17 August 2018 – Rapid advances in gene editing and so-called “DIY biological laboratories” which could be used by extremists, threaten to derail efforts to prevent biological weapons from being used against civilians, the world’s only international forum on the issue has heard.
UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré | The United Nations Office at Geneva, where multilateral discussions on biological weapons have been taking place.
At meetings taking place at the United Nations in Geneva which ended on Thursday [16 August 2018], representatives from more than 100 Member States which have signed up to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) – together with civilian experts and academics – also discussed how they could ensure that science is used to positive ends, in line with the disarmament blueprint set out by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
Some 20,000 people participated in Friday’s [17 August 2018] protests, which took place a few hundred meters from the Gaza border.
Medics said Israeli gunfire killed two men and wounded at least 270 other Palestinians, 40 of them with live bullets. | Photo: Reuters | Photo from teleSUR.
17 August 2018 (teleSUR)* – Israeli forces opened fire on a group of Palestinian protesters, killing at least two and injuring over 40, during a demonstration near the eastern Gaza Strip, the Gaza Health Ministry said Friday [17 August 2018].
Medics said Israeli gunfire killed two men and wounded at least 270 other Palestinians, 40 of them with live bullets.
The city of Ghazni in Afghanistan is still too dangerous for aid workers to reach, after a week of “intense” fighting and reports that traumatized children are turning up at hospitals looking for their parents, UN humanitarian agency, OCHA, on 17 August 2018 said.
UNICEF/Celeste Hibbert | Children in Southern Afghanistan who were vaccinated against polio by a government health workers, supported by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization.
“As of this hour, there is no safe way for civilians or humanitarian workers to enter into Ghazni,” OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke said, adding that hundreds of civilians are believed to have died since last Friday [17 August 2018], in clashes between Taliban fighters and pro-Government forces.
The last two weeks have seen a suicide attack on an education centre in Afghanistan which killed and injured young students in class, 21 children killed in Yemen when their school bus was hit by an airstrike, and ongoing child casualties in Syria – particularly in the conflict zones of Idlib and Western Aleppo in the North of the country.
Funding for humanitarian operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) is at an “all-time low”, threatening the delivery of life-saving aid to people in the West Bank and Gaza, the United Nations on 17 August 2018 warned.
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UNRWA/Tamer Hamam | A Palestine refugee woman receives food assistance at the UNRWA Khan Younis Distribution Centre in Gaza. (file)
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So far, only 25 per cent of the nearly $540 million needed this year has been received, the organization’s humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, has reported.
OCHA said the decline in funding for the UN agency assisting Palestine refugees, UNRWA, “has been a key contributing factor.”
Oh, my dear USA – the country where I spent six of the best years of my life, where I have paid so many visits, where I have so many friends – are you still alive, behind the Trump Curtain, or are you hiding in despair and disbelief?
Gunnar Westberg
Two weeks I spent there. Two weeks is an ideal time to confirm your prejudices and to reach premature conclusions. If you stay longer, you will understand that you have understood very little.
I went to places I know well: to rural Minnesota, to the civilized big city of Minneapolis and to the Capital of the World, New York.
And yes, you are still there, the real USA, the real Americans! Trump does not reign over your hearts.
Everyone talks of him, tries to understand who he is, and how he came to be elected, but he has not changed the daily lives and the minds of the people.
