(UN News)* – An estimated 6.3 million children under five, in six countries in Africa’s Sahel region, will suffer from wasting this year, UN agencies and their partners warned in a publication issued on Wednesday [6 April 2022].
The West and Central Africa Nutrition working group fears at least 900,000 young lives could be at risk across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.
They said the number of under fives in the region expected to suffer from global acute malnutrition has never been so high, with a 27 per cent increase expected this year compared to 2021, marking the fifth consecutive year of record highs.
In 2010-2019 average annual global greenhouse gas emissions were at their highest levels in human history, but the rate of growth has slowed. Since 2010, there have been sustained decreases of up to 85% in the costs of solar and wind energy, and batteries.
(UN News)* — An astonishing 99 per cent of the world’s population breathes polluted air that exceeds internationally approved limits, with negative health impacts kicking in at much lower levels than previously thought, UN medical scientists said on Monday[4 April 2022].
ADB/Ariel Javellana | Emissions from coal-fired power plants contribute to air pollution in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
Noting that fossil fuels are responsible for most of the harmful emissions that are linked to acute and chronic sickness, the World Health Organization (WHO) called for tangible steps to curb their use.
The UN agency also urged more governments to take note that it has made significant revisions to its air quality indicators, including for particulate matter – known as PM2.5 – that can enter the bloodstream, along with nitrogen dioxide (NO2), another common urban pollutant and precursor of particulate matter and ozone.
Adam Isacson is Director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America
Migrant encampment in the border town of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Credit: Adam Isacson.
WASHINGTON DC, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)* – “The migrants try to organize themselves to stay safe,” a humanitarian worker told me as we stood near a town square in Reynosa, Mexico, steps away from the U.S. border.
More than 2,000 people from many countries, blocked from asking for asylum in the United States, were packed into this square block, living under tents and tarps, amid port-a-potties and cooking fires. Children were everywhere.
MADRID, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)* – While the world’s top scientists and experts continue their arduous work to finally submit to politicians at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (7-18 November 2022), a new alert now emerges: the climate crisis has already become the single biggest health threat to humankind.
This year’s World Health Day launched a new warning: more than 13 million deaths around the world each year are due to “avoidable environmental causes”. Credit: Bigstock
But this new alert should be no surprise: it rather constitutes the logic, expected consequence of the more and more intensive pressure of the life-keeping and life-saving natural resources.
UK government ministers want the British Empire’s benefits taught in schools. Don’t let them ignore the death and destruction it inflicted
Gurminder Bhambra as a child with her grandfather, Mohan Singh | Gurminder Bhambra
1 April 2022 (openDemocracy)* — Recent weeks have seen a variety of UK government ministers – from Oliver Dowden to Kemi Badenoch to, most recently, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi – both extol the benefits of British Empire and urge the teaching of those benefits.
.
This follows on from the government’s response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which set out the need for a new model curriculum for history which would advise schools on how best to teach these issues.
“No war has the honesty of confessing, ‘I kill to steal.’”
(Image by Rafael Edwards)
4 Apr 2022 – Wars always invoke noble motives. They kill in the name of peace. In the name of God. In the name of civilization. In the name of progress. In the name of democracy…
And just in case, if so many lies are not enough… the mass media are ready to invent imaginary enemies to justify the conversion of the world into a great madhouse and an immense slaughterhouse.
In King Lear, Shakespeare had written that “…in this world, the mad lead the blind…”. And… four centuries afterward, the masters of the world are madmen in love with death.
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)* – The world is sailing into a perfect storm as key leaders seem intent on threatening more war, albeit while proclaiming the noblest of intentions. By doing so, they block international cooperation to create conditions for sustainable peace and shared prosperity for all.
Anis Chowdhury
Monetarist counter-revolution The 1970s saw Milton Friedman disciples’ monetarist counter revolutionblaming stagflation on ostensibly Keynesian economic policies. In 1974, Nixon replacement President Gerald Ford declared inflation “public enemy number one” and US “determination to whip inflation”.
Monetarists wanted tighter monetary policies to fight inflation. Curbing rising prices was deemed urgent, even though it would increase joblessness. They advocated abandoning expansionary fiscal measures for more growth and jobs.
Americans “need to imagine their vote has an impact on policy, an illusion the media encourages them to believe in.”
Ouch!
Peter Isaacson, writing in Fair Observer, seems to be saying . . . oh my God, democracy is a cliché, a big sham. I stand up, put my hand on my heart, pledge allegiance to the flag. This is America, land of the empowered voter.
Then I read about our president’s latest budget proposal, which includes $813 billion for “national defense” — pushing the Pentagon budget’s already record-setting enormity further into outer space — and I feel myself collapse (yet again) into nothingness.
Those in the Middle East know the kind of destruction seen in Ukraine all too well – the West was the perpetrator.
Joe Biden’s claims of the moral imperative of challenging Russian autocracy are likely to fall on deaf ears | Yuri Gripas/Abaca Press/Alamy
2 April 2022 (openDemocracy)* — Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine remains in a violent stalemate. Russian forces are pausing their attempts to occupy Kyiv, having withdrawn some of their forces from around the capital, but a major retreat is highly unlikely given Russia is recruiting several thousand mercenaries from Syria.
Peter Isaacson
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 