'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
– When governments and states begin their recovery journey from the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there might be a heightened threat to indigenous peoples, their land and resources.
UNITED NATIONS, New York, 11 July 2020 (UNFPA)* – Officially, the COVID-19 pandemic has sickened 12 million people and left more than half a million dead. But the full toll of this catastrophe has been incalculably greater. Health systems have been overwhelmed. Economies have been shuttered. And women and girls have been disproportionately affected, with sexual and reproductive health services being curtailed and gender-based violence on the rise.
The COVID-19 pandemic affects everyone, everywhere, “but it does not affect everyone equally”, the UN chief said in his message for World Population Day, on 11 July 2020.
“It is deepening existing inequalities and vulnerabilities, particularly for women and girls”, said Secretary-General António Guterres. (*).
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(UN News)* — Sounding the alarm over the crippling impact of “growing economic shocks, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic” in Lebanon, the UN human rights chief called on Friday [10 July 2020] for a unified response by politicians and the people to overcome the worsening socio-economic crisis there.
(UN News)* – The COVID-19 pandemic shows how wildlife crime is a threat not only to the environment but to human health, according to a new UN report issued on 10 July 2020.
Zoonotic diseases represent up to 75 per cent of all emerging infectious diseases and include the new coronavirus that caused the global pandemic.
Refugees on Bhasan Char Urgently Need UN Protection, Services
People stand by the banks of Bhasan Char, or floating island, in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh, December 2019. © 2019 AP Photo/Saleh Noman
New York – Bangladesh authorities should immediately move over 300 Rohingya refugees, including at least 33 children, from the silt island of Bhasan Char to the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps to be with their families, Human Rights Watch said on 9 July 2020.
The World Wildlife Crime Report found that along with threatening endangered species, wildlife crimes and exploitation of nature can promote climate change as well as negatively impact public health because of zoonotic disease transmissions.
(UN News)* — A new mechanism launched on 9 July 2020 aims to speed up action so that people everywhere will have access to water and sanitation by the end of the decade, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Global Acceleration Framework for SDG 6 addresses an issue which cuts across many areas of the UN’s work.
Developed by more than 30 UN entities and 40 international organizations, it outlines more efficient and coordinated support to countries to ensure global availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
(UN News)* — A surge in demand for medical products to combat COVID-19 has led to a jump in the trafficking of substandard and faulty merchandise, according to new UN research published on 8 July 2020.
Among its countless other impacts, the coronavirus has further highlighted the shortcomings in regulatory and legal frameworks aimed at preventing the manufacturing and selling of these products, points out the UNODC research brief, entitled “COVID-19-related Trafficking of Medical Products as a Threat to Public Health”.
Trained community workers – many of them refugees themselves – are providing vital mental health support during the COVID-19 outbreak in northern Iraq.
Syrian refugee Falak Selo (right) talks to her mother and sister in Akre camp, northern Iraq, where she provides mental health support to other refugees (26 January, 2020). © UNHCR/Seivan MSalim
8 July 2020 (UNHCR)* — Falak Selo knows what the sudden loss of home, country and loved ones can do to a person’s mental wellbeing. She was studying philosophy at the University of Damascus in 2013 when Syria’s civil war reached the area where her mother and sister were living. | Español | Français | عربي
Miles Woodgate is part of the crew of helicopter pilots hired by FAO to spray the desert locusts in Somalia, helping to save people’s food and livelihood sources. ©FAO/Haji Dirir
8 July 2020 (FAO)* — The alarm went off a few minutes ago, before the morning call to prayer. It is now a quarter past five and still pitch-black outside. Miles Woodgate is eating breakfast and getting ready for the long day ahead fighting Desert Locusts.
This Englishman is one of the pilots conducting aerial spraying in the easternmost country of the Horn of Africa — the first time in 30 years that the security situation has allowed for this to happen in Somalia.
(UN News)* — Annual global temperature is likely to be at least 1°C warmer than pre-industrial levels in each of the coming five years, putting globally agreed climate change targets in jeopardy, new data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveals.
The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, led by the United Kingdom’s Met Office, provides a climate outlook for the next five years, updated annually.
8 July 2020 (WMO)* — June 2020 was just 0.01°C below the record-breaking temperatures of June 2019, with exceptional heat in Arctic Siberia, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Globally, temperatures last month were 0.53°C warmer than the average June from 1981-2010.
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Over Arctic Siberia, average temperatures reached as high as 10 °C above normal for June, fuelling severe wildfires. During both June and for the last 12 months, Siberia stands out as the region with the largest anomalies.
– The coronavirus—which has claimed the lives of over 538,000 people and infected more than 11.6 million worldwide—has destabilized virtually every facet of human life ever since its outbreak in late December.
Credit: United Nations
Providing a grim economic scenario of the devastation caused by the pandemic– including rising poverty, hunger and unemployment– UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last week of the possibility of an even worse disaster: the risks of bioterrorist attacks deploying deadly germs. Continue reading
The rampant spread of the coronavirus in Brazil has already taken the lives of more than 57 thousand people. Meanwhile, illegal miners are going further and further into Indigenous lands in the Amazon, threatening not only the forest, but also exposing Indigenous People to COVID-19.
PublicDomainPictures.net/Linnaea Mallette. CC0 1.0.“Can we dare to think people are kind, and shape organisations around this view?”
7 July 2020 (openDemocracy)* — That’s the question Rutger Bregman examines in his latest book Humankind, and it’s one that anyone involved in youth and community work like me wrestles with on a daily basis. But is Bregman’s optimistic analysis grounded in reality?
To succeed, the struggle against racism needs to be understood in the context of the struggle against the culture of war.
In my history of the culture of war, I quote Malcolm X at length:
“”Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation. I saw how since the sixteenth century, the so-called “Christian trader” white man began to ply the seas in his lust for Asian and African empires, and plunder, and power… First, always “religiously,” he branded “heathen” and “pagan” labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations. The stage thus set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons of war.”
– In his early February annual State of the Union address, US President Donald Trump typically hailed his own policies for increasing wages and jobs to achieve record low US unemployment. Directly appealing to labour for a second term, Trump claimed exclusive credit for the US “blue-collar boom”.
Anis Chowdhury
‘Blue-collar boom’
During his previous two State of the Union speeches, Trump also directly appealed to blue-collar Americans who put him in the White House in November 2016.
As Trump claims manufacturing workers have been the main beneficiaries of his economic policies, including his trade and other policies, this seemed likely to dominate his re-election campaign.
In fact, US manufacturing growth had slowed to its lowest level in August 2019 when the purchasing managers’ index fell for the first time since September 2009. Despite his bombast, Trump has failed to reverse the continuing decline in manufacturing’s share of GDP. Continue reading
The police brutality that sparked protests in the United States and beyond reminds some refugees of the bigotry they fled — and sometimes still encounter in places they now call home. Here are some of their voices.
Indigenous women are on the front lines of resistance against forest evictions.
6 July 2020 (openDemocracy)* — The outbreak of the coronavirus and the regulations that have been installed by governments worldwide to protect citizens, life and vulnerable groups effect everyone – but not every person or community in the same way.
It is not yet clear, if indigenous groups in India, often living in remote areas with lack of information and restricted access to health care are particularly threatened by Covid-19 or more resilient to its spreading if they devise innovative coping mechanisms (such as self-isolation and protective health measures).
In the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Spain, researchers are poring over samples of wastewater for signs of the coronavirus, which is believed to be shed in human feces.
Given that many people with the virus are asymptomatic and will not be tested for the disease, scientists say sewage could act like a COVID-19 early warning system.
Countries have long monitored sewage, which is laden with traces of the food people eat, the medicine they take, and the disinfectants they use. Wastewater monitoring has been used for decades to assess the success of vaccination campaigns against poliovirus, for example.
– Jayashree Parwar has not traveled much outside of her village of Bicholim in the western coastal Indian state of Goa. But the homemaker-turned-social-entrepreneur has been reaching women in dozens of cities across the country with a hygiene product she makes at home along with women from her community.
The Sakhi sanitary pad is completely natural, comprising pinewood fibre, non-woven cloth, and butter paper. lt composts in eight days. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS
(UN News)* — As the battle against COVID-19 rages, the world can expect to see other diseases that pass from animals to humans emerge, according to a new UN report launched on 6 July 2020, which maintains that there is still time to head off potential zoonotic pandemics.
Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission identifies seven trends driving the increasing emergence of zoonotic diseases, including a growing demand for animal protein, unsustainable farming practices and the global climate crisis.
(UN News)* — States, civil society, psychiatric organizations and the World Health Organization (WHO) itself must change the way they address mental health challenges, a UN independent rights expert said, calling for a shift towards understanding the context behind mental distress.
(Wall Street International)* — Accepting rules and commitments established in contexts that organize their validity corresponds to limits defining necessary functions. When these rules and commitments exist independently of the situations they regulate, when they exist to maintain other orders, they enslave and chain. Thus, being bound by commitments and rules makes the individual a link to alienating chains.
28 Jun 2020 – A letter to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. by Dr. Antonietta M. Gatti
Dear Robert,
I don’t know if you are completely aware of the Italian situation. Summarizing everything in a few words, Italy was sold to Big Pharma and has become a huge laboratory where experiments are carried out on the population: adults, children, old, healthy, sick people … it makes no difference, we are all guinea pigs.
6 July 2020 (UN Environment)* — A new report by UNEP and The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) considers the root causes of the emergence and spread of COVID-19 and other zoonoses. Zoonoses are diseases that originate in animals and are transferred to humans.
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The report offers a set of practical recommendations that can help policymakers prevent and respond to future disease outbreaks.
3 July 2020 (openDemocracy)* — Widely regarded as the first film made in Black Africa, Borom Sarret (The Wagoner) by Ousmane Sembène provides an immediate glimpse of post-colonial reality. Made in 1963 on Sembène’s return from the Gorkii Studios in Moscow, it portrays one day in the life of a cart driver in Dakar, Senegal. Its formal minimalism enables Borom Sarret to reveal several layers of complexity. Continue reading
Environmental stories out of Russia have been in the news lately. First, there was one of the largest diesel spills in the Russian Arctic’s history. Then, there is the shocking heating of the Arctic which can be directly connected to climate change, which is driven by the burning of fossil fuels, like diesel. Now — once again, as is happening with increasing fury every year — there are wildfires raging across Siberia, another effect of climate change.
Well, here’s a story that ties all these things together:
3 July 2020 (RT)* — The remote worker of the future has been revealed. She’s called Susan and she’s not a pretty sight – a warning that we shouldn’t be seduced by the benefits of ‘WFH.’
© DirectlyApply
If you’re working from home, stop now. Quit your job immediately, get out of the house and sign up as a barista or tree surgeon or literally any job that you can’t do from your domicile. Because I’ve seen the future of home-working: it’s hideous and it’s called Susan.
Susan, bless her miserable imagined existence, is the ‘remote worker in 25 years,’ according to American ‘job discovery platform’ DirectlyApply. And she is not a healthy-looking specimen.
How did it get done? You might call it an act of God.
The events last December were convened by the Peruvian program of the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI) an international alliance launched in 2017 to mobilize religious leaders to defend rainforests, through collaboration with indigenous communities, local groups, and advocates for rainforest protection.
BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions of bailout dollars from the Federal Reserve. The fate of a large portion of the country’s corporations has been put in the hands of a megalithic private entity with the private capitalist mandate to make as much money as possible for its owners and investors; and that is what it has proceeded to do.
Ellen Brown
To most people, if they are familiar with it at all, BlackRock is an asset manager that helps pension funds and retirees manage their savings through “passive” investments that track the stock market.
But working behind the scenes, it is much more than that.
BlackRock has been called “the most powerful institution in the financial system,” “the most powerful company in the world” and the “secret power.”
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5 July 2020 (Wall Street International)* – In June 2020, Mexico dropped out of the top 25 countries for foreign investment for the second time in over 20 years. For the second largest economy in Latin America, this is bad news.
What has precipitated this decline in confidence by the global investment community? This article explores the central reasons for this reality.
The world has been worried about pandemic diseases for many years. Before COVID-19, attention was focused on influenza viruses as the most likely cause. A recent paper reminds us that the threat from flu remains very real. It reports that a swine flu virus is circulating in China that has the potential for pandemic spread in humans. This sounds highly alarming, but just how worried should we be?
Main symptoms of swine flu in humans | Public Domain
There are millions of cases of flu each year, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. These are caused by “seasonal” or type B influenza viruses.
There are also other types of flu viruses that are harboured by animals, notably the type A viruses of birds.
Thankfully, most of these infect humans poorly. But as they are different from the seasonal viruses, humans have no or little existing immunity to them.
“The time for manufacturing of weapons of war has passed as a viable industry for our nation, despite the way some of our political leadership clings to economies of the past.”
— Lisa Savage, U.S. Senate candidate in Maine
Fincantieri Marine Group
On 25 June 2020 President Trump’s re-election efforts took him to the “battleground” state of Wisconsin, where he toured the Fincantieri Marinette Marine shipyard. He railed against the Democrats as a scarier enemy than Russia or China.
He also celebrated Wisconsin’s win over domestic enemies like the state of Maine in securing a key shipbuilding project. Continue reading
CAIRO, Egypt (UNFPA)* – “Every morning we meet with the intention of packing as many kits as we can, to be delivered to the health workers who are working hard to protect us,” 22-year-old Ammar told UNFPA.
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Ammar is a volunteer with Y-PEER, UNFPA’s youth leadership network, which mobilized dozens of young people to assemble hygiene and dignity kits for distribution to health workers working on the front lines of the COVID-19 response.
3 July 2020 (WMO)* — Climate change impacts are affecting water availability and are exacerbating the damages floods and drought cause worldwide. Climate related water action is a key for bringing us back on track to deliver Sustainable Development Goal 6, to ensure access to water and sanitation for all and to sustain a healthy environment.
WMO hosted a virtual diplomatic briefing on 2 July on plans for a Water and Climate Coalition aimed at building momentum on water and climate action through implementing concrete activities at the national, regional and global levels.
Afghanistan’s shortage of decent and affordable housing is one of the biggest challenges facing millions of displaced and returning refugees. A new project is offering some a solution. | Français | عربي
Four-year-old Malali eats bread made by her grandmother, Sadar Bibi. The family returned to Afghanistan after 30 years living as refugees in Pakistan. © UNHCR/Farzana Wahidy
Crosses installed in tribute to the victims of COVID-19, Brasilia, Brazil, June 28. | Photo: EFE
Members of the Yanomami community arrive at a military brigade, Surucucu, Brazil, 2020. | Photo: EFE
If climate change directly affected white Westerners, action would have come quicker.
1 July 2020 (openDemocracy)* — We have known about climate change for decades. As early as 1992 the threat was sufficiently obvious, and the science sufficiently clear, to justify a UN treaty on the topic. Yet we’ve only even begun to get our act together in the last five or so years. Why?
Kawkab Mustafa pictured inside her shop in the Bab al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood of Tripoli, Lebanon. © UNHCR/Diego Ibarra Sánchez
Behind the counter of her small convenience store in a rundown neighbourhood of Tripoli, northern Lebanon, 35-year-old Kawkab Mustafa keeps a list of debts owed to her by customers she has allowed to buy goods on credit. In recent months, the list has grown so long she needs four separate notebooks to record all the entries.
The High Court in London, Britain, July 2, 2020. | Photo: EFE
Climate change severely impacts people’s livelihoods around the world, especially the most disadvantaged groups such as small-scale farmers, women, youth, indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities, who have to cope with extreme natural disasters and degradation of natural resources.
(UN News)* — A likely link between processed and fried foods containing so-called “transfats” and ovarian cancer has been identified by UN scientists, they said on Thursday [2 July 2020].
Previous, smaller studies have suggested a link between these industrially manufactured fatty foods and ovarian cancer, but the evidence has been “inconclusive” until now, said IARC’s Dr Inge Huybrechts.
– Seventy-five years ago, on 26 June 1945, before the Japanese surrender ending the Second World War, fifty nations gathered at San Francisco’s Opera House to sign the United Nations (UN) Charter.
UN Charter
Nations pledged “to practice tolerance and live together in peace …, and to ensure … that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples”.
They sought “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, … and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to … promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”.
These are the findings of UNFPA’s flagship 2020 State of World Population report, released on 30 June 2020. The report examines the origin and extent of harmful practices around the world, and what must be done to stop them.
It identifies 19 harmful practices – ranging from breast ironing to virginity testing – that are considered to be human rights violations.
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