'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
‘Tremendously off track’ to meet 2030 Sustainable Development Goals: UN chief
(UN News)* — Between 720 and 811 million people in the world faced hunger in 2020 – some 161 million more than for 2019 – the UN Secretary-General said on 12 July 2021; “new, tragic data”, which indicates the world is “tremendously off track” to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
(UN News)* — Global hunger levels have skyrocketed because of conflict, climate change and the economic impact of COVID-19; and one in five children around the world is stunted, UN agencies on 12 July 2021 warned.
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This time, it was different. Protests over Israel’s threatened forcible removal of Palestinian residents from East Jerusalem, followed by armed police storming the compound of the Al-Aqsa Mosque; rocket fire from Hamas in Gaza and the latest military onslaught on the Strip, formed a sequence of events that were reported with inputs from a much wider range of sources than in comparable episodes from the recent past.
Jake Lynch
The result was a pattern of coverage, in many international media, which posed a serious challenge to the propaganda lines, elisions and suppressions that have kept the Israeli security state in a privileged position in public discourse over several decades.
The most prominent visual signifier of this shift came when the New York Times used its front page to display photos of all 66 children killed in the ten-day bombardment of Gaza. The paper followed up with in-depth investigations, exposing false claims by Israeli army and government spokespersons that targets for its bombs had any conceivable military role or value.
– ‘No one is protected from the global pandemic until everyone is’ has become a popular mantra. But vaccine apartheid worldwide, due to rich countries’ policies, has made COVID-19 a developing country pandemic, delaying its end and global economic recovery.
Anis Chowdhury
Systemic inequities
Most rich countries have been blocking the developing country proposal to temporarily suspend relevant provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for the duration of the pandemic to more affordably and effectively contain it.
Needed to quickly scale up production and affordable access to relevant diagnostic tests, medical treatments, personal protective equipment and prophylactic vaccines, the proposal – by South Africa and India in late 2020 – is now supported by more than two-thirds of WTO members.
The Biden administration has reversed Trump’s opposition to the proposal, albeit only for vaccines.
13 July 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Every once in a while, a seductive term comes along to save the fortress of rulers from being taken down by disgruntled ‘subjects’. We’ve had concepts like ‘inclusive’, ‘sustainable’, and ‘participatory’, each hiding what is otherwise business as usual. The latest in this lineage is ‘net-zero’.
Legal scholar Francis A. Boyle told Ann Garrison that a “Responsibility-to-Protect” intervention in Ethiopia would be illegal and catastrophic.
“The NATO nations, and especially the US are hostile to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the government of Ethiopia.”
Ann Garrison: Francis Boyle, you’re an expert in international law, including subsets, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law. Could you explain what international humanitarian law is?
Francis A. Boyle: There is a subset of international human rights law that is called international humanitarian law.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 