'Unseen' News and Views
25 May 2021 (United Nations)* — In the UN Charter, a Non-Self-Governing Territory is defined as a Territory “whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government.”
In 1946, several UN Member States identified a number of Territories under their administration that were not self-governing and placed them on a UN list.
25 May 2021 — As those individuals aware of it will have observed, presumably with deep regret, the latest ‘International Day for Biological Diversity’ passed on 22 May with the bulk of the human population continuing to act in ways that destroy Earth’s biosphere at an ever-accelerating rate.
Robert J. Burrowes
Unaware that many authors continue to report the ongoing destruction of Earth’s biodiversity, which is under siege on a range of fronts by unchecked human destruction of Earth’s biosphere as well as particular assaults on Earth’s living creatures, responses to this ‘hidden’ path to human extinction continue to waver between non-existent and token.
Consequently, in such circumstances, the destruction of biodiversity might yet become the means by which Homo sapiens is consigned to the fossil record ‘beating’ nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and electromagnetic radiation as the fundamental driver of extinction.
The crisis of 2020 has created the greatest wealth gap in history. The middle class, capitalism and democracy are all under threat. What went wrong and what can be done?
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Ellen Brown
In a matter of decades, the United States has gone from a largely benign form of capitalism to a neo-feudal form that has created an ever-widening gap in wealth and power.
In his 2013 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, French economist Thomas Piketty declared that “the level of inequality in the US is probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past anywhere in the world.”
In a 2014 podcast about the book, Bill Moyers commented:
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(UN News)* — Attacks on water and sanitation facilities in conflict zones around the world are putting the lives of millions of children around the world in danger, and are a much greater threat than violence itself, warns the UN Children’s agency, UNICEF, in a report released on 25 May 2021.
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Water Under Fire Volume 3, highlights that children’s access to water has been threatened in nearly every conflict-related emergency where UNICEF is responding.
22 May 2021 (WMO)* — New observations show that the increase in Arctic average surface temperature between 1979 and 2019 was three times higher than the global average during this period – higher than previously reported – according to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP).
22 May 2021 (FAO)* — Humans rely on a shockingly low number of plants for the majority of our daily calories. In fact, of the thousands of fruit and vegetable species cultivated for food, fewer than 200 make up a substantial part of food produced globally.
Thousands of plant species and varieties that fed our ancestors are already extinct, and we are losing more every day. Diversity is our food’s life insurance. ©FAO/Luis Tato
Everyone will lose unless humanity makes ‘peace with the planet’ – UN Chief.
(UN News)* — Humanity is “waging a war on nature”, threatening biodiversity loss, climate disruption and escalating pollution, the UN chief on 21 May 2021 said.
“We will all be losers if we don’t achieve peace with the planet”, Secretary-General António Guterres told a webinar ahead of the International Day for Biological Diversity, commemorated annually on 22 May. “We should all be advocates for nature”, he said.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 