(UN News)* — Money sent home by migrants abroad has surpassed foreign direct investment in boosting the gross domestic product (GDP) of developing countries, UN migration agency IOM said in the latest edition of its flagship report, released on Tuesday [7 May 2024].
World Migration Report 2024 reveals a significant shift in global migration patterns, including a record number of people displaced due to conflict, violence, natural and other disasters.
Speaking at the launch in Dhaka, Bangladesh, IOM Director General Amy Pope said the report aims to “demystify the complexity of human mobility through evidence-based data and analysis”.
Is the West launching an all-out war against global ‘South,’ against the BRICS – plus, against the ‘other’? Are we in the first stages of a civilizational struggle initiated by the U.S.-led assemblage we call the “collective West”? That would have seemed an absurd idea until very recently.
Bremmer, Michael
Yet, there are remarkable developments on the world scene that suggest that dramatic alterations indeed are in the offing. Let us examine them; then interpolate what systemic meaning they might auger.
1) Palestine is the most revealing, graphic indicator that something is badly askew in the mentality of political elites in North America and Europe – with resonance among their accommodating publics.
Complicity in the genocidal actions of Israel in Gaza – accompanied by pogroms in the West Bank – is a stunning phenomenon. It forces us to reconsider who we in the West are and what we stand for.
‘We now see huge fear among the population of the West Bank.’UNRWA | Nour Shams Palestine refugee camp, that is only 3 kilometers away from the city of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank after Israeli forces’ operation that lasted more than 55 hours between 18 and 21 April
(UN News)* —As war rages in Gaza, violations against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have also increased substantially, a senior official with the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Wednesday [8 May 2024].
“The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is acting as if there is an armed conflict in the West Bank,” Ajith Sunghay, head of the OHCHR office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told UN News.
BRATISLAVA, May 3 2024 (IPS)* – A new report has warned media freedom in the EU [European Union] is close to “breaking point” in many states amid rising authoritarianism across the continent.
Protestors gathered in Bratislava on May 2, 2024 to protest against changes to the public broadcaster, RTVS. The placard in the picture reads: RTVS on a flat-screen TV; STVR about a flat earth. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS
In its latest annual report covering 2023, the Berlin-based Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties) highlighted widespread threats, intimidation and violence against journalists and attacks on the independence of public broadcasters in the EU, with roll backs in media freedom down to “deliberate harm or neglect by national governments”.
UNITED NATIONS, May 1 2024 (IPS)* –The seven- month-long war in Gaza is perhaps the only military conflict in contemporary history which has claimed the lives of over 100 journalists, including targeted killings.
As of April 26, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), preliminary investigations have shown at least 97 journalists and media workers were among the more than 35,000 killed since the war began on October 7—with more than 34,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank and 1,200 deaths in Israel.
Diaa Al-Kahlout, pictured after his return to Gaza after more than a month in Israeli detention, said he was interrogated over his journalism by Israel’s army and security service. Credit: Courtesy of Diaa Al-Kahlout
NEW YORK, May 1 2024 (IPS)* – Diaa Al-Kahlout, the veteran Gaza bureau chief for the Qatari-funded London-based newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, had been covering the Israel-Gaza war for two months when he became part of the news.
On December 7, Al-Kahlout was detained along with members of his family by Israeli forces in a mass arrest in Beit Lahya in northern Gaza. Over 33 days in Israeli custody, he said he was interrogated about his journalism and subjected to physical and psychological mistreatment.
(UN News)* —Children as young as four are being forced to go to work in Lebanon amid a “massive collapse” in humanitarian funding and escalating hostilities on the country’s southern border with Israel that threaten to spiral into a “full-scale war”,UN child experts said on Tuesday [].
In a call for an immediate end to the war in Gaza which sparked intensifying exchanges of fire between armed militants Hezbollah and the Israeli military, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned that airstrikes are hitting “deeper and deeper” into Lebanon, with 344 people killed to date, including eight youngsters.
The author has no doubt the Western political elite are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians at a much deeper level than the people have yet understood.
Sunak and Netanyahu in Israel, 19 Oct 2023. (No. 10/Wikimedia Commons)
26 Apr 2024 – Governments cannot take big decisions extremely quickly except in the most extreme of circumstances.
(UN News)* — The head of UN peacekeeping and demining reiterated calls on Monday [] for a ceasefire in Gaza as a first step to returning the war-ravaged enclave to some normality, while mine clearance experts warned that the Strip is now at its “most dangerous period”.
“This is the most dangerous period; once people start returning to the north, that’s when most accidents will occur because they won’t be familiar with where your unexploded ordnance is located,” said Mungo Birch, Chief of the UN Mine Action Programme (UNMAS) in the State of Palestine.
“It’s important that once the returns start, we’re poised and ready to be able to provide the risk education they need.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 