'Unseen' News and Views
(UN News)* — Women’s organisations operating in crisis settings are being pushed to the brink by widespread funding cuts.
Across 73 countries, 308 million people now rely on humanitarian aid – a number that continues to rise.
Women and girls are disproportionately affected by these crises, facing preventable pregnancy-related deaths, malnutrition, and alarming levels of sexual violence.
Desertification and Drought Day 2025
Bonn – Accelerating progress to restore 1.5 billion hectares of degraded land around the world and jumpstarting a trillion-dollar land restoration economy will be the focus of this year’s Desertification and Drought Day on 17 June.
The theme of Desertification and Drought Day 2025 is “Restore the land. Unlock the opportunities”, underscoring multiple benefits linked to land restoration.
Livestock in eastern Mauritania are dying due to drought. Credit: UNHCR/Caroline Irby
The answer, according the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is drought.
The past 10 years have been the hottest 10 years on record, and higher temperatures and drier conditions are making more regions vulnerable to drought and arid land degradation, or desertification.
Geneva, 13 May 2025 – An unprecedented 83.4 million people were living in internal displacement at the end of 2024, according to the newly released Global Report on Internal Displacement 2025 (GRID) from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
People internally displaced in Honayiet, Sudan. Credit: IOM 2024/ Omer Hagali
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-AI – TRANSCEND Media Service*
12 May 2025 – Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, the physicist known for his pioneering work in the field, told LBC’s Andrew Marr that artificial intelligences had developed consciousness – and could one day take over the world.
Mr Hinton, who has been criticised by some in the world of artificial intelligence for having a pessimistic view of the future of AI, also said that no one knew how to put in effective safeguards and regulation.
(UNICEF)* — Measles is a highly contagious virus. For young children, it can be deadly. In too many places, low vaccination coverage is creating opportunities for measles to spread.
Over the last five years, measles outbreaks have hit over 100 countries, home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s children.
But we know how to stop it. Measles vaccines are safe and effective. They are the best way to protect children from getting sick with measles and spreading it to others.
As measles cases surge, here are five things you need to know:
8 May 2025 (openDemocracy)* — Since entering office in January, Donald Trump’s repeated threats to seize control of the Panama Canal, a critical passage for global freight traffic, have dominated headlines around the world. | ESPAÑOL
Monitoring in Motion for Migrants in the Darien Gap
8 May 2025 — The Darien jungle on the border between Panama and Colombia is a labyrinth of rivers, filled with wild animals and oppressive, humid heat that envelops everything. It is a transit and destination route for migrants and asylum seekers, where fear, despair, and danger are constant.
It is also the main entry point for people heading towards Canada, Mexico and the United States of America. Yet, the greatest danger does not come from nature itself, but from traffickers and criminals who prey on people on the move.
(UN News)* — Shattered by her husband’s death during the rising tide of gang violence in Haiti last year, Christiana and her six children fled 223 kilometres from their hometown to the city of Mirebalais, where her six-year-old daughter, Leineda, began treatment for malnutrition.
This refrain echoes through centuries of struggle—from the plantations of Saint Domingue to the besieged neighborhoods of Gaza, from the mineral-rich soil of the Congo to the burning plains of Southern Africa.
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Today, as humanity faces mounting climate catastrophe, global inequality, and ethnic cleansing, we must ask: how did we get here?
And how long will we refuse to name the violence for what it is—a crime against humanity – or better a genocide?
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 