'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
8 November 2019 (WHO)* — The impact of successive storms, cyclones and heavy rains has been severe in 2019, and in the wake of heavy flooding, WHO is upping disease surveillance actions and providing critical supplies to hard-hit populations across Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean Region.
Credit: EPA (photo posted ere from WHO).
8 November 2019 (UN Environment)* — When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in the late 15th century, he and his crew had spent months sleeping on a hard and dirty deck—most likely infested with vermin. It is no surprise that the islands seemed like paradise. Not only did the sailors finally feel the land beneath their feet again, but the indigenous people slept comfortably in nets between the trees, rather than on the hard floor.
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Photo by Willian Justen de Vaconcellos/ Unsplash
The autumn sun lights the classroom in Ternopil, Western Ukraine, where children laugh as Mr. Possum asks 11-year-old Sasha to deliver a package to his nephew in another country. Sasha hesitates, while her classmates give her advice: some suggest that she should help a stranger, others believe it’s risky.
Liza and Her Friends Travelling the World is a board game developed by IOM to help children and young people become aware of human trafficking. Photo: Studii Rozvytku
– Buses carrying cross-border traders and goods from Cotonou in Benin to Bamako in Mali have recently been using the Lomé route — travelling through the capital of Togo and then getting onto the Ouagadougou corridor on their way to the Malian capital.
Traders transporting goods in Mali. Thanks to the African Development Bank (AfDB), infrastructure linking African nations has made cross-border transportation of goods easier. Courtesy: Mary Newcombe/ CC by 2.0
It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There’s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of “conspiracy theorists” is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist.
Edward Curtin
The “Deep State” has been redefined as career bureaucrats doing their patriotic duty.
It was two years ago, early in the Trump administration, when The New Yorker and Salon, among many others, were asserting in no uncertain terms that there was no deep state in the United States, and so Trump had nothing to fear from that quarter since it was a figment of his paranoia.
Kit Knightly, writing in the Off-Guardian, brilliantly demolished this spurious propaganda at the time in a must read reminder of how tricksters play their games.
8 November 2019 (FAO)* — They may be small, but they are mighty. Wreaking havoc on crops, locusts are one of the oldest migratory pests in the world and a serious threat to agricultural production and food security. If infestations are not detected early, massive plagues can develop that often take several years and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring under control. A plague of Desert Locusts, one of the most dangerous locust species of all, can easily affect 20 percent of the Earth’s land, potentially damaging the livelihoods of one tenth of the world’s population.
Locust infestations can take years to bring under control and affect the livelihoods and food security of millions. ©FAO/Yasuyoshi Chiba
On 26 Oct, the New York Times headlined “Keep the Oil’: Trump Revives Charged Slogan for New Syria Troop Mission” and opened by saying that “in recent days, Mr. Trump has settled on Syria’s oil reserves as a new rationale for appearing to reverse course and deploy hundreds of additional troops to the war-ravaged country.”
UN agencies on Friday [8 November 2019] highlighted the dire needs of thousands of unaccompanied and separated children who have arrived in Italy as refugees, lacking the proper support to transition through to adulthood. *
Between 2014 and 2018, around 60,000 of them arrived in Italy by sea, 90 per cent of whom were between the ages of 15 and 17, according to a new report issued by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
