'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
March 13, 2023 — FIFA has been handed a letter supported by over one million petition signatures — and custom-designed football shirts — demanding that it provide compensation to migrant workers who suffered horrific human rights abuses while working on the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar.
Authorities Should Provide Protection; Prosecute Attackers
(Tunis) – President Kais Saied’s recent attempt to mitigate the serious harm that a speech he made on February 21, 2023, caused Black African migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in Tunisia does not go far enough, Human Rights Watch said on 10 March 2023.
Measures announced on March 5 fall far short of the steps needed to end a surge in violent assaults, robberies, and vandalism by Tunisian citizens, arbitrary evictions by landlords, and job terminations by employers, that followed Saied’s speech.
(UN News)* — Life-threatening hunger caused by climate shocks, violent insecurity and disease in the Horn of Africa, have left nearly 130,000 people “looking death in the eyes” and nearly 50 million facing crisis levels of food insecurity, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday [].
In an appeal for $178 million to support humanitarian assistance across the seven affected countries in the Greater Horn region, veteran WHO worker Liesbeth Aelbrecht warned that the situation was worse than anything she’d seen in more than two decades in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.
“These 48 million people do include as many as 129,000 who are facing catastrophe; and catastrophe, that means they are facing starvation and literally looking death in the eyes,” Ms. Aelbrecht told journalists in Geneva. Those most at risk, are living in both South Sudan and Somalia.
– It is two months since the World Health Organization declared Uganda free of the most recent Sudan ebolavirus, which killed 55 people.
Uganda used public health measures like screening, testing of temperatures, and isolation of suspected cases to contain the Ebola outbreak. While those measures were successful, scientists warn that another outbreak could occur. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS
Uganda employed public health measures to end the outbreak. In the absence of vaccines and therapeutics, the threat of the next outbreak looms. Scientists are yet to find answers to questions like who was the first person to be affected? Or the index case, what viral host reservoir did that patient get in contact with?
The following is an adapted version of the presentation made at the webinar “Connecting Dots” on 25 Feb 2023. Other speakers were Dr. Marwa Osman and Dr. Atif Kubursi.
Rick Sterling
Introduction
Syria has been at war since 2011. The conflict is in a stalemate. US troops control nearly a third of the country. The US finances the operation and a secessionist army with oil and wheat they take from the area. It funds them and deprives the Syrian government from their own resources.
In the northern province of Idlib, the Syrian version of Al Qaeda is in control, receiving the majority of aid from Europe while the 90% of Syrians who live in government controlled areas go hungry and have electricity only three hours per day.
Meanwhile in Ukraine, the bloodshed continues as Russian troops battle Ukrainian soldiers while the US and NATO pour in weapons. Russian troops have taken control of much of the eastern region, the Donbass.
How did we get here and what is driving the process?
Nearly every maternal death is preventable, and the clinical expertise and technology necessary to avert these losses have existed for decades. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS
Severe bleeding, high blood pressure, pregnancy-related infections, complications from unsafe abortion, and underlying conditions that can be aggravated by pregnancy (such as HIV/AIDS and malaria) are the leading causes of maternal deaths, UN specialised bodies report.
“These are all largely preventable and treatable with access to quality and respectful healthcare.”
Why then are these causes still not prevented and treated?
Central East Correctional Centre in Kawartha Lakes, Ontario, February 10, 2021. © 2021 Kawartha 411
A coroner’s inquest into the 2015 death of Abdurahman Hassan, a refugee from Somalia, has brought to light shocking details about Canada’s immigration detention system and abusive conditions in provincial jails. In response, 40 organizations have renewed their call on the federal government to stop incarcerating people in provincial jails for administrative immigration purposes. The letter was also endorsed by former cabinet ministers Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock.
(UN News)* — In a new blow for equality in the 21st century workplace, UN labour experts said on Monday [] that women’s access to jobs, their employment conditions and a persistent pay gap, have barely improved worldwide in nearly two decades.
The jobs gap for women is a “stubborn and damaging reality of the global labour market” but it is particularly worrying in developing countries, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said, with almost one in four women unable to find a job, compared with 16.6 per cent of men.
That assessment is based on new data gathered from all people looking for work, as opposed to those registered as unemployed.
“It paints a much bleaker picture of the situation of women in the world of work…(it) shows that women still have a much harder time finding a job than men,” ILO said.
(UN News)* — Experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council have expressed concern over reports of increased militarization and intimidation surrounding a multi-billion-dollar urban development and tourism project in Indonesia.
The Mandalika project includes parks, resorts, hotels and a motorcycle racetrack hosting international sporting events. It is located on Lombok island, in impoverished West Nusa Tenggara Province.
The experts said they have received alarming accounts of alleged human rights violations committed by police and military forces, including excessive use of force to evict and restrict the rights of the indigenous Sasak people.
The $3 billion project is being implemented by the Indonesia Tourism and Development Corporation (ITDC), a State-owned enterprise, with funding primarily from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
(UN News)* — Increasingly sophisticated and high-calibre firearms and ammunition are being trafficked into Haiti, fuelling an ongoing surge of gang violence that has plagued residents for months, according to a new UN assessment released on Thursday [].
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report, Haiti’s criminal markets: mapping trends in firearms and drug trafficking, warns that a recent increase in arms seizures alongside intelligence and law enforcement reporting, suggests trafficking of weapons is on the rise.
“By providing a rapid assessment of illicit firearms and drug trafficking, this UNODC study seeks to shed light on the trafficking flows enabling gangs in Haiti and fuelling further violence in a volatile and desperate situation to help inform responses and support to the people of Haiti,” said Angela Me, Chief of the UNODC Research and Trend Analysis Branch.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 