'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
27 April 2018 — Some 2,900 mostly Syrian and Iraqi families have arrived in Evros this month, with eight others losing their lives trying to cross the Evros River from Turkey – prompting the United Nations refugee agency to call on the Greek Government to improve the conditions at its reception area.
By Pierre Krähenbühl*
23 April 2018 (UNRWA)* — Local people call it “the checkpoint of death”. It is controlled by ISIS and for two years, 900 Palestine refugee students registered with UNRWA risked their lives to pass through it every day to get to school on the other side.
Providing Palestine Refugee Children in Jerash with the Tools They Need to Succeed | UNRWA
The school’s education coordinator said “these children dreamed of becoming doctors. ISIS would harass them as they waited to cross, sometimes confiscating their books. But they persevered because education for them was a matter of life and death; their only weapon”.
Climate change in the coming decades – even if global temperature rise can be kept to below 2°C – will adversely affect animal and plant species across the world. If the world adopts a “business as usual” approach, and we see a rise of 4.5°C, many more species could die off.
A warming world threatens the planet’s library of life | UN Environment
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This is the basic finding of new research by the World Wildlife Fund, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, and James Cook University, Australia.
The study, Wildlife in a Warming World, looked at 35 “Priority Places” for conservation throughout the world. It found that:
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh, 27 April 2018 (UNFPA)* — Early monsoon rains have arrived in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees are living in flimsy tents of bamboo and tarpaulin, renewing fears of flooding, mudslides, water-borne diseases and further displacement among an already beleaguered population.
Some 693,000 Rohingya refugees have crossed the border in the past eight months alone, following extreme violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.
28 April 2018 (Wall Street International)* The March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and ensuing tsunami comprises one of the most recorded and reproduced disasters in history. Almost immediately after earthquake occurred, photos and video clips spread across the world of swaying Tokyo skyscrapers and workers and schoolchildren sidestepping falling debris.
28/04/2018
ON THE fifth day of the six-day war in 1967, I published an open letter to the Prime Minister, Levy Eshkol.
Uri Avnery
The Israeli army had just conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and I proposed that Eshkol immediately offer the Palestinian people to establish the State of Palestine there, in return for peace with Israel.
I was a Member of the Knesset at the time. Two days after the end of the war, Eshkol asked me to meet him in his office in the Knesset building.
He listened to what I had to say, and then he answered with a fatherly smile: “Uri, what kind of a trader are you? In a negotiation, one offers the minimum and demands the maximum. Then one starts to negotiate, and in the end one reaches an agreement somewhere in the middle. And here you want to offer everything before the negotiation even starts?”
27 April 2018 (Wall Street International)* — The world is heading into troubled waters in the figurative and in the real sense of this expression, as we are witnessing an unprecedented movement of people – refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons (IDPs) alike – fleeing from insecurity, climate change, natural disasters, calamities and social instability.
The tragedy of migrants | Photo from Wall Street International.
The lives of tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees hang in the balance as monsoon and cyclone seasons threaten camps in southern Bangladesh, the United Nations migration agency on 27 April 2018 warned, appealing for urgent financial support to prepare the area against floods and landslides.
“We cannot wait for funding to come in after the emergency is over and possibly preventable tragedies have occurred,” said John McCue, IOM’s Senior Operations Coordinator in Cox’s Bazar.
27 April 2018 — The United Nations emergency food relief agency has issued an urgent appeal for nearly $46 million to feed some 350,000 impoverished migrants who crossed the border from Venezuela into Colombia, as well as host communities with pre-existing vulnerabilities.
27 April 2018 — United Nations human rights experts have expressed serious concerns about racism rooted in the fabric of the United Kingdom’s society, given the disproportionate number of people of African descent and of ethnic minorities dying due to excessive use of force by State security.
