awareness of the health and environmental hazard of lead and where to source lead-free alternatives, as well as a shortage of lead paint laws in the countries where they are based mean many small manufacturers around the world are still producing hazardous lead paint.
May 2022 (FAO)* — Step inside a tea merchant’s shop in China with its metal canisters lining the walls or scroll through the range offered by any of the country’s popular online shopping platforms and you’ll be able to choose among green teas, black teas or in-between, semi-fermented teas. But as an ancient industry turns its eyes to the future, another choice you might soon be able to make is low carbon teas.
Droughts represent 15% of natural disasters but took the largest human toll, approximately 650,000 deaths from 1970-2019, Credit: Guillermo Flores/IPS
But it is not about only them. Also you are already affected. In fact, around 1.700 billion of drylands, home to two billion people, are already covering 41% of the planet’s land surface.
Moreover, an additional 1 billion dryland hectares are now under threat. Continue reading
Instead of buying into the World Economic Forum’s dystopian “Great Reset,” we can build an alternative system with a mandate to serve the people.
This is part two to a May 5, 2022 article called “A Monetary Reset Where the Rich Don’t Own Everything,” the gist of which was that national and global debt levels are unsustainably high. We need a “reset,” but of what sort?
Ellen Brown
The “Great Reset” of the World Economic Forum (WEF) would leave the people as non-owner tenants in a feudalistic technocracy.
The reset of the Eurasian Economic Union would allow participating nations to opt out of the Western capitalist system altogether, but what of the Western countries that are left? That is the question addressed here.
Our Forefathers Had Some Innovative Solutions
Fortunately for the United States, our national debt is in U.S. dollars. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once observed, “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”
Women in Nigeria collect food vouchers as part of a programme to support families struggling under the COVID-19 lockdown. Credit: WFP/Damilola Onafuwa
Sounds altruistic – even as the number of billionaires keep rising while the poorest of the world’s poor keep multiplying. Continue reading
(UN News)* — More than 33 million new jobs need to be created by 2030 in the Middle East and North Africa region by 2030, if the world’s largest unemployment hot spot is to be substantially improved, four United Nations agencies said on Monday [23 May 2022].
The joint-release by the UN labour agency, ILO, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was issued ahead of a two-day meeting in Amman, Jordan, aiming to address the youth transition from learning, to work, a key priority for adolescents and young people across the vast predominantly Arabic-speaking region.
(UN News)* — The recovery of the global jobs market is going into reverse, the UN labour agency, ILO, said on Monday [23 May 2022], blaming COVID-19 and “other multiple crises” that have increased inequalities within and between countries.
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(UN News)* — With a scorching summer fast approaching, food prices rising and access to water and electricity limited in many parts of Syria, donors must make good on $4.3 billion in humanitarian pledges committed at last week’s Brussels funding conference, the UN’s senior humanitarian official told the Security Council on Friday [20 May 2022].
Martin Griffiths, Humanitarian Affairs chief and Emergency Relief Coordinator, thanked donors for their contributions – totalling nearly $6.7 billion – which includes $2.4 billion earmarked for 2023 and beyond.
(UN News)* – As 18 million people in Africa’s Sahel region teeter on the edge of severe hunger over the next three months, the UN released on Friday [20 May 2022] an additional $30 million from its emergency humanitarian fund, to boost the humanitarian response across four countries.
Food insecurity is set to reach its highest level since 2014, warned the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
“Entire families in the Sahel are on the brink of starvation,” said Martin Griffiths, UN Humanitarian Affairs chief and Emergency Relief Coordinator. “If we don’t act now, people will perish”.
Sobering numbers
In the Sahel, 7.7 million children under five are expected to suffer from malnutrition, of which 1.8 million are severely malnourished.
And if aid operations are not scaled up, this number could reach 2.4 million by the year’s end.
“The good news is that human decisions are the largest contributors to disaster risk, so we have the power to substantially reduce the threats posed to humanity, and especially the most vulnerable among us” Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
Others, instead, may think that such human ingenuity will once more address the symptoms rather than the causes provoking them. Thus, they would be right to want to be informed and aware of the root causes of such disasters in order to push for eradicating them. Continue reading
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water. Only / There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: I. The Burial of the Dead, 1922
Pepe Escobar
This glimpse of “fear in a handful of dust” already ranks as one the prime breakthroughs of the young 21st century, presented this week by Chief of Russian Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Protection Force Igor Kirillov.
The provisional results of evidence being collected about the work of U.S. bioweapons in Ukraine are simply astonishing. These are the main takeaways.
Global Coalition Calls for Financial Remedy for Deaths, Wage Theft.
London, 18 May 2022 – Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Qatar have not received financial compensation or any other adequate remedy for serious labor abuses suffered while building and servicing infrastructure for the FIFA World Cup, which begins in November 2022, Human Rights Watch on 18 May 2022 said.
GODE, Ethiopia, 19 May 2022 (UNFPA)* – “When I saw my baby’s hand coming out, I ran for our lives. We travelled nearly 90 kilometres to the nearest health facility… We are both lucky to be alive.”
Ayan Abadi Wali, 24, recounted her story while recovering from a life-saving caesarean-section delivery in Gode, a town in Ethiopia’s Somali region and one of the hardest hit by the country’s worst drought in four decades.
Ms. Abadi is currently living at an informal settlement in the Shabelle zone with her seven children and her mother-in-law, Ms. Barkhado, alongside hundreds of others displaced by the drought.
Yet those who skimmed the headlines of initial reports from several U.S. media outlets may have been left with a different impression of what happened.
“Israeli Police Clash with Mourners at Funeral Procession,” read the headline of MSNBC’s online report. The Wall Street Journal had a similar headline on its story: “Israeli Forces, Palestinians Clash in West Bank before Funeral of Journalist.”
16 May 2022 (UNEP)* — As anyone who visits Egypt between the months of May to September can attest, the weather gets hot, often uncomfortably so.
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That is especially true in Cairo—a megacity home to nearly 22 million people—where the mercury can hit 40°C.
Those sky-high temperatures are partially a product of the so-called ‘heat island effect,’ which sees buildings, roads, and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s warmth more than natural landscapes.
Research shows that things will only get worse for cities due to the climate crisis.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that by the year 2100, many cities across the world could warm as much as 4°C if greenhouse gas emissions continue “at high levels,” – a potential health hazard for inhabitants.
Global gas flaring increased to 144 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2021 from 142 bcm in 2020. It is estimated that each cubic metre of associated gas flared results in about 2.8 kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions. Credit: public domain
This is anything but a minor issue: in fact, as much as 144 billion cubic metres of gas was flared at upstream oil and gas facilities in just one year-2021. Such an amount caused the emission of 400 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent, according to the World Bank.
A world renowned journalist Shireen AbuAqleh was intentionally murdered by an Israeli sniper in Jenin. Millions of tears were shed for her including ours at the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (palestinenature.org). We planted ten trees in her honor. The constellation of events and circumstances and her background actually were so amazing that it provided a huge dose of sadness but also a big ray of hope for us.
.She was a journalist and wearing protective blue journalist vest and helmet. Thus she mobilized the media. She was beloved by every Palestinian home for her coverage of their daily miseries inflected by foreign occupiers for decades.
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Children working on tobacco farms in Chipangali District in Eastern Province of Zambia. Credit: Brenda Chitindi
“Most major tobacco producing countries use child labour in tobacco growing. Almost no cigarette can be guaranteed to be free from child labour.” – British Medical Journal, 2015.
– Despite World Day Against Child Labour launched in 2002 by the International Labour Organization (ILO), little has changed over the past two decades for the millions of children who remain trapped. Continue reading
(UN News)* — Severe malnutrition, also known as severe wasting, is one of the top threats to child survival, yet perhaps one of the least known or understood, according to a report issued on Tuesday [17 May 2022] by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Severe Wasting: An overlooked child survival emergency, details that around one in five deaths among children under age five, can be attributed to severe wasting.
Triggered by a lack of nutritious food and repeated bouts of disease – such as diarrhoea, measles and malaria – it compromises a child’s immunity.
(UN News)* — The news that more than 100,000 people in Mexico are now officially registered as “disappeared” is a tragedy, UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet said on Tuesday [17 May 2022], in a call for action to tackle the country’s longstanding problem.
A national database has listed all those who’ve been reported missing in the country since 1964, and the tally continues to climb, amid ongoing drug gang violence and a lack of effective investigations.
To date, only 35 of the disappearances recorded since then have led to the conviction of the perpetrators, a “staggering rate of impunity”, said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
(UN News)* — Syrian families living in refugee camps in Iraq are facing new and alarming levels of food insecurity, according to figures released by the World Food Programme (WFP) and UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on Tuesday [17 May 2022].
Iraq hosts nearly 260,000 Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom are based in the Kurdistan Region.
– Central bank policies have often worsened economic crises instead of resolving them. By raising interest rates in response to inflation, they often exacerbate, rather than mitigate business cycles and inflation.
Neither gods nor maestros
US Federal Reserve Bank chair Jerome Powell has admitted: “Whether we can execute a soft landing or not, it may actually depend on factors that we don’t control.” He conceded, “What we can control is demand, we can’t really affect supply with our policies. And supply is a big part of the story here”.
Anis Chowdhury
Hence, decisionmakers must consider more appropriate policy tools. Rejecting ‘one size fits all’ formulas, including simply raising interest rates, anti-inflationary measures should be designed as appropriate. Instead of squelching demand by raising interest rates, supply could be enhanced.
Thus, Milton Friedman – whom many central bankers still worship – blamed the 1930s’ Great Depression on the US Fed. Instead of providing liquidity support to businesses struggling with short-term cash-flow problems, it squeezed credit, crushing economic activity.
16 May 2022 (UN News)* — Countries taking part in the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour this week in South Africa, are being urged to do more to end child labour by 2025.
The strong call for urgent action at the conference taking place in Durban, aims to combat an uptick in the numbers of children being forced into work. Latest figures indicate that 160 million children – almost one in ten worldwide – are still being affected.
Furthermore, numbers are on the rise, with the pandemic threating to reverse years of progress, as child labour becomes a bigger scourge in particular among the vulnerable five to 11-year-old age group.
“I have been talking to leaders of rich countries to address the problem of post-pandemic economic meltdown. We have to work for social protection for marginalised people in low-income countries and focus on children, education, health, and protection. That is not a big investment compared to what we are going to lose – a whole generation.” – Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi
Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi addresses the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour. Despite setbacks, he is optimistic that child labour can be abolished. Credit: Cecilia Russell/IPS
– A mere 35 billion US dollars per annum – equivalent to 10 days of military spending – would ensure all children in all countries benefit from social protection, Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi told the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour. Continue reading
While elite control over human societies started to gather pace with the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, it was rapidly accelerated with the dawn of human civilization 7,000 years later.
Robert J. Burrowes
Since that time, ‘ordinary’ human beings like you and me have fought an unending sequence of battles to defend ourselves against these ongoing efforts by elites to kill or control us and capture the bulk of Earth’s resources for their own use.
We have had to fight off elites in a vast range of contexts: Pharaohs and Emperors politically, the Popes and other Vatican officials religiously, the City of London Corporation and other financial elites economically, monarchs and political elites nationally, and now a Global Elite that exercises enormous control technologically, economically, politically, militarily and otherwise over the entire world. For a fuller explanation of this point, see ‘Why Activists Fail’.
(UN News)* — Investigations must be held into the actions of the Israeli security forces, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said on Saturday [14 May 2022], calling for accountability and an end to impunity.
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The veteran Palestinian-American journalist was buried in East Jerusalem on Friday and huge crowds turned out for her funeral.
The High Commissioner issued a statement saying she was following “with deep distress” the events in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Every year, 570 million tons of food are wasted at the household level people. Global food waste accounts for 8–10% of greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS
South Africa and other countries that have abstained from voting against Russia at the United Nations General Assembly in response to the war in Ukraine face intense international criticism. In South Africa, the domestic criticism has been extraordinarily shrill, and often clearly racialized.
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It is frequently assumed that abstention means that South Africa is in support of the Russian invasion, and this is either due to corrupt relations between Russian and South African elites, or nostalgia for support given to the anti-apartheid struggle by the Soviet Union, or both. Continue reading
A child beneficiary holding a drawing portraying domestic violence, at the Centre for Youth Empowerment and Civic Education, Lilongwe, Malawi which partnered with the ILO/IPEC to support the national action plan aimed at combating child labour. Credit: Marcel Crozet/ILO
(UN NEWS)* — Humanity is “at a crossroads” when it comes to managing drought and accelerating ways of slowing it down must happen “urgently, using every tool we can”, said the head of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) on Thursday [12 May 2022], calling for a global commitment to support drought preparedness and resilience.
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Through its newly published Drought in Numbers report, released in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, during the 15th Conference of Parties (COP15), UNCCD’s compendium of drought-related information and data is helping inform negotiations for the final outcomes of the conference when it closes on 20 May.
(UN News)* — The top UN official in the Middle East has urged Israel to halt all settlement activity following the latest approval given to new construction in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, announced on Thursday [12 May 2022].
“I condemn today’s decision by Israeli authorities to advance plans for over 4,000 housing units in settlements in the occupied West Bank,” Tor Wennesland, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said in a statement.
Israel’s Higher Planning Council, which approved the move, also retroactively legalized two outposts: Mitzpeh Dani and Givat Oz VeGaon, according to media reports.
Pope Francis has suggested to Italian daily Corriere Della Sera that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” provoked the military operation in Ukraine and alluded that countries should not supply Ukraine with more arms. Specifically, the Pope said that Russia has “an anger that I don’t know whether it was provoked but was perhaps facilitated” by NATO’s unrelenting expansion towards the Eurasian Giant.
Thousands of people form a huge peace sign to protest against the invasion of Ukraine in Heroes’ Square, Budapest. © Bence Jardany / Greenpeace
Protecting plant health can help end hunger, reduce poverty, protect biodiversity and the environment, and boost economic development. Credit: Saleem Shaikh/IPS
As dangerous as the fact that up to 40% of food crops are lost due to plant pests and diseases every single year, according to the world top food and agriculture organisation.
This is affecting both food security and agriculture, the main source of income for vulnerable rural communities, FAOwarns on the occasion of the International Day of Plant Health, marked 12 May 2022. Continue reading
The We Are Human, We Are Free Campaign
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Millions of people worldwide are aware that their lives, and their children’s lives, are being threatened by lockdowns, vaccine mandates and loss of free speech.
And there is a growing awareness that these immediate and obvious threats are merely parts of a complex overall plan to implement a technocratic system of world governance that can be described as a neo-feudal system that seeks to increase and consolidate the power and wealth of the world’s billionaire individuals and families by destroying any possibility of autonomous individual behaviour.
The intention of these psychopathic elitists is that we ‘the people’ become literal extensions of their will, through technological invasion of all aspects of our lives which will lead to the total loss of our capacity to feel, think and act for ourselves. Continue reading
Caught in a web of deceit, a human trafficking survivor from Ghana tells her story. Credit: Getty Images
Cissy says although she was a bit sceptical about the offer and afraid of her destination country, the so-called travel agent convinced her that she had nothing to worry about. Continue reading
We have a serious debt problem, but solutions such as the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” are not the future we want. It’s time to think outside the box for some new solutions.
Ellen Brown
In ancient Mesopotamia, it was called a Jubilee. When debts at interest grew too high to be repaid, the slate was wiped clean. Debts were forgiven, the debtors’ prisons were opened, and the serfs returned to work their plots of land.
This could be done because the king was the representative of the gods who were said to own the land, and thus was the creditor to whom the debts were owed. The same policy was advocated in the Book of Leviticus, though it is unclear to what extent this biblical Jubilee was implemented.
That sort of across-the-board debt forgiveness can’t be done today because most of the creditors are private lenders. Banks, landlords and pension fund investors would go bankrupt if their contractual rights to repayment were simply wiped out. But we do have a serious debt problem, and it is largely structural.
Governments have delegated the power to create money to private banks, which create most of the circulating money supply as debt at interest.
World Bank, Washington DC. | The multilateral Asian Development Bank and the World Bank owns 13% and 9% of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, respectively.
(UN News)* — Alcohol is increasingly being marketed across borders, with young people and heavy drinkers particularly targeted, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a new report on Tuesday [10 May 2022] that calls for more effective regulation.
Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist
Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent, Vermont) describes himself as a democratic socialist. When asked to explain in more detail what he means by this, he says that he believes that the United States would benefit from having a social system more like those found in the Scandinavian countries.
The Danish Political and Social System
John Scales Avery
I have lived and worked in Denmark for the last half century, teaching at the University of Copenhagen until my retirement, and I am married to a Danish wife.
This gives me some knowledge of the way that the social system works in Denmark, and I will try to describe it for you.
Denmark has a market economy, with private corporations, but it also has cooperatives, owned by the users. The main thing that distinguishes Denmark from a country like the United States is the very high and steeply progressive rate of taxation. Because rich people are taxed so extremely heavily, it is difficult for anyone to become very rich.
10 May 2022 (FAO)* — They are in the lotion that keeps our skin smooth or the herbal tea we sip on Sunday afternoons. They are waiting to be drizzled on salads or tucked into the daily food supplements we take. Wild plants are scattered throughout our everyday existence offering us with food, oxygen and medicine.
(UN News)* — The 15th session of the Conference of Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), kicked-off on Monday [9 May 2022], in the Ivorian “economic” capital.
Against the backdrop of a UNCCD warning that up to 40 per cent of all ice-free land has already degraded, threatening dire consequences for climate, biodiversity, and livelihoods, world leaders are meeting in Abidjan under the theme of “Land, Life. Legacy: From scarcity to prosperity”.
“We are faced with a crucial choice,” Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told the participants.
Geneva, 9 May 2022 (WMO)* – There is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial level for at least one of the next five years – and the likelihood is increasing with time, according to a new climate update issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
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There is a 93% likelihood of at least one year between 2022-2026 becoming the warmest on record and dislodging 2016 from the top ranking.
People require humanitarian assistance, livelihood support, jobs, and long-term investment to help solve the crisis.
WFP/Arete/Andrew Quilty
KABUL, (WFP)* – 19.7 million people, almost half of Afghanistan’s population, are facing acute hunger according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis conducted in January and February 2022 by Food Security and Agriculture Cluster partners, including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and many NGOs.
With few ways to earn income on the border, many young men turn to the dangerous but well-paid work of people smuggling.
Graffiti on the US-Mexico border wall | Mike Hardiman/Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved
With years of conflict, a severe economic downturn, and food prices rising relentlessly since 2020, the Ukraine crisis is exacerbating what was already an alarming food security scenario in Syria.
In March, food prices increased by 24 percent in just one month, following an 800 percent increase in the last two years. This has brought food prices to their highest level since 2013.
“Saying that the situation in Syria is alarming is a huge understatement. The heart-breaking reality for millions of Syrian families is that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 