'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
Photo: Greenpeace
As the degrees of latitude rose, those of temperature dropped. When we crossed the Arctic Circle and all the time we traveled I wondered what sound would finally come out of that adventurous piano.
‘More than a third of the population in urgent need of food, agriculture and nutrition assistance amid risk of catastrophe in some parts of the country’
Juba – Up to 4.8 million people in South Sudan – well over one-third of the population – will be facing severe food shortages over the coming months, and the risk of a hunger catastrophe continues to threaten parts of the country, three UN agencies on 29 June 2016 warned.
Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in CGIAR seed banks, Bill Gates (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in a facility in Svalbard in the Arctic — the ‘doomsday vault’.
16 Jun 2016 – A great seed and biodiversity piracy is underway and it must be stopped. The privateers of today include not just the corporations — which are becoming fewer and larger through mergers — but also individuals like Bill Gates, the “richest man in the world”.
When the Green Revolution was pushed in India and Mexico, farmers’ seeds were “rounded-up” and locked in international institutions, which used these seeds to breed green revolution varieties which responded to chemical inputs.
The first two institutions were the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico. These institutes took diversity from farmers’ fields and replaced the diversity with chemical monocultures of rice, wheat and corn.
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The disclosures have triggered far-reaching debates about tax avoidance. The European Commission concluded that some tax deals in Luxembourg and in the Netherlands are illegal state aid and violate European competition rules.
By Robert J. Burrowes*
Deeply affected by the death of my two uncles in World War II, on 1 July 1966, the 24th anniversary of the ‘USS Sturgeon’ sinking of the Japanese prisoner-of-war ship ‘Montevideo Maru’ which killed the man after whom I am named, I decided that I would devote my life to working out why human beings are violent and then developing a strategy to end it.
Robert Burrowes 17 February 1918 – 1 July 1942
The good news about this commitment was that it was made when I was nearly 14 so, it seemed, anything was possible. Now I am not so sure.
Here is my report on 50 years of concerted effort to understand and end human violence.
In 1966 one of my immediate preoccupations was war.
The US genocidal war on Vietnam was raging and, as a sycophantic ally of the United States, Australia had been drawn into it some years previously.
Some 69 million children under five years of age will die from mostly preventable causes, 167 million children will live in poverty, and 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030, unless the world focuses more on the plight of its most disadvantaged children, according to a United Nations report published on 28 June 2016.
Refugee children on the border of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Serbia. Photo: UNICEF/Tomislav Georgiev
27 June 2016 – One of the strongest El Niño events ever recorded has placed the lives of 26.5 million children at risk of malnutrition, water shortages and disease in ten countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has reported.
Barren fields due to the impact of El Niño-induced drought in the Southern African nation of Lesotho. Photo: FAO
“Children face protection risks as families and communities move in search of work, food, water and grazing land for animals. Children are also finding it difficult to stay in school, due to hunger and/or lack of water,” UNICEF noted in a study on the Eastern and Southern Africa region.
UNICEF added that it found that more than one million children are in need of treatment for severe acute malnutrition.
Juncker is not the “right man for the job” and should resign, Czech Foreign Minister Lubomír Zaorálek said on Monday (27 June).
The Czech minister said someone in the EU institutions should take “responsibility” for last week’s vote by British citizens to leave the EU.
“Right now I can’t see the European Commission chairman as the right man for the job,” Zaorálek told Czech television.
27 June 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – The long awaited Chilcot report (5 years) on the Invasion of Iraq will finally be released on 6th July, 2016.
Mairead Maguire
The Report is to be welcomed and the hope expressed that this inquiry will tell the truth of what happened to Iraqi people, and UK’s involvement, through an official government recognition of facts of the wars, sanctions and invasion of Iraq and for transparency, accountability and reparation to be paid to the Iraqi people by UK Government who participated in these illegal and immoral genocidal wars.
The story of what was done to the Iraqi people by UK and Western allies is shocking and deeply disturbing.
The two wars, the imposition of economic sanctions, causing the slow deaths of thousands of people, were indeed crimes against humanity, war crimes, breaking all international obligations and conducted with no respect for human life or Iraqi people’s rights.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 