'Unseen' News and Views
Map of the Horn of Africa. Source: United Nations, Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Cartographic Section. Public Domain
IOM distributes hygiene kits in Damas, Syria last May 2017. File photo: UN Migration Agency (IOM) 2017
Findings indicate that the vast majority of people returning (84 per cent) had been displaced within Syria, the Geneva-based UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported.
The next highest number of people (16 per cent) returned from Turkey, followed by Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, it added. Those from Turkey and Jordan reportedly returned mainly to Aleppo and Al Hasakeh Governorates.
– Last month, Spanish charity workers rescued 167 migrants arriving from Africa aboard a small boat.
Refugees land at Lampedusa island in Italy. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS.
2016 was the deadliest for migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean, with at least 3800 deaths recorded. Most know the dangers they face on the route, yet still choose the possibility of death in overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels over the hopelessness of life in areas they reside.
12/08/17
THE VULTURES are circling. They can see the wounded man on the ground, and are waiting for his end.
Uri Avnery
So are the human carnivores – the politicians.
They sing his praises, swear to defend him with all their heart – but in their heads they are already calculating who might be his successor. Each of them mutters to themself: Why not me?
Binyamin Netanyahu is facing the greatest crisis in his long career. The police are about to conclude their investigations.
The Attorney General is under huge pressure to issue official indictments. The large demonstrations near the Attorney General’s home are growing from week to week.
The Attorney General, the Inspector General of the Police and the Minister for Internal Security were all personally picked by Netanyahu (and his wife). Now even this does not help. The pressure is too strong.
The United Nations human rights office on 11 August 2017 expressed deep concern about the steadily deteriorating humanitarian and human rights conditions in Gaza, especially the restrictions on the enclave’s power supply.
Electrical power transmission lines in Gaza City. Photo: World Bank/Natalia Cieslik (file). Source: UN News Centre.
“At the height of summer, with soaring temperatures, electricity provision has not risen above six hours per day since the beginning of the current crisis in April, and has often been under four hours,” Ravina Shamdasani, Spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights(OHCHR), told the regular media briefing in Geneva.
John Scales Avery, author of this book: We Need Their Voices Today! has generously granted Human Wrongs Watch permission to publish it in a series of chapters. This is Chapter 18: Edna St. Vincent Millay. The others will follow successively.
Figure 18.1: The American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, (public domain).
The beautiful red-haired American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), is known for her lyric poetry, but she also wrote some of the finest sonnets in the English language, combining classic form with modern imagery.
Many of these sonnets are based on the emotions that she experienced in her love affairs with both men and women.
However, my own favorite is a serious sequence of eighteen sonnets, “Epitaph for the Race of Man”, published in 1934, just as the catastrophe of World War II was about to engulf our planet.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 