09/09/2014
Melbourne, 9 September 2014 – A large and persistent shortfall in the number and quality of the jobs being created in G20 countries is affecting prospects for re-igniting economic growth, according to a report entitled G20 labour markets: outlook, key challenges and policy responses, prepared by the ILO, the OECD and the World Bank Group for the G20 Labour and Employment Ministers meeting taking place in Melbourne on 10-11 September 2014.
Photo from ILO
Despite some recent improvement, slow recovery from the financial crisis means that many G20 economies still face a substantial jobs gap, which will persist until at least 2018 unless growth gains momentum.
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With more than 100 million people still unemployed in the G20 economies and 447 million ‘working poor’ living on less than $2 a day in emerging G20 economies, the weak labour market performance is also threatening economic recovery because it is constraining both consumption and investment.
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09/09/2014
Lighting from electricity accounts for approximately 15 to 19 per cent of global energy consumption and over five per cent of worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, UNEP reports in relation to the Climate Change Summit 2014 scheduled to take place in UN headquarters in New York on 23 September 2014.
UNEP en.lighten initiative
Unless policies are implemented immediately to address this issue, overall energy consumption for lighting will have grown by 60 to 70 per cent by 2030 with dramatic consequences for climate change.
The phase-out of inefficient incandescent lamps provides one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to reduce carbon emissions, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) adds.*
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09/09/2014
The multiplication of crises affecting children since the beginning of 2014 is creating unprecedented challenges that overshadow progress to date to protect them from the impact of war, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council on 8 September 2014.
Members of an ethnic Yezidi family sleep in the shade in Shekhadi village, Iraq, after fleeing Sinjar. Photo: UNHCR/N. Colt
The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Leila Zerrougui, said that she was appalled by the total disregard for human life shown by extremist armed groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Boko Haram.
The situation also remains dire in Syria, she said as she presented the Secretary-General’s latest report on children and armed conflict.*
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09/09/2014
Almost 30 million children are out of school in emergency or conflict affected countries following the targeting of schools and the displacement of millions of children forced from their homes and studies, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on 8 September 2014 said.
Thirty million children can’t go back to school because of a record number of conflicts and crises. Photo: UNICEF
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09/09/2014
With one in four young people – 175 million adolescents – unable to read a single sentence, International Literacy Day is an opportunity to remember one simple truth: literacy not only changes lives, it saves them, said the head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Women police in Herat, Afghanistan, boost their literacy through UNAMA’s Ustad Mobile programme. Photo: UNAMA
“Literacy facilitates access to knowledge and triggers a process of empowerment and self-esteem that benefits everyone,” Director-General Irina Bokova said in a message for the Day on 8 September 2014.
This year’s activities for the Day, observed annually on 8 September, are focused on the links between literacy and sustainable development with a literacy award ceremony and a girls’ and women’s literacy conference in Bangladesh. The events underscore the power of literacy to enable people to make choices that promote economic growth, social development and environmental integration.
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07/09/2014
By Dorothy Lusweti, Boroli Refugee Settlement, Uganda, (UNHCR)* – When 13-year-old Yayo Tangko turned up at the Boroli refugee settlement in Uganda earlier this year with her four younger siblings, she feared the worst for her missing parents. “They are dead, because otherwise they would have come looking for us,” the South Sudanese teenager told aid workers.
© UNHCR/D.Lusweti | Yayo Tangko (centre), with her sister Yotok to her left. The two girls looked after their younger siblings in Uganda.
It turned out she was wrong and the children would eventually be reunited with their mother. But the aid workers were impressed at the girl’s strength and determination in bringing her sister and three brothers to safety after conflict flared between government forces and rebels in South Sudan at the end of last year.
When the fighting came to Pibor county, where they lived, their parents were away at a market. Kept together by Yayo, the children were swept along by the mass of humanity flowing out of Jonglei and into Adjumani and other districts of northern Uganda.
They walked for days, with the older children taking turns to carry two-year-old Babur when he was too exhausted to walk. Other refugees shared food with the youngsters and protected them until they reached the border crossing at Elegu, where they were picked up and taken to the Dzaipi transit centre.
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07/09/2014
“The executioner always kills twice”, Elie Wiesel once wrote, “the second time through silence”. Historically, global issues – such as development, human rights, cultural pluralism and intercultural dialogue – have been characterized by a total absence of awareness and understanding of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
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©UNESCO/Jean O’Sullivan – Pupils at the UNESCO ASPnet school, CES Abomey-Calvi (Benin), beside their mural of the logo of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project
To break the silence around the Slave Trade, UNESCO launched the Slave Route Project, a global inquiry into the means of promoting the rapprochement of peoples through the shared legacy of this tragedy. On 10 September, UNESCO will celebrate the project’s 20th anniversary at its Paris headquarters.
“The Slave Route is not merely a thing of the past: it is our history and it has shaped the face of many modern societies, creating indissoluble ties between peoples and continents, and irreversibly transforming the destiny, economy and culture of nations,” said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova.
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07/09/2014
A new UNICEF report looks at the scope of violence against children – a crisis of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that takes place every day around the world, and yet remains all too invisible.
UNICEF
NEW YORK – The largest-ever compilation of data on violence against children shows the staggering extent of physical, sexual and emotional abuse — and reveals the attitudes that perpetuate and justify violence, keeping it ‘hidden in plain sight’ in every country and community in the world, the UNICEF reported on 4 September 2014.*
“These are uncomfortable facts — no government or parent will want to see them,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake. “But unless we confront the reality each infuriating statistic represents — the life of a child whose right to a safe, protected childhood has been violated — we will never change the mind-set that violence against children is normal and permissible. It is neither. “
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06/09/2014
Human Wrongs Watch
By Uri Avnery*
5 September 2014
FOR SIX decades my friends and I have warned our people: if we don’t make peace with the nationalist Arab forces, we shall be faced with Islamic Arab forces.
**Photo: Uri Avnery at a Hadash rally against the 2006 Lebanon War
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will turn into a Jewish-Muslim conflict. The national war will become a religious war.
Religious conflicts are irrational. Each side believes in an absolute truth, and automatically considers everybody else as infidels, enemies of the only true God.National conflicts are basically rational. They concern territory. They can usually be solved by compromise.
There can be no compromise between True Believers, who believe that they are fighting for God and get their orders straight from Heaven. “God Wills It” shouted the Crusaders and butchered Muslims and Jews. “Allah is the Greatest” shout fanatical Muslims and behead their enemies. “Who is like you among the Gods!” cried the Maccabees, and annihilated all fellow Jews who had adopted Greek manners.
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06/09/2014
Ten years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 24 countries in the region will participate in an exercise organized by the United Nations to test their readiness to address such rare but potentially destructive events, the UN announced on 5 September 2014.
Photo: UNESCO
The large-scale simulation exercise – known as “IOWAVE14” – is planned for 9 and 10 September, and is organized under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).*
The exercise is intended to test the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System, which was set up in the wake of the catastrophe that struck the area on 26 December 2004.
On that day, an earthquake off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent waves as high as 30 metres crashing into 14 countries, claiming nearly 230,000 lives and leaving around 2 million people homeless.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 