Rome, 18 June 2018 (Other News)– Donald John Trump, 45th and current president of the United States, has been seen in many illustrious circles as an anomaly that cannot last. Well, it is time to look at reality.
Roberto Savio
If we put on the glasses of people who have seen their level of income reduced and are afraid of the future, Trump is here to stay, and he is a result and not a cause.
In his year and a half of government, Trump has not lost one of his battles. He has changed the political discourse worldwide, established new standards of ethics in politics, a new meaning of democracy, and his electoral basis has not been shrinking at all.
Amsterdam/Valencia, 17 June 2018 (Médecins Sans Frontières)* — Following this week’s political stand-off over the fate of people rescued in the Mediterranean, the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) denounces Italy’s closure of its ports to prevent 630 rescued people from disembarking and European governments’ choice of political point-scoring over saving lives at sea.
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Kenny Karpov/SOS MEDITERRANEE | Diplomatic stand off in the Central Mediterranean Sea
GENEVA, 17 June 2018 (UNHCR)* — UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, applauds Spain for its actions today in bringing to an end a sea-rescue crisis on the Mediterranean after a ship, the Aquarius, was refused permission to land and disembark elsewhere more than 600 rescued people.
Civilians are fleeing Hodeidah after hundreds were killed in the Saudi-led coalition’s bomb campaign to take the strategic Yemeni port from Houthi rebels. The death toll and the disruption of vital supply lines has alarmed the UN.
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Giles Clarke/OCHA | Suad, aged 18, begs in the middle of the road between Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, and Saada with her four-year-old nephew, whose mother was killed in the conflict. Across the country, which has been at war since 2015, more than 22 million people need humanitarian assistance.
Over 4,000 families have fled the city since June 1, according to the latest report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs that describes people losing their entire livelihood after airstrikes destroyed their farms.
14 June 2018 (openDemocracy)*— There will be hard times ahead in Italy, unless you are a cisgendered, white man. The new families minister opposes abortion, immigration and LGBTI rights.
Italy’s new family minister Lorenzo Fontana, 1 June 2018. Photo: NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images.
There will be hard times ahead, unless you are a cisgendered, heterosexual, white man. The new interior minister, Matteo Salvini, told undocumented immigrants: “Get ready to pack your bags.”
14 June 2018 (UN Environment)* — In a remote village of the Himalayas, Kristin Kagetsu was struggling with a recipe. Not your average recipe for cooking up a delicious meal. This one was for making sustainable colored crayons. After trial and error, resulting in crayons of different shapes and sizes, Kagetsu finally hit on the right recipe and the crayons are still sold today.
But the experience taught her a valuable lesson: ingredients for truly sustainable products must be sourced locally.
Fast-forward five years, and twenty-eight-year-old Kagetsu, now Chief Executive Officer of Saathi pads, has teamed up with co-founder, twenty-six-year-old Tarun Bothra, to turn their attention to a more pressing environmental and social problem.
17 June 2018, Quito, Ecuador (UNCCD)* — More than 3.2 billion people, or 2 in every 5 people, are impacted by land degradation today and up to 143 million people could move within their countries by 2050 to escape water scarcity and falling crop productivity due to the slow onset impacts of climate change.
