'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
Depression causes persistent sadness, a loss of interest in activities that you normally enjoy and an inability to carry out daily activities. Credit: WHO
Not that the world body all of a sudden wants to spoil your happiness—it is just that depression affects people of all ages, from all walks of life, in all countries, and as many as over 300 million people worldwide, according to the latest estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO).
1/4/2017
SOME DAYS ago, a man committed an act of terrorism in the center of London, a city I love.
Uri Avnery
He ran over several persons on Westminster Bridge, stabbed a policeman to death and approached the doors of Parliament, where he was shot dead. All this in the shadow of the tower of Big Ben, an irresistible photographic target.
It was an electrifying world-wide news item. Within minutes, Daesh was blamed. But then the truth came out: the terrorist was a British citizen, a Muslim convert born in England. From early youth he had committed a string of petty crimes. He had been in and out of prison several times.
Some 400 million people in Asia and the Pacific still confront poverty as part of their daily lives due to widening income inequality, despite the region’s impressive gains in reducing poverty in recent decades, a United Nations-backed report has found.
Rural produce can boost urban nutrition. Fruit vendors unloading pumpkins at the market in Maradi, Niger. Photo: FAO/Giulio Napolitano
“As outlined in the report, a renewed strengthening of the social contract is critical for addressing multi-dimensional poverty and the high marginalization and exclusion of people,” the Executive Secretary of ESCAP, Shamshad Akhtar, told the Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development (APFSD 2017), according to a press release from ESCAP.
Despite international efforts to address food insecurity, around 108 million people worldwide were severely food insecure in 2016, a dramatic increase compared with 80 million in 2015, according to a United Nations-backed report on food crises that offers benchmark for action needed to avoid catastrophe.
A resident of Rabaable village in Somalia fetches water with the help of her daughters. The villages well was recently rehabilitated by UNICEF. Photo: UNICEF Somalia/Sebastian Rich
“The cost in human and resource terms only increases if we let situations deteriorate,” said UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General José Graziano da Silva, in a news release on the Global Report on Food Crises 2017.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 