'Unseen' News and Views
(UN News)* — Recent attacks indicate how the conflict in Yemen risks spiralling out of control, the chief UN mediator for the country told the Security Council on Tuesday [15 February 2022], as he called for “serious efforts” to be made by Yemeni parties, the region and the international community, to end the fighting, now in its seventh year.
The Republican Party Has Become Irresponsible
John Scales Avery
In recent years, and especially since Donald Trump’s term as president, the Republican Party has become irresponsible.
Republican Senators and members of the House of Representatives no longer act to promote whatever is best for their country and the planet. Instead they block whatever the Democratic Party tries to achieve.
The Republican Party is aided by Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who, although the are nominally Democrats, act as destructively as though they were Republicans. Manchin is paid to do this by giant coal corporations, while Sinema gets her blood money from big pharmaceutical firms.
The African Storybook Project has developed writing and publishing apps that are promoting literacy. Credit: Saide
The student from Katsina State in Nigeria, Hassan, won a National Reading Competition for a story she created using the African Storybook reader app and the African Storybook maker app. Saide, an education NGO, developed the apps through its African Storybook (ASb) project.
10 February 2022 (UNEP)* — Yacouba Sawadogo, 76, has been a farmer for much of his life, tending a plot of land in a semi-arid stretch of central Burkina Faso. But in the 1980s, that way of life almost came to an end.
(UN News)* — The number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Myanmar has doubled since February of last year, now crossing the 800,000 mark, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) announced on 11 February 2022.
Russia does not want to invade Ukraine
John Scales Avery
Both Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, and its Foreign Secretary, Sergey Laverov, have repeatedly stated that Russia does not intend to invade Ukraine.
Logic also tells us that if they had wished to do so, they would have done it long ago. The threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a western invention.
To understand how Russians feel about having western weapons and troops poured into a position on their nation’s borders, we should imagine how the United States would react if large numbers of Russian weapons and troops were stationed in Mexico or Canada.
In 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker assured Mikhail Gorbachev that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastward direction”.
There is an old expression that “the chickens have come home to roost.” The wars that the American Empire waged abroad have come to the continental USA. For more than a century the US has waged war, overtly or covertly throughout Latin America.
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And in recent decades throughout the Middle East. Not to mention its so-called Cold Wars with Russia and now China. But now the invasion of the Capitol one year ago has signaled the beginning of a second civil war at home.
This new, second civil war is now being widely recognized in the media. See, for example, the article in the Guardian : “The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it.”
Credit: United Nations
In a circular to staffers worldwide, the JIU says it is conducting “a system-wide review of measures and mechanisms for preventing and addressing racism and racial discrimination (RRD) in the institutions of the United Nations system.”
The survey will examine the various forms of RRD at the individual, institutional, and structural levels and the measures and mechanisms in place, including cultural and contextual factors that facilitate or constrain efforts by organizations.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 