'Unseen' News and Views
So far, 650 million women alive today were married as children
Ending child marriage and teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone | UNICEF Sierra Leone/2017
Yet another inhumane practice to be added to the already reported Born Complete, Don’t Mutilate Them! and Robert J. Burrowes’ Humanity’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ – Starving, enslaving, raping, torturing and killing our children.
Now it is about child-girls forced to be married before the age of 18.
Citing climate change as being caused by “emissions accumulated throughout history”, the head of China’s Xiamen Airlines told the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) in New York on Friday [12 July 2019] that heavy carbon dioxide emitters should “take on greater responsibility” to ameliorate the problem.
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From Britain to Hungary to Italy, the far right is on the rise. openDemocracy investigations over the past year have revealed the vital role of US Christian conservatives.
.Some of us have wondered, “Are people today too disconnected and frantic to calm down in order to solve global challenges together? Are we so polarized and self-absorbed that we cannot stop judging one another or insisting on our partisan ways?”
In Kabul, our thoughts and feelings are diverse, complicated and flawed, so we centre our three dreams on relationships.
Since 4 July, heavy monsoon rains and wind have pounded the refugee camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, with deaths, displacement and major damage following in their wake, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday [12 July 2019].
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“Those in the most vulnerable living situations have been relocated to safer, newly developed land in the camps”, WFP Spokesperson Herve Verhoosel told the regular news briefing in Geneva, noting that 5,600 people had been displaced.
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.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 
