'Unseen' News and Views
Background by the United Nations*
The Genocide Convention (article 2) defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group … “, including:
A Muslim man grieving over his son’s grave in Vitez, Bosnia and Herzegovina in May 1994. UN Photo/John Isaac
Why Climate Is an Emergency
John Scales Avery
The central problem which the world faces in its attempts to avoid catastrophic climate change is a contrast of time scales.
In order to save human civilization and the biosphere from the most catastrophic effects of climate change we need to act immediately. Fossil fuels must be left in the ground. Forests must be saved from destruction by beef or palm oil production.
These vitally necessary actions are opposed by powerful economic interests, by powerful fossil fuel corporations desperate to monetize their underground “assets”, and by corrupt politicians receiving money from the beef or palm oil industries.
How FAO is helping indigenous communities in Bolivia take the chocolate industry to the next level
Bolivia’s chocolate industry is thriving, thanks to indigenous and smallholder farmers growing cacao beans with support from FAO and its Forest Farm Facility partners. ©HELVETAS Bolivia
2 December 2019 (FAO)* — In the Bolivian countryside an appetizing industry has taken off, bringing a sweet new business to rural communities: chocolate production. When it comes to chocolate, Bolivia might not be the first place you think of yet – but thanks to the combined efforts of FAO, smallholder farming collectives and indigenous producers, it soon will be.
9 December 2019 (UN News)* — Despite global progress in tackling poverty, hunger and disease, a “new generation of inequalities” indicates that many societies are not working as they should, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) argues in its latest report released on Monday [9 December 2019].
– While opening a newspaper or watching a TV program we are every day made aware of the plights of irregular migrants. Some recent examples among many – on 24 October, 39 Chinese nationals were found dead in a lorry trailer in Essex. They had apparently frozen to death within a refrigerator container with temperatures as low as -25C (-13F).
This while tragedies occur almost daily on the Mediterranean Sea. On 26 November, a rescue vessel found a boat almost completely sunken.
It had three dead bodies aboard. Fifty-five migrants were saved.
Three of them were in a critical condition, and one died after reaching Melilla in Spain, where the migrants were brought in.
Three children were among the survivors, though a further ten individuals were reported missing. Nowadays, such news items pass by almost imperceptibly.
Infants and young children most at risk of fatal complications, health agencies warn
Worldwide more than 140,000 people died from measles in 2018, according to new estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC). These deaths occurred as measles cases surged globally, amidst devastating outbreaks in all regions.
WHO/Daniel Hodgson
With every passing day, it becomes clearer that the military coup in Bolivia on November 10th was masterminded in Washington DC.
Bolivian president Evo Morales who is now in exile in Mexico.(Photo: Sebastian Baryli)
This reality will create yet a new difficulty in relations between the U.S. regime and Mexico to its direct south, because the Mexican Government, under progressive President Lopez Obrador, took the courageous and very meaningful step of providing refuge to the U.S.-couped Bolivian President Evo Morales and therefore posed overtly a resistance to the U.S. dictatorship.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 