'Unseen' News and Views
What the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has once again laid bare is just how fragile globalised food systems are. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS
The data, released by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on 5 August, adds the FAO Food Price Indexaveraged 140.9 points in July, down 8.6% from June, “marking the fourth consecutive monthly decline since hitting all-time highs earlier in the year.”
A Liberian execution squad fires a volley of shots, killing cabinet ministers of Liberia. April 1980. Credit: Website Rare Historical Photos
Perhaps one of the secure “safe havens”—and a popular “political retirement home”– is Saudi Arabia, a traditionally authoritarian regime, which has provided sanctuary for leaders from Uganda, Tunisia, Pakistan, Yemen and Qatar.
A cartoon in a British newspaper summed it up when it jokingly depicted the “ARRIVALS” terminal in a Saudi airport with a fast-checkout line for visitors– supermarket-style—with a sign that read: “FOR OUSTED WORLD LEADERS ONLY”
In a submission to the United Nations in advance of its review of US compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Human Rights Watch and our partners laid out three key areas in which racial discrimination thrives in the US and perpetuates health inequities, with particularly devastating impacts on Black women.
(UN News)* — The UN trade and development body, UNCTAD, has called for action to curb cryptocurrencies in developing nations, in three policy briefs published on Wednesday [10 August 2022].
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UNCTAD said their benefits to some are overshadowed by the threats they pose to financial stability, domestic resource mobilization, and the security of monetary systems.
Cryptocurrencies are an alternative form of payment. Transactions are done digitally through encrypted technology known as blockchain.
10 August 2022 (UN News)* — Dozens of people are said to be missing after a boat of migrants and refugees sank in the Aegean Sea on Wednesday off the Greek island of Karpathos, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
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On International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, World Food Programme agronomist Deborah Suc tells Simona Beltrami she’s lost her shyness for sticking up for others – and the environment.
‘The consequences of climate change are hitting us really hard,’ says Deborah Suc who works for WFP in her native Indigenous community in Guatemala. Photo: WFP/Nelson Pacheco
8 August 2022 (WFP)* — As record hunger sweeps the globe, Indigenous peoples’ communities – who’ve been marginalized and left behind throughout history – remain disproportionately affected by food insecurity and malnutrition.
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3 Aug 2022 – “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous Peoples.”
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So said Pope Francis last week, at a powwow in Alberta, at the start of his “apology tour” across Canada — for the participation of the Catholic Church in the multi-century horror of Native American “residential schools” on this continent, which more accurately might be called concentration camps for 6-year-olds.
This papal mega-apology, while cheered by some, has been widely criticized as little more than a wimpy shoulder-shrug — sorry about that — for a governmental, church-complicit policy, lasting well into the 20th century, of snatching indigenous children from their families and squeezing their culture, if not their life, out of them.
AIsrael launched multiple air strikes on Gaza on August 5, in another eruption of open warfare between Israel and Palestinian militants. The latest attacks come just over a year after hundreds were killed in an intense period of conflict in the territory.
Fatima Shbair/AP/AAP
Israel announced its missile strikes were targeting military leaders of the al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad militant organisation in Gaza. Israel alleged Islamic Jihad forces were making “threatening movements” near the Israeli border.
Israel’s strikes killed two key leaders of Islamic Jihad in Gaza and severely damaged its military capabilities.
Students protest in Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil, against budget cuts in education. Black students, generally the poorest, suffer the most from the deterioration of schools, the reduction of scholarships, the shrinking of school meal programs and the loss of opportunities to study. CREDIT: CPERS- Fotos Públicas
The basic idea spread is that Brazil is the creation of its Portuguese colonizers, especially with regard to everything that requires brains, lamented Luciana da Cruz Brito, professor of history at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB).
– Nothing –or too little– has changed since Hollywood started producing its spectacular western movies. Rough men, ranchers, mercenary killers, saloons, cowboys, guns, gold fever, the ‘good sheriff’… and the ‘bad indians”. Those movies were anything but fiction–they were real history.
Add to this mix, the deeply-rooted, widely dominating culture of the so-called “white supremacy.”
The female guardians of Venezuela’s Imataca Forest Reserve | An FAO-GEF project, which also aims to increase gender equality in the forestry sector, has continued supporting the Kariña women in actively leading the development of their territories and the conservation of the area’s biodiversity. Credit: FAO
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 