'Unseen' News and Views
(UN News)* — The deadly legacy of conflicts old and new – from Gaza to Sudan and beyond – continues to kill and maim civilians on a near-daily basis, mine action workers said on 3 December 2025, as they appealed for greater support for their lifesaving work in the face of deep funding cuts.
Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Both in the scale of the devastation they cause, and in their uniquely persistent, spreading, genetically damaging radioactive fallout, they are unlike any other weapons.
A mushroom cloud after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killing over 73,000 people. Keystone / Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum
A single nuclear bomb detonated over a large city could kill millions of people. The use of tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs would disrupt the global climate, causing widespread famine.
(Stockholm) Revenues from sales of arms and military services by the 100 largest arms-producing companies rose by 5.9 per cent in 2024, reaching a record $679 billion, according to new data released on 1 December 2025 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), available at www.sipri.org.
Global arms revenues rose sharply in 2024, as demand was boosted by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, global and regional geopolitical tensions, and ever-higher military expenditure.
For the first time since 2018, all of the five largest arms companies increased their arms revenues.
A nuclear test is carried out on an island in French Polynesia in 1971. Credit: CTBTO
In the five decades between 1945 and the opening for the signature of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996, over 2,000 nuclear tests were carried out all over the world. The United States conducted 1,032 tests between 1945 and 1992.
(UN News)* — Across southeast Asia, record-breaking rains and flooding caused by back-to-back tropical storms have claimed hundreds of lives and brought devastation and displacement upon entire communities, UN agencies said on Tuesday [].
(UN News)* — With nearly $1.6 billion in unpaid dues, the UN Secretary-General warned on Monday [] that chronic late payments are hampering the world body’s ability to function, even as sweeping cuts move forward through the General Assembly’s main budget committee.
António Guterres told the Fifth Committee the UN is facing its most fragile cash position in years, despite sharp reductions already built into next year’s budget plans.
UN News/Vibhu Mishra | The United Nations Headquarters as seen from First Avenue in New York City.
– US President Trump’s economic strategy for his second term aims to get the rest of the world, especially its wealthy allies with greater means, to pay more to help strengthen the US economy.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Recent US initiatives have undoubtedly accelerated de-dollarisation but these have largely been unavoidable consequences of its own actions rather than due to any conspiracy by others to that end.
De-dollarisation distraction
Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff recently observed, “We are absolutely at the biggest inflection point in the global currency system since the Nixon shock to end the last vestige of the gold standard.”
After the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the gold price was set at $35 per ounce. In August 1971, US President Richard Nixon ended this gold-dollar parity.
UNAIDS campaigns have dominated the global effort to end HIV/Aids as a public threat since 1999. Credit: UNAIDS
“We have not recovered from the impact of the US funding cuts earlier this year, and closing down UNAIDS prematurely will only make things worse, especially for key populations and other criminalized groups, including people who use drugs,” Taslim, who is Advocacy Lead at the International Network of People Who Use Drugs (INPUD), tells IPS.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 