'Unseen' News and Views
Global Coalition Calls for Financial Remedy for Deaths, Wage Theft.
London, 18 May 2022 – Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Qatar have not received financial compensation or any other adequate remedy for serious labor abuses suffered while building and servicing infrastructure for the FIFA World Cup, which begins in November 2022, Human Rights Watch on 18 May 2022 said.
GODE, Ethiopia, 19 May 2022 (UNFPA)* – “When I saw my baby’s hand coming out, I ran for our lives. We travelled nearly 90 kilometres to the nearest health facility… We are both lucky to be alive.”
Ayan Abadi Wali, 24, recounted her story while recovering from a life-saving caesarean-section delivery in Gode, a town in Ethiopia’s Somali region and one of the hardest hit by the country’s worst drought in four decades.
Ms. Abadi is currently living at an informal settlement in the Shabelle zone with her seven children and her mother-in-law, Ms. Barkhado, alongside hundreds of others displaced by the drought.
Yet those who skimmed the headlines of initial reports from several U.S. media outlets may have been left with a different impression of what happened.
“Israeli Police Clash with Mourners at Funeral Procession,” read the headline of MSNBC’s online report. The Wall Street Journal had a similar headline on its story: “Israeli Forces, Palestinians Clash in West Bank before Funeral of Journalist.”
Global gas flaring increased to 144 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2021 from 142 bcm in 2020. It is estimated that each cubic metre of associated gas flared results in about 2.8 kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions. Credit: public domain
This is anything but a minor issue: in fact, as much as 144 billion cubic metres of gas was flared at upstream oil and gas facilities in just one year-2021. Such an amount caused the emission of 400 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent, according to the World Bank.
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Children working on tobacco farms in Chipangali District in Eastern Province of Zambia. Credit: Brenda Chitindi
“Most major tobacco producing countries use child labour in tobacco growing. Almost no cigarette can be guaranteed to be free from child labour.” – British Medical Journal, 2015.
– Despite World Day Against Child Labour launched in 2002 by the International Labour Organization (ILO), little has changed over the past two decades for the millions of children who remain trapped.
(UN News)* — Severe malnutrition, also known as severe wasting, is one of the top threats to child survival, yet perhaps one of the least known or understood, according to a report issued on Tuesday [17 May 2022] by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Severe Wasting: An overlooked child survival emergency, details that around one in five deaths among children under age five, can be attributed to severe wasting.
Triggered by a lack of nutritious food and repeated bouts of disease – such as diarrhoea, measles and malaria – it compromises a child’s immunity.
(UN News)* — The news that more than 100,000 people in Mexico are now officially registered as “disappeared” is a tragedy, UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet said on Tuesday [17 May 2022], in a call for action to tackle the country’s longstanding problem.
A national database has listed all those who’ve been reported missing in the country since 1964, and the tally continues to climb, amid ongoing drug gang violence and a lack of effective investigations.
(UN News)* — Syrian families living in refugee camps in Iraq are facing new and alarming levels of food insecurity, according to figures released by the World Food Programme (WFP) and UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on Tuesday [17 May 2022].
– Central bank policies have often worsened economic crises instead of resolving them. By raising interest rates in response to inflation, they often exacerbate, rather than mitigate business cycles and inflation.
Neither gods nor maestros
US Federal Reserve Bank chair Jerome Powell has admitted: “Whether we can execute a soft landing or not, it may actually depend on factors that we don’t control.” He conceded, “What we can control is demand, we can’t really affect supply with our policies. And supply is a big part of the story here”.
Anis Chowdhury
Hence, decisionmakers must consider more appropriate policy tools. Rejecting ‘one size fits all’ formulas, including simply raising interest rates, anti-inflationary measures should be designed as appropriate. Instead of squelching demand by raising interest rates, supply could be enhanced.
Thus, Milton Friedman – whom many central bankers still worship – blamed the 1930s’ Great Depression on the US Fed. Instead of providing liquidity support to businesses struggling with short-term cash-flow problems, it squeezed credit, crushing economic activity.
16 May 2022 (UN News)* — Countries taking part in the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour this week in South Africa, are being urged to do more to end child labour by 2025.
The strong call for urgent action at the conference taking place in Durban, aims to combat an uptick in the numbers of children being forced into work. Latest figures indicate that 160 million children – almost one in ten worldwide – are still being affected.
Furthermore, numbers are on the rise, with the pandemic threating to reverse years of progress, as child labour becomes a bigger scourge in particular among the vulnerable five to 11-year-old age group.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 