A Colombian woman who spent decades working to heal children and teenage survivors of sexual violence and exploitation on 5 October 2020 accepted the 2020 Nansen Refugee Award at a special ceremony, calling the prize a “recognition of their strength, courage and endurance.” | Español | Français | عربي
(UN News)* — A stillborn baby is delivered every 16 seconds, which translates into nearly two million infants over the course of a year that never took their first breath, according to a new UN report published on Thursday [8 October 2020].
7 October 2020 (UN News)* — Across the world, girls as young as 12 are being forced or tricked into marrying men who exploit them for sex and domestic work, in what the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has called an “under-reported, global form of human trafficking”.
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UNICEF/UN0159775/Nybo | Farmer Nurul Haque stands near his 13-year-old daughter in Bangladesh, saying he may have to pull her from school and marry her off to an older man because he has few financial options left.
7 October 2020 (UN Environment)* — In 1933, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order allocating US$ 10 million for emergency conservation efforts under the New Deal, putting unemployed Americans to work. When South Korea was struggling with famine and a refugee crisis in the 1950s, the government restored forests and farmland, creating hundreds of thousands of rural jobs.
5 October 2020 (Wall Street International)* — The central problem which the world faces in its attempts to avoid catastrophic climate change is a contrast of time scales. In order to save human civilization and the biosphere from the most catastrophic effects of climate change we need to act immediately. Fossil fuels must be left in the ground. Forests must be saved from destruction by beef or palm oil production.
The dangerous greenhouse gas methane is bubbling up from melting permafrost in the Arctic and from the shallow seas north of Siberia | Image fromWall Street International.
6 October 2020 (WMO)* — The annually occurring ozone hole over the Antarctic is one of the largest and deepest in recent years. Analyses show that the hole has reached its maximum size.
The 2020 ozone hole grew rapidly from mid-August and peaked at around 24 million square kilometres in early October. It now covers 23 million km2, above average for the last decade and spreading over most of the Antarctic continent.
(UN News)* — Starvation is being intentionally used as a war tactic in South Sudan’s brutal conflict, a UN-backed human rights panel said on Tuesday [6 October 2020], releasing its latest report on the country.
UN Photo/Isaac Billy | A displaced family leaves a UN protection camp in Juba to return to their home in the Jonglei region of South Sudan
South Sudan gained independence in July 2011 but descended into conflict roughly two-and-a-half years later, following irreconcilable tensions between President Salva Kiir and his deputy, Riek Machar.
The Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan said the brutal fighting has caused incalculable suffering to civilians, and resulted in staggering levels of acute food insecurity and malnutrition.
(UN News)* — While COVID-19 has affected all countries, the pandemic is “uneven”, and it is estimated that 10 per cent of the global population may have been infected with the virus, senior officials with the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday [5 October 2020].
UN Women/Louie Pacardo | Wearing a full protective suit, a women doctor who leads a group of volunteer medical professionals attending to COVID-19 patients and persons under investigation at a community hospital in the Philippines.
Speaking to a special session of the agency’s Executive Board, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 10 countries account for 70 per cent of all reported cases and deaths, and just three countries account for half.
5 October 2020 (Wall Street International)* — We humans, having populated every part of Earth’s surface and visited the Moon, now are perched atop the planet’s food chain. We are learning from this perilous position but hastening the extinction of all other species in our shared, life-supporting biosphere.
The planet is now teaching us directly how our lifestyles are causing climate disasters: fires, floods, droughts, super-storms, rising seas and pandemics.
1 October 2020 (openDemocracy)* — “Who the hell cuts a health budget in the middle of a pandemic?” woefully expressed a fellow comrade upon learning of the Nigerian government ‘s decision to slash the national health expenditure budget by almost half.
Women prepare food at a protest outside the IMF offices in Buenos Aires, October 2019 | Carol Smiljan/NurPhoto/PA Images
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 