'Unseen' News and Views
The 2020 Antarctic ozone hole grew rapidly from mid-August and peaked at around 24.8 million square kilometres on 20 September 2020, spreading over most of the Antarctic continent.
Oh, Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends.
So, oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
Janis Joplin, 1970
James Dean accident.
– COVID-19 has made several of us aware of the frailty of our bodies, the certainty of death and how valuable health, companionship and compassion are. Such insights are not uncommon in poor societies where a person’s main and perhaps only asset is her/his body and what s/he is able to do with her/his hands.
However, wealthy and privileged people are surrounded by, dependent on, and even integrated with an ever more sophisticated technology, which increasingly, for better or worse, is separating us from what human existence has been for thousands of years.
Once technology has made its entry into the human sphere; from fire and wheels, to printing presses, trains, radio, aircraft, TV, the Intranet, sophisticated weaponry and … cars, everyone’s life, even unprivileged ones, has changed to an extent that it is difficult to fathom. For example, cars were invented as an effective and comfortable means of transport, but they soon became so much more.
5 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Here are some quotations from a December 2, 2020 article by Justin Rowlatt entitled Humans waging suicidal war on nature – UN chief Antonio Guterres:
Humanity is waging what he describes as a suicidal war on the natural world.
Nature always strikes back, and is doing so with gathering force and fury, he told a BBC special event on the environment.
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Boost nutrition in your household with these traditional recipes from around the world! ©FAO/Benjamin Rasmussen
5 January 2021 (FAO)* — Meal after meal. Day after day. It’s easy to get into routines with food and forget about the variety of fruits, vegetables, grains and other foods that exist, with all the different nutritional benefits that they offer.
If that sounds familiar, then FAO is here to help. Drawing on our experiences from around the world, we’ve consulted with local cooks, chefs and families to put together some fascinating and useful cookbooks.
Conversations with leading experts in childhood love, adversity and mental health.
Why is love so important in childhood?
4 January 2021 — In this ground-breaking new series by UNICEF, Laura Mucha – author, poet and children’s advocate – interviews some of the world’s leading experts to find out.
The series sets out to cover how adversity impacts us as children and the adults we become, what we can do to protect and improve young people’s mental health, and why safe and loving relationships are so vital for children’s health, development and wellbeing throughout life.
– Goodbye 2020, but unfortunately, not good riddance, as we all have to live with its legacy. It has been a disastrous year for much of the world for various reasons, Elizabeth II’s annus horribilis. The crisis has exposed previously unacknowledged realities, including frailties and vulnerabilities.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
For many countries, the tragedy is all the greater as some leaders had set national aspirations for 2020, suggested by the number’s association with perfect vision. But their failures are no reason to reject national projects.
As Helen Keller, the deaf and blind author activist, noted a century ago, “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight, but no vision.”
After JFK’s assassination in November 1963 ended US opposition to Western intervention in Indonesia, President Sukarno warned his nation in August 1964 that it would be ‘living dangerously’, vivere pericoloso, in the year ahead.
A year later, a bloody Western-backed military coup had deposed him, taking up to a million lives, with many more ruined.
4 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Looking at our planet, we see that it is mostly water.
So why are so many politicians, scientists, public officials in hundreds of global conferences all warning of a “Water Crisis”? These alarms are really just focused on the planet’s 3% of freshwater, ignoring the abundant 97% of our planet’s saltwater.
The broad assumption in most of these alarms is that 97% of saltwater is no use for the everyday needs of humans. So all these alarms warn of shrinking food supplies, rising hunger, malnutrition, dwindling drinking water, as taps almost ran dry in some cities, including Cape Town, South Africa in 2019.
The Secretary-General will convene a UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 to launch bold new actions to transform the way the world produces and consumes food, delivering progress on all 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
For decades, synthetic fertilizer – containing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium – has been used all over the world to increase crop yields. Plants need phosphorus to grow but using too much of it can harm the environment.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 