'Unseen' News and Views
UNICEF calls for improved humanitarian access and protection of children including re-integration into local communities and safe return to home countries
DAMASCUS, 17 July 2019 (UNICEF)* — Taking cover from the sun at the entrance of a tent, 14-year-old Afraa, originally from Iraq, waits for her two younger siblings to be examined.
Geneva, 16 July 2019 (IOM)* – The International Organization for Migration (IOM) this week issued a call for films for the Global Migration Film Festival. The multi-venue festival which takes place annually in over 100 countries in December is the world’s première cultural event on migration.
The UN organization’s call for submissions includes Full-Length Feature and Short Films, in all genres: fiction, documentary and animation. Filmmakers have long viewed migration as a rich source of storytelling.
New York, 16 July 2019 (UN Enbironment)* – A global partnership of some of the world’s largest organizations today launched two new knowledge platforms – the Green Industry Platform and the Green Finance Platform – at the High-level Political Forum for Sustainable Development in New York.
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These platforms provide the financial and private sectors with the latest research, data, guidance, and tools from leading experts and institutions to help green their operations.
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Many women and girls “still face enormous challenges to their health, well-being and human rights”, Secretary-General António Guterres told a High-level General Assembly meeting on Tuesday [16 July 2019] conevened to mark the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), a milestone in reproductive health and rights.
“Violence against women and girls affects one-in-three women worldwide”, the UN chief stated, adding that that number is “even higher” in parts of the world and during conflict and emergencies.
Deeply concerned about the new rule barring from asylum the majority of people crossing the southern land border of the United States, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has warned that the ‘severe’ measure will endanger vulnerable people in need of international protection from violence or persecution.
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Squandering the Planet’s Increasingly Scarce Fossil Fuels for our Amusement
Dr Gary Kohls
In 1825, long before anybody even thought about air flight, the US Navy began operations in the Pensacola, Florida area, when the federal government built a naval yard on Pensacola Bay.
90 years later, in 1914, the naval yard became home to the Navy’s first permanent air station.
Since that time, NAS (Naval Air Station) Pensacola has served as the primary training base for naval aviators and has housed the Blue Angels aerobatic programs, which will be giving 61 shows at 32 locations from March through November of 2019. The two Blue Angel shows in Duluth are scheduled for July 20 – 21, 2019.
The US Navy pilots that came back in one piece from World War II returned flush with pride for doing their part in winning the war in the Pacific.
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5 facts on food security and nutrition in Small Island Developing States.
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are a group of countries that generally share similar challenges, including susceptibility to natural disasters, limited resources and excessive dependence on international trade. ©jShep/shutterstock.com (from FAO).
16 July 2019 (FAO)* — The world is more connected than ever: economies, travel, media. Unfortunately, this also holds true for the world’s challenges. Plastic and pollution in our ocean harm the global fish supply. Water scarcity, rising sea levels, air pollution, deforestation … all of these affect the entire world.
– The world’s two most populous nations-– China and India—have been making steady progress in eradicating extreme poverty, but have fallen short in their attempts to eliminate extreme hunger, according to the Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).
In an interview with IPS, Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCAP said Asia-Pacific is on track to eradicate extreme poverty, which still afflicts 285 million people in that region, but that goal would be successful only “if current progress is maintained until 2030”.
“Both China and India are reducing extreme poverty faster than the regional average. And half the population lifted out of extreme poverty globally, since 2000, comes from China,” she said.
After nearly a decade of progress, the number of people who suffer from hunger has slowly increased over the past three years, with about one in every nine people globally suffering from hunger today, the United Nations said in a new report released on Monday [15 July 2019].
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This fact underscores “the immense challenge” to achieving the Zero Hunger target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2019.
Proper nutrition for newborn babies into early childhood is key to development and good health in later life, according to the Regional Director of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe, as she launched two new studies on Monday [15 July 2019].
The studies from WHO Europe show that a high proportion of baby foods are incorrectly marketed as suitable for infants under the age of six months, when in fact much of it contains inappropriately high levels of sugar.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 