'Unseen' News and Views
(UN NEWSFor Valdecir Nascimento, 63, the Black movement in Brazil was a “turning point” for her as a young woman, leading her from the revolutionary stilt houses in Alagados, to joining more than 1,000 participants last week at UN Headquarters for the second session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.
While poor maternal outcomes among Black women in the U.S. is not new, improving it is imperative. U.S. policymakers can look to sub-Saharan Africa for guidance on reversing this trend. Credit: Ernest Ankomah/IPS
(UN NEWS)* — The United Nations on Friday [] appealed for sustainable funding for its agency that supports Palestine refugees, UNRWA, which is on the brink of financial collapse.
Chronic underfunding over the past decade, and resultant severe austerity measures, mean UNRWA is already operating with a $75 million shortfall, putting its lifesaving programmes across the Middle East at risk.
“As I address you today, I do not have the funds to keep our schools, health centres and other services running as of September,” Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told a pledging conference at UN Headquarters in New York.
In this feature, part of a series exploring the fight against trafficking in the Sahel, UN News focuses on the illegal fuel trade in the region.
(UN NEWS)* — Kourou/Koualou, a tiny village in a neutral zone straddling Benin and Burkina Faso, was the centre of a one-million-litre-a-year cross-border illicit fuel trade, a snapshot of a phenomenon that spreads far across the 6,000-kilometre-wide African Sahel region.
Transported by criminal networks and taxed by terrorist groups, illegal fuel flows along four major routes snaking across the Sahel towards ready buyers, siphoning millions from nations on the road to stabilizing their security-challenged region, home to 300 million people.
Fake or substandard antimalarial medicines kill as many as 267,000 sub-Saharan Africans every year. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS
This is how several international specialised bodies, mainly the United Nations, depict the aggravated situation in this already highly fragile African region, which the UN describes as a region in crisis, as those living there are prey to “chronic insecurity, climate shocks, conflict, coups, and the rise of criminal and terrorist networks.”
(UN NEWS)* — Racism is a global problem, and every country must take a stance against it, General Assembly President Csaba Kőrösi said on , addressing the latest meeting of a UN platform to improve the safety and quality of life of people of African descent worldwide.
“Racism and xenophobia continue to spoil our communities, like scars that spoil the fabric of society. The hatred and violence they engender persist, demanding our collective efforts to eradicate racial violence in all its forms,” he told the second session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.
Mr. Kőrösi said overcoming this requires recognizing our shared humanity, as the “unacknowledged legacies” of slavery and segregation persist today through oppressive and racially violent prison systems, inequalities in access to healthcare, and exclusion from the workforce.
It is remarkable how the media in a select few countries are able to set the record on matters around the world.
Meas Sokhorn (Cambodia), Inverted Sewer, 2014
The European and North American countries enjoy a near-global monopoly over information, their media houses vested with a credibility and authority inherited from their status during colonial times (BBC, for instance) as well as their command of the neocolonial structure of our times (CNN, for instance).
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has now reported on the “Staggering’ rise in climate emergencies in the last 20 years.’ Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS
Indeed, several scientific findings, released ahead of the 2023 World Environment Day (5 June), staggeringly indicate that the world-spread climate carnage is predicted to hit all-time records.
See: global temperatures are set to break records during the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on 17 May 2023 alerted.
Warmest year ever
“There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period, will be the warmest on record.”
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In 1987, at the Organization for African Unity, Thomas Sankara said, “Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa.” Ethiopia might actually be better off if the US keeps the IMF from signing off on its latest loan request.
The US is holding up Ethiopia’s request for a $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for postwar reconstruction and development. I spoke to Robert J. Prince, Retired Senior Lecturer at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies , about Ethiopia, Africa, and the IMF.
ANN GARRISON: A source who preferred to remain anonymous told me that the US is holding Ethiopia’s loan up, demanding accountability for wartime atrocities, but that their real goal is to force Ethiopia to distance itself from Russia and China, but most of all from Eritrea. That sounds plausible, but what do you think?
Long wait at the border between Sudan and Egypt. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS
Muhammad Saqr, a truck driver, left Cairo with a load of thinners on April 13, heading to Khartoum. By the time he had arrived at the border, the battle had flared up.
Saqr remained, like dozens of trucks, waiting for the borders to be reopened.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 