'Unseen' News and Views
COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) is the vaccines element of the ACT-Accelerator programme, led by the WHO and international partners, to develop a set of tools to fight the virus.
WHO says that the programme has supported the fastest, most coordinated, and successful global effort in history to fight a disease. The aim is to distribute two billion doses, mostly to poorer countries, in 2021, and immunise 27 per cent of their citizens.
History will likely remember the Covid-19 pandemic as the first time since records began that inequality rose in almost every country at once. However, not everyone was affected in the same way.
Julissa Álvarez is a 44-year old hairdresser living in the Dominican Republic. Because of COVID-19-induced lockdowns, she has lost her clients and livelihood, on which she relied to put food on the table for her partner and their six children. Photo: Valerie Caamaño/Oxfam
“This year’s Zero Discrimination Day is an especially poignant one.
It was said at first that viruses don’t discriminate. But as we’ve witnessed again, crises, and societies, do.
Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS
COVID-19 has magnified the fissures in society. It has seen marginalized communities, who were already on the edge, taking the hardest economic hit, getting stuck at the back of the line for vital services and getting scapegoated for the crisis.
Yet the crisis has also seen the most excluded communities being, once again, the first to step up to help—rooted in their expertise from experience, in their empathy and in their insistence that health for all and a recovery for all is possible.
(UNAIDS)* — On Zero Discrimination Day this year (download brochure), UNAIDS is highlighting the urgent need to take action to end the inequalities surrounding income, sex, age, health status, occupation, disability, sexual orientation, drug use, gender identity, race, class, ethnicity and religion that continue to persist around the world.
– A sign outside a laundry in New York city had a frivolously flippant slogan: “We launder dirty clothes, not dirty money.”
Credit: UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
And a 2019 movie titled “Laundromat,” based on a book ‘Secrecy World’ by Pulitzer Prize winning author Jake Bernstein, exposed the byzantine world of money laundering.
That’s the insidiously darker side of the world’s financial system – with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains finding safety in offshore banks– a crime perpetrated on a global scale, says a High-Level Panel on International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (FACTI).
“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.
Edward Curtin
This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience.
We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.
Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.
UN Environment Assembly concludes with an urgent call for action to solve planetary emergencies
Nairobi, 24 February 2021 (UNEP)* –Ministers of environment and other leaders from more than 150 nations on 23 February 2021 concluded a two-day online meeting of the Fifth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) in which the Assembly warned that the world risks new pandemics if we don’t change how we safeguard nature.
The Green Gigaton Challenge backed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and partners, catalyses public and private funds to combat deforestation, with the goal to cut annual emissions by 1 gigaton by 2025.
24 February 2021 (UNEP)* — As environmental leaders and change makers meet virtually for the Fifth Session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in February 2021, the issue of deforestation has been central to their discussions.
The principle of inclusive education, in this case, opening education up to all refugee children and their inclusion into national education systems can also lead to better services for local communities in host countries.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 