'Unseen' News and Views
An outbreak of African Migratory Locusts threatens farmers in regions of Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia. ©FAO/Phillipus Tobias.
13 November 2020 (FAO)* — “This is the first time seeing such a scary situation ever since I was born here. Nothing else can compare to such a serious threat,” said farmer Fabian Sisamu. “It is the worst situation ever; we are fearful of the future,” his friend Ian Mubita adds, disheartened by what may lay ahead.
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“Early studies of weather, seasonality, and environmental influences on COVID19 have yielded inconsistent and confusing results. To provide policy-makers and the public with meaningful and actionable environmentally-informed COVID-19 risk estimates, the research community must meet robust methodological and communication standards,” state the paper’s authors.
(UN News)* — The fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement and the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) “go hand in hand”, the UN chief told a major development bank conference on Thursday [12 November 2020].
“The decisions we make now will determine the course of the next 30 years and beyond: Emissions must fall by half by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions no later than 2050 to reach the 1.5C goal”, Secretary-General António Guterres said in his message to the virtual Finance in Common Summit.
(UN News)* — The International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Thursday [12 November 2020] reported yet another devastating shipwreck in the Central Mediterranean, which has claimed the lives of at least 74 migrants off the coast of Khums, Libya. It is the eighth such incident since the beginning of October.
I would like to announce the publication of a new book, in which I have tried to sketch human history, from earliest times until the present, against a cosmic backdrop.
John Scales Avery
The book may be downloaded and circulated free of charge from the following link:
http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/A-History-of-the-Earth-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf
According to modern cosmology, the universe is almost unimaginably vast. It is estimated that there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe. Of these, many stars have planets on which life is likely to have developed. Thus our earth and its life forms are by no means unique.
We cannot claim to be “the center of the universe” with any unique justification. However, the earth is our home. It is important to us. As parents, we wish for and work for the survival of our children and grandchildren, and for all future generations of humans.
11 November 2020 (UN News)* — The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has called on world leaders to take bold and swift action to eradicate statelessness by 2024.
The need is all the more pressing in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which is worsening the plight of millions of stateless people around the world, he warned.
11 November 2020 (Wall Street International)* — I am writing this article a few days prior to the American presidential election. By the time you read these words, that very same election will one way or the other be history. Surely, no matter the outcome, it will be the subject of extreme contention. We Americans can anticipate the likely intervention of the newly unbalanced Supreme Court.
– The ouster of Donald Trump from the US presidency last week may well be the dawn of a new era for multilateralism – and perhaps for a besieged United Nations— after nearly four years of misguided political rhetoric emerging from the White House.
As a hard-core unilateralist, Trump was openly antagonistic towards multilateral institutions and contemptuous of the world body.
Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, addresses the high-level segment of the General Assembly in September 2020. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas
11 November 2020 — Now it is clear that Joe Biden is the new president of the United States. It is unlikely that Donald Trump’s legal manoeuvring will change the election results, as when a conservative Supreme Court in 2000 decided in favour of George Bush over Al Gore, who lost by 535 votes.
Roberto Savio
Even this Supreme Court, where Trump has six sympathetic members (three appointed by him, quite a record), and only three unsympathetic, will dare to change a result coming from too many states.
Trump is gone, but it is sad to say, Trumpism is here to stay. But is that a specific situation of the United States, or is it a more general phenomenon? We think that, in an era of globalisation, we should attempt a global analysis.
This will leave out a zillion of facts, events and analysis, but this is now the destiny of journalism. Anyone can add what they think is relevant and decide what has been left out. This will be a big improvement over this abridged analysis.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 