'Unseen' News and Views
A demonstrator holds up an anti-U.N. poster during a protest outside a UN base in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS
“The UN has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera,” Deputy Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, Farhan Haq said in a statement shared with IPS.
Candidates for Secretary-General debate in the UN General Assembly hall. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider
Despite widespread support for the next UN Secretary-General to be a woman, female candidates have not fared as well as men in the first two so-called straw polls of UN Security Council members.
However the campaign received a small boost from UN Secretary -General Ban Ki-Moon this week when he told an Associated Press Journalist in California it is “high time” for a woman to hold his job.
Boy playing on piece of exploded artillery shell which landed near his home, in the village of Al Mahjar, a suburb of Sana’a, Yemen. Photo: UNICEF/Mohamed Hamoud
15 August 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – Money is the key: that genius innovation for storing general value and exchanging specific values according to price. Not strange, that heads of state had their faces imprinted on coins and bills.
Johan Galtung
But not on cents and euros. The EU is faceless. Brexit is not.
Coins and bills are fading; not money, capital, and its growth. Look at The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger by Greg Steinmetz, brilliantly reviewed by Martha Howell (TNYRB, 7 Apr 2016). Born in 1459, in that pivot German city Augsburg, he died in 1515, and here is how he used the system:
“Fugger expanded his business from trade and used his ability to provide ready credit in order to secure rights to productive assets, such as mines that reliably yielded returns over considerable periods of time. He made princes, in this case the Habsburgs dependent on his money. He financed their elections to the sponsorship, extended loans to pay their armies, and bribed their enemies to keep them at bay.”
Sounds familiar? Half a millennium ago. Solid. There is more to it:
– Children are being smuggled, sexually abused, maimed, killed for their vital organs, recruited as soldiers or otherwise enslaved. Not only: 69 million children under five will die from mostly preventable causes, 167 million will live in poverty, and 263 million are out of school. And 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030.
A boy carrying his belongings in a large cloth bag over his shoulder is among people walking on railway tracks to cross from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia into Serbia. Photo: UNICEF/NYHQ2015-2203/Georgiev
These are just some of the dramatic figures that the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) and other UN and international bodies released few weeks ahead of the World Humanitarian Day (WHD) marked every year on August 19.
Workers in Djibouti Port offloading wheat from a docked ship. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS
Once loaded, the trucks set off westward toward Ethiopia carrying food aid to help with its worst drought for decades.
With crop failures ranging from 50 to 90 percent in parts of the country, Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest wheat consumer, was forced to seek international tenders and drastically increase wheat purchases to tackle food shortages effecting at least 10 million people.
Photo: Greenpeace
From Canada to Honduras to Brazil to Finland, Indigenous Peoples face systematic oppression, government ambivalence and corporate greed – and with a changing climate their battles have gotten even bigger. When your life, existence and culture is threatened, you can’t run away – speaking truth to power is the only way to live.
15 August 2016, TRANSCEND Media Service – When the time arrives for national elections in the United States, most of the candidates campaign on the slogan: making America great again. However, not one political figure brings into the open the real source of the nation’s great problem. Many of those running for an office tend to defend the way things have been going.
**Image: John Trumbull’s painting, Declaration of Independence, depicting the five-man drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress. The painting can be found on the back of the U.S. $2 bill. The original hangs in the US Capitol rotunda…
US Constitution Needs Revision
Up to now, the United States Constitution was never revised, far less updated, since it was composed some 300 years ago when things were entirely different from those of our times.
Desert, drought advancing. Photo UNEP
Moreover, scientists have estimated that the fraction of land surface area experiencing drought conditions has grown from 10-15 per cent in the early 1970s to more than 30 per cent by early 2000, and these figures are expected to increase in the foreseeable future.
While drought is happening everywhere, Africa appears as the most impacted continent by its effects. According to the Bonn-based United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), two-thirds of African lands are now either desert or dry-lands.
15 August 2016
Today, human greed and folly are destroying the global environment. As if this were not enough, there is a great threat to civilization and the biosphere from an all-destroying thermonuclear war. Both of these severe existential threats are due to faults our inherited emotional nature.
John Scales Avery
From the standpoint of evolutionary theory, this is a paradox.
As a species, we are well on the road to committing collective suicide, driven by the flaws in human nature.
But isn’t natural selection supposed to produce traits that lead to survival?
Today, our emotions are not leading us towards survival, but instead driving us towards extinction. What is the reason for this paradox?
Some stories from the Bible
The Old Testament is the common heritage of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Some of the stories which it contains can be seen as attempts to explain the paradoxes of human emotional nature:
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 