'Unseen' News and Views
Fully artificial food is an increasingly popular trend focused on developing a new line of synthetically produced, ultra-processed food products by using recent advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology.
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These new products seek to imitate and replace animal products, food additives, and expensive, rare, or socially conflictive ingredients (such as palm oil).
– After two years of human devastation, the world is learning to live with COVID-19 while trying to balance the protection of public health and livelihoods.
For countries in Asia and the Pacific, this is challenging not only because national coffers are heavily strained by record public spending to mitigate pandemic suffering, but also due to deeper structural economic issues.
Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
COVID-19 has exposed a pandemic of inequality in a region which has the world’s most dynamic economies but also half of the global poor.
A region where nearly half of the total income goes to just 10 per cent of people while the poorest 10 per cent get just 0.2 per cent.
This failure to grow together meant that the pandemic worsened the circumstances of those left behind.
(UN News)* — Decrying the erosion of democracy in Brazil, a UN expert has called for authorities to create and maintain a safe environment conducive to the exercise of the rights to peaceful assembly and association.
“I am concerned that in recent years there have been emerging trends limiting the enjoyment of these rights in all areas,” Clément Nyaletsossi Voule said on Monday [11 April 2022] in São Paulo, speaking at the end of a 12-day visit to South America’s largest country.
(UN News)* — The basic rights of older persons need to be protected today, more than ever before, said the UN human rights chief on Monday [11 April 2022], but existing legal safeguards render them, in effect, “invisible”.
Students eating lunch at Shivbhawani Primary School, Deulekh, Bajhang, Nepal. Credit: Marty Logan
Worldwide 388 million students, or 1 in 2 schoolchildren, received at least one meal or snack per day at school before the COVID-19 pandemic in what the World Food Programme (WFP), quoting the World Bank, calls the world’s “most extensive social safety net.”
(UN News)* — The number of hungry people in the Sahel and West Africa has quadrupled over the last three years, currently reaching 41 million, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) reported on Friday [8 April 2022].
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Issuing the alert, WFP said that the figure rose to 43 million when the Central African Republic was included in the food insecurity estimate.
Government capitulations to the far Right have only aided Emmanuel Macron’s opponents | Victor Joly/Abaca Press/Alamy
The war in Ukraine has placed U.S. and NATO policy toward Russia under a spotlight, highlighting how the United States and its allies have expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, backed a coup and now a proxy war in Ukraine, imposed waves of economic sanctions, and launched a debilitating trillion-dollar arms race.
The Nation: Hiroshima – It’s time to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.
The explicit goal is to pressure, weaken and ultimately eliminate Russia, or a Russia-China partnership, as a strategic competitor to U.S. imperial power.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 