'Unseen' News and Views
Younger women among those most at risk
(WHO)* — Violence against women remains devastatingly pervasive and starts alarmingly young, shows new data from WHO and partners. Across their lifetime, 1 in 3 women, around 736 million, are subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence from a non-partner – a number that has remained largely unchanged over the past decade.
A woman in Aden, Yemen prepares food at a settlement for people who have fled their homes due to insecurity. Credit: UNOCHA/Giles Clarke
But rarely, if ever, has the world denounced the primary arms merchants, including the US and UK, for the more than 100,000 killings since 2015– despite accusations of “war crimes” by human rights organizations.
The killings are due mostly to air strikes on weddings, funerals, private homes, villages and schools. Additionally, over 130,000 have died resulting largely from war-related shortages of food and medical care.
In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talkand told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is “not missiles, but microbes.” When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as “a world war.”
“The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,” he said.
In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited.
But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.
When climate change dried up their livelihoods — literally — a group of women backed by the World Food Programme turned a traditional craft into a business
(WFP)* — “It is a beautiful river — it used to be very large, it had fish, but now the water’s gone down so much,” says Elba. Years of recurring droughts and an erratic climate have taken their toll on the Torola, which courses through the department of Morazán, in eastern El Salvador.
The West-Iran conflict is extremely a-symmetric. It’s the West that historically sought to influence, change, threaten, demand obedience, and punish–with sanctions and more. It liquidated high-level politicians and scholars, shot down a civilian plane, demonised and excluded Iran. Not to speak of giving Saddam Hussein the chemical weapons and the green light for his war on Iran in 1980.
Iran has not done similar harm to the West.
The conflict’s roots go back to 1953 when the US’s CIA and the UK’s MI6 orchestrated a coup d’état, or regime-change, in Tehran and deposed the democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the Shah and made Iran the most militarised country in the region (and gave it nuclear power).
Iran and the West have been on a collision course ever since around various issues. The biggest has been whether or not Iran should be “allowed” to have nuclear weapons. In addition to strong Western political pressure, sanctions and embargo have been imposed since 1987.
8 March 2021 (UN News)* — In Nigeria, where nearly three out of 10 Nigerian women have experienced physical violence by age 15, human rights lawyer Rashidat Mohammed fights for the rights of women, children and other vulnerable groups.
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Refugee Rosemary Kariuki has been recognized as Australia’s 2021 ‘Local Hero’ for her work helping other displaced women overcome isolation and gender violence.
Rosemary Kariuki, who came to Australia as a refugee from Kenya two decades ago, at her home in Western Sydney. © UNHCR/Brook Mitchell
UN Should Urgently Investigate Atrocities by All Parties
Priest on his way to church in Axum, Tigray region, Ethiopia on January 25, 2011. © 2011 Matjaz Krivic via Getty Images
(Nairobi) – Eritrean armed forces massacred scores of civilians, including children as young as 13, in the historic town of Axum in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in November 2020, Human Rights Watch on 5 March 2021 said. The United Nations should urgently establish an independent inquiry into war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in the region to pave the way for accountability, and Ethiopian authorities should grant it full and immediate access.
Image from Greenpeace International.
Our natural earth is dying. It is on the brink of collapse.
Just 15% of the world’s forests remain intact, and only 3% of the world’s oceans are free from human pressures.
Mainly due to human pressures, the planet is losing species – its biodiversity – at an alarming rate, thought to be comparable only to the 5th mass extinction 65 million years ago.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 