'Unseen' News and Views
(UN News)* — The UN human rights office OHCHR, called on Friday [2 October 2020] for urgent action to address the “unimaginable horrors” faced by migrants attempting to cross the central Mediterranean Sea in search of safety in Europe.
– Recent months have brought all sorts of climate-linked disasters, from raging wildfires in California and Oregon to flooding in Alabama. As we think of the incalculable losses that are associated with these extremities linked to the changing climate, I cannot help but think of the belowground web of life that is burning, being flooded and washed away, affected, or lost.
Soil stores nutrients, carbon and micro-organisms. Credit: Xavi Fernández de Castro/IPS
The investigation reveals that Brazil´s CO2 emissions from deforestation average 500 million tons of CO2 per year. | Photo: EFE/ Ezequiel Vannon
– The coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed the lives of over one million people worldwide and destabilized the global economy, also upended the UN’s ambitious socio-economic goals, including the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger by 2030.
Coral Reefs restoration at the coast of Banaire in the Caribbean. Credit: UN Environment Programme
While extreme poverty rates have fallen in past years, says Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, “it is projected that between 70 and 100 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic”.
29 September 2020 (UN Environment)* — Our societies are intimately linked with and depend on biodiversity. Biodiversity is essential for people, including through its provision of nutritious food, clean water, medicines, and protection from extreme events.
29 September 2020 (UN News)* — New approaches and solutions are needed to address worsening food loss and waste, the UN Secretary-General has said, in a message marking the first ever International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste Reduction.
“If you tell a lie, tell a big one.”
“If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.”
“Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.”
— Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, 1933 to 1945
Robert J. Burrowes
Transhumanism is a set of beliefs based on the premise that human beings can be improved by genetic manipulation and/or implanting technologies into the brain and body to achieve enhanced capacities.
Transhumanism has a long history as an idea but since 1990 it has attracted serious attention from an increasing number of technology-lovers and early advocates are readily identified. See ‘What is Transhumanism?’
– One of the biggest revelations of the COVID-19 pandemic has been that people with pre-existing, diet-related conditions such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, are more at risk of suffering severe forms of the disease leading to a need for intensive hospitalization.
The UN estimates that 74% of Africans cannot afford healthy diets. That is nearly 1 billion Africans. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS
Photo by Andreas Weith/Wikimedia Commons
28 September 2020 (UN Environment)* — Unprecedented wildfires, storms and glacier melt are the strongest indications yet of how climate change threatens life on Earth. The world has seen big declines in summer sea ice in the last two decades, with the lowest extent recorded in 2012.
13 September 2020 marked a new, troubling milestone – with Arctic sea ice shrinking to the second-lowest extent ever recorded.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 