'Unseen' News and Views
“I use gas”, announces a minibus driving along a street in Mexico City. Natural gas is becoming increasingly widely used as fuel for public transportation in Mexico, coming mainly from the United States where it is extracted through hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a technique that requires high volumes of water and toxic chemicals. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS
7 December 2020 (UNEP)* — The record-breaking wildfires that engulfed the western United States this year show the danger from global heating and ecosystem decline, but also light up opportunities for forest and landscape restoration to reduce the threat of catastrophic fires.
Altered rainfall patterns are lengthening fire seasons from the Mediterranean to Australia. Record heat and drought are sucking moisture from trees and undergrowth. And some regions are seeing more violent thunderstorms, whose lightning can provide a fateful spark.
Scientists say forest restoration and other natural solutions could provide up to one-third of the mitigation needed to keep global warming below 2°C.
UNITED NATIONS, New York (UNFPA)* – A new data dashboard launched by UNFPA on 2 December 2020 shows that young women face the greatest risk of intimate partner violence. Yet partner violence is rampant around the world, and older women are not immune, the new tool reveals.
– COVID-19 has magnified global food insecurity and is driving unhealthy eating and worsening malnutrition, food experts say. They have called for deliberate global investment in food as medicine on the back of growing diet-related illnesses.
Sorghum is has nutritional and health benefits. Small scale farmer, Catherine Sibanda examines her sorghum crop in field, in Jambezi District, Zimbabwe, March 2015. Credit: Busani Bafana / IPS
Famed Greek physician, Hippocrates, foretold the future of food. He is attributed to have said: ‘Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food’. COVID-19 has pushed the conversation about food as medicine onto the world agenda as more people are paying attention to their health and increasingly what they eat.
Mass Extinctions Due to Human Activities
John Scales Avery
According to a recent United Nations report, more than a million species of plants and animals are currently threatened with extinction because of human activities. Rates of extinction today are as much as 1,000 times greater than the normal background rate.
As the greenhouse gas emissions of human society push the earth towards catastrophic climate change, rates of extinction in the biosphere will certainly become higher.
Are Humans Threatened with Extinction?
What about our own species? Are we too threatened with extinction?
There are certainly several threatened catastrophes that might greatly reduce the global population of humans. In a thermonuclear war, followed by nuclear winter, a large part of the world’s population might perish.
Nairobi/Seattle (UNEP)* – A special issue of the Production Gap Report – from leading research organizations and the UN – finds that the COVID-19 recovery marks a potential turning point, where countries must change course to avoid locking in levels of coal, oil, and gas production far higher than consistent with a 1.5°C limit.
UN Security Council in session. Credit: United Nations
Simplifying his argument in more realistic terms, he said: “When two small powers have a dispute, the dispute disappears. When a great power and a small power are in conflict, the small power disappears. And when two great powers have a dispute, the United Nations disappears.”
And more appropriately, it is the UN Security Council (UNSC) that vanishes into oblivion, particularly when big powers clash, warranting a ceasefire, not in some distant military conflict, but inside the UNSC chamber itself.
There is a vast literature on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who died on this date, November 22, 1963. I have contributed my small share to such writing in an effort to tell the truth, honor him, and emphasize its profound importance in understanding the history of the last fifty-seven years, but more importantly, what is happening in the U.S.A. today.
In other words, to understand it in its most gut-wrenching reality: that the American national security state will obliterate any president that dares to buck its imperial war-making machine. It is a lesson not lost on all presidents since Kennedy.
Unless one is a government disinformation agent or is unaware of the enormous documentary evidence, one knows that it was the U.S. national security state, led by the CIA, that carried out JFK’s murder.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 