'Unseen' News and Views
This is the dramatic, hushed reality of 3.6 billion people who don’t have one that works properly.
“Who cares about toilets? The UN raises this question as the starting point of this 2021 Campaign for World Toilet Day, marked every year on 19 November.
– It sounds incredible: while politicians have been cackling about the climate emergency and profiling in empty promises to halt it, they have spent six trillion US dollars from taxpayers’ money to subsidise fossil fuels in just one year: 2020. And they are set to increase the figure to nearly seven trillion by 2025.
An offshore oil rig drilling platform. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies amounted to 5.9 trillion US dollars in 2020, according to an IMF report. Credit: Bigstock
Add to this that governments will double the production of energy from these very same, highly dangerous, global warming generators.
Leaders at the COP26 summit have no intention of tackling the growing environmental impacts caused by their ‘defence’ spending.
Physicians for Social Responsibility
World leaders gathered in Glasgow last week for the COP26 summit in a bid to demonstrate how they are belatedly getting to grips with the climate crisis.
Agreements to protect forests, cut carbon and methane emissions and promote green tech are all being hammered out in front of a watching world.
(UN News)* — Following pandemic-driven school closures, five UN agencies threw their strong support behind an international coalition to improve the nutrition, health and education of school-age children around the world.
16 November 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Are drones already conquering the world? Hi-tech is exponentially and rapidly changing our lives.
We are observing the rise of AI technology in all sectors of society. A large number of industries, including both the military and commercial sectors, governments and recreational users are all adopting the technology of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) — or drones.
The climate emergency we face today is part of several interlocking crises involving our health, our soils, and the biodiversity on the planet. The same line of thinking and actions that are driving climate change is leading to biodiversity loss and extinction of species and has also created the current hunger, malnutrition, and health emergencies. The climate crisis is a symptom of the broader ecological crisis being perpetuated by an extractivist and profit-driven system.
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– The United Nations, which consists of 193 member states, has long been accused of discrimination against staffers who number over 315,000 and spread across 56 UN agencies and entities worldwide.
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But most of these are deeply rooted system-wide. A wide-ranging staff survey, both in New York and Geneva last year, revealed that discrimination was based either on race, religion, gender or nationality.
Drought, a complex and slowly encroaching natural hazard with significant and pervasive socio-economic and environmental impacts, is known to cause more deaths and displace more people than any other natural disaster.
(UNCCD)* — By 2025, 1.8 billion people will experience absolute water scarcity, and 2/3 of the world will be living under water-stressed conditions (1).
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed and exacerbated the social protection gap between countries with high and low income levels.
GENEVA (ILO)* – Despite the unprecedented worldwide expansion of social protection during the COVID-19 crisis, more than 4 billion people around the world remain entirely unprotected, a new International Labour Organization (ILO) report says.
It finds that the pandemic response was uneven and insufficient, deepening the gap between countries with high and low income levels and failing to afford the much-needed social protection that all human beings deserve.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 