UNITED NATIONS, Jul 21 2025 (IPS)* –Electric vehicles contribute to an ongoing environmental and humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Mining operations cause deforestation, pollution, food insecurity and exploitative labor practices.
A young girl washes her hands in a puddle near a UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC. Photo Credit: UN Photo/Sylvain Liechti
Advertisers paint electric vehicles as an environmentally friendly option to help save the planet. In the West, American states like California and New York incentivize citizens to go green and help their cities by ditching gas-powered vehicles.
UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, has learned that the United States Government will deny future funding to the organization, cutting essential support for millions of people living in humanitarian crises and for midwives preventing mothers from dying in childbirth.
The amendment states that no US funds may be made available to any organization that supports or participates in the management of a programme of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.
Multiple evaluations by the US Government itself and others have found no evidence that UNFPA engages in coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in China.
The US had become one of UNFPA’s most critical partners, providing $180 million in funding on average a year.
The workers we don’t pay or see are grandmothers, mothers, daughters — the women who take care of children, look after ill family members and give dignity to the elderly.
To do this vital care work, they give up formal employment with pay cheques.
“Our system is designed as if women didn’t do care work, and that forces us to choose between raising children or working,”said Meredith Cortés Bravo, a founder of a grassroots organization in Chile that supports these women.
(UN News)* — Major cuts to aid budgets have already left people fleeing wars in Sudan and beyond without the assistance and protection they need, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on .
Globally, $1.4 billion of the agency’s programmes are being shuttered or put on hold, UNHCR said in a new report.
“We can’t stop water, you can’t stop sanitation, but we’re having to take decisions when it comes, for example, to shelter,” said UNHCR Director of External Relations Dominique Hyde.
“Terrorist” just means “anyone who inconveniences the empire in any way.” It really is that simple.
Trump and Ahmed al-Sharaa aka Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, ex-terrorist turned Syria’s president. Image via White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (Public Domain)
8 Jul 2025 – The US has removed Syria’s Al Qaeda franchise from its list of designated terrorist organizations just days after the UK added nonviolent activist group Palestine Action to its own list of banned terrorist groups.
The western empire will surely find ways to be even more hypocritical and ridiculous about its “terrorism” designations in the future, but at this point it’s hard to imagine how it will manage to do so.
(UN News)* — Amid violent clashes in southern Syria’s Suweida governorate, a picture of grave human rights abuses and rising humanitarian needs is emerging by the hour, the UN said on Friday .
Briefing reporters in Geneva, UN human rights office, OHCHR, spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani highlighted “credible” reports of “widespread violations and abuses, including summary executions and arbitrary killings, kidnappings, destruction of private property and looting of homes” in the city of Suweida.
Gang violence in Haiti has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and many are finding shelter in former schools where belief in the power of education remains strong.
(UN News)* —Craters filled with muddy water pocket the landscape of the Kono district in Sierra Leone – the result of a blood diamond mining industry which contributed to a decade-long civil war.
CIAT/Georgina Smith | Girls plant seeds in Lushoto, Tanzania.
But now, parts of the land have been restored. Crops are beginning to flourish and bees are buzzing around once again.
The people responsible for this change are a hodgepodge group – former taxi drivers and miners, people who barely finished secondary school and some with higher education degrees.
The unifying factor? Most have youth on their side.
PORTLAND, USA, Jul 16 2025 (IPS)* –To be, or not to be, an undocumented migrant, that is the question for millions of men, women and children in many less developed countries.
The chance of dying during the first year of life in the least developed countries is ten times higher than in the more developed countries. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS
“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them” for a better life as an undocumented migrant in a foreign land.
(UN News)* —The continued onslaught and mass deprivation of people in the Gaza Strip is becoming normalised, the UN aid coordination office OCHA warned on Friday .
“Every day brings more preventable deaths, displacement and desperation,” the agency said in a humanitarian update.
On Friday, Israeli authorities issued another displacement order, this time for parts of North Gaza.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 