'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
An overloaded boat of refugees and migrants trying to reach Europe as seen from the deck of the Italian Coastguard ship, the San Giorgio, during a Mediterranean patrol in 2014. © UNHCR/Alfredo D’Amato
As a priority we ask that 5,600 refugees and migrants currently held in centres across Libya be freed in an orderly manner and their protection guaranteed, or evacuated to other countries from where accelerated resettlement is needed.
The Great Transition Initiative* — We have entered the Planetary Phase of Civilization. Strands of interdependence are weaving humanity and Earth into a single community of fate—the overarching proto-country herein christened Earthland.
A global scenario pioneer charts a path to an organic planetary civilization, a vision that opens before us as both possibility and exigency in an interdependent and dangerous century.
In the unsettled twenty-first century, the drama of social evolution will play out on a world stage with the perils many and dark premonitions all too plausible.
Still, a Great Transition to a planetary civilization of enriched lives and a healthy planet remains possible.
But how? What forms of collective action and consciousness can redirect us toward such a future? Who will lead the charge? What might such a world look like?
Journey to Earthland offers answers. It clarifies the world-historical challenge; explains the critical role of a global citizens movement in advancing social transformation; and paints a picture of the kind of flourishing civilization that might lie on the other side of a Great Transition.
Dr Natalia Kanem is Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA)
– Every year on World Population Day (July 11), UNFPA receives queries from journalists about the total number of people around the world. Numbers are indeed important because they help governments develop policies that respond to evolving needs for services such as education and health.
While global population is currently around 7.7 billion, what is perhaps more important than the numbers is the bigger story they tell–a story about sex: who has it, when they have it and under what circumstances. It is also a story about agency.
Maiduguri, 12 July 2019 (IOM)* – In a bid to better respond to trafficking in persons in Borno State, north-east Nigeria, where 7.1 million people need humanitarian assistance, twenty organizations are joining forces in a new Anti-Trafficking Task Force (ATTF) in humanitarian action.
At the Bakassi IDP Camp in Maiduguri, staff and community members attend a stage play about human trafficking. Photo: IOM/Paulina Odame
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), jointly with Heartland Alliance International and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) launched the Task Force on 9 July in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno.
11 July 2019 (UN Environment)* — The sandwich is a trusty solution to working lunches around the world. Fast, tasty and unlikely to produce much mess, the sandwich lunch continues to be a staple in the professional diet.
(Photo from UN Environment)
But when Tristram Stuart, an international award-winning author and campaigner on the environmental and social impact of food production, visited a sandwich factory back in 2016, he saw something different.
Every day, 13,000 slices of bread were discarded. As he mulled over this disturbing thought, it was a visit to the Brussels Beer Project which triggered inspiration.
Today’s Political World at a Glance
Global politics is overwhelmingly becoming robotic when question of safeguard of the mankind comes up.
Global political leaders are fast becoming actors on stage – issuing abstract statements of outrage and phony sense of grief when thousands and millions of human lives are constantly bombarded by the weapons they manufacture and sell to crush the human soul and to support the war economies.
The UNO and its Secretary General and the UN Security Council – all are just debating clubs engaged in time killing exercises to deceive the mankind and to betray the ideals of the Charter to “safeguard the humanity from the scourge of wars.”
