New York/Rome, 19 December 2019 (FAO)* — FAO welcomes today’s decision by the United Nations to create two new international days and one international year devoted to issues directly related to food and agriculture.
If you’re looking for a treatise on the joys of love-making between consenting, autonomous adults, read no further.
Marilyn Langlois
In fact, what follows quite the inverse, revealing an ongoing nightmare of child sexual violence that lurks just beneath the surface of our collective consciousness and has infected the highest circles of power.
After all, who wants to think about such things? But ignoring them will not make them go away.
Pedophilia, human trafficking, kiddie porn are terms that pop up here and there in news reports and local crime blotters.
In the past, these terms conjured up for me distasteful notions of creepy men lusting after and fondling boys or girls, run-away adolescents being manipulated into prostitution, and adults watching videos of teenagers engaging in sex.
More women could soon have access to an affordable version of an expensive life-saving breast cancer treatment, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday [18 December 2019]. (*)
OPS-OMS/Sebastián Oliel | Women receiving treatment for breast cancer, in Mexico.
(UN News)* — Two decades of increasing tobacco use around the world are set to go into reverse, UN health experts have predicted, after revealing data indicating that fewer men and boys are smoking than before.
Unsplash/Ali Yahya | The World Health Organization projects that the number of males using tobacco is on the decline, indicating a powerful shift in the global tobacco epidemic.
The first-ever Global Refugee Forum concluded in Geneva on Wednesday [18 December 2019] with more than 770 pledges of support, covering areas such as protection, employment, and education, for refugees and the communities which have taken them in. .
K M Asad/UN | Rohingya Refugees at a camp in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, during the visit of UN Secretary-General António Guterres. 2 July 2018.
As “policies shaped more by fear than fact” have caused untold suffering to migrants, the UN Secretary-General is urging countries to realize the goals of a global agreement that promotes enhanced international cooperation on migration. (*).
António Guterres issued the charge in his message for International Migrants Day, observed annually on 18 December.
DAYLESFORD, Australia, 18 December 2019 — At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds.
Robert J. Burrowes
The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous ornithologist, naturalist and painter John James Audubon:
‘I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose… Before sunset I reached Louisville, distance from Hardensburgh fifty-five miles. The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers, and continued to do so for three days in succession.’ See ‘Passenger Pigeon’.
10 December 2019 (Wall Street International)* — As William Nordhaus illustrated in his Nobel award address in December last year, the free-rider problem is particularly severe for climate change. Those who do nothing ride free, while those who undertake costly reductions pay dearly. If an important player does not go along, the others could establish a climate club with penalties in the form of tariffs for the free rider.
On June 1, 2017, President Trump announced his intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. This intent was reiterated in a December 2018 meeting of the Parties. Thus, the US is on the trajectory of becoming that free rider.
(Greenpeace International)* — 2019 was a terrible year for the Amazon Rainforest – threats to its survival have intensified, but the situation can always get worse. A new Provisional Presidential Decree (PPD) 910, signed on Tuesday [12 December 2019] by President Jair Bolsonaro, gives criminals a huge Christmas gift — in the form of a gigantic piece of illegally occupied public land in the Amazon that will now be offered for legal use.
Like many countries in the world, Australia had several indigenous peoples, often called aboriginals or tribes, living in this subcontinent.
St Patrick’s Cathedral
Again, as in other countries, these peoples were conquered, crushed and their cultures, cuisines, knowledge systems destroyed.
These peoples have become extinct except for a few stray tribes who still exist in small numbers and who are difficult to see in most places.
One such place is called Toowoomba about 150 km from the modern city Brisbane located in the province of Queensland on the eastern coast of the country.
This place is beautiful, peaceful, serene, full of gardens, and open areas. As they say in Toowoomba, it has pleasant weather on one day and perfect the next.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 