'Unseen' News and Views
KABUL. Displaced children sweeping snow away from their makeshift tents in Kabul..
Akhtar has his hat pulled well over his ears and his scarf snugly around his neck. As other Afghan children delight in the first snowfall of winter, playing and making snowballs, Akhtar is on his way to work to collect scrap, he tells us.
“I usually collect Pepsi cans that I sell and paper we can burn for cooking and to keep our house warm,” he tells us.
A farmer from South Sudan tells how learning new skills at an FAO Farmer Field School has changed her life.
As the farming group’s elder, Akuilina has become a counselor, the person other women turn to whenever disputes arise. ©FAO / Stefanie Glinski
27 January 2019 (FAO)* — Akuilina Ihurre used to think she was too old to join a farmers’ group but she knew she needed support to overcome years of hunger. Today, she is producing food with seeds, agricultural tools and techniques acquired through an FAO Farmer Field School in Torit, in South Sudan.
UN Environment / Hannah McNeish
28 January 2019 (UN Environment)* — Until a few years ago, 70-year-old rice farmer Neang Bo had no problem putting food on the table by cultivating fields around her village on the Cambodian coast.
Bo and her husband would harvest around 4 tonnes of rice in Prey Nob district, Sihanouk province. The chickens grew fat pecking on spare grains in the shade of their wooden home on stilts. “We used to have regular seasons; dry for half the year and rainy for the other,” she said.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
(Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon)
Decolonization consists of working with migrant communities, and vulnerable populations in their countries of origin.
Communities in the Global South who are especially subject to the sting entrapment of U.S. immigration, such as forced migrants, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and others, can easily become absorbed by assimilation into American “settlerism”.
Get it over with? Whatever happens over the next few months, Brexit has only just started.
Anti-Brexit protesters in Manchester | Robert Mandel, UK | CC BY 4.0
(openDemocracy)* — There is a revulsion with Brexit and a growing desire across Britain to ‘Get it over with’. This impatience can be seen in the growing support for ‘No Deal’.
“We did not vote for a DEAL, we voted for LEAVE” tweets one angry Brexit supporter. ‘Just do it’ is a growing sentiment – its hopes captured, ironically, by the report that quarter of the supporters of ‘No Deal’ think it means the UK will stay! Which grammatically at least makes sense, but emotionally is about just getting the whole damn thing over with.
The latest developments in Venezuela’s attempts to prevent a coup d’état by the U.S. has seen them unsuccessfully attempt to withdraw their gold, currently holed-up in the Bank of England.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro touches a gold bar as he speaks during a meeting with the ministers responsible for the economic sector at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela March 22, 2018. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File Photo | Photo: Reuters| Phit from teleSUR..
27 January 2019 (teleSUR)* — The head of Venezuela’s central bank, Calixto Ortega, traveled to London in mid-December to seek access to the nation’s assets, admitting defeat this week after U.S. officials asserted pressure on their British counterparts, to prevent the release of US$1.2bn in gold.
24 January 2019 (Wall Street International)* — When the present is perceived as threatening, we deal with it in a presentified and structuring way, or we deal with it through filters – fears, desires, anxieties, values -, losing autonomy, generating conflicts, experiencing everything as unbearable in the family, school, at work, among friends or in intimate relationships.
27 January 2019 (FAO)* — You have made your resolution to be healthy. You go to the store to choose between two products, looking for the better option. But then what? How do you pick? You read the label of course!
Labels help you to understand the composition of your food. This information is fundamental in ensuring that you are eating the kinds of food that are good for you. ©FAO/Alessia Pierdomenico
They are something we take as a given, but they are enormously important to our health and well-being.
Food labels guarantee that the food is what we think it is and that products are as nutritious as we think they are. Labels teach us about ingredients and nutrients.
Nairobi, 24 January 2019 (UN Environment)* – The first-ever global assessment of environmental rule of law finds weak enforcement to be a global trend that is exacerbating environmental threats, despite prolific growth in environmental laws and agencies worldwide over the last four decades.
Photo from UN Environment.
Despite a 38-fold increase in environmental laws put in place since 1972, failure to fully implement and enforce these laws is one of the greatest challenges to mitigating climate change, reducing pollution and preventing widespread species and habitat loss, the UN Environment report found.
24 January 2019 (UNHCR)* — Kedija, 15, and Yonas, 12, survived kidnapping, detention, and a failed sea crossing before finally rejoining their mother in Switzerland. | Español | Français
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 