'Unseen' News and Views
The theme of the 2017 UN Commission on the Status of Women will be economic empowerment. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS
While discussing the 61st Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), organisations highlighted the importance of intersectionality in the discussion of women’s rights and implementation of relevant social and economic policies, referring to the importance of considering the many different ways that women can be marginalised.
Only 50 per cent of working age women are represented in the labour force globally, compared to 76 per cent of men, UN Women reports. “What’s more, an overwhelming majority of women are in the informal economy, subsidising care and domestic work, and concentrated in lower-paid, lower-skill occupations with little or no social protection.”
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The 2017 theme for International Women’s Day, 8 March, focuses on “Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030”.
I BELIEVE I was the first to recommend that the soldier Elor Azaria, the killer of Hebron, be granted a pardon.
Uri Avnery
But this recommendation was conditional on several requirements: first, that the soldier openly and unconditionally confess his crime, that he apologize and that he be sentenced to many years in prison.
Without these conditions, any request for a pardon by the soldier would mean an approval of his act and an invitation for more war crimes.
Sergeant Azaria, a medic in a combat unit, appeared on the scene after an incident in the center of the Jewish enclave in the ancient town of Hebron. Two young Palestinians had attacked an army control point with knives and been shot.
We don’t know how the first one died, but the second was filmed by a camera provided to the locals by the wonderful Israeli anti-occupation organization B’Tselem.
2 March 2017 – The world’s money markets have priced people out of cities, a United Nations independent expert has said, blaming financial markets and speculators for treating housing as a “place to park capital.”
High rises and hotel buildings in Punta Pacifica, Panama City, Panama. Photo: Gerardo Pesantez/World Bank | Source: UN News Centre
“Housing has lost its social function and is seen instead as a vehicle for wealth and asset growth. It has become a financial commodity, robbed of its connection to community, dignity and the idea of home,” said Leilani Farha, the Special Rapporteur on the right to housing.
– Latin America and the Caribbean is the only region in the world where, for the past four decades, states have continuously met to discuss and commit themselves politically to eradicating discrimination and gender inequality and moving towards guaranteeing women the full exercise of their autonomy and human rights.
Alicia Bárcena. | Photo: Lorenzo Moscia/ECLAC
Since the first Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, held in Havana in 1977, the region has been through years of political, economic, social and cultural changes, which have meant progress for women in the region but which also have shown the persistence of inequality.
We have overcome a number of obstacles, collectively giving rise to exceptional developments.
Citing a significant rise over the past year in the number of women dying from drug overdoses globally, the independent expert body which monitors Governments’ compliance with the United Nations international drug control treaties on 2 March 2017 called for the implementation of gender-sensitive drug policies and programmes.
Despite eradication and education efforts, drug use, especially heroin, remains rampant in parts of Myanmar. Photo: IRIN | Source: UN News Cenre
The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) on March 2 said that women and girls comprise one-third of global drug users yet are only one-fifth of those receiving treatment, as significant systemic, structural, social, cultural and personal barriers affect women’s ability to access substance abuse treatment.
By Robert J. Burrowes*
DAYLESFORD, Australia, 1 March, 2017 – It is already clearly apparent, as many predicted, that Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States would signal the start of what might be the final monumental assault on much of what is good in our world.
Preview YouTube video Chris Hedges: Trump Will Crush Dissent With Even Greater Violence and Savagery | Video provided by RJ Burrowes
Whatever our collective gains to date to create a world in which peace, social justice and environmental sustainability ultimately prevail for all of Earth’s inhabitants, we stand to lose it all in the catastrophic sequence of events that Trump is now initiating with those who share his delusional worldview.
ROME, 3 March 2017 (IPS)* – Women across the globe are facing new threats, which risk dismantling decades of hard-won rights and derailing the effort to end extreme poverty, an international confederation of civil society organisations has revealed ahead of International Women’s Day pm March 8.
Rural women: a driving force against hunger, malnutrition and poverty | Photo: FAO
The renewal of the global gag rule restricting US funding for family planning services is the latest of a number of new threats that will have a huge effect on the world’s poorest women, OXFAM international on March 2 warned in its new report ‘An economy that works for women’.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 