'Unseen' News and Views
26 October 2019 (Wall Street International)* — Several Democratic contenders for the 2020 presidential nomination have come out in favor of reparations for Native Americans and African Americans in one form or another. These candidates spoke of the need for the United States government to reckon with and make up for centuries of stolen labor and legal oppression.
25 October 2019 (UN Environment)* — Environmental crime has become the world’s fourth-largest crime sector, growing at 2–3 times the rate of the global economy. INTERPOL and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimate that natural resources worth up to US$258 billion are being stolen by criminal syndicates, depriving countries of their resources, revenues and development opportunities.
Supporting indigenous peoples to restore the balance between wildlife and food security
Conservation is important for biodiversity and food security in the Rupununi Region of Guyana. ©FAO/David Mansell-Moullin
October 2019 (FAO)* — “There used to be a lot of wildlife here in my father’s and grandfather’s time: deer, tapir, capybara and peccaries,” explains Asaph, a traditional hunter from the Wapishana indigenous tribe in the Rupununi region of Guyana. “There are still some animals in the Kanuku Mountains, but they are harder to find.”
Protests that started over a hike in public transport fares boiled into massive marches. The government responded with heavy repression. At least 18 people have been killed, hundreds have been injured, and over 7,000 arrested.
The popular movement against Piñera’s neoliberal government and its repressive policies, is unprecedented in Chile’s modern history | Photo: teleSUR
25 October 2019 — Around two-thirds of sexually active women surveyed in a new UN study indicated that although they wished to avoid or postpone having children, they had stopped relying on contraception out of concern for how it was affecting their health. As a result, around a quarter of all pregnancies are unplanned. That’s according to World Health Organization (WHO) findings published on Friday [25 October 2019]. *
The family planning study of more than 10,000 women aged 15 to 49, across 36 low and middle-income countries confirms that 65 per cent of women with an unintended pregnancy were either not using contraception, or relied on traditional methods (such as withdrawal or calendar-based methods).
25 October 2019 — Sunaina lives in Majhi, a village of 104 people in Nepal’s impoverished Terai region. Huts fashioned of mud, thatch and straw stand in a row along the shoulder of a dirt road that carves through rice fields, where Sunaina, and the majority of her neighbours earn their living.*
© WSSCC/Hiroyuki Saito | Sunaina borrowed the money to build a toilet in her village in Nepal.
In this under-developed area, sanitation has hitherto been lacking.
“Previously, the people did not have toilets, they did not see the necessity of having a proper place to defecate,” says Raju Prajad Sah, the local Chief Administrative Officer.
OHCHR Regional Office for Centra Hundreds of people take to the streets of Managua, Nicaragua, demanding justice for victims of the violent crackdown on protests
24 October 2019 (Wall Street International)* — At first I was appalled by the report of Piauí Magazine “Teatro Familiar – Alugar Parentes é um Negócio que Floresce no Japão” (Family Theater – Renting Relatives is an Emerging Business in Japan), but soon I realized the truism of the situation.
This situation is banal and obvious from the point of view of the trajectories of market capitalism, in which everything is a product that can be consumed, but it is overwhelming to the extent of depersonalizing and reducing individuality to the condition of a mere representation of its institutional and affective pillars.
An interview with UN Environment Programme’s peatlands expert Dianna Kopansky
Photo by Aulia Erlangga/CIFOR.
24 October 2019 (UN News)* — Amid growing competition for radio wave space due to new wireless technologies, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Thursday [23 October 2019] called on governments to protect radio frequencies allocated to potentially life-saving weather forecasting services.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 