Where was the global sympathy when a terror attack left at least 44 people dead and 239 others injured in Lebanon?
**Photo: Great Pyramid of Giza lit up by images of the flags of Lebanon, France and Russia in solidarity with victims of recent terrorist attacks, 16 November 2015 | Author: Wikiilluminati| Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.| Wikimedia Commons
14 Nov 2015 – As news arrived yesterday of terror attacks in Paris that ultimately left more than 120 people dead, U.S. President Barack Obama characterized the situation as “heartbreaking” and an assault “on all of humanity.”
Presidential sympathy had been conspicuously absent the previous day when terror attacks in Beirut left more than 40 dead.
Predictably, Western media and social media were much less vocal about the slaughter in Lebanon.
18 November 2015 (openDemocracy)– “A life is a life” saidLabour leader Jeremy Corbyn reflecting on the disparity between blanket media coverage of the atrocities in Paris last Friday and what he perceived as a distinct lack of attention to the loss of life in other parts of the world
Pointing to last week’s suicide bombs in Beirut in which 43 people were killed and the 95 people killed in Turkey last month, Corbyn argued that “our media needs to be able to report things that happen outside of Europe as well as inside.”
This echoed a similar claim earlier this year that western media focused on the terror attacks in Paris back in January but paid scant attention to the massacre of many hundreds of people by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria.
‘The Nigerian government plans to start closing camps for those displaced by the Boko Haram conflict by the end of December, forcing thousands of people to return to the very places they fled. With much of northeastern Nigeria still very insecure and infrastructure lacking, many are scared. Is it too soon?’
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**Photo: Fragkiska Megaloudi/IRIN | IDPs in northeastern Nigeria often share overcrowded rooms.
By Fragkiska Megaloudi*
MAIDUGURI/YOLA, 17 November 2015 (IRIN)– Memuna* was four months pregnant when Boko Haram attacked her village on the outskirts of Bama, some 60 kilometres southeast of the Borno State capital of Maiduguri.
Her husband was killed during the September 2014 raid. She was captured and thrown into a cage by the militants after becoming separated from her five children.
Over 25,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of mud – full of dangerous metals like manganese and mercury – quickly overtook the nearby mining community of Mariana in Minas Gerais state.
At least seventeen people were killed.
Hundreds more have been displaced by the wall of sludge released in the dam collapse.
Widespread adoption of products labelled “biodegradable” will not significantly decrease the volume of plastic entering the ocean or the physical and chemical risks that plastics pose to marine environment, accord to a United Nations report released on 17 November 2015.
Plastic bottles and garbage waste from a village in Timor-Leste wash on the shores of a river and then spill into the sea. UN Photo/Martine Perret
United Nations Security Council held an already scheduled debate on conflict prevention on 17 November 2015 amid added urgency fueled by last week’s terrorist attacks in Beirut and Paris, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressing that counter-terrorism must also tackle such root causes as bad governance, injustice and exclusion.*
**Photo: People who earn their living by collecting and sorting garbage and selling them for recycling, Payatas, Manila, Philippines. | Author: Kounosu | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license. | Wikimedia Commons.
‘Yet our responses have not caught up to these realities. We are not yet properly integrating UN action across the inter-dependent pillars of our work: peace, development and human rights,” he added, calling for a global recovery plan for the Middle East similar to the multi-billion dollar Marshall Plan with which the United States rebuilt Western Europe after World War Two.
17 November 2015 – The United Nations refugee agency today expressed its shock and horror at the attacks in Paris and the killing of so many innocent people but warned against the scapegoating of refugees, in the wake of the deadly attacks.
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A volunteer on the Greek Island of Lesvos gathers a baby girl in her arms, moments after her family arrived in an inflatable boat. Photo: UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis
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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), António Guterres conveyed his solidarity with the Government and the people of France, as he did with the Government of Lebanon, following the recent Beirut attacks.
MIAMI, Florida, 17 November 2015 (IPS)– We humans are acutely aware of risks. From our earliest times, the risks we faced were from hunger, predatory animals, extreme environmental conditions and, as our numbers grew, from other human tribes.
Fast forward to our growing mastery of nature, technological prowess and the Industrial Revolution.
The risks humans faced changed beyond those always present in extreme environmental conditions.
The technologies we developed against such risks – advancing our energy, shelter, food and health systems – also created new risks, often unforeseen for decades.
Conflicts with other humans grew as the human family colonized every part of our planet, stressing ecosystems and driving other species to extinction.
Today, in the 21st century, new risks dominate our political and social issues from terrorism, barbarous attacks on civilians as in Paris, nuclear meltdowns and weapons, financial crises, desertification and famines, disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas, Greenland and Antarctica, water shortages, polluted air, rising sea levels, new pandemics and drug-resistant diseases.
16 November 2015 (RT)*– President Vladimir Putin says he’s shared Russian intelligence data on Islamic State financing with his G20 colleagues: the terrorists appear to be financed from 40 countries, including some G20 member states.
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Putin also spoke of the urgent need to curb the illegal oil trade by IS.
“I’ve shown our colleagues photos taken from space and from aircraft which clearly demonstrate the scale of the illegal trade in oil and petroleum products,” he said.
“The motorcade of refueling vehicles stretched for dozens of kilometers, so that from a height of 4,000 to 5,000 meters they stretch beyond the horizon,” Putin added, comparing the convoy to gas and oil pipeline systems.
Rome, 16 November 2015 – The media everywhere are now unanimous in their condemnation of the Paris massacre three days ago, calling for unity of the West and intensification of military action against the Islamic States (IS). But would that solve the problem of terrorism? And it is not also time to make reflect on the responsibilities of the West in the rise of terrorism?
Roberto Savio
Of course, the slaughter in Paris can only cause horror and mourning. But why can some very young people act so atrociously?
The commune of Courcouronnes, the ghetto from which identified kamikaze killer Ismail Mostafa came, was also home to Asata Diakitè, one of the victims. Let then us make three reflections.
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The first is that relations between the Arab world and the West have a heavy past. They started when, in 1916 during the First World War, an agreement was made to divide the Ottoman Empire among France, Britain, Russia and Italy.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 