Nairobi, 23 September 2025 –Two years of escalating conflict have caused unprecedented levels of environmental damage in the Gaza Strip, damaging its soils, freshwater supplies and coastline, finds a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
HADRAMAUT/HAJJAH/TAI’Z GOVERNORATES, Yemen, 15 September 2025 – “The patient was in her third trimester and arrived with severe bleeding,” said Ms. Akaber, a community midwife from the Ku’aydinah District, in Yemen’s northwestern Hajjah Governorate. “I provided assistance, but the baby was already dead.”
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Sep 23 2025 (IPS)* –– US President Trump’s snide barbs against his appointee, US Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Jerome Powell, have revived support for central bank independence – long abused by powerful finance interests against growth and equity.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Independent central banks are supposed to improve the quality, equity, and growth impact of monetary policy.
Instead, they have primarily served powerful financial interests, with contractionary and regressive effects leading to slower, unequal growth.
Independent of whom? Central banks were established to determine monetary policy to shape financial conditions to achieve national economic objectives.
In recent decades, the new conventional policy wisdom has been that independent central banks should set monetary policy. Thus, they have been influenced by powerful financial interests, typically foreign, in smaller, open developing countries.
11 Sep 2025 – Kirk, Charlie Kirk is DEAD. By that single “BEAUTIFUL” shot, as his Patron Donald Paedo Trump Jr is wont to say (ala BIG and Beautiful Bill).
Obviously, it must have been a Big and Beautiful Bullet. The shot was too neat and professional, needing no follow-up, that in turn, rules out any “woke” or Left or Marxist or Muslims or LGBTQs.
22 September 2025 — Deep in the forest in Venezuela’s Bolivar state, residents live in fear of horrific violence at the hands of armed groups involved in the illicit gold trade.
During a 2020 investigation, a 17-year-old boy told Human Rights Watch how he witnessed members of a Venezuelan armed group amputating both hands of a miner they accused of stealing gold. Summary executions and forced child labor by armed groups is still happening today.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 19 2025 (IPS)** –Thousands of Afghans who fled to the USA when the Taliban took over in August 2021 now face the prospect of deportation to countries they’ve never been to.
Credit: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters via Gallo Images
People who risked everything to escape persecution, often because they helped US forces, now find themselves treated as unwanted cargo under the Trump administration’s anti-migration policy.
Trump’s expanded deportation programme targets an estimated 10 million foreign-born people who live in the USA but lack proper legal documentation.
(UN News)* —The United Nations has sounded the alarm over Sudan’s spiralling crisis, warning that deadly attacks in El Fasher, the collapse of essential services, and mass displacement are pushing millions in Darfur and beyond closer to catastrophe.
According to local reports, heavy shelling and assaults late last week in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, killed at least six civilians and injured scores more, triggering fresh displacement from the already besieged city.
16 September 2025 —WHO/Europe’s new report “Health workforce migration in the WHO European Region: country case studies from Albania, Armenia, Georgia, Ireland, Malta, Moldova, Norway, Romania and Tajikistan” offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of health worker mobility across the Region.
Drawing on data from National Health Workforce Accounts, as well as detailed case studies from 9 countries, it highlights the patterns, flows and scale of the Region’s health workforce migration.
Between 2014 and 2023, the number of foreign-trained doctors working in the Region grew by 58%, and foreign-trained nurses by 67%.
BRATISLAVA, Sep 17 2025 (IPS)* – Just under a year into a fragile ceasefire, 150,000 people in southern Lebanon continue to deal with the potentially lethal aftermath of Israeli bombing, highlighting the devastating long-term effects of conflict.
Damage to the water tank at the Maisat water pumping station. Credit: WaSH Sector Lebanon
A report published late last month (AUG) by Action Against Hunger, Insecurity Insight, and Oxfam said that at least 150,000 people remain without running water across the south of Lebanon after Israeli attacks had damaged and destroyed swathes of water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities since the beginning of the conflict in Lebanon.
(UN News)* —As bombs continue to fall on Gaza City as part of Israel’s intensifying military operation, families with starving children are being pushed southwards from one “hellscape” to another, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday [].
The development followed reports that the Israeli military has stepped up its ground offensive in Gaza City, ordering residents to leave the area.
Speaking from the south of the enclave, UNICEF’s Tess Ingram described the forced mass displacement of families as a “deadly threat for the most vulnerable”.
“It is inhumane to expect nearly half a million children battered and traumatized by over 700 days of unrelenting conflict to flee one hellscape to end up in another,” she insisted.