'Unseen' News and Views
Women in Nigeria collect food vouchers as part of a programme to support families struggling under the COVID-19 lockdown. Credit: WFP/Damilola Onafuwa
Sounds altruistic – even as the number of billionaires keep rising while the poorest of the world’s poor keep multiplying.
(UN News)* — More than 33 million new jobs need to be created by 2030 in the Middle East and North Africa region by 2030, if the world’s largest unemployment hot spot is to be substantially improved, four United Nations agencies said on Monday [23 May 2022].
The joint-release by the UN labour agency, ILO, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was issued ahead of a two-day meeting in Amman, Jordan, aiming to address the youth transition from learning, to work, a key priority for adolescents and young people across the vast predominantly Arabic-speaking region.
(UN News)* — The recovery of the global jobs market is going into reverse, the UN labour agency, ILO, said on Monday [23 May 2022], blaming COVID-19 and “other multiple crises” that have increased inequalities within and between countries.
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(UN News)* — With a scorching summer fast approaching, food prices rising and access to water and electricity limited in many parts of Syria, donors must make good on $4.3 billion in humanitarian pledges committed at last week’s Brussels funding conference, the UN’s senior humanitarian official told the Security Council on Friday [20 May 2022].
(UN News)* – As 18 million people in Africa’s Sahel region teeter on the edge of severe hunger over the next three months, the UN released on Friday [20 May 2022] an additional $30 million from its emergency humanitarian fund, to boost the humanitarian response across four countries.
Food insecurity is set to reach its highest level since 2014, warned the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
“Entire families in the Sahel are on the brink of starvation,” said Martin Griffiths, UN Humanitarian Affairs chief and Emergency Relief Coordinator. “If we don’t act now, people will perish”.
Sobering numbers
In the Sahel, 7.7 million children under five are expected to suffer from malnutrition, of which 1.8 million are severely malnourished.
And if aid operations are not scaled up, this number could reach 2.4 million by the year’s end.
“The good news is that human decisions are the largest contributors to disaster risk, so we have the power to substantially reduce the threats posed to humanity, and especially the most vulnerable among us” Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
Others, instead, may think that such human ingenuity will once more address the symptoms rather than the causes provoking them. Thus, they would be right to want to be informed and aware of the root causes of such disasters in order to push for eradicating them.
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water. Only / There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: I. The Burial of the Dead, 1922
Pepe Escobar
This glimpse of “fear in a handful of dust” already ranks as one the prime breakthroughs of the young 21st century, presented this week by Chief of Russian Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Protection Force Igor Kirillov.
The provisional results of evidence being collected about the work of U.S. bioweapons in Ukraine are simply astonishing. These are the main takeaways.
Global Coalition Calls for Financial Remedy for Deaths, Wage Theft.
London, 18 May 2022 – Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Qatar have not received financial compensation or any other adequate remedy for serious labor abuses suffered while building and servicing infrastructure for the FIFA World Cup, which begins in November 2022, Human Rights Watch on 18 May 2022 said.
GODE, Ethiopia, 19 May 2022 (UNFPA)* – “When I saw my baby’s hand coming out, I ran for our lives. We travelled nearly 90 kilometres to the nearest health facility… We are both lucky to be alive.”
Ayan Abadi Wali, 24, recounted her story while recovering from a life-saving caesarean-section delivery in Gode, a town in Ethiopia’s Somali region and one of the hardest hit by the country’s worst drought in four decades.
Ms. Abadi is currently living at an informal settlement in the Shabelle zone with her seven children and her mother-in-law, Ms. Barkhado, alongside hundreds of others displaced by the drought.
Yet those who skimmed the headlines of initial reports from several U.S. media outlets may have been left with a different impression of what happened.
“Israeli Police Clash with Mourners at Funeral Procession,” read the headline of MSNBC’s online report. The Wall Street Journal had a similar headline on its story: “Israeli Forces, Palestinians Clash in West Bank before Funeral of Journalist.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 