'Unseen' News and Views
In late 2014, the McKinsey Global Institute announced that 2.1 billion of the 7.3 billion people in the world were overweight or obese.
This represented a fifty per cent increase over the previous WHO estimate of 1.4 billion less than a decade earlier. The Institute also estimated that about 2.8 percent of world income is spent dealing with the consequences of associated ill health.
Journalist and asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani is detained indefinitely by the Australian government on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Credit: Supplied.
Journalism is the reason Boochani was forced to flee his home country of Iran, and – like the other 900 men detained indefinitely on Manus Island – seek refuge in Australia.
“When the Australian government exiled me to Manus Island I found out that they are basing their policy on secrecy and dishonesty,” Boochani told IPS.
29 December 2016 – A recently completed United Nations study indicates that during 2016, Israeli authorities demolished or seized 1,089 Palestinian-owned structures throughout the West Bank – including East Jerusalem – thus displacing 1,593 Palestinians and impacting the livelihoods of another 7,101.
Demolition of Palestinian property in North ‘Anata, West Bank, July 2016. Photo: OCHA
**Photo; Putin with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, 2014 | Kremlin.ru | Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
A hundred years ago, Ernst Jünger described a peculiar encounter with a frightened British officer in his account of trench warfare, Storm of Steel: “he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph (…). I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family (…). It was a plea from another world.”
26 December 2016 – TRANSCEND Media Service – To understand something we often compare it with something else.
Johan Galtung
A recent Harvard study found 26.7% of world car production in China and 13.3% in USA; US economy bigger but China leading in export with 8 of the 12 biggest harbors; USA end 2016 fighting 7 wars with bases all over and China with no wars or bases, investing, building the New Silk Road-Lane, the Economic Belt. How successfully, it is to be seen.
But these are global power relations. That the West is going down, the Rest is coming up, the USA is a major part of the West and China of the Rest, are decades-old truths. And the EU is also part of the West.
What does domestic China remind us of, historically, structurally? Not USA, a state since 1776, 1812. Let us compare China with present border and context to Europe from the Atlantic to–whatever the border.
One conclusion can be foretold: only recently are both of them becoming cohesive, as super-states and as super-nations. Why, and how?
A campaign in support of the Arms Trade Treaty argued that weapons were subject to fewer regulations than bananas. Credit: Coralie Tripier / IPS.
“In terms of implementation, the big disappointment is Yemen,” Anna Macdonald, Director of Control Arms, a civil society organisation dedicated to the treaty, told IPS.
A United Nations human rights expert on freedom of religion or belief has welcomed the United States’ legislative amendments aimed at protecting non-believers and atheists.
.
Religious leaders. UN Photo/Rick Bajornas
“This is an important development, as believers, atheists and non-believers must all be equally protected,” on 28 December 2016 said the newly appointed Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Ahmed Shaheed, in a news release from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
“Many humanists and non-believers are still widely stigmatized and persecuted around the world.”
By Thalif Deen*
United Nations Secretariat Building
The late Republican Senator Jesse Helms, a fulltime chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a part-time UN basher, once said “providing funds to the UN was like pouring money into a rat hole.”
A Syrian refugee rides a motorbike through deep mud at the informal Tal Sarhoun settlement in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. © UNHCR/Diego Ibarra Sánchez
“I had to carry my wife all the way from here under the rain so she could deliver (at the hospital). We came back and I was holding my baby to my chest and covering him with a blanket,” says Mohammed of his newborn son, Dayf-allah.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 