UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2025 (IPS)* –The year 2024 has been one of the most devastating for journalists covering conflicts worldwide– with 361 behind bars, the second highest since the global record of 370 imprisoned back in 2023.
Credit: Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
According to a new report released January 16, by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), China, Israel, and Myanmar were the leading jailers of reporters, followed by Belarus and Russia.
The main drivers of journalist imprisonment in 2024 were ongoing authoritarian repression, war, and political or economic instability. Many countries, including China, Israel, Tunisia, and Azerbaijan, set new records for imprisonment.
MADRID, January 2025 – In his master-piece: 1984, George Orwell amazingly predicted how today’s world would be, and how the current reality is not expected to get any better, rather…
George Orwell*
This way, war is now called peace; the killing of unarmed civilians for the purpose of invading and dominating is called an act of self-defence; all products are now marketed as ‘100% natural’ as if all what-ever has been elaborated had never used natural resources…
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair is his real name) wrote 1984 in 1949, that’s four years after publishing his yet another masterpiece: Animal Farm, through which he also predicted how popular uprisings and ‘revolutions’ have ended up in apparent ‘regime changes’ that quite too often led to restoring the old ones.
Done!
Meanwhile, today’s world is visibly dominated by the addiction to war and the destruction of Nature, through more and more voracity and greed. This is called ‘development.’
(UN News)* — The world is entering a new era of crisis for children; climate change, inequality and conflict are disrupting their lives and limiting their futures, an authoritative study from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warns.
At the beginning of each year, UNICEF looks ahead to the risks that children are likely to face and suggests ways to reduce the potential harm.
The latest report, Prospects for Children 2025: Building Resilient Systems for Children’s Futures, demands strengthening national systems that are designed to mitigate the impacts of crises on children and ensure they have access to the support they need.
Here is a breakdown of the main trends to look out for in 2025:
(UN News)* — UN weather experts from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed on Friday [] that 2024 was the hottest year on record, at 1.55 degrees Celsius (C) above pre-industrial temperatures.
“We saw extraordinary land, sea surface temperatures, extraordinary ocean heat accompanied by very extreme weather affecting many countries around the world, destroying lives, livelihoods, hopes and dreams,”WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis said.
(UN News)* —Social media posts inciting hate and division have “real world consequences” and there is a responsibility to regulate content, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted on Friday [], following Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programme in the United States.
‘Famine conditions are spreading’ as Sudan’s crisis worsens: UN Security Council
UN Photo/Loey Felipe | OCHA’s Edem Wosornu addresses the Security Council meeting on the protection of civilians in armed conflict in Sudan.
(UN News)* —Human suffering in Sudan has reached devastating levels, with over 11.5 million people internally displaced and 3.2 million seeking refuge in neighbouring countries.
BANGKOK, Thailand, Jan 9 2025 (IPS)* – The debt disaster is back. Indeed, the aid agency Cafod reports that developing countries today face “the most acute debt crisis in history”.
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Credit: Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD)
At least 54 countries are in a debt crisis – more than double the number in 2010. A further 57 countries are at risk of debt crisis. In the past decade, interest payments for developing countries overall have risen by 64%, and for Africa by 132%.
African countries are paying over 100 billion dollars a year to creditors. The share of African countries’ budgets going on debt payments is four times higher than in 2010.
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 7 2025 (IPS)* – When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.”
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Displaced Palestinians walk through the Nour Shams camp in the West Bank. Credit: UNRWA/Mohammed Alsharif
Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous.
But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
7 January 2025 (UNEP)* —In the unusually hot summer of 2016, a bacterium that causes anthrax killed more than 2,500 reindeer in Siberia’s remote Yamal Peninsula, according to one study.
Credit: AFP/Olivier Morin
Normally locked deep in a layer of permanently frozen land, or permafrost, the once-dormant pathogen eventually spread to humans, claiming the life of a 12-year-old boy and causing dozens of others to fall ill.
Some researchers believe the outbreak is a sign of things to come. As climate change rapidly warms the Artic, scientists say it could unleash a wave of potentially deadly microbes that for centuries have been trapped in ice.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jan 6 2025 (IPS)* – In 2021, the Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr became the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded the Prix Goncourt, France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize.
Literature
His novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, The Most Secret Memory of Men, tells the story of a young Senegalese writer living in Paris, who by chance stumbles across a novel published in 1938 by an elusive Senegalese author named T.C. Elimane.
This author had once been hailed by an ecstatic Paris press, but had then disappeared from view. Elimane had before every trace of him had vanished, been accused of plagiarism.
After losing a legal process connected with the plagiarism charge, Elimane’s publisher had been forced to withdraw and destroy all available copies of The Labyrinth of Inhumanity.
Literature
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 