28 December 2020 (UN News)* — An increase in violence against women in India during the global COVID-19 outbreak has been described by the United Nations as a “shadow pandemic”.
UNDP | UN officials say that gender-based violence is a “shadow pandemic,” hidden beneath COVID-19.
Many women, who have been forced to stay at home due to lockdown measures, have been cut off from support services and have suffered at the hands of abusive partners.
In Assam, in tea-growing country in the northeast of India, women are now getting help from groups supported by the UN.
Read More e here about how women are empowering themselves to confront gender-based violence.
28 December 2020 (UN News)* — United Nations agencies and humanitarian partners have called on authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to act urgently to help hundreds of migrants, stranded and without shelter, amid freezing winter temperatures.
IOM 2020/Ervin Causevic | A migrant at what remains of the Lipa Emergency Tent Camp in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, after it was destroyed in a fire.
Every day is critical in the pastoralists’ fight to save their ecosystems and way of life from the military training ground.
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Preparation for military training in September 2019, highlands of Sinjajevina | Image: Ministry of the Defense of Montenegro
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(openDemocracy)* — While all eyes were focused on elections in the US, few noticed that a new government was to be sworn in in Montenegro. Shepherds and villagers of the Sinjajevina-Durmitor mountain range, the biggest mountain grassland in the Balkans and second biggest in Europe, looked with hope to the new government as they are fighting to preserve their traditional lands and ways of life.
A military training ground supported and fueled by NATO has been operating since 2019 on their lands, which for millennia have served as pasture to local communities living in the area.
Laetitia Bader, Human Rights Watch’s Horn of Africa Director, recently returned from a research mission in Sudan to interview refugees who fled the fighting that broke out in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in early November 2020. For several weeks, federal government forces, the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF), and their allies clashed with forces and militia allied to Tigray’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), in response to what Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed described as attacks by TPLF forces on federal military bases and forces in the region. The conflict has taken a heavy toll on the region’s civilian population. Here, Bader describes her impressions and some of Human Rights Watch’s initial findings.
What were your first impressions of the impact of this conflict on civilians?
Beverly L. Longid is the Global Coordinator of International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation (IPMSDL). Beverly is an indigenous Igorot belonging to the Bontok-Kankanaeys tribe from Sagada, Mountain Province in the Philippines. She is also the International Officer of Katribu – National Alliance of Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines, and Co-Chair of CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness. The IPMSDL Global Secretariat is currently based in Quezon City, Philippines.
Indigenous Peoples, advocates and members of IPMSDL call for continuing struggle for self-determination to combat imperialist plunder and state-terror. Credit: Carlo Manalansan, International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation (IPMSDL)
QUEZON CITY, Philippines, Dec 17 2020 (IPS)* – Rights are earned through hard-fought struggles. And for Indigenous Peoples (IP), its fulfillment comes from the collective and continuous defense of ancestral land and territory, and assertion of their ways of life and the right to self-determination.
Big Oil, King Coal, Big Chemical, Big Tech and Big Pharma are titans of a Deep State cartel that is driving our country down the road to plutocracy and environmental apocalypse. We must unite to fight them — and not each other.
“To greed, all nature is insufficient.” — Seneca
Long before it turned its attention to systematically destroying the planet, the carbon industry set its sights on destroying American democracy and on bulldozing our values.
The term “Deep State” is one of those toxic phrases that highlights and exacerbates the widening chasm between Democrats and Republicans. Ironically, polarization is a key strategic objective for the sinister cabal that the phrase describes.
23 December 2020 (Debates Indigenas | IWGIA)* – After a decade as Chancellor of Evo Morales, David Choquehuanca was the leader chosen by the Pacto de Unidad to represent indigenous, native and peasant peoples in the Movimiento al Socialism’s (MAS) binomial. Following the victory by 55% of the votes, in his speech, the Vice President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia called for reconciliation and dialogue among the Bolivian people. Regarded as a wise Aymara, for his knowledge of the worldview of “Vivir Bien” (Living Well), he called upon the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala, to the complementarity of the Chacha-Warmi and to the Andean solidarity of the Ayni.
Choquehuanca with Morales when he was Minister of External Affairs. Photo: Communidad Andina.
In 2015, Oxfam published the “40 faces 40 years” photo exhibition, profiling 40 Sahrawi refugees four decades after the Western Sahara conflict erupted in 1975 forcing tens of thousands to flee to neighboring Algeria, where they remain to this day. This exhibition provided an opportunity to shed a light on the lives of generations of individuals born and raised in displacement.
Five years later, little has changed – the Sahrawi refugee population is marking their 45th year in camps situated in the middle of the Algerian Sahara, where life remains incredibly difficult.
Temperatures reach up to 50 degrees Celsius in summer and dip below zero degrees in winter, and most refugees remain dependent on humanitarian aid to meet their most basic needs, including access to food, water, and shelter.
Our own (USA) government, in alliance with the big corporations and banks, has created an empire that brings servitude, misery, and death to millions of people.
(John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, New York, Plume, 2004).
As head of USAID, Power will be in perfect position to wield foreign aid as a cudgel for beating foreign heads of state till they bow to US empire.
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Just when it seemed that Joe Biden’s coming administration couldn’t be more of a horror show, Axios reported that he’s likely to appoint another monster from the deep, violent know-it-all Samantha Power, to head the US Agency for International Development (USAID). I rescheduled my piece on contact tracing’s potential to further empower the surveillance state for next year’s first Black Agenda Report and instead updated my 2015 piece “Samantha Power: Africa’s Problem from Hell.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 