TRIPOLI, Libia, Feb 17 2022 (IPS)* – Libya was supposed to hold elections early this year. Instead, it now has two rival political administrations — a return of the divisions of the past.
Graffiti on a wall in Benghazi, Libya, calls for elections and democracy. Credit: The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL)
Libya is entering a new cycle of its political crisis. In December 2021, a mere 48 hours before polls were supposed to open, the elections were postponed. Emad Sayah, the head of Libya’s High National Election Committee (HNEC), declared it to be a case of force majeure. He then proposed to Libya’s parliament, the House of Representatives (HoR), to reschedule the elections for 24 January 2022.
(UN News)* — As the Sahel region “stares down a horrendous food crisis”, the UN emergency food relief chief warned on Wednesday [16 February 2022] that the number of people on the brink of starvation has “increased almost tenfold” over the past three years and “displacement by nearly 400 per cent”.
(UN News)*— The World Health Organization’s (WHO) top official in Europe on Tuesday [15 February 2022]called on governments and health authorities to “closely examine” why there is low demand and acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines, as an “Omicron tidal wave” slams countries in the east of the region.
(UN News)* — Recent attacks indicate how the conflict in Yemen risks spiralling out of control, the chief UN mediator for the country told the Security Council on Tuesday [15 February 2022], as he called for “serious efforts” to be made by Yemeni parties, the region and the international community, to end the fighting, now in its seventh year.
In recent years, and especially since Donald Trump’s term as president, the Republican Party has become irresponsible.
Republican Senators and members of the House of Representatives no longer act to promote whatever is best for their country and the planet. Instead they block whatever the Democratic Party tries to achieve.
The Republican Party is aided by Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who, although the are nominally Democrats, act as destructively as though they were Republicans. Manchin is paid to do this by giant coal corporations, while Sinema gets her blood money from big pharmaceutical firms.
Feb 14 2022 (IPS)* – Inequality is deadly… It contributes to the deaths of at least 21,300 people each day—or one person every four seconds. This is a “highly conservative estimate” for deaths resulting from hunger, lack of access to healthcare and climate breakdown in poor countries…
10 February 2022 (UNEP)* — Yacouba Sawadogo, 76, has been a farmer for much of his life, tending a plot of land in a semi-arid stretch of central Burkina Faso. But in the 1980s, that way of life almost came to an end.
Photo: Reuters Connect / 10 Feb 2022
Severe droughts triggered soil erosion and land degradation, crippling farms across Burkina Faso and much of Western Africa.
“People were leaving, and the animals and trees were dying,” Sawadogo recalled. “We had to look at a new way to farm.”
(UN News)*— The number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Myanmar has doubled since February of last year, now crossing the 800,000 mark, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) announced on 11 February 2022.
Both Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, and its Foreign Secretary, Sergey Laverov, have repeatedly stated that Russia does not intend to invade Ukraine.
Logic also tells us that if they had wished to do so, they would have done it long ago. The threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a western invention.
Russia fears the eastward expansion of NATO
To understand how Russians feel about having western weapons and troops poured into a position on their nation’s borders, we should imagine how the United States would react if large numbers of Russian weapons and troops were stationed in Mexico or Canada.
A broken promise
In 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker assured Mikhail Gorbachev that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastward direction”.
The Conservative MP writes today on openDemocracy that urgent action is needed to stop ‘growing’ levels of fraud
John Penrose, the UK government’s anti-corruption tsar, warned that online fraud is growing | Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters / Alamy Stock Photo
10 February 2022 (openDemocracy)* — The UK government’s anti-corruption tsar has called the City of London “a magnet for dirty cash” and warned that online fraud is growing.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 