'Unseen' News and Views
24 February 2020 (UN News)* — Because the production of everything we eat transforms the environment, the United Nations agriculture chief told a high-level UN meeting on biodiversity that careful discussions are needed to decide on the scale of acceptable transformations.
(UN News)* — While a sudden increase in new cases of COVID-19 is of concern, the spread of coronavirus is not yet a pandemic, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on 24 February 2020.
“Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely, it has. Are we there yet? From our assessment, not yet,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists in Geneva.
(UN News)* — Cheap and easily accessible small arms are increasingly becoming the “weapon of choice” for many terrorist groups, the UN counter-terrorism chief told an event on Friday [21 February 2020] aimed to raise awareness of the nexus between terrorism, organized crime and illicit small arms trafficking.
24 February 2020 (Wall Street International)* — In previous articles, I discussed the importance of eating little or no meat (especially beef)1-3.
Unfortunately, the food industry is a powerful force working against this idea. Clever marketing continues to increase the demand for mass-produced beef throughout the world.
So, it’s especially disappointing when news agencies publish headlines like this one: “Vegan and Plant-Based Diets Worsen Brain Health”4.
– The United Nations, which has long preached the irrefutable concept of income equality to the outside world, is now accused of condoning wage discrimination in its own backyard.
The message from the UN Staff Coordinating Council in Geneva was brutally frank—“protesting the UN’s hypocrisy” for launching “International Equal Pay Day*” while failing to reverse an illegal pay cut that has left 3,000 staff being paid 5 per cent less than colleagues on the same grades.
– The UN’s highly-touted socio-economic agenda, which lays out an ambitious global plan for “people, planet and prosperity”, has been dominated by “goals, targets and deadlines.”
Credit: IPBES
But regrettably, most developing nations are struggling to reach these goals—due largely to a shortfall in much-needed funding or lack of political will on the part of most governments.
20 February 2020 (UN News)* — A new study conducted by researchers from the United Nations health agency revealed that bladder cancer mutations can be detected in urine up to 10 years before clinically diagnosing the disease.
The test is based on detecting mutations in the telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) gene – a crucial element for cancer genesis and progression – the most common mutations in bladder cancer, according to the report conducted by the UN World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and international partners.
The new evidence is detailed in an article published by The Lancet, which highlights the potential of early detection.
18 February 2020 (IWGIA)* — The situation for Indigenous Peoples in Bangladesh in many ways echoes the situation of other Indigenous Peoples in Asia: they face heavy militarization; they are stigmatized as anti-national for wanting to be included in decisions affecting their lives – such as industrial development taking place on their ancestral lands, lands which they depend on for their livelihood; and their lands are grabbed at the speed of light, and with their land goes a huge part of their identity. Indigenous women are targeted, and rape is used systematically as a weapon to suppress them. The misery seems to be unending. Yet they are still here; alive, struggling, fighting, uniting.
.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 