20/06/2015
In an effort to boost the global fight against the horrors faced by women and girls in zones of conflict worldwide, the United Nations General Assembly on 19 June 2015 approved by consensus a new resolution to commemorate 19 June as the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict.
Victims of sexual violence at a shelter in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo. UN Photo/Marie Frechon (file)
“Rape and other forms of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict constitute grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law,” President of the 193-member Assembly, Sam Kutesa, declared as he greeted the resolution’s adoption. “Yet these depraved acts still occur and are used to terrorize and control civilian populations in conflict zones.”
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19/06/2015
Geneva, 18 June 2015 (UNHCR)* – Wars, conflict and persecution have forced more people than at any other time since records began to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere, according to a new report from the UN refugee agency. “Most alarmingly, however, it showed that over half the world’s refugees are children.”
**© UNHCR | Global Trends 2014
UNHCR’s annual Global Trends Report: World at War, released on Thursday (18 June), said that worldwide displacement was at the highest level ever recorded. It said the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 had risen to a staggering 59.5 million compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and 37.5 million a decade ago.* The increase represents the biggest leap ever seen in a single year. Moreover, the report said the situation was likely to worsen still further.
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19/06/2015
The international community is experiencing a dramatic shift in the situation facing the world’s refugees as a global surge in war, conflict and persecution has caused a record number of people to flee their homes in search of safety, the United Nations refugee agency on 18 June 2015 reported.
Hundreds of refugees and migrants aboard a fishing boat moments before being rescued by the Italian Navy in June 2014. Photo: The Italian Coastguard/Massimo Sestini
According to data gathered by Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) over the course of 2014, the number of people forcibly displaced during the reporting year swelled to a staggering 59.5 million people compared to the 51.2 million from the previous year.
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18/06/2015
By Anthony Judge*
A Modest Proposal Worthy of the 21st Century?
18 June 2015 – TRANSCEND Media Service – In this period much is made of the genius of humanity in enabling travel to Mars. However, in the same period, Europe is clearly at a total strategic loss in the face of mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa — with all the dangers to human life, and all the poverty and fear driving that process.
Asylum-seekers and economic migrants take to the seas, waiting out the dangerous journey in the boat’s cramped cargo space. Photo: UNHCR/A. D’Amato
Over 100,000 are estimated to have arrived in Europe in the first six months of 2015, compared with an estimated 170,100 migrants in 2014, exceeding by far the 42,925 of the previous year.
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18/06/2015
Land is a renewable resource, but only if investments are made in land degradation neutrality, which has been proposed as an element of the post-2015 development agenda, on 17 June 2015 said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his message on the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought.
Example of good fertile earth that has dried and cracked from lack of rain. Photo: FAO/Jeanette Van Acker
“We need to change course and start securing every hectare of land that can provide food or freshwater and rehabilitate all the degraded land that we can,” urged Ban, who assured that by doing so, the international community will be able to make rapid steps towards controlling climate change.*
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18/06/2015
The stark conditions afflicting millions of displaced Palestinians across the Middle East risk destabilizing the region and plunging it into a deeper humanitarian and security crisis, the head of the United Nations agency assisting Palestinian refugees has warned.*
Palestinian refugees living in active conflict areas in Syria such as Yarmouk, Khan Eshieh and the Dera’a surroundings, face brutal hardships. Photo: UNRWA/Taghrid Mohammed
“The isolation, exclusion and dispossession of Palestine refugees in Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon represent a time-bomb for the Middle East region,” Pierre Krähenbühl, the Commissioner General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), on 16 June 2015 said yesterday at a meeting of the agency’s Advisory Commission of major donors and host governments, held in Amman, Jordan.
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18/06/2015
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London, 17 June 2015 (IRIN) –
Ahead of World Refugee Day, anthropologist and author of “Illegality, Inc.”, Ruben Andersson of the London School of Economics looks at how localized migration control efforts have ignored the globalization of irregular migration routes.
**Photo: Frontex | Frontex officers inspect discarded clothing at the Hungarian-Serbian border | Source: IRIN
The warning was restrained, as was to be expected from a European border police chief, yet it was a warning nonetheless.
Amid European leaders’ scramble to launch a military operation targeting migrant smugglers’ boats in the Mediterranean, the director of EU border agency, Frontex, voiced some caution: “If there is a military operation in the vicinity of Libya,” he said in early June, “this may change the migration routes and make them move to the eastern route.”
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18/06/2015
By John Frizell*
16 June 2015 – Late last week the Winter Bay, a freighter carrying 1,800 tones of fin whale meat – Iceland’s entire catch from the 2014 whaling season – arrived in Tromso, Norway, 200 miles north of the Arctic circle. It will stay there until July 1st and then sail over the top of Russia, through the Northern Sea Route – a passage which is increasingly navigable to commercial vessels thanks to thinning of the sea ice caused by global warming – on its way to Japan.
Photo: Greenpeace
No shipment from Iceland has gone this way before. This unusual route is because of the unusual cargo. The owner of Iceland’s fin whaling industry, Mr Loftsson, used to send his whale meat via the international sea freight cargo network using European ports.
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18/06/2015
By Johan Galtung*
18 June 2015 – TRANSCEND Media Service – The decline and fall of the US Empire’s grip on the world; of the West; of the state system–with the rise of the TNC-IGO-NGO system, regions, nations, local authorities; the rise of the East and the South; of China–many details cross an editor’s desk; inspiring some rethinking:
**Image: Clickable world map (with climate classification). Author: LordToran | Wikipedia Commons
Thus, in a pile of quotes not to be forgotten, from Balfour 1917:
“it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status of Jews in any other country“.
Very prescient thinking, not clearly understood. Time to rethink?
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17/06/2015
16 June 2015 – Next time you are in the shower using a refreshing exfoliating shower gel, take a moment to check what the scrubbing agents are made of. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), chances are pretty high they are made of tiny plastic beads, and by the time the container is empty, you will have used and poured down the drain as much plastic as the packaging the gel came in.*
For the last 50 years, microparticles of plastic, called microplastics, have been used in personal care products and cosmetics (PCCP), replacing natural options. Photo: UNEP
This alarming fact is contained in a UNEP report Plastic in Cosmetics: Are We Polluting the Environment Through Our Personal Care?, which is a compilation of currently available knowledge on the linkages between cosmetics and plastic pollution in the oceans.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 