'Unseen' News and Views
October 2015 (ICAN) – “It’s been great to put humanitarian disarmament advocacy work in perspective and relate it to real conflicts”, commented a participant at the end of the 4th Humanitarian Disarmament Campaigns Forum.
Source: ICAN-International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Almost one hundred NGO representatives attended the forum in the margins of the UNGA First Committee meeting in New York this weekend.
26 Oct 2015, L’Alfàs del Pi, Alicante, Spain (TRANSCEND Media Service) – Our focus is on transactions: I give something to you, you give something to me. The double flow of which lo social is made.
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**A world map of the 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index by Transparency International, which measures “the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians”. High numbers (blue) indicate less perception of corruption, whereas lower numbers (red) indicate higher perception of corruption. | Author: Ruben.2196 | Wikimedia Commons
We then limit the focus to economic transactions, of factors of production–resources, labor, capital, technology, administration–and products–goods, services.
28 October 2015 – More than 3.7 billion people under the age of 50 are infected with herpes simplex virus type 1, which in most cases causes “cold sores” around the mouth, according to the first global estimates of the infection by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Photo: WHO/Jim Holmes
Grasslands replaced the Amazon rainforest in Brasil Novo, a municipality in the Xingú River basin, where the giant Belo Monte hydroelectric dam is being built. Low-productivity stock-raising, with just one or two animals per hectare, is the big factor in deforestation and soil degradation in the region, and the government’s goal is to recover just one-fourth of the area degraded by this activity. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
Source: SIWI
Nexus thinking is complex, I know. Trying to create synergy from water, energy and food, instead of competition, is not an easy task – not to mention that there are probably as many definitions of “the nexus” as there are nexus researchers.
But food is not just food, energy is not just energy, and water is not just water.
**Photo: Jonathan Vit/IRIN | Ngadimin in his field in Ketung Miri village in Indonesia’s Special Region of Yogyakarta. Normally the field would be a flooded rice paddy, but his rice harvest failed due to drought so he planted tobacco and chilis.
The weathered farmer breaks the year into harvests. There’s the first harvest, then the second, with a growing season of alternative crops in between.
It hasn’t rained since “the second rice,” said Ngadimin, who uses just one name like many Indonesians.
28 October 2015 (Greenpeace) – 22 year old Indonesian student, Rahmi Carolina has spent her entire life living with the haze. Each year, as the fires rage and grow more intense, so does she. So she’s using social media and doing something about it.
Elementary students under a heavy haze in Central Kalimantan province, Borneo Island | Greenpeace
When I was young my friends and I would visit our local river, just a short walk from our small town in Pangkalan Kerinci, upstream of Riau’s peatland coast in Sumatra.
On days when we needed to cool down from the heat, we would spend hours swimming and getting lost in the shade of the trees, chasing birds and sleeping.
My parents instilled in me the importance of the environment. Growing up, forests fascinated me – how trees nurture and protect us, the beauty of bark, the way in which roots weave like tangled hair knots.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on 27 October 2015 announced that it would start vaccine treatments for cholera beginning this weekend to prevent further outbreaks in Iraq, where the disease has now been confirmed in 15 out of 18 governorates, while the agency also reported a suspected case was also found in northern Syria.
WHO is mobilizing 510,000doses of oral cholera vaccine to help control the cholera outbreak among high-risk groups. Photo: UN OCHA Iraq
WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier told the regular press briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, that the latest laboratory tests had confirmed 1,942 cases and two deaths in 15 out of 18 governorates in Iraq.
“On 31 October, WHO will begin, in conjunction with the Ministry of Health, the oral cholera vaccine treatment, and will use 510,000 of the global stock pile to ensure that 255,000 internally displaced persons and refugees in the affected areas will receive two doses,” the spokesperson said.
The ongoing conflict and the widening humanitarian crisis in Yemen has not deterred nearly 70,000 refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants to reach the country by sea causing the Yemini population to ‘bear the brunt,’ said the United Nations refugee agency on 27 October 2015.
Ethiopian and Somali refugees at the Mayfa’a reception centre in Yemen. Photo: UNHCR/J. Björgvinsson
These desperate people, mainly from Somalia and Ethiopia, have continued to arrive at the Yemeni shores even after the conflict erupted in the Middle Eastern country in March, Adrian Edwards, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UN Day told reporters in Geneva.
The latest UNHCR estimates indicate that Yemen is currently hosting 264,615 refugees, of which 250,260 are Somali.
27 October 2015 – Ethiopia is experiencing its worst drought in 30 years according to the United Nations, with levels of acute need across all humanitarian sectors having already exceeded levels seen in the Horn of Africa drought of 2011, and which are projected to become far more severe in 2016.
*Dry earth in the desert plains of the Danakil depression in northern Ethiopia. Photo: Siegfried Modola/IRIN
A recent report published by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) noted that the impact of the failed spring rains was compounded by the arrival of the El Niño weather conditions that weakened summer rains, which feed 80 to 85 per cent of the country.
“This greatly expanded food insecurity, malnutrition and devastated livelihoods across six affected regions of the country,” OCHA indicated.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 