'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
14 May 2021 (UNEP)* — As Pakistan prepares to host World Environment Day on June 5, ecosystem restoration, which includes critical ecosystems like mangrove forests, will be the focus.
Mr Quershi, who sadly passed away in December 2020, played a key role in the development of mangrove restoration in Pakistan and will be fondly remembered at the event.“He was a magnificent man.
World Food Programme partnerships officer Krystyna Kovalenko offers a glimpse of the south of the country, where thousands of people are starving
(WFP)* — The ‘Grand Sud’ in Madagascar looks like something out of a sci-fi film — totally dry, inhabitable and deserted. The land has suffered from several years of consecutive drought. But locals say that this year has been worse than any other.
– The UN Security Council (UNSC), the most powerful political body at the United Nations, has largely remained silent or ineffective in resolving one of the longstanding military conflicts in the Middle East involving Israelis and Palestinians.
Smoke from an airstrike rises over the city of Rafah in southern Gaza Strip. Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba
But, at the same time, several attempts to condemn Israel for its excesses have been thwarted by successive US administrations, which have exercised the veto power in the Security Council to protect a client state whose survival has depended largely on billions of dollars in US economic and military aid, state-of-the-art weapons systems and outright military grants doled out gratis.
Supporters of Palestinian rights have been fighting back successfully against efforts to silence their advocacy and suppress their solidarity actions, with major legal victories in four separate jurisdictions over the last year.
Jake Lynch
In Australia last month, Melissa Parke, a former Labor federal legislator and UN legal officer in Gaza, won a libel case against Colin Rubenstein, director of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.
He issued a statement in settlement, affirming that she was not, in fact, “a compulsive slanderer, a conspiracy theorist, a liar, a fanatic, or an anti-Semite”.
Ms Parke had taken the action, she explained, “seeking an acknowledgment that I was not any of the things imputed of me” and to resist “the inappropriate weaponisation of accusations of anti-Semitism”.
