'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
Speaking by videoconference to journalists in New York, Mark Cutts said humanitarians had seen “some real horror scenes” in the last few days, especially in the northwest, where he said the camps were “bad at the best of times”.
Do our “Defense Departments” really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud.
John Scales Avery
For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. Civilians like us are just hostages. We are expendable. We are pawns in the power game, the money game.
Nations possessing nuclear weapons threaten each other with “Mutually Assured Destruction”, which has the very appropriate acronym MAD. What does this mean? Does it mean that civilians are being protected?
Not at all. Instead they are threatened with complete destruction. Civilians here play the role of hostages in the power games of their leaders.
Credit: Shafiqul Alam Kiron/IPS
21 January 2022 (UNEP)* — Last week, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that in 2021, the US experienced 20 major climate-related disaster events with damage costs exceeding 1 billion. In total, these events caused US$145 billion in damage and claimed at least 688 lives.
The year was also one of the hottest globally and the fourth-hottest in the US since it started keeping records 127 years ago.
(UN News)* — Urgent action is required to assist and protect some 400 Vietnamese migrant workers who were allegedly trafficked to Serbia, experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said on Friday [21 January 2022].
Eight companies, including Vietnamese labour recruitment agencies and Chinese construction firms registered in Serbia, have reportedly been implicated in serious human rights abuses, they said, citing information received.
(UN News)* — The UN chief has condemned airstrikes launched early on Friday [21 January 2022] by the Saudi-led coalition battling Houthi rebels in Yemen, that struck a detention centre in the rebel-held city of Saada, which have left at least 60 dead, and more than hundred injured.
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By Ann Garrison | Popular Resistance – TRANSCEND Media Service*
While France steps up neocolonial aggression in its former North and West African colonies, the U.S. has set its sights on the elected government of Ethiopia in the geostrategic Horn of Africa. Ethiopia’s growing ties with China and Russia and the Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Cooperation Between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea so threaten U.S. global hegemony that a U.S. “regime change” campaign is well underway.
Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS
“The gains from socioeconomic development have favoured the wealthiest, with the wealthiest 5% of the population controlling close to 70% of total wealth in the region,” reports the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). Continue reading
(UN News)* — Escalating conflict in Yemen has seen an alarming number of air and drone strikes already this year, notably against civilians and non-military targets, the UN rights office, OHCHR, said on Tuesday [18 January 2022].
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“We are deeply concerned by the continuing escalation of the conflict in Yemen. Overnight, air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition on the capital, Sana’a, are reported to have left at least five civilians dead,” said OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani.
(UN News)* — The UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, on Tuesday [18 January 2022] appealed for $1.6 billion to support its lifesaving work this year amid acute regional crises and chronic funding shortfalls.
UNRWA provides services and programmes, including education, health and food assistance, to more than five million Palestinians across the Middle East.
The 2022 budget proposal includes additional emergency funding to address humanitarian needs arising from crises in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon.
Geneva, 19 January 2022 (WMO)* – Although average global temperatures were temporarily cooled by the 2020-2022 La Niña events, 2021 was still one of the seven warmest years on record, according to six leading international datasets consolidated by the World Meteorological Organization.
Global warming and other long-term climate change trends are expected to continue as a result of record levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The average global temperature in 2021 was about 1.11 (± 0.13) °C above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels. 2021 is the 7th consecutive year (2015-2021) where global temperature has been over 1°C above pre-industrial levels, according to all datasets compiled by WMO.
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies – TRANSCEND Media Service*
The Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower Summary since President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria since 2004. But President Trump stopped publishing them after February 2020, shrouding continued U.S. bombing in secrecy.
August 2020 U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 Afghan civilians. Credit: Getty Images
Over the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries. That is an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years.
In Malawi, some students have been going to school amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: UNICEF/Malumbo Simwaka
These phenomenal changes in fortunes took place during the first two years of a Covid-19 pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall, and over 160 million more people forced into poverty—60 million more than the figures released by the World Bank in 2020.
“If these ten men were to lose 99.999 percent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 percent of all the people on this planet,” said Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher.
While this is being written, tension builds up around the more comprehensive Ukraine conflict formation. If this blows up in real war – God forbid! – the main reason will be three serious lies disseminated by the NATO side.
Britannica
Lies are used in so-called security politics when some militarist project doesn’t make any (common) sense to intelligent people, when the real motives have to be covered up and war is being prepared or when the sociological cancer called the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, and the elites who run it, try to squeeze out even larger military expenditures from their taxpayers.
In Boris Johnson’s government, private clubs play an increasingly important role in political life | SOPA Images Limited/Alamy Live News
15 January 2022 (openDemocracy)* — Downing Street may be out of bounds for Boris Johnson to throw any new parties, but he still has other partying options. He was recently pictured at one of London’s most exclusive private members’ clubs, Oswald’s – which is owned by a Conservative Party donor.
Credit: Albert Gonzalez Farran / UNAMID
The military spending data come from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which also reports that global nuclear arsenals grow as states continue to modernise, thus sharply increasing the dangers of an unimaginable number of victims of the most devastating death machinery.
(UN News)* — The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) called on Friday [14 January 2022] for concerted international action to end armed conflict in Africa’s central Sahel region, which has forced more than 2.5 million people to flee their homes in the last decade.
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Speaking to journalists in Geneva, the agency’s spokesperson, Boris Cheshirkov, informed that internal displacement has increased tenfold since 2013, going from 217,000 to a staggering 2.1 million by late last year.
The number of refugees in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger now stands at 410,000, and the majority comes from Mali, where major civil conflict erupted in 2012, leading to a failed coup and an on-going extremist insurgency.
(UN News)* — A new bill being debated by lawmakers in the United Kingdom increases the risk of discrimination and “serious human rights violations” and breaches the country’s obligations under international law, five independent UN human rights experts on 14 January 2022 said.
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Trafficked, kept prisoner in Saudi Arabia Wanjiku Njoki was lucky to escape unharmed. She has since found work serving tea for a government parastatal. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
And this fear is all too familiar for 28-year-old Wanjiku Njoki. The young woman’s whose search for greener pastures in the Gulf landed her in the hands of a physically, mentally, and verbally abusive employer.
In 2018, she travelled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Continue reading
Tents and makeshift shelters at an IDP camp in Yemen. Credit: UNICEF/Alessio Romenzi
The 2021 Near East and North Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition shows that the number of hungry people in the region reached 69 million people in 2020, “triggered by protracted crises, social unrests and exposure to multiple shocks and stresses such as conflicts, poverty, inequality, climate change, scarce natural resources and the economic repercussions associated with the recent COVID-19 pandemic.”
(UN News)* — As the death toll from the recent unrest in Kazakhstan mounts to 164, the UN Office for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Tuesday [11 January 2022] requested “prompt, independent, impartial investigations” into the killings, and whether “unnecessary and disproportionate use of force was made by security forces”.
Close to 10,000 people are now estimated to be held in detention following the riots.
“We understand that the Ministry of Interior has announced that some 9,900 people are in detention as of the 11th of January. Now, this is clearly a huge number,” said OHCHR spokesperson Liz Throssell, briefing reporters at the United Nations in Geneva (UNOG).
View of downtown Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan. Credit: World Bank/Shynar Jetpissova
The government initially tried a carrot-and-stick approach to the unrest, but later was pushed to call a state of emergency and ultimately to request military help from former Soviet allies. Continue reading
The centre used to provide humanitarian assistance to refugees and asylum seekers before it was permanently closed in December.
Dax Roque, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Libya Country Director, said:
Propaganda is most impactful when people don’t think it’s propaganda, and most decisive when it’s censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived.
The actual impact is on thousands of movies made, and thousands of others never made. And television shows of every variety. Continue reading
(UN News)* — The UN and partners launched a more than $5 billion funding appeal for Afghanistan on Tuesday [11 January 2022], in the hope of shoring up collapsing basic services there, which have left 22 million in need of assistance inside the country, and 5.7 million people requiring help beyond its borders.
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(UN News)* — Amid record global displacement, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on Monday [10 January 2022] urged European countries to prioritize the better protection of people fleeing war, conflict and persecution.
UNHCR made the appeal in recommendations to France, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), and the Czech Republic, which assumes the presidency in July.
Governments and the public need to recognize, understand and respond to the ageing of human populations in the 21st century, which is the inescapable demographic future of nations worldwide. Credit: Maricel Sequeira/IPS
– The ageing of human populations is an inescapable demographic future. That evolving and universal future is increasingly challenging governments and the public, who are by and large ill prepared for that certain future.
Whereas the 20th century was one of record setting rapid population growth with world population nearly quadrupling, the 21st century is one of unprecedented population ageing with its economic, social and political consequences reverberating across countries worldwide.
Global Costs of Unlawful Detention and Interrogation Post-9/11
New York, 9 January 2022 – Twenty years after Guantánamo Bay detention operations commenced on January 11, 2002, a new report assesses the massive costs of US unlawful transfers, secret detention, and torture after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
– There are more under-reported consequences of human activities unmatching the rhythm of Mother Nature. Such is the case, among many others, of the growing salinisation and ‘plastification’ of the world’s soils.
In fact, currently it is estimated that there are more than 833 million hectares of salt-affected soils around the globe (8.7% of the planet). This implies the loss of soil’s capacity to grow food and also increasing impacts on water and the ability to filter pollution.
Soil salinisation and sodification are major soil degradation processes threatening ecosystems and are recognised as being among the most important problems at a global level for agricultural production, food security and sustainability in arid and semi-arid regions, says the UN on occasion of the 2021 World Soil Day.
(UN News)* — The UN’s benchmark food and commodity prices index rose sharply on average through 2021, compared with the previous year, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) informed on Thursday [6 January 2022].
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FAO Senior Economist Abdolreza Abbassian explained that, normally, high prices are expected to ease as production increases to match demand.
(UN News)*— Fifty-five journalists and media professionals were killed last year, latest UN data showed on Thursday [6 January 2022], with nearly nine in 10 killings since 2006 still unresolved.
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5 January 2022 (UNEP)* — Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – the atmospheric gases responsible for causing global warming and climatic change – are critical to understanding and addressing the climate crisis. Despite an initial dip in global GHG emissions due to COVID-19, the United Nations Environment Programme’s latest Emissions Gap Report (EGR) estimates that emissions rebounded to near-2019 levels in 2021.
(UN News)* — UN humanitarians warned on Tuesday [4 January 2022] that a harsh winter in Afghanistan is aggravating already severe conditions faced by millions across the country.
“Further snow and low temperatures are forecast in the coming days”, UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told journalists at the daily briefing for correspondents in New York.
(WMO)* — Record-breaking heat and rainfall, devastating fires and debilitating drought were among the extreme weather, climate and water events of 2021, with human, economic and environmental impacts which will far outlast the calendar year.
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I would like to announce the publication of a new book which discusses the reasons for our human encroachment on the earth’s ecological systems, and the possible consequences if we do not take steps to correct the problem.
John Scales Avery
The book may be downloaded and circulated free of charge from the following link:
Here are some of the problems that are discussed in the book:
There is a danger that by the middle of the present century, population growth, the end of the fossil fuel era, and the effect of climate change on agriculture will combine to produce an extremely large-scale famine, afflicting billions of people rather than millions.
Nina has found peace after being rescued from human traffickers and pimps in Goa, India. Credit: Mehru Jaffer/IPS
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1 January 2022 (UN News)* — The number of Haitians who have tried to migrate by unofficial channels to neighboring countries by boat has increased dramatically in 2021. They are being driven by economic hardship, insecurity, and a recent earthquake, to seek what they believe will be a better life.
The story of Jacques* a 32-year-old father from Limonade on Haiti’s northern coast is perhaps typical of the increasing numbers of people who try to leave the Caribbean country in unofficial ways and without proper documentation.
(UN News)* — The people of Myanmar are facing an unprecedented political, socioeconomic, human rights and humanitarian crisis with needs escalating dramatically since the military takeover and a severe COVID-19 third wave.
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Once completed in 2030, it could well be considered the world’s eighth wonder, this time natural. It is the African-led Great Green Wall or the largest living structure on the planet – an 8,000 kilometres natural hit stretching across the entire width of the continent.
Baher Kamal
Human Wrongs Watch sincerely asks for your indulgence as its daily updates focus on the so many and so inhuman violations of the most basic rights everywhere in the world.
Unfortunately we could not do otherwise. Media generally report on an astonishingly reduced number of events that are either irrelevant to the principle of “All Human Beings Are Born Equal,” or to the basic, pressing needs of the most vulnerable.
And we do so to modestly attempt to call you attention towards the numerous unseen –or unwanted to be seen– news and views.
Human Wrongs Watch wishes for all a new year of peace, serenity, heath and care, much care for Mother Nature.
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(UN News)* — Armed conflict, inter-communal violence and insecurity continued to take a devastating toll on thousands of children throughout 2021, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), warned on Friday [31 December 2021].
From Afghanistan to Yemen, and Syria to northern Ethiopia, UNICEF denounced grave violations against youngsters in both protracted and new conflicts.
‘Dreadful disregard’
Last week, four children were reportedly among the victims of an attack that killed at least 35 people – including two Save the Children staff – in Kayah state in eastern Myanmar.
(UN News)* — The UN chief condemned on Wednesday [30 December 2021] the looting and attacks against United Nations facilities, equipment and supplies gifted to the Sudanese authorities for civilian in El Fasher, Darfur.
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21 December 2021 (Wall Street International)* — I feel that the US is set on a collision course with China and Russia. And it is unwise, unnecessary, extremely dangerous. But certainly, this is not an escalating tension engineered by President Biden.
(UN News)* — The Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, said on Tuesday [28 December 2021] that a recent military escalation in the country is “among the worst” in years and increasingly putting civilians in crosshairs.
According to his statement, airstrikes on Sana’a have resulted in the loss of civilian lives, and damage to noncombatant infrastructure and residential areas.
A continued offensive on Ma’rib, where at least 35,000 people have been forced to flee since September, and unabated missile attacks on the governorate are causing civilian casualties, damage to civilian objects and mass displacement.
(UN News)* — The UN refugee agency called on Wednesday [29 December 2021] for the immediate, life-saving disembarkation of a group of Rohingya refugees in distress at sea off the coast of Indonesia.
In a statement, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that it was “deeply concerned for the safety and lives of those onboard”.
The boat was first sighted in the waters off Bireuen, a district in Aceh province, on Sunday.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 