'Unseen' News and Views
8 November 2020 (UN News)* — Some 13 million people in the central Sahel region of north Africa require urgent humanitarian assistance, due to violence, insecurity and extreme weather events. Behind these stark figures lie personal stories of tragedy, resilience and hope.
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Robert J. Burrowes
In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World Carl Sagan lamented as follows:
I have a foreboding of [a] time when… awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down… is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media… but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance…. The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just of science, but of anything – are avoidable, even undesirable.
8 November 2020 (Wall Street International)* — “Having children showed me a whole different kind of love that I had never known,” the late musician Scott Wieland said. “It was something that had always been missing. Complete love. I would die for them.”
(UN News)* — Eight new animated characters on a mission to protect the planet, have been pressed into service by the UN to empower children worldwide and boost the drive towards sustainability by 2030.
The Climate Action Superheroes are the face of a new campaign, to be launched on UN social media platforms this Saturday [6 November 2020], aimed at mobilizing children under 12 to recycle and to save water and energy.
UN food agencies warn of rising levels of acute hunger with potential risk of famine in four hotspots – Burkina Faso, northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen cause for concern but acute hunger on the rise across the globe.
ROME, 6 November 2020 (FAO)* – The world has been put on a heightened famine alert with a new report by two United Nations agencies that contains a stark warning; four countries contain areas that could soon slip into famine if conditions there undergo “any further deterioration over the coming months”.
– When the United Nations was struggling to cope with a cash crisis back in April 1996, one of the many drastic measures it undertook was to cut down on its staff.
Work and reforms of the UN ‘at risk’, Antonio Guterres warned Member States, amidst ‘record-level’ cash crisis, October 2020. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas. The UN Secretariat building in New York
So, it took the path of corporate America, and ironically, for a cash-strapped institution, it offered a “golden handshake”—a severance pay of about $80,000 dollars each — to those who would voluntarily leave the near-bankrupt Organization.
4 November 2020 (UN News)* — The UN climate change secretariat, UNFCCC, has underlined its commitment to work with stakeholders in the United States and beyond, to accelerate climate action, in line with an historic treaty on limiting global warming and curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite sharp falls in carbon emissions in 2020 linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis continued to grow. Extreme weather disasters have not stalled – from cyclone Amphan in India and Bangladesh to the wildfires raging in the USA – with the poorest and most marginalized people suffering the most.
Zohora, 92, walks along a muddy road in Kholpetuya village, searching for food for her grandchildren, after Cyclone Amphan struck western coastal areas of Bangladesh on May 13, 2020. 
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 