'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
The first-ever Global Refugee Forum concluded in Geneva on Wednesday [18 December 2019] with more than 770 pledges of support, covering areas such as protection, employment, and education, for refugees and the communities which have taken them in. .
As “policies shaped more by fear than fact” have caused untold suffering to migrants, the UN Secretary-General is urging countries to realize the goals of a global agreement that promotes enhanced international cooperation on migration. (*).
António Guterres issued the charge in his message for International Migrants Day, observed annually on 18 December.
UNRWA | The UN Special Coordinator for Middle East Peace addressed the Security Council on Wednesday, asking for more funding for the occupied territories. About 76 per cent of funds requested for the Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) for 2020 target the Gaza enclave.
DAYLESFORD, Australia, 18 December 2019 — At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds.
Robert J. Burrowes
The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous ornithologist, naturalist and painter John James Audubon:
‘I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose… Before sunset I reached Louisville, distance from Hardensburgh fifty-five miles. The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers, and continued to do so for three days in succession.’ See ‘Passenger Pigeon’.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 