(New York) – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2024 electoral campaign frequently used hate speech against Muslims and other minorities, Human Rights Watch on 14 August 2024 said.
(UN News)* — Conflict in Myanmar between the military junta and opposition forces is increasingly brutal, with both sides likely responsible for international crimes including summary executions, top independent rights investigators said on Tuesday [].
In a call to regional bloc ASEAN to help end the violence and support efforts to bring perpetrators to justice, the head of the Human Rights Council-appointed probe into the Myanmar emergency Nicholas Koumjian described an increasingly “desperate” junta whose devastating military tactics were being matched by opposition fighters acting with total impunity.
“Aerial bombings have increased very substantially in this last year,” Mr. Koumjian told journalists in Geneva.
(UN News)* —Sudan’s deepening humanitarian crisis caused by nearly 16 months of war has left countless women and girls subject to sexual violence and rape and tens of thousands of children at risk of death from hunger, UN aid teams said on Tuesday [13 August 2024].
Speaking from Sudan, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spokesperson James Elder described meeting a senior medical worker at a hospital outside Khartoum who had “direct contact with hundreds, hundreds of women and girls, some as young as eight years old, who have been raped. Many have been held captive for weeks on end.”
(UN News)* —Amid further evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military in Gaza, UN humanitarians delivered a fresh warning on Monday [12 August 2024] over the dire sanitary emergency there and the urgent need for a mass polio vaccination campaign in the embattled enclave.
UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, issued a statement from Deir al-Balah in Gaza’s central area, where untreated sewage run-off formed large pools on the road next to shelters for forcibly displaced people.
“Sewage water is all over the streets,” said UNICEF spokesperson Salim Oweis, who highlighted the destruction of Gaza’s water and sanitation network, and its sewage treatment plants, since war erupted on 7 October, after Hamas-led terror attacks in Israel.
“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”
— Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh
Voters in the U.S.A. live in fantasy and probably always will. No matter how obvious it is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, not a democracy, the ardent pipe dreams of a new face in the White House go to their heads every four years. It can only be explained by a combination of intellectual ignorance, the acceptance of propaganda, and the embrace of illusions.
From Kenya to Pakistan, protesters want the International Monetary Fund to stop exploiting countries in debt crisis
(OpenDemocracy)* 24 July 2024 — Mass protests rocking Kenya in the past month have once again laid bare the predatory lending practices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Placards read “IMF keep your hands off Kenya,” and “We ain’t IMF bitches”, calling on President William Ruto to withdraw an IMF-driven finance bill set to ramp up austerity and regressive taxes.
Kenyan protesters anger at new IMF measures | James Wakibia/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 12 2024 (IPS)* –– The growing number of killings of Palestinian journalists in Gaza has triggered a demand for a cut-off in US arms supplies to Israel.
The journalists gather in front of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital to commemorate their friends, Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi, who lost their lives in Israeli army attack on a moving vehicle in the Al-Shati refugee camp, in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on July 31, 2024. Source: Middle East Monitor. Credit: Ashraf Amra, Anadolu Agency
A letter addressed to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken—and signed by scores of reporters, news outlets and journalist unions— says Israel has killed more than 165 Palestinian journalists since October 7 last year.
(UN News)* — The UN Human Rights Office condemned on Saturday [] the increasing frequency of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) strikes on schools, where hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians have sought shelter, with the latest attacks killing dozens at a Gaza City school.
At around 4:30am during dawn prayer on Saturday, a mosque inside Al Tabaeen School was struck by the IDF “at least three times”, the UN rights office, OHCHR, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory said in a statement, adding that the attacks were “conducted with apparent disregard for the high rate of civilian fatalities”.
Climate change-related extreme weather jeopardizes Kenya’s development agenda; even though it contributes very little to global warming, it is marked as a high-risk country by development banks.
Drought in Kenya’s Ewaso Ngiro river basin in 2017 when pastoralists had to dig for water because much of the river system in Isiolo county had dried up. Credit: Denis Onyodi/KRCS
NAIROBI, Aug 7 2024 (IPS)* –Kenya contributes less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions every year, yet development banks have flagged the East African nation as a high climate risk.
(UN News)* — The UN human rights office, OHCHR, called on Friday [] for the Israeli authorities to monitor senior officials whose public statements on the Gaza conflict may promote war crimes.
.
UNIS Vienna | Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, addresses a conference for youth human rights defenders at the UN in Vienna (file).
OHCHR spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said UN Human Rights High Commissioner Volker Türk “is shocked and appalled” by comments made by Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who suggested that letting two million Palestinians in Gaza starve to death could be “justified and moral” in order to free hostages.
The High Commissioner condemned these words in the strongest terms, which also incite hatred against innocent civilians.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 