'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
– Meeting the President of the Republic of Korea in September 2019, President Donald J Trump bragged that the “US economy is the envy of the world”. Trump reiterated such claims in his State of the Union address in early February, hailing his own policies with typical humility.
Trump touted US economic success at the Davos World Economic Forum in January as “nothing short of spectacular”, asserting “I’m proud to declare the United States is in the midst of an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”
To the contrary, US economic growth slowed after Trump started the ‘trade war’ with China, dropping from 3.5% in the second quarter of 2018 to 2.1% in the last quarter of 2019, much less than the 5.5% per annum peak in the second quarter of 2014 during the Obama presidency.
Worldwide material consumption has expanded rapidly, as has material footprint per capita. In 1990, some 8.1 tonnes of natural resources were used to satisfy a person’s need, while in 2017, almost 12.2 tonnes of resources were extracted per person.
Malcolm Lightbody | Unsplash mlightbody.com
More funding needed to combat locust swarms ‘unprecedented in modern times’
.
There is no scarcity of literature in this field, much of it permutations around the basic core of “I am of course against war, but – -”. So let it be clear from the outset that the present author is against war, there being no “but”.
Johan Galtung
War as an institution to resolve conflict is an abomination, like slavery and colonialism as institutions. Occasional war, slavery and colonialism are probably hard to eliminate.
But the key word is institution, legitimized by social norms and mores.
A doctrine of just war is designed to do exactly that, offer a legitimation, for instance by seeing the evil of war as something that can be outweighed by possible positive consequences. But all human activity carries in its wake something good and something bad, weighing one against the other we can justify anything, like justifying Hitler with the Autobahnen.
24 February 2020 (UN News)* — Because the production of everything we eat transforms the environment, the United Nations agriculture chief told a high-level UN meeting on biodiversity that careful discussions are needed to decide on the scale of acceptable transformations.
(UN News)* — While a sudden increase in new cases of COVID-19 is of concern, the spread of coronavirus is not yet a pandemic, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on 24 February 2020.
“Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely, it has. Are we there yet? From our assessment, not yet,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists in Geneva.
(UN News)* — Cheap and easily accessible small arms are increasingly becoming the “weapon of choice” for many terrorist groups, the UN counter-terrorism chief told an event on Friday [21 February 2020] aimed to raise awareness of the nexus between terrorism, organized crime and illicit small arms trafficking.
The Taliban remain strong despite everything the US is throwing at them – but how serious is Trump about a peace deal?
20 February 2020 (openDemocracy)* — The US and the Taliban have agreed that they would like to hold a seven-day ceasefire. The chances of it actually happening varies by the day, and it’s not clear whether Donald Trump and those close to him do genuinely want a deal.
Beyond those hurdles, however, could a short-term ceasefire open into a lasting peace – one that brings stability while ensuring respect for human rights?
From the US perspective, the war is low profile but extraordinarily intense. The country’s armed forces are dropping many more bombs than a decade ago, when they had many more boots on the ground.
