'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
– The deadly, fast-spreading coronavirus which upended three key UN conferences—on the empowerment of women, on nuclear disarmament and on indigenous rights—claimed another casualty last week when a commemorative meeting on the transatlantic slave trade was postponed.
Credit: UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
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1 April 2020 (UN Environment)* — Are you stuck in self isolation to help flatten the coronavirus curve? On official quarantine or lockdown? Are you taking on a new role as “home school teacher due to school closures? Here are a few ways to bring the outside in — enjoyable for learners of all ages.
Shady Rabab with a flute made from an old plastic bottle. Photo by UNEP
Explore the underwater world from the comfort of your home.
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Take virtual dives and swim with corals and beautiful marine life.
The COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating already existing inequalities – from catching the virus, to staying alive, to coping with its dramatic economic consequences. Policy responses must ensure that support reaches the workers and enterprises who need it most.
GENEVA, 30 March 2020 (ILO)* – In many countries, income inequality has risen steeply since the 1980s, with adverse social and economic consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic now cruelly highlights those inequalities – from catching the virus, to staying alive, to coping with its dramatic economic consequences.
Joint press release from OHCHR, IOM, UNHCR and WHO
(UN News)* — As the world exhibits new bonds of solidarity in response to the coronavirus pandemic, it is a matter of “humanitarian and practical urgency to lift unilateral economic sanctions immediately,” to prevent hunger crises in pandemic-hit countries, a UN human rights expert, said on Tuesday [31 March 2020].
The continued imposition of such measures on Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba and Zimbabwe in particular, severely undermines the fundamental right to sufficient and adequate food, Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, stressed.
In what is being called the worst financial crisis since 1929, the US stock market has lost a third of its value in the space of a month, wiping out all of its gains of the last three years. When the Federal Reserve tried to ride to the rescue, it only succeeded in making matters worse. The government then pulled out all the stops. To our staunchly capitalist leaders, socialism is suddenly looking good.
Ellen Brown
The financial crisis began in late February, when the World Health Organization announced that it was time to prepare for a global pandemic.
The Russia-Saudi oil price war added fuel to the flames, causing all three Wall Street indices to fall more than 7 percent on March 9. It was called Black Monday, the worst drop since the Great Recession in 2008; but it would get worse.
(UN News)* — The economic fallout from COVID-19 is likely to get “much worse” before it gets better for some six billion people living in developing economies, the UN said on Monday[30 March 2020], in an appeal for a $2.5 trillion rescue package to boost their resilience to further hardship.
30 March 2020 (UN News)* — Combatting the COVID-19 pandemic must also include stamping out what one independent human rights expert has called the “darker sides” of the disease: verbal and physical attacks against Chinese and other minority communities, and excluding them from access to healthcare.
In a recent article I reported existing evidence on the way in which COVID-19 is being used to implement, but also divert attention from, initiatives being taken by the global elite to consolidate and expand its power in significant ways, and perhaps to make the final drive to take total control of global society. See ‘Observing Elites Manipulate Our Fear: COVID-19, Propaganda and Knowledge’.
Robert J. Burrowes,
Moreover, while global attention is focused on COVID-19, attention has been distracted from the many other ongoing crises – particularly including the vast range of threats that constitute an imminent danger to human existence: see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ – and no doubt other undesirable initiatives being carried out by the global elite outside our view.
Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa’s socialist party returned the country to economic growth while reversing austerity policies. | Photo: EFE (Photo from teleSUR’s article).
29 March 2020 (teleSUR)* — The current socialist government in Portugal decided to grant citizenship rights to all migrants and asylum seekers with pending residency applications from Monday until July 1 at least due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the country’s authorities announced Saturday [28 March 2020].
