'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
Geneva, 30 January 2018 – IOM, the UN Migration Agency, reports that 5,502 migrants and refugees entered Europe by sea through 28 January. This compares with 5,288 coming ashore during a similar period in 2017. Italy accounts for approximately 58 per cent of the total, with the remainder split between Spain (22 per cent) and Greece (20 per cent).*
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IOM
IOM Rome reported on Monday (29 January) that 965 migrants have been rescued at sea during the weekend by Italian and international rescue ships, with some still being brought to land late Monday (and so not included in the table below).
Juba, 30 January 2018 (IOM)* – After more than four years of armed conflict – and despite efforts to revive the peace process – humanitarian needs in South Sudan remain immense, as conditions continue to deteriorate.
Wau protection of civilians site. Photo: Peter Bauza 2017 | IOM
To address these growing needs, IOM South Sudan is appealing for USD 103.7 million in 2018 to provide lifesaving humanitarian assistance, as well as to support transition, recovery and migration management initiatives.
Today, an estimated 7 million people in South Sudan need relief aid, including 1.9 million internally displaced persons (IDPs).
30 January, 2018 (Greenpeace)* — If it seems like we’ve been talking about lawsuits a lot lately, it’s because we have. Corporate bullies, helped by Donald Trump’s go-to law firm, have filed two massive lawsuits against Greenpeace in the last two years. They aim to silence us, but we are not alone.
Participants and activists appear outside a United States District Court – October, 2017
Many of our allies and other individual activists are fighting meritless lawsuits of their own.
**Image: A 16th-century illustration by Flemish Protestant Theodor de Bry for Las Casas’s Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, depicting Spanish atrocities during the conquest of Cuba.| This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less. | Wikimedia Commons: “This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.“
30 January 2018 – Facing an acute funding shortage, the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees is seeking more than 800 million dollars for its emergency programmes for Syria and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
From 21-24 February 2016, UNRWA distributed 19,160 thermal blankets to approximately 5,700 Palestinian refugee and other civilian families from the besieged and hard to reach Syrian communities of Yarmouk, Yalda, Babila and Beit Saham. Photo: UNRWA
The appeal would enable the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to “continue delivering desperately needed relief to those affected by deepening emergency situations,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl said at a launch event in Geneva.
Surging violence in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is driving thousands of Congolese into neighbouring Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda, the United Nations refugee agency on 30 January 2018 said.
Congolese refugees at a transit centre in Uganda near the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (File) Photo: UNHCR/L. Beck
“Thousands of children, women and men have abandoned their homes, in the midst of intensified military operations against Mai Mai armed groups in South Kivu province,” Babar Baloch, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told press at the regular briefing in Geneva.
29 January 2018 – TRANSCED Media Service – Aung San Suu Kyi’s Social Welfare Minister has declared already that all the burned lands in the region stretching over 100 km (68 miles) are reclaimed by the State.
Aung San Suu Kyi
Northern Rakhine region of predominantly Rohingya residents has also been designated as the Special Economic Zone II: Zone I is in the area which were cleared of Rohingya and other Muslim habitation (communities) in the 2012 bouts of large scaled organized ‘mass violence’ backed by the State under Thein Sein’s presidency (2010-15).
She has made no attempt to travel across the border j–in fact 30 minutes helicopter ride or 10 minutes boat ride across the boundary Naf River to the vast Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazaar.
Instead she has gone to N. Rakhine State –not with UN investigators or diplomats in Yangon, but with her hand-picked cronies.
Antimicrobials have been a driver of unprecedented medical and societal advances, but their overuse has resulted in antibiotic resistant bacteria, with the World Health Organization (WHO) reporting new surveillance data on 29 January 2018, which reveals widespread resistance to some of the world’s most common infections, including E. coli and pneumonia.
Lab assistant growing culture viruses and bacteria in the “Infectious Room” of the Cancer Institute of Columbia. Photo: PAHO/WHO
