'Unseen' News and Views
Tourism industry could not feel happier–the number of people going on holiday is on constant rise. It reached 940 million people in one year only–2010. While hailing this fact as a source of employment amidst global financial crisis, little mention is made about the extremely precarious, abusive work conditions of such seasonal employment.
Just see what the 34 industrialised, rich countries group–the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says.
Ethiopia’s new leadership should commit to fundamental human rights reforms in the wake of the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Human Rights Watch said*. Meles’s death was announced by the Ethiopian state media on August 21, 2012.
**Meles Zenawi – World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2012.
Ethiopia’s international partners should call on the government to support fundamental rights and freedoms in the country and a prompt rollback of repressive laws, Human Rights Watch (HRW) added.
“Ethiopia’s government should commit to respect for human rights and core rights reforms in the coming days and weeks,” said Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director at HRW. “The country’s new leadership should reassure Ethiopians by building on Meles’s positive legacy while reversing his government’s most pernicious policies.”
Meles had been in power since 1991, when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) lead a coalition of armed opposition groups in overturning the rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam.
By RT* — Israel has deported Sudanese asylum seekers by issuing documents with purposefully incorrect nationalities, a recently published report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed.
**Photo: Tamar Dressler/IRIN – South Sudanese children at a protest against Israeli government directive to return home.
More than 100 Sudanese nationals in Israel were given passports or birth certificates incorrectly labeling them as citizens of South Sudan, the report said.
Israel has no repatriation agreement with Sudan, but can deport the asylum-seekers to the country’s neighbor, which seceded last year from the North.
The revelation comes two months after Israel initiated a controversial ‘emergency plan’ to deport 60,000 African migrants.
**Photo credit: Sherkashmiri
UN Women launched the One Million Signatures Campaign during the annual 16 Days of Activism in Pakistan in 2011, in partnership with a country-wide network of women’s organizations, the EVAWG Alliance.
The campaign has seen more than 450,000 community members and social media users mobilized, along with at least 1,500 Pakistani women leaders.
Pakistanis from all walks of life, including a plethora of celebrities and politicians, have publicly signed postcards in support of EVAWG goals, while Charters of Demand have been gathered from 57 districts, many with a focus on reforming laws, policies and services to better serve women.
By EurActiv* — Sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far greater rate than previously expected, according to data from the first purpose-built satellite launched to study the thickness of the Earth’s polar caps.
Image: EurActiv
Preliminary results from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe indicate that 900 cubic kilometres of summer sea ice has disappeared from the Arctic ocean over the past year.
This rate of loss is 50% higher than most scenarios outlined by polar scientists and suggests that global warming, triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions, is beginning to have a major impact on the region. In a few years the Arctic ocean could be free of ice in summer, triggering a rush to exploit its fish stocks, oil, minerals and sea routes.
Using instruments on earlier satellites, scientists could see that the area covered by summer sea ice in the Arctic has been dwindling rapidly.
But the new measurements indicate that this ice has been thinning dramatically at the same time. For example, in regions north of Canada and Greenland, where ice thickness regularly stayed at around five to six metres in summer a decade ago, levels have dropped to one to three metres.
By IRIN* – Lower output forecasts for US maize and soybeans and wheat from Russia in 2012/13 have been jumped on by the international media as evidence that a food crisis is almost certainly on the way.
Photo: Hannah McNeish/IRIN. Many people are already living in a food crisis
But a range of economists and food experts are also warning against overreaction that could create panic, causing governments to apply export controls that would restrict supplies of grains. This would affect markets and push prices still higher, they say.
“Increasingly pessimistic outlooks for the US corn and Russian wheat crops this year have certainly driven prices up for both commodities, with maize reaching a record high last week following the USDA [US Department of Agriculture] announcement [that the maize crop was going to be even smaller than expected],” said Christopher Barrett, a professor of applied economics at Cornell University in the US.
The US, the world’s largest producer of maize, is expected to produce its smallest crop since 2006/07, the USDA said in its August forecast.
A former Serb military official was transferred to Portugal to serve a 20-year sentence for crimes committed against non-Serb prisoners of war, the United Nations war crimes tribunal set up in the wake of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s announced on 17 August.
A standard cell at the UN Detention Unit in The Hague | UN
On 27 September 2007, Mile Mrkšic, a former Colonel within the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), was sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to 20 years in prison “for aiding and abetting the murder, torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, as well as the inhumane conditions of detention at the hangar of Ovcara near the Croatian town of Vukovar between 20 and 21 November 1991.”
Villawood Immigration Detention Centre outside Sydney, Australia. Photo: IRIN
Ramallah, IRIN* – Rasmiyye Hamande has lived in a cave in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) for most of her life, which may have been a blessing in disguise. “This cave,” she says, “can’t be demolished so easily.”
Photo: Shabtai Gold/IRIN. In 2012 395 Palestinian structures were demolished in the West Bank.
Other places in the village of Al-Mufaqara, in Area C – the 60 percent of the West Bank under Israeli military control – are more easily destroyed.
Some 622 structures were demolished by Israeli forces in the West Bank in 2011, a 42 percent increase from 2010. 2012 could well surpass last year’s numbers, as by the end of July, some 395 demolished structures in oPt were registered by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
By Rajesh Krishnan*, Greenpeace India — Genetically engineered (GE) food is a hot button topic in India. What happens here often sends ripples throughout the GE debate worldwide, but what happened last week is surely a major milestone.
**Image: Greenpeace
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture, made up of members of parliament (MPs) from across party lines, tabled its latest report on GE food and GE crops following intense consultation with farmers, environmental groups, scientists and consumer groups.
The committee undertook extensive consultation – perhaps the most comprehensive taken anywhere in the world. The committee took two and half years holding hearings across India and going through some 493 memoranda running to some 15,000 pages.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 