MADRID, Mar 21 2023 (IPS)* – Shockingly, the human suicidal war on Nature not only continues unabated but is also set to become even more virulent. Just to start with, please be reminded that groundwater accounts for 99% of all liquid freshwater on Earth, according to the 2022 UN World Water Development Report.
“Drop by drop, this precious lifeblood is being poisoned by pollution and drained by vampiric overuse, with water demand expected to exceed supply by 40% by decade’s end” Credit: Bigstock.
And that groundwater already provides half of the volume of water withdrawn for domestic use by the global population, including the drinking water for the vast majority of the rural population who do not get their water delivered to them via public or private supply systems.
Also that around 25% of all water withdrawn for irrigation, being this a major cause of the fast depletion and pollution of this vital source.
There are two main reasons behind such a dangerous over-exploitation and poisoning of the world’s groundwater: Continue reading →
(WFP)* — Before the deadly earthquakes on its border with Türkiye, in February, Syria was a largely forgotten crisis – now, as the country marks 12 years of conflict, the unprecedented hardships people continue to face there are thrown into sharp relief.
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A boy in Aleppo amid the rubble of an earthquake-hit building. Many families continue to occupy dangerous structures in Syria. WFP/Jonathan Dumont
More than half of Syria’s population, or 12.1 million people, are food-insecure with a further 2.9 million on the brink of food insecurity. Food and fuel prices are at their highest in a decade.
“In 2019, an average Syrian family earned enough to buy more than double what they needed every month for food,” says Kenn Crossley, country director and representative for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Syria. “Right now, that same wage, which has not gone up, can only buy a quarter of what the family needs.”
(UN News)* — The UN food agency in Afghanistan announced on Friday [] that a lack of funds has forced deep cuts to life-saving assistance in March for at least four million people.
The World Food Programme (WFP) appealed for urgent funding for its operations in the country, where families are battling crisis after crisis, including growing hunger, since the Taliban takeover of 2021.
Catastrophic hunger could become widespread across Afghanistan, and unless humanitarian support is sustained, hundreds of thousands more people will need assistance to survive, the agency said in an alert.
‘Half of what they need’
Due to funding constraints, at least four million people will receive just half of what they need to get by in March. Ss food stocks have run out before the next harvest is due in May, this is traditionally the most difficult time of the year for rural families, WFP said.
In the lead up to the US-led invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, proponents of the war spoke of the Iraqi people as helpless victims of a dictatorial regime. Yet the Iraqi people paid the heaviest price of the invasion.
Almost half a million people lost their lives, millions lost homes, and countless civilians suffered abuses by all parties to the conflict.
Then and now, Human Rights Watch urged parties to the conflict to compensate victims and hold perpetrators accountable, but impunity prevails.
Soon after military operations began, evidence emerged of coalition laws of war violations. Coalition forces, including the United States and United Kingdom, dropped thousands of inherently indiscriminate cluster munitions in populated areas and conducted indiscriminate airstrikes that killed civilians.
MADRID, Mar 17 2023 (IPS)* – Three-quarters of a century ago, the world adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, emphasising that all human beings are born equal in dignity and rights. The 2023 theme of its 75th anniversary focuses on the urgency of combating racism and racial discrimination.
More: nearly a quarter of a century ago, the world adopted in South Africa the Durban Declaration to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, distrust, intolerance, and hate, globally.
Since then, these “contagious killers” not only continued unabated but are now more spread than ever in all societies, in particular in those under the dominance of the so-called ‘white supremacy.’
In Africa as in the rest of the world, US machinations undermine its goals and bring other nations together as they seek to protect themselves from a desperate empire.
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The US can’t seem to understand that the rest of the world, including Africa, doesn’t like to be pushed around. African nations’ refusal to reinforce US foreign policy in the UN General Assembly is a case in point.
During the Assembly’s February 16 vote on a resolution “deploring” Russia’s action in Ukraine, nearly half the nations who abstained were African, 15 of the 32 , although only 54 of the UN’s 193 member nations are African.
No African nations were on the list of nations introducing the resolution, and two of the seven who voted no—Eritrea and Mali—were African. Continue reading →
“Terrorism and violent extremism cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality, civilization, or ethnic group.”
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Hate speech – including online – has become one of the most common ways of spreading divisive rhetoric on a global scale, threatening peace around the world, says UN chief.
MADRID, Mar 13 2023 (IPS)* – Islamophobia is a ‘fear, prejudice and hatred of Muslims that leads to provocation, hostility and intolerance by means of threatening, harassment, abuse, incitement and intimidation of Muslims and non-Muslims, both in the online and offline world.’
Consequently, suspicion, discrimination and ‘outright hatred’ towards Muslims have risen to “epidemic proportions.”
It appears that the military-industrial complex has complete control of the government of the United States, which recently voted to give the Pentagon roughly a trillion dollars of the taxpayers money. This was done by cutting back on social programs that would have helped poor working families.
Recently Joan Roelofs published a book entitled “The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States” (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2022).
In this book, she points out that the U.S. military-industrial complex has located military bases in regions where the local economy is entirely dependent on them.
The vast river of money flowing into the pockets of the military-industrial complex implies that very many people earn their living, directly, or indirectly, from the manufacture or use of weapons. Continue reading →
March 13, 2023 — The Danish Immigration Service has announced that it deems two more areas of government-controlled Syria as “safe” for returns: Tartous and Latakia. In 2019, Damascus and Rif Damascus were also controversially declared “safe”.
March 13, 2023 — FIFA has been handed a letter supported by over one million petition signatures — and custom-designed football shirts — demanding that it provide compensation to migrant workers who suffered horrific human rights abuses while working on the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar.
The items were delivered to FIFA ahead of the organization’s annual conference on 16 March in Rwanda, where it will come under pressure from some of its own members to remedy these appalling abuses. The one million signatures were collected by Avaaz and Amnesty International in 190 countries.
“This meeting offers another opportunity for FIFA to make amends and establish a firm plan and timetable to directly and quickly recompense workers and their families, who suffered shocking human rights abuses to deliver a World Cup that was built on their sacrifice,” said Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s Head of Economic and Social Justice.
(Tunis) – President Kais Saied’s recent attempt to mitigate the serious harm that a speech he made on February 21, 2023, caused Black African migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in Tunisia does not go far enough, Human Rights Watch said on 10 March 2023.
Measures announced on March 5 fall far short of the steps needed to end a surge in violent assaults, robberies, and vandalism by Tunisian citizens, arbitrary evictions by landlords, and job terminations by employers, that followed Saied’s speech.
(UN News)* — Life-threatening hunger caused by climate shocks, violent insecurity and disease in the Horn of Africa, have left nearly 130,000 people “looking death in the eyes” and nearly 50 million facing crisis levels of food insecurity, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday [].
In an appeal for $178 million to support humanitarian assistance across the seven affected countries in the Greater Horn region, veteran WHO worker Liesbeth Aelbrecht warned that the situation was worse than anything she’d seen in more than two decades in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.
“These 48 million people do include as many as 129,000 who are facing catastrophe; and catastrophe, that means they are facing starvation and literally looking death in the eyes,” Ms. Aelbrecht told journalists in Geneva. Those most at risk, are living in both South Sudan and Somalia.
“The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”
John Adams, (1735-1826)
John Scales Avery
The Nuremberg Principles
According to the Nuremberg Principles, the citizens of a country have a responsibility for the crimes that their governments commit. But to prevent these crimes, the people need to have some knowledge of what is going on. Indeed, democracy cannot function at all without this knowledge.
What are we to think when governments make every effort to keep their actions secret from their own citizens? We can only conclude that although they may call themselves democracies, such governments are in fact oligarchies or dictatorships.
At the end of World War I, it was realized that secret treaties had been responsible for its outbreak, and an effort was made to ensure that diplomacy would be more open in the future. Needless to say, these efforts did not succeed, and diplomacy has remained a realm of secrecy.
KAMPALA & MUBENDE, Mar 10 2023 (IPS)* – It is two months since the World Health Organization declared Uganda free of the most recent Sudan ebolavirus, which killed 55 people.
Uganda used public health measures like screening, testing of temperatures, and isolation of suspected cases to contain the Ebola outbreak. While those measures were successful, scientists warn that another outbreak could occur. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS
Uganda employed public health measures to end the outbreak. In the absence of vaccines and therapeutics, the threat of the next outbreak looms. Scientists are yet to find answers to questions like who was the first person to be affected? Or the index case, what viral host reservoir did that patient get in contact with?
(UN News)* — A UN independent human rights expert criticized the United States for using extraterritorial jurisdiction to impose sanctions on foreign individuals, in a statement issued on Thursday [].
UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan said the practice raises concerns about rights violations, including the right to due process, as enshrined under a decades-old international treaty.
Longstanding practice
“The United States has for years been imposing sanctions on individuals and entities without national criminal jurisdiction and in the absence of universal jurisdiction,” she said.
“This is a clear violation of due process rights, including the presumption of innocence and fair trial.”
The following is an adapted version of the presentation made at the webinar “Connecting Dots” on 25 Feb 2023. Other speakers were Dr. Marwa Osman and Dr. Atif Kubursi.
Rick Sterling
Introduction
Syria has been at war since 2011. The conflict is in a stalemate. US troops control nearly a third of the country. The US finances the operation and a secessionist army with oil and wheat they take from the area. It funds them and deprives the Syrian government from their own resources.
In the northern province of Idlib, the Syrian version of Al Qaeda is in control, receiving the majority of aid from Europe while the 90% of Syrians who live in government controlled areas go hungry and have electricity only three hours per day.
Meanwhile in Ukraine, the bloodshed continues as Russian troops battle Ukrainian soldiers while the US and NATO pour in weapons. Russian troops have taken control of much of the eastern region, the Donbass.
(UN News)* — One third of women in Tajikistan are subjected to violence by their husbands, but very few cases are reported. Social and legal support, provided through the joint EU/UN Spotlight Initiative, is helping affected women to protect their rights.
Like many women in Tajikistan, Shermatova Marjona has experienced gender-based violence.
Ms. Shermatova met her husband while she was working abroad as a cleaner in Moscow, Russia. It wasn’t long before they were married, and he persuaded her to send all the money she earned to her father-in-law in Tajikistan, who was to use the funds to build a house for them.
Once construction had begun, Ms. Shermatova and her husband returned to Tajikistan. She used the last of her savings to put a roof on the house, install windows and doors, and to paint the rooms. The family lived in the semi-finished home together. In addition, she provided her father-in-law with money almost daily, whenever he would ask for it.
MADRID, Mar 7 2023 (IPS)* – The answer is that there are alarming setbacks for maternal health care and, in many cases, even a total lack of maternity services, which threaten to further raise the number of these tragic preventable deaths one million or more a year by 2030.
Nearly every maternal death is preventable, and the clinical expertise and technology necessary to avert these losses have existed for decades. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS
Severe bleeding, high blood pressure, pregnancy-related infections, complications from unsafe abortion, and underlying conditions that can be aggravated by pregnancy (such as HIV/AIDS and malaria) are the leading causes of maternal deaths, UN specialised bodies report.
“These are all largely preventable and treatable with access to quality and respectful healthcare.”
Why then are these causes still not prevented and treated? Continue reading →
A coroner’s inquest into the 2015 death of Abdurahman Hassan, a refugee from Somalia, has brought to light shocking details about Canada’s immigration detention system and abusive conditions in provincial jails. In response, 40 organizations have renewed their call on the federal government to stop incarcerating people in provincial jails for administrative immigration purposes. The letter was also endorsed by former cabinet ministers Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock.
(UN News)* — In a new blow for equality in the 21st century workplace, UN labour experts said on Monday [] that women’s access to jobs, their employment conditions and a persistent pay gap, have barely improved worldwide in nearly two decades.
ILO/Marcel Crozet | The production floor of an apparel exporting factory in Bangladesh.
The jobs gap for women is a “stubborn and damaging reality of the global labour market” but it is particularly worrying in developing countries, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said, with almost one in four women unable to find a job, compared with 16.6 per cent of men.
‘Bleaker picture’
That assessment is based on new data gathered from all people looking for work, as opposed to those registered as unemployed.
“It paints a much bleaker picture of the situation of women in the world of work…(it) shows that women still have a much harder time finding a job than men,” ILO said.
(UN News)* — Experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council have expressed concern over reports of increased militarization and intimidation surrounding a multi-billion-dollar urban development and tourism project in Indonesia.
Unsplash/Appai | Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.
The Mandalika project includes parks, resorts, hotels and a motorcycle racetrack hosting international sporting events. It is located on Lombok island, in impoverished West Nusa Tenggara Province.
The experts said they have received alarming accounts of alleged human rights violations committed by police and military forces, including excessive use of force to evict and restrict the rights of the indigenous Sasak people.
Intimidation and coercion
The $3 billion project is being implemented by the Indonesia Tourism and Development Corporation (ITDC), a State-owned enterprise, with funding primarily from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
(UN News)* — Increasingly sophisticated and high-calibre firearms and ammunition are being trafficked into Haiti, fuelling an ongoing surge of gang violence that has plagued residents for months, according to a new UN assessment released on Thursday [].
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report, Haiti’s criminal markets: mapping trends in firearms and drug trafficking, warns that a recent increase in arms seizures alongside intelligence and law enforcement reporting, suggests trafficking of weapons is on the rise.
‘Volatile situation’
“By providing a rapid assessment of illicit firearms and drug trafficking, this UNODC study seeks to shed light on the trafficking flows enabling gangs in Haiti and fuelling further violence in a volatile and desperate situation to help inform responses and support to the people of Haiti,” said Angela Me, Chief of the UNODC Research and Trend Analysis Branch.
MADRID, Mar 3 2023 (IPS)* – The data is shocking: three-quarters of African Governments have already reduced their agricultural budgets while paying almost double that on arms.
Chronic underinvestment in agriculture is a key cause of the widespread hunger experienced in 2022, according to Oxfam report. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS.
Africa is home to a quarter of the world’s entire agricultural land. Nevertheless, in the 12 months that African leaders vowed to improve food security in the continent, over 20 million more people have been pushed into “severe hunger.”
1 March 2023 (HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH)* — A devastating new investigation by the New York Times found migrant children across the United States working in dangerous jobs in violation of US child labor laws.There is more to this story. A group of often-overlooked US child workers – those working in agriculture – regularly risk their health and lives in dangerous jobs. But their backbreaking work rarely violates child labor laws because they lack basic protections given to other child workers.
(UN NEWS)* — The number of children worldwide without access to social protection continues to rise, putting them at risk of poverty, hunger and discrimination, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a report published on Wednesday [].
Between 2016 and 2020, an additional 50 million boys and girls aged 15 and under missed out on child benefits, driving up the total to 1.46 billion globally.
Increased risk of hardship
Child and family benefit coverage rates either fell or stagnated in every region of the world during this period, according to the report.
For example, Latin America and the Caribbean saw coverage decline significantly, from roughly 51 per cent to 42 per cent, whereas rates remained around 21 per cent in Central and Southern Asia.
MADRID, Mar 1 2023 (IPS)* – Wildlife is indeed far much more than a safari or an ‘exotic’ ornament: as many as four billion people –or an entire half the whole world’s population– rely on wild species for income, food, medicines and wood fuel for cooking.
A million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, we have lost half of the world’s corals and lose forest areas the size of 27 football fields every minute, finds WWF report. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS
In spite of that, one million species of plants and animals are already facing extinction due to the voracious profit-making, over-exploitative, illegal trade and the relentless depletion of the variety of life on Planet Earth.
ALMERIA, Spain, Feb 24 2023 (IPS)* – Chances are that the fruits and vegetables sold in European supermarkets have been picked and packed by a migrant worker in southern Spain. By the tens of thousands, they work there, in sweltering hot plastic greenhouses – often underpaid and without residence permit – in the vegetable garden of Europe. “Cheap vegetables, yes. But at what price?”
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It is estimated that about a hundred thousand migrants work in the greenhouses, scattered throughout the area. Credit: Floris Cup/IPS
It is a sunny Saturday afternoon, warm and dry, when we leave the city of Almería, in the southern province of Andalusia, to drive towards the countryside. Leaving the freeway, the lane narrows and turns into a dirt road. The hot desert breeze blows a dusty, brown cloud of sand into the air that completely covers the car in no time. We take a slight turn and drive past impressive mountain ranges. Continue reading →
Will President Biden, Congress and other North Americans recognize the massive war crimes committed against the Iraqi people with appropriate declarations and actions on March 19, 2023?
MADRID, Feb 23 2023 (IPS)* – While the world’s biggest powers and their giant private corporations continue to attach high priority to their military –and commercial– dominance, both of them being shockingly profitable, entire generations are being lost to deadly armed conflicts, devastating climate catastrophes, diseases, hunger and more imposed impoverishment.
In Nigeria’s Northeast the number of children suffering from acute malnutrition is projected to increase to two million in 2023. Credit: UNOCHA/Christina Powell.
Part Iof this series of two articles focussed on the unprecedented suffering of the most innocent and helpless human beings – children– in 11 countries. But there are many more.
According to the UN Children Fund (UNICEF), hundreds of thousands of children continue to pay the highest price of a mixture of man-made brutalities, with their lives, apart from the unfolding proxy war in Ukraine, and the not yet final account of victims of the Türkiye and Syria earthquakes, which are forcing children to sleep in the streets under the rumble, amid the chilling cold. Continue reading →
MADRID, Feb 22 2023 (IPS)* – Today, there are more children in need of desperate humanitarian assistance than at any other time since World War II.
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A child carries empty jerry cans to fill water from a nearby tap providing untreated water from the Nile river in Juba, South Sudan. Credit: UNICEF/Phil Hatcher-Moore
“Across the globe, children and their families are facing a deadly mix of crises, from conflict and displacement to disease, outbreaks and soaring rates of malnutrition. Meanwhile, climate change is making these crises worse and unleashing new ones.”
The Illegality of NATO: Violation of the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles
John Scales Avery
In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of international law, and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles.
Former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Christof von Sponeck used the following words to express his opinion that NATO now violates the UN Charter and international law: “In the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the Charter of the United Nations was declared to be NATO’s legally binding framework.
However, the United Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine. NATO’s territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its members to include the whole world.” Continue reading →
12 February is the United Nations sponsored International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers. Efforts to counter the use of persons under 18 years of age in the military began with non-governmental efforts in 1979 – which the U.N. had proclaimed as “The International Year of the Child”.
MADRID, Feb 17 2023 (IPS)*– In this world of wars, massive weapons production, sales and use; of sharpening inequalities and deadly climate emergencies, hate speech and its inhumane impact, is being amplified at ‘unprecedented scale’ by new technologies.
Hate speech loads the gun, misinformation pulls the trigger – And that’s the kind of the relationship that we’ve come to understand over the years. Credit: Shutterstock.
Hate speech has now reached dangerous records, fuelling discrimination, racism, xenophobia and staggering human rights violations.
It mainly targets whoever is not “like us” i.e ethnic minorities, black, ‘coloured,’ and Asian peoples; and Muslims worldwide through widespread Islamophobia, let alone the millions of migrants, and the billions of poor. In short, the most vulnerable human beings, let alone the world’s girls and women.
7 Feb 2023 – A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport — to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.
The 2023 meeting was organized around the theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” and the topics up for debate were all worthy choices: climate change, Covid-19, inflation, war, and the looming threat of recession.
Glaringly missing, however, was any honest investigation of the deeper context behind such an epic set of crises — namely, the reality of worldwide poverty and the extreme inequality that separates the poor from the rich on this planet.
Every year, Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice, uses the occasion of Davos to release its latest rundown on global inequality. Continue reading →
(Human Rights Watch)* — US President Joe Biden and members of the House of Representatives repeatedly scapegoated migrants during both this week’s presidential State of the Union address and during a hearing on the US-Mexico border held by the House of Representative’s Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
San José, 8 February 2023 (IOM)* – Migrant smugglers are using social media and instant messaging applications to promote and provide their illegal services, according to a study published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The study found that digital technology has made it easier for migrant smugglers to exchange money, goods, and information. Most of these activities occur on commonly used services and applications rather than on the dark web.
The study by IOM shows that young migrants use instant messaging and geolocation in their smartphones to contact smugglers and navigate their journeys. Photo: María Gema Cortés / IOM
Smugglers use social media and video platforms to promote their services by sharing short videos of successful crossings. Social networks also play a critical role in connecting migrants and smugglers, allowing them to interact and share information. Instant messaging and real-time geolocation technologies facilitate journey planning and execution.
MADRID, Feb 10 2023 (IPS)* – The food industry continues to intensively use toxic chemicals in their products, some of them provoking heart diseases and death. Trans fat is just one of them, adding to contaminating fertilisers, pesticides, microplastics and a long etcetera.
Industrially produced trans fat is responsible for up to 500,000 premature deaths from coronary heart disease each year, according to WHO. Credit: Shutterstock.
“Trans fat is a toxic chemical that kills, and should have no place in food,” warns Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), informing that trans fat has no known benefits, and substantial health risks that incur enormous costs for health systems. “Put simply, trans fat is a toxic chemical that kills, and should have no place in food.”
Humans are capable of great compassion and unselfishness. Mothers and fathers make many sacrifices for the sake of their families. Kind teachers help us through childhood, and show us the right path. Doctors and nurses devote themselves to the welfare of their patients.
Sadly there is another, side to human nature, a darker side. Human history is stained with the blood of wars and genocides. Today, this dark, aggressive side of human nature threatens to plunge our civilization into an all-destroying thermonuclear war.
Humans often exhibit kindness to those who are closest to themselves, to their families and friends, to their own social group or nation. By contrast, the terrible aggression seen in wars and genocides is directed towards outsiders.
Human nature seems to exhibit what might be called “tribalism”: altruism towards one’s own group; aggression towards outsiders. Today this tendency towards tribalism threatens both human civilization and the biosphere. Continue reading →
(UN NEWS)* — Acts of armed violence targeting schools in Haiti have spiked nine-fold in one year amid rising insecurity and widespread unrest, UNICEF warned on Thursday [].
“Violence continues to take a heavy toll on children’s lives in and around Port-au-Prince, and schools are no longer spared,” said Bruno Maes, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) representative in Haiti. “As children reel from the effects of armed violence, insecurity in Haiti shows no sign of abating.”
‘Huge impact’ on children
“The targeting of schools by armed groups is having an enormous impact on children’s safety, wellbeing and ability to learn,” Mr. Maes said.
(UN News)* — Activists working with sea-rescue charities in Italy should not be criminalized, a UN independent human rights expert said on Thursday [], ahead of a trial against crew members from several non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
IOM/Francesco Malavolta (file) | Migrants from the Mediterranean are rescued in the Channel of Sicily, Italy (file).
Preliminary criminal proceedings opened last May in Sicily against 21 people charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration in connection with several search-and-rescue missions conducted between 2016 and 2017.
Those accused include four crew members of the Iuventa, a former fishing trawler credited with saving some 14,000 migrant lives in the Mediterranean Sea, and human rights activists from other civilian vessels.
(UN News)* — Africa is currently experiencing an exponential rise in cholera cases, amid a global surge in the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Thursday [].
Unicef Malawi | Daina Denja takes the cholera vaccine during UNICEF’ cholera vaccine campaign at Misili village in Chikwawa district, Malawi.
Across the continent, cases in January were 30 per cent higher than for the whole of last year.
Most new infections and deaths have occurred in Malawi, which is facing its worst outbreak in 20 years.
10 countries affected
Overall, 10 African countries are affected by cholera. The waterborne disease causes acute watery diarrhoea and can kill within hours but is easily treatable.
Besides Malawi, cases have been reported in neighbouring Mozambique and Zambia, as well as in Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Nigeria.
(Jerusalem) 2 February 2023 – Israeli authorities’ actions to seal the family homes in the occupied West Bank of two Palestinians suspected of attacks against Israelis amount to collective punishment, a war crime, Human Rights Watch said today.
Bangkok, 14 Januray 2023 (FAO)* – Asia’s cities are growing at such a fast pace that nearly 55 percent of the region’s enormous population is expected to reside in urban areas by 2030, and that will have equally enormous consequences for urban food security and nutrition, according to the main findings of a new report by four United Nations agencies.
(UN News)* — Alarmed by the recent killing and injury of many children in Israel and Palestine, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) voiced an appeal to parties on Monday [] to de-escalate tensions and refrain from violence.
ABUJA, 16 January 2023 (UNICEF)* — Nearly 25 million Nigerians are at risk of facing hunger between June and August 2023 (lean season) if urgent action is not taken, according to the October 2022 Cadre Harmonisé, a Government led and UN-supported food and nutrition analysis carried out twice a year.
UNICEF/UN028425/Esiebo
This is a projected increase from the estimated 17 million people currently at risk of food insecurity. Continued conflict, climate change, inflation and rising food prices are key drivers of this alarming trend.
Food access has been affected by persistent violence in the north-east states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe (BAY) and armed banditry and kidnapping in states such as Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna, Benue and Niger.
Millions of children are at risk from one of the worst climate-induced emergencies in decades.
UNICEF/UN0639249/SewunetA baby rests in a stabilization centre at a hospital in the Afar region of Ethiopia.
Four consecutive seasons of poor rainfall, sharp increases in food prices, and conflict have pushed children and families in the Horn of Africa to the brink of climate change-induced catastrophe.
Exceptional drought across large swathes of Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Eritrea and Djibouti has unleashed hunger, thirst, displacement and death on already vulnerable communities as crops fail and livestock die.
(UN News)* — Almost twelve years into Syria’s devastating civil war, the country remains tattered and deeply divided, facing massive economic hardships, limited political progress and the world’s largest displacement crisis, with 70 per cent of the population now in need of humanitarian aid, senior UN officials told the Security Council on Wednesday [].
“As we move into 2023, the Syrian people remain trapped in a profound humanitarian, political, military, security, economic and human rights crisis of great complexity and almost unimaginable scale,” said Geir Pedersen, UN Special Envoy for Syria.
Outlining recent developments, he reiterated his previous calls for calm on the ground, good faith engagement in Syria’s stalled Constitutional Committee process, and the Security Council’s critical humanitarian support.
(UN News)* — Some 21.6 million people in Yemen – that’s two-thirds of the population – are going to need some kind of humanitarian assistance and protection services during the course of 2023, according to the UN’s Humanitarian Response plan published on Wednesday [].
The UN humanitarian affairs office OCHA is calling for $4.3 billion to reach the 17.3 million most vulnerable people in need, whose lives have been turned upside down because of protracted war, displacement and economic collapse, compounded by recurrent natural disasters.
Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when Houthi rebels took the capital, Sana’a, forcing the Government to leave, leading to the establishment of a Saudi-led coalition in support of the Government who launched airstrikes on the rebels in early 2015.
The total projected number in need this year has decreased slightly from 23.4 million people in 2022, to 21.6 million in 2023, while the “overall intersectoral target” is down from 17.9 to 17.3 million people.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 