'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
**Photo: A city street in Ramadi heavily damaged by the fighting in 2006 | Joey Buccino at English Wikipedia | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Banana is the eighth most important food crop in the world and the fourth most important in developing countries. Credit: FAO
Take the case of one of the world’s most favourite foods—banana in all its forms: banana split, banana muffins, banana bread, banana pudding, banana pancakes… Whether plain, cooked, baked or fried, bananas are among the most widely consumed fruits on the planet.
However, how much do you really know about this most produced and exported fruit? asks the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). And the answers provided are some interesting facts you should know about bananas:
The Occupy movement is one example of citizen-led disruption. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS.
The world’s first systematic review of how well countries uphold fundamental civic freedoms – to protest, organise and speak out – reveals a significant deterioration in the protection of these constitutional rights in the US.
7 November 2016 – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned that in order to adapt agriculture to a changing climate, new approaches to irrigation will need to be developed and implemented worldwide.
Photo: FAO/Giulio Napolitano
These new approaches are being discussed as part of the 2nd World Irrigation Forum which opened yesterday in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and brings together stakeholders from around the world to rethink water management in the context of continued population and economic growth as well as the growing threats of climate change.
7 November 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – Civilians have constantly suffered during wars, by direct violence or starvation or both. It has always been thus, in past centuries and now.
Whether from the air or from the ground, they have been on the receiving end of abusing armies in city sieges, from impoverishing scorched earth, of Roman ballistas, the artillery of arrows and of cannon, and of bombs via airships, aeroplanes and missiles.
Although the use in common parlance of the term ‘collateral damage’ is relatively new – since the mid 1980’s – its basis as applied to aerial bombardment of civilians in particular, dates back to Greek mythology and to religion.
Zeus, the mythical king of the gods, used thunderbolts from the sky to spread fear and destruction.
In a biblical way, God’s aerial bombardment of rain caused The Flood which wiped out humanity, save for Noah and family. Fire and brimstone destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
