'Unseen' News and Views
The Al Basma fertility clinic in Gaza City after an Israeli missile strike. December 2023. Credit: Mohammad Ajjour.
New paper on exploitation of Palestinian women working in illegal Israeli settlements
Children and their families are returning to their homes or the remains of their homes to check the status of their homes. (Photo: Alef Multimedia Company/Oxfam)
12 March 2025 – Oxfam has released a briefing paper Palestinian Women Working in Illegal Israeli Settlements: Dependencies, Exploitation, and Opportunity Costs, shedding light on the harrowing daily realities faced by many vulnerable Palestinian women employed in exploitative and harsh conditions in illegal Israeli settlements, where their rights are being systematically violated.
GENEVA, 13 March 2025 – Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities, according to a new report issued today by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
The European Commission’s proposal for a new “Returns Regulation” for undocumented migrants, announced March 11, is both cruel and unrealistic.
It would mean longer detention, harsher treatment, and fewer rights for people, without any meaningful promise of more repatriations.
(UN News)* — Online attacks against women are getting worse, according to the UN, causing lasting damage that can spill over into real world violence. Leading activists from Spain and Latin America met at UN Headquarters on Wednesday [] to rally women and share strategies on fighting back.
“We were already overstretched, under resourced and literally under attack, with last year being the deadliest year on record to be a humanitarian worker. But it is far tougher for the 300 million plus people who we serve,” he said.
(UN News)* — The UN’s top relief official warned on Wednesday [that the global humanitarian system has reached breaking point, with funding cuts forcing life-or-death decisions over which aid programmes to sustain and which to shut down.
– NATO geopolitical strategy has now joined the ‘coalition’ of Western geoeconomic forces accelerating planetary heating, now led again by re-elected US President Donald Trump.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Industrial Revolution
Economic development is typically associated with the spread of industrialisation over the last two centuries.
The Industrial Revolution involved greater energy use to increase productive capacities significantly.
Burning biomass and fossil fuels greatly expanded mechanical energy generation. The age of industry in the last two centuries has thus involved more hydrocarbon combustion to increase output.
Uneven development has also transformed population geography.
China went from one of the poorest countries in the world to global economic powerhouse in a mere four decades.
Currently featured in the news is DeepSeek, the free, open source A.I. built by innovative Chinese entrepreneurs which just pricked the massive U.S. A.I. bubble.
Even more impressive, however, is the infrastructure China has built, including 26,000 miles of high speed rail, the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world, 100,000 miles of expressway, the world’s first commercial magnetic levitation train, the world’s largest urban metro network, seven of the world’s 10 busiest ports, and solar and wind power generation accounting for over 35% of global renewable energy capacity.
Topping the list is the Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure development program involving 140 countries, through which China has invested in ports, railways, highways and energy projects worldwide.
(UN News)* — Haiti is in freefall. Gangs are tightening their grip on the capital, violence is spreading, and “suffering permeates all social strata” in a nation teetering on the brink, according to the UN human rights office’s designated expert on the country, William O’Neill.
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The Israeli army is building an AI language model using millions of intercepted conversations between Palestinians, which could accelerate the process of incrimination and arrest, a joint investigation reveals.
An Israeli soldier photographs a Palestinian man using an AI facial recognition tool during a raid in Wadi Qutyna, Al-Mughayer, occupied West Bank, 17 Jan 2025. (Avishay Mohar/Activestills)
6 Mar 2025 – The Israeli army is developing a new, ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence tool and training it on millions of Arabic conversations obtained through the surveillance of Palestinians in the occupied territories, an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 