'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
Geneva/Dubai (WMO)* 30 November 2023 – 2023 has shattered climate records, accompanied by extreme weather which has left a trail of devastation and despair, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
(UN News)* — Amid hopes of a deal to extend the pause in fighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday [], the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) reported that humanitarian assistance had reached its shelters in northern Gaza for first time since war erupted last month.
(UN News)* — As the pause in fighting in Gaza appeared to enter a fifth day on Tuesday [], UN humanitarians warned that aid deliveries needed to multiply immediately to save the lives of the injured and stem the risk of a deadly disease outbreak that has left doctors “terrified”.
Priorities include transporting fuel to the north of the war-torn enclave, so that it can be used to power hospitals, provide clean water and maintain other vital civilian infrastructure.
Such services have been massively impacted by weeks of Israeli bombardment in response to Hamas’s 7 October massacres in southern Israel that left some 1,200 dead and around 240 taken hostage.
– In recent decades, failure to sustain economic progress has been blamed on a supposed middle-income country (MIC) trap. Such blaming obscures as much as it supposedly explains.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
The ‘middle-income trap’ fable began as a World Bank story about why upper MICs in Latin America failed to become high-income countries (HICs) after pursuing policies required or prescribed by the Bretton Woods institutions.
Bretton Woods’ Frankenstein
The 1944 Bretton Woods rules-based international monetary system ended in August 1971 when President Richard Nixon unilaterally repudiated US obligations. This happened after the US Treasury had borrowed heavily from the rest of the world from the 1960s.
The US government’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ of ‘spending well beyond its means’ has continued despite the resulting international monetary ‘non-system’.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 