'Unseen' News and Views
By Daniel Johnson in Geneva and Ziad Taleb in Gaza
“Continuous” Israeli military evacuation orders in Gaza threaten already extremely vulnerable people in the enclave with further forced displacement, raising concerns that vital services could soon be cut off, UN humanitarians warned on Wednesday [].
Windows shattered by nearby airstrikes. Children crying out from conflict’s psychological blowback. The sense of a hangman’s noose growing ever tighter.
These are some of the stories shared by World Food Programme Gaza employees. Like for hundreds of thousands of fellow Palestinians on the Strip, there is no escaping the 10-month-old war.
A UN team inspects an unexploded 1,000-pound bomb lying on a main road in Khan Younis. Credit: OCHA/Themba Linden
His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.
15 Aug 2024 – Now the numbers killed in the indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza exceeded 40,000 registered deaths (72% of them women and children). But the number of deaths could be many folds more (at least ten thousand under the rubble, many thousands died for lack of food or medical care etc).
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Gaza under intense, relentless Israeli bombardment Aug 2024. Photo: Mazin Qumsiyeh
But globally the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How do they do it and how do we stop it.
Climate change is fuelling flooding and other forms of extreme weather, causing fresh displacement and making life even harder for people already uprooted from their homes.
Residents in Baghlan-e-Jadid district assess the damage caused by recent flooding in Afghanistan’s northeastern Baghlan province. © UNHCR/Mujeeburrahman Habiby
In recent weeks, torrential rains in Afghanistan, Brazil and East Africa have inundated towns and villages, destroyed homes and livelihoods, and brought increasing hardship for the most vulnerable populations.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres is closely following negotiations in Doha focused on trying to end the war in Gaza, where the situation continues to remain catastrophic after more than 10 months of unrelenting war.
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Heavy smog seen engulfed amid rise in pollution levels at Barakhamba on November 2, 2023 in New Delhi, India. The Air Quality Index (AQI) remained in the “very poor” category for the sixth consecutive day on November 2. © Sanchit Khanna/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.
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This year, to mark the UN Environment Program’s International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies, Greenpeace East Asia’s Clean Air Unit is highlighting the severe health impacts of air pollution and the positive steps global communities are taking to quantify and combat the problem.
(UNEP)* — In the small coastal town of Guapi, Colombia, Mary Luz Ante Orobio is meeting with a group she calls “the unstoppable women.”
They are gathered around a wooden chest filled with loose cash, a ledger and a calculator. Orobio flips through the ledger, eyes poring over tidy notes outlining a series of financial investments.
She jots down some numbers before distributing cash among the group.
The women are members of one of 80 local savings and credit groups in Colombia formed with the help of planetGOLD, a programme led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
This is a summary of what was said by UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder – to whom quoted text may be attributed – at 13 August 2024 press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.
ATBARA, Sudan/GENEVA 13 August 2024 (UNICEF)* – “Sudan’s humanitarian crisis for children is, by numbers, the biggest in the world. It is also a crisis of neglect.
“So many of the countless atrocities upon children in Sudan have gone unreported, often as a result of very limited access.
(UN News)* — The perpetrators of a deadly rampage targeting a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank must face justice to deter future attacks, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, insisted on Friday [].
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 