'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
9 June 2017 – Through a joint project, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are exploring mobile tools to combat food fraud and contamination, which result in global annual in the billions and pose a serious public health threat.
A researcher tests tomatoes at the IAEA’s Food and Environmental Laboratory in Seibersdorf, Austria. Photo: IAEA
9 June 2017 – Protracted fighting and unrest are swelling the ranks of displaced and hungry ins some parts of the world, even as large agricultural harvests in some regions are buoying global food supply conditions, according to a new report by the United Nations agriculture agency.
Community members transport humanitarian supplies delivered in Mayendit town, South Sudan. An inter-agency mobile team was deployed to support the resumption of life-saving services by static partners. Photo: OCHA/Guiomar Pau Sole.
“Civil conflict continues to be a main driver of food insecurity, having triggered famine conditions in South Sudan and put populations in Yemen and northern Nigeria at high risk of localized famine,” said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization on 9 June’s release its Crop Prospects and Food Situation report.
8 June 2017 (UNODC)* – While airlines provide a tremendous force for good, connecting businesses to markets, reuniting families and friends, promoting tourism and cultural exchange, their services can be misused by criminals to facilitate the trafficking of men, women and children.
Speaking at the 73rd International Air Transport Association (IATA) Annual General Meeting and World Air Transport Summit, Jean-Luc Lemahieu, UNODC Director of the Division for Policy Analysis and Public Affairs, said “As a father myself of 4 kids, using the term ‘human trafficking’ in the 21st century is frankly heart-breaking.”
“Conflict, crisis, climate change, poverty means that 65.3 million people are on the run, leaving their houses and shelters behind within their countries or across borders,” he continued, adding that by seeking new and uncertain opportunities away from familiar grounds, many put themselves unwittingly or wittingly in very risky and vulnerable positions.
The first-ever United Nations summit on oceans on 9 June 2017 wrapped up with a global agreement to reverse the decline of the ocean’s health, and more than 1,300 pledged actions for protecting the blue.
Fishing boat in the Indian Ocean off the island of Mombasa. UN Photo/Milton Grant (file)
10/06/17
IN THE tumult of the last few days, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the “unification” of Jerusalem, one of the articles stated that “even peace-activist Uri Avnery” voted in the Knesset for the unification of the city.
Uri Avnery
That is true. I have tried to set out the circumstances in my autobiography, “Optimistic”. But not everyone has read the book and it has so far appeared only in Hebrew.
Therefore I shall try to explain again that curious vote. Explain, not justify.
ON TUESDAY, June 27, 1967, two weeks after the 6-day war, I did not get up. I had the flu, and Rachel, my wife, had given me a lot of medicines. Suddenly they called me from the Knesset and told me that the chamber had just started a debate on the unification of Jerusalem, which had not appeared on the agenda.
I jumped out of bed and drove like hell from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, some 65 kilometers. Upon arriving I was told that the list of speakers had already been closed. But the Speaker, Kadish Luz, famous for his fairness, added me to the list.
9 June 2017 – TRANSCEND Media Service – It is amazing. The United Nations have decades, years, weeks and days, dedicated to more values, goals and concerns than most of us are aware of. Compare it to nation-states usually with only one day, their day, their national day, celebrating nobody but themselves.
Johan Galtung
Maybe the UN overdoes it, that one decade flows into the next without leaving more than some verbal traces.
But that is not the UN’s fault. The accusing finger points at all of us; what did you do when the world’s conscience called on you?
Let us start with the Decades:
1960s: First UN Development Decade
1970s: Second UN Development Decade
International Decade of Ocean Exploration
6 June 2017 (GREENPEACE)* – When Resolute Forest Products, Canada’s largest logging company, threw two multi-million dollar lawsuits at Greenpeace and Stand.Earth for speaking out for the protection of the Canadian boreal forest, people around the world did not sit idly by.
In over 25 countries around the world, people took to the forest and their most iconic trees to send a message of unity and solidarity in the face of Resolute’s legal attempt to silence its critics and stifle freedom of speech.
From the tropics of Indonesia, people gathered in defense of the forests of Canada in front of a giant Kenari Babi tree to send their message to Resolute.
– World’s oceans are dangerously exposed to at least three major threats: climate change; the sharp degradation of marine biodiversity, and politicians. These simply encourage the destruction of oceans by subsidising over-fishing and turning a blind eye on illegal captures. See what happens.
A school of Moorish Idols cruise over the coral reef, Ha’apai, Tonga. Credit: UNEP GRID Arendal/Glenn Edney
While it is feared that at current trends there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050 –with over 5 trillion pieces of plastic weighing more than 260,000 tonnes currently floating in world’s oceans– harmful fishing subsidies that contribute to overfishing are estimated to be as high as 35 billion dollars, according to United Nations.
Continuing his visit to Central Asia, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on 10 June 2017 visited the Aral Sea – once the world’s fourth largest inland sea, that has now shrunk to about a quarter of its original size due to human mismanagement – where he urged the world to take lesson from the catastrophe and to ensure that such tragedies are not repeated.
A view of rusted, abandoned ships in Muynak, Uzebkistan, a former port city whose population has declined precipitously with the rapid recession of the Aral Sea. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
“The Aral Sea’s progressive disappearance was not because of climate change, it was mismanagement by humankind of water resources,” said Secretary-General Guterres after visiting Muynak, the ‘cemetery of ships’ – once a port city but now devoid of all water.
