'Unseen' News and Views
World Food Programme partnerships officer Krystyna Kovalenko offers a glimpse of the south of the country, where thousands of people are starving
(WFP)* — The ‘Grand Sud’ in Madagascar looks like something out of a sci-fi film — totally dry, inhabitable and deserted. The land has suffered from several years of consecutive drought. But locals say that this year has been worse than any other.
– The UN Security Council (UNSC), the most powerful political body at the United Nations, has largely remained silent or ineffective in resolving one of the longstanding military conflicts in the Middle East involving Israelis and Palestinians.
Smoke from an airstrike rises over the city of Rafah in southern Gaza Strip. Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba
But, at the same time, several attempts to condemn Israel for its excesses have been thwarted by successive US administrations, which have exercised the veto power in the Security Council to protect a client state whose survival has depended largely on billions of dollars in US economic and military aid, state-of-the-art weapons systems and outright military grants doled out gratis.
Supporters of Palestinian rights have been fighting back successfully against efforts to silence their advocacy and suppress their solidarity actions, with major legal victories in four separate jurisdictions over the last year.
Jake Lynch
In Australia last month, Melissa Parke, a former Labor federal legislator and UN legal officer in Gaza, won a libel case against Colin Rubenstein, director of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.
He issued a statement in settlement, affirming that she was not, in fact, “a compulsive slanderer, a conspiracy theorist, a liar, a fanatic, or an anti-Semite”.
Ms Parke had taken the action, she explained, “seeking an acknowledgment that I was not any of the things imputed of me” and to resist “the inappropriate weaponisation of accusations of anti-Semitism”.
(UN News)* — Although the outlook for global growth has improved, the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as inadequate progress on vaccination in poorer countries, are putting recovery at risk, according to the latest UN economic forecast, published on Tuesday [11 May 2021].
Geneva, 11 May 2021 (WMO)* — The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated impacts of extreme weather and climate change in vulnerable countries but also highlighted the need to build resilience against a multitude of hazards through better early warnings and risk information.
This is one of the key messages of the 2020 Annual Report of the Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems Initiative (CREWS), a unique climate action programme that helps saves lives, livelihoods and assets in the world’s most vulnerable countries.
Latest Escalation Highlights Reality of Apartheid, Persecution for Millions of Palestinians
A Palestinian man evades teargas fired by Israeli security forces in front of the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem on May 10, 2021. © 2021 Mahmoud Illean/AP Photo
Forcible takeovers of homes, brutal suppression of demonstrators, places of worship under assault, identity-based communal violence, indiscriminate rocket attacks, children killed in strikes: what to make of the dizzying headlines out of Israel and Palestine in recent days?
– When the UN’s Beirut-based Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), released a landmark 2017 report on “apartheid” in Israel, the United Nations disassociated itself with the study and left it to die— unceremoniously and unsung.
Credit: The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)
According to a March 2017 report in Foreign Policy Journal, both the Israeli and the Trump administrations put “enormous pressure on UN Secretary-General António Guterres to withdraw the report”.
But the head of the ESCWA, Rima Khalaf, refused to withdraw it and resigned from her UN position in protest.
(UN News)* — The UN Secretary-General said he was “gravely concerned” at escalating violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory on Tuesday [11 May 2021], while the UN rights office, OHCHR, appealed for “a redoubling of efforts to restore calm”, after airstrikes and days of clashes between protesters and Israeli police.
“Ghost fishing” happens when lost or abandoned fishing gear stays in the ocean and traps fish or other marine life. © World Animal Protection
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 