14 August 2019 (UN Environment)* — Stories in the Caribbean tell of a time before satellites and computers. A time when dust, rain and wind were the early warning systems people relied on to predict major storms during the Atlantic hurricane season. Families would wake up and a hazy sun would predict a hurricane was on the horizon. Erratic rain, wind and the movements of animals would provide telltale signs that the old god Hurakán was on his way.
Photo by the United Nations and NASA [Posted here fromUN Environment].
Today, we have much more advanced systems that provide us with crucial information about developing storms several days to weeks in advance.
14 August 2019 (International Work Group for indigenous Affairs – IGWIA)* — When the Community Land Act was adopted in September 2016, it was perceived as a great step forward for securing indigenous communities’ land rights in Kenya. However, three years after its adoption there are still more questions than answers over its implementation.
The pastoralists mainly occupy the arid and semi-arid lands of northern Kenya and towards the border between Kenya and Tanzania in the south. This photo is taken at a community meeting in Laikipia.
IWGIA is supporting a pilot project in northern Kenya focusing on the implementation of the Act to increase awareness and develop guidelines for the process.
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 14 2019 (IPS)* – When Yassir Arafat was denied a US visa to visit New York to address the United Nations back in 1988, the General Assembly defied the United States by temporarily moving the UN’s highest policy making body to Geneva– perhaps for the first time in UN history– providing a less-hostile political environment for the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
Global warming is rooted in an economic system that has a parasitoid relationship with the Earth upon which we live.
Image: Lausanne, CC by 2.0
13 August 2019 (openDemocracy)* — Global Warming which is caused by human activity is rooted in a social and economic system that has a parasitoid relationship to the Earth upon which we live.
The United Nations humanitarian wing launched a new Response Plan (HRP) on Wednesday [14 August 2019], that aims to help around 2.6 million people in Venezuela through to the end of the year, almost half of whom are youth.
.Noting that the plan “only represents a limited number of all people in need”, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said that $223 million was required from donors, to achieve this goal.
To mark the International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism, on 21 August, UN News travelled to Chad and the Far North region of Cameroon in West Africa earlier this year, to interview people who have personal stories to tell, about how terrorism has shattered their lives.
UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe | Hawa Abdu, a Nigerian mother of two was abducted by Boko Haram in 2014 and spent four years with the outlawed terrorist group moving around the north-east of Nigeria.
Hawa Abdu, a 38-year old Nigerian mother of two was abducted by Boko Haram in 2014 and spent four years with the outlawed terrorist group moving around the north-east of Nigeria.
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Aug 13 2019 (IPS)* — We live in different worlds. The ones of friends, family and work colleagues. Worlds which are overshadowed by other, much bigger ones. Global spheres of international finance, politics, climate change, etc., contexts that might threaten our smaller circle of relationships; our family, our income, our general wellbeing, in short – our entire existence.
Credit: Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information
“If Trump is a symptom, what is the disease?” One often encounters this interesting question in alternative media articles. I think that at least part of the answer is “Excessive economic inequality”.
Johan Scales Avery
Hobson’s Explanation of Imperialism
The English economist and Fabian, John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940), offered a famous explanation of the colonial era in his book, Imperialism: AStudy, (1902).
According to Hobson, the basic problem that led to colonial expansion was an excessively unequal distribution of incomes in the industrialized countries.
The result of this unequal distribution was that neither the rich nor the poor could buy back the total output of their society.
13 August 2019 (Wall Street International)* —I am among those psychologists and other professionals who introduced the use of the term “gender” into the lexicon of the social sciences 50 years ago, in my case and by those feminists working alongside me, into the field of psychology.
Before our generation of writers, teachers and therapists, the differences between boys and girls, men and women were all subsumed under the term “sex.”
The Trump administration is already campaigning for the upcoming elections and its main target is an easy fragile one – migration and how to put the brakes on it. Turning Guatemala into a temporary prison has been its latest achievement. Español
August 2, 2019, Guatemala City, Guatemala, Guatemala: Women wait for relatives just deported from the USA arriving at Guatemala City International Airport Friday on a flight filled with deportees. | Miguel Juarez Lugo/Zuma Press/PA Images
12 August 2019 (openDemocracy)* — The issue of migration allows Trump to show off his imperial power in front of the cameras, and to cover up with much fuss a series of failures.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 