'Unseen' News and Views
Developments in the Middle East cannot be divorced from Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory and settlement-building, or Hamas’ hold over Gaza and its militant activity, a senior United Nations envoy told the Security Council on Thursday [20 June 2019], warning that these actions “collectively erode the prospects of a two-State solution”.*
21 June 2019 (Other News)* — Social Democrats, who had been steadily disappearing following the crisis of 2008, have been making a small comeback in the last year. Now they are in power in Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland and, most recently, in Denmark.
Roberto Savio
But the statistics are daunting. The recent European elections gave members of the Socialist group 20% of the vote, against 25% in 2014, and the erosion from the 34% achieved in 1989 and 1994 is clear.
The latest success, in Denmark, with 25.9% of the vote, was lower than in 2015. In Finland, they received 17.7% of the vote, just two-tenths more than the Alt-Right.
And in Sweden, Stefan Löfven won his mandate with the lowest vote in decades. In countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy, they are becoming irrelevant.
Home ownership has been called “the quintessential American dream.” Yet today less than 65% of American homes are owner occupied, and more than 50% of the equity in those homes is owned by the banks.
Ellen Brown
Compare China, where, despite facing one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, a whopping 90% of families can afford to own their homes.
Over the last decade, American wages have stagnated and U.S. productivity has consistently been outpaced by China’s.
The U.S. government has responded by engaging in a trade war and imposing stiff tariffs in order to penalize China for what the White House deems unfair trade practices.
19 June 2019 (UN Environment)* — “Our world is swamped by harmful plastic waste. Microplastics in the seas now outnumber stars in our galaxy. From remote islands to the Artic, nowhere is untouched. If present trends continue, by 2050, our oceans will have more plastic than fish. The message is simple: reject single use plastic. Refuse what you can’t reuse. Together, we can chart a path to a cleaner, greener world,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres.
Photo by Unsplash/Artem Beliaikin
Sexual violence in conflict is a “threat to our collective security” and a “stain on our common humanity”, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in his message commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, on Wednesday 19 June 2019.
Straight to the point: while right and far-right politicians keep marketing their image with intensive campaigns of hatred, discrimination and stigmatisation against migrants, 200 million migrant workers worldwide will sacrifice over half a trillion dollars from their hard-earned money, to rescue 800 million members of their impoverished families. And that’s only this year 2019.
Around 200 million migrant workers sent US$528 billion back to their families in remittance-reliant countries in 2018. Photo: ©IFAD
More than 300,000 people have been forced to flee resurgent inter-ethnic violence in north-east Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) just this month, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Tuesday 18 June 2019.
As resistance to antibiotics grows, the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched the latest stage of its campaign to fight this deadly health risk – likened by the agency to an “invisible pandemic”– with the launch of a new online tool for health professionals on Tuesday 18 June 2019.
The AWaRe portal divides antibiotics into three groups – Access, Watch and Reserve – and explains which antibiotics should be used to treat the most common and serious infections (Access), which ones should be available at all times in the healthcare system (Watch), and those that must be used sparingly or preserved and used only as a last resort (Reserve)
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 