'Unseen' News and Views
Soil is a major carbon storage system, essential for sustainable agriculture and climate change mitigation, the United Nations agriculture agency on 5 December 2017 said, launching on World Soil Day a comprehensive global map showing the amount of carbon stocks contained in soil.
Women of the Batwa community tilling the soil with hoes in preparation for planting potatoes, in Gashikanwa, Burundi. Photo: FAO/Giulio Napolitano
Yemen remains gripped by uncertainty after the assassination of the former president and a spike in brutal violence in and around its capital, Sana’a, the United Nations envoy for the war-torn country on 5 December 2017 said.
War-torn Taiz governorate district of Al Qahira, Yemen. Photo: WFP
In his remarks on the recent International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – see ‘Violence Against Women is Fundamentally About Power’ – United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres inadvertantly demonstrated why well-meaning efforts being undertaken globally to reduce violence against women fail to make any progress in addressing this pervasive crisis.
Robert J. Burrowes
Hence, while the UN might be ‘committed to addressing violence against women in all its forms’ as he claimed, and the UN might have launched a range of initiatives over the past twenty years, including awarding $129 million to 463 civil society initiatives in 139 countries and territories through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against women, his own article acknowledges that ‘Attacks on women are common to developed and developing countries. Despite attempts to cover them up, they are a daily reality for many women and girls around the world.’
Mongolian farmers harvest carrots as part of an FAO South-South Cooperation Programme between China and Mongolia. Credit: FAO
Aerial View of Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
A baby is screened for malnutrition at the UNICEF-supported Al-Jomhouri Hospital in Sa’ada, Yemen. Photo: UNICEF/Ma’ad Al-Zekri
Top officials from across the United Nations system called on 2 December 2017 for the Saudi-led coalition to fully lift its blockade of Yemen’s Red Sea ports, warning that unless commercial imports are resumed, “the threat of widespread famine in a matter of months is very real.”
02/12/17
ZIONISM IS an anti-Semitic creed. It was so right from the beginning.
Uri Avnery
Already the founding father, Theodor Herzl, a Viennese writer, penned some pieces with a clear anti-Semitic slant. For him, Zionism was not just a geographical transplantation, but also a means of turning the despicable commercial Jew of the Diaspora into an upright, industrious human being.
Herzl traveled to Russia in order to win the support of their anti-Semitic, pogrom-inciting leaders for his project, promising to take the Jews off their hands.
Indeed, it was always a main plank of Zionist propaganda that only in the future Jewish state will Jews be able to live a normal life. The slogan was to “overturn the social pyramid” – putting it on a sound basis of workers and farmers, instead of speculators and bankers.
A shot of the living conditions inside a detention centre in Libya. Credit: UN Migration Agency (IOM)
A record level of aid funding – more than $22.5 billion – is needed to deliver lifesaving assistance around the world in 2018, the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator on 1 December 2017 said.
Internally displaced women and children at a World Food Programme (EFP) center in Mogadishu, Somalia. Thousands of people poured into the Somali capital in mid-2017 in search for food and water at the severe drought takes hold in remote rural regions. Photo by Giles Clarke for Getty/OCHA
Several years ago in Cameroon, a country in West Africa, a Western Black Rhinoceros was killed. It was the last of its kind on Earth.
Robert J. Burrowes
Hence, the Western Black Rhinoceros, the largest subspecies of rhinoceros which had lived for millions of years and was the second largest land mammal on Earth, no longer exists.
But while you have probably heard of the Western Black Rhinoceros, and may even have known of its extinction, did you know that on the same day that it became extinct, another 200 species of life on Earth also became extinct?
This is because the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history is now accelerating at an unprecedented rate with 200 species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles being driven to extinction on a daily basis.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 