'Unseen' News and Views
— Artificial intelligence (AI) is ripe to help resolve certain major problems in Africa, from farming to the health sector, but Senegalese expert Seydina Moussa Ndiaye is warning of a new “colonization” of the continent by this new technology if foreign companies continue to feed on African data without involving local actors.
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(UN News)* — In 2024, the UN will once again be at the heart of international efforts to tackle the world’s most urgent challenges, from bolstering the global economy, to supporting climate action and keeping the peace in conflict hotspots.
© UNICEF/Raphael Pouget | Children make a shape with their hands in the south Omo district of southern Ethiopia.
How Uzbekistan’s farmers are overcoming soil salinity and water shortages.
After years of soil degradation in western Uzbekistan, smallholder farmers like Adyl have turned to climate-smart techniques to tackle the impacts of drought. ©Temur Khujanazarov
The industrial agriculture paradigm, which sees the world as a machine, and not as a self-organized living system, has created devastation on the planet, while contributing significantly to the issue of climate change.
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Navdanya International’s latest graphic report, ‘Regeneration is Life‘, presented at Cop 28 in Dubai, analyzes the actual causes at the root of climate change and highlights the true regenerative solutions against the false solutions proposed by polluters.
(UN News)* — This year’s surprising spike in dengue infections globally represents a potentially high public health threat, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday [22 December 2023].
© UNDP/Gwenn Dubourthoumieu | Bed nets protect against mosquitoes that carry diseases like malaria and dengue fever.
The warning came as WHO reported more than five million dengue infections and 5,000 deaths from the disease worldwide this year.
– The World Bank insists commercial finance is necessary for achieving economic recovery and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but does little to ensure profit-hungry commercial finance serves the public interest.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
By failing to address pressing challenges within their purview, the second-ever Bretton Woods institutions’ (BWIs) annual meetings on the African continent, in Marrakech in October 2023, set the developing world even further back.
The International Monetary and Financial Committee, which oversees the International Monetary Fund (IMF), could not agree, by consensus, on the usual end-of-meeting ministerial communique for ‘geopolitical’ reasons. The Development Committee, which governs the World Bank Group, fared little better.
By Bill Frelick, Director, Refugee and Migrant Rights Division | Human Rights Watch*
Lawmakers Demand Mandatory Detention in Return for Aid Support
The Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, New Mexico, US, September 29, 2022. © 2023 Andres Leighton/AP Photo
The Biden administration is reportedly considering accepting mandatory detention of asylum seekers, one of the demands of Republican Party lawmakers to “secure the border” in exchange for passing the administration’s supplemental aid bill for Ukraine, Israel, and US border enforcement.
The US Immigration and Nationality Act already makes detention mandatory for asylum seekers in expedited removal who are awaiting credible fear of persecution interviews.
(WMO)* — Mountains Matter and the Cryosphere is Critical is the message from the peaks to the valleys to the desert landscape of COP28 in Dubai on International Mountain Day, an annual event on 11 December drawing attention to the importance of our mountain ecosystems to the whole planet. 
(UN News)* — Amidst a multitude of global crises and escalating of armed conflicts, small arms and light weapons remain a silent killer, having claimed over 260,000 lives during 2021, amounting to 45 per cent of all violent deaths.
That’s according to Izumi Nakamitsu, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, who briefed the Security Council on Friday [], quoting the latest figures available.
“This is more than 700 people a day, or one person dying from small arms every two minutes”, she said.
She added that “small arms and light weapons are the weapons of choice in initiating, sustaining and exacerbating conflict, armed violence, terrorism and other forms of organized crime”.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 