24 December 2019 — The International Labour Organization (ILO) is marking its centenary in 2019 and as part of the commemoration has launched a photography project called “Dignity at Work: The American Experience” to document the working life of people across the United States. UN News joined the ILO on a visit to the southern US state of Louisiana. (*).
ILO Photo/John Isaac | Demond Melancon, also known as Big Chief, is a Mardi Gras Indian Chief of the Young Seminole Hunters group.
23 December 2019 (Wall Street International)* — It had been a hard day. Actually, it has been hard from the very beginning of the political season. All started, thought the Irish judge Bill O’Connor, the day in which the Senate accepted to discuss the term “sentient” for the new generation of sentient robots.
Judge Bill, at the head of his conservative party, had made a fierce fight against such an idea, claiming that the term “sentient” was fuzzy and deprived of scientific value-and certainly not applicable to machines.
(Greenpeace International)* — Like many ecologists, every week I read announcements about a new “game changing” technology that promises to turn our ecological crisis around. The game rarely changes.
Governments and corporations cling to the belief that the world economy can grow forever, even as resources are depleted and carbon emissions keep increasing.
23 December 2019 (UN Environment)* — Over the last few months, the scientific community has repeatedly sounded the alarm on biodiversity breakdown and the climate emergency. Scientists and most governments agree that the world is facing an unprecedented environmental crisis with huge numbers of species on the brink of extinction and global temperatures continuing to rise.
Photo by Geoffroy Mauvais/IUCN
Nature-based solutions offer the best way to achieve human well-being, address climate change and protect the planet. Yet nature is in crisis, as we are losing species at a rate 1,000 times greater than at any other time in recorded human history.
In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippan argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain. .
In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites.
21 December 2019 (UN News)* — Although they spent 20 years living in a refugee camp in Uganda, Jean-Pierre Ntegyeye and Isaiah Bahati never gave up hope of leaving for a better life. Today, with help from the UN migration agency, IOM, their dream has come true, but they haven’t forgotten the plight of those left behind. Their story is told in a new movie, One Way Ticket, screened as part of the Global Migration Film Festival (GMFF).
IOM/Gregoire Gosset | Still of Isaiah Bahati (left) and Jean-Pierre Ntegyeye, from One Way Ticket, a documentary about two Congolese refugees resettling in the US.
20 December 2019 (World Meteorological Organization)* — As 2019 draws to a close, it remains on track to be the second or third warmest year on record. The final ranking will be confirmed in January by the World Meteorological Organization, which consolidates leading international temperature datasets.
More important than the ranking of any one individual year is the long-term warming trend. Average temperatures for the five-year (2015-2019) and ten-year (2010-2019) periods are almost certain to be the highest on record.
21 December 2019 (Wall Street International)* — Corporate bullying is a repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons by one or more perpetrators including verbal abuse, offensive behaviour, with nonverbal conducts which are threatening, humiliating or intimidating. We all know what this is about, mangers that abuse power, yell, harass and breed resentment, sabotage and costly turnovers without even caring.
16 December 2019 (UN Environment)* — The word “Mottainai” in Japanese literally translates to “it is a shame to waste.” It stems from Buddhist philosophy on living minimally and appreciating nature’s gifts. The practice has been in place for generations.
Image from UN Environment.
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Japan is often heralded as having one of the most sophisticated recycling systems in the world, with detailed separation of everything from radios to cat litter.
Devastating drought in the southern African nation of Lesotho has left more than half a million people facing severe food shortages and tens of thousands “one step away from famine”, UN humanitarians said on Friday [20 December 2019], in an appeal for funds. (*).
FAO/Elisabeth Tsehlo | A farmer uses conservation agriculture to grow maize in Lesotho.
The $34 million flash appeal will support more than 260,000 people “with lifesaving interventions” until April next year, Jens Laerke from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told journalists in Geneva.
ILO Photo/John Isaac | Demond Melancon, also known as Big Chief, is a Mardi Gras Indian Chief of the Young Seminole Hunters group. 
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 