Improved aid access, strengthened resilience and advances in food system networks could provide as much as $3.5 billion in annual cost savings at a time when humanitarian needs are skyrocketing in multiple complex emergencies across the globe, a new United Nations study has found.
Women carry emergency food supplies from a World Food Programme (WFP) helicopter that landed in Thanyang, South Sudan. Photo: UNICEF/Holt
“More than anything else, the world needs to wake up, and end these wars and these conflicts, so we can make real progress in ending hunger,” said David Beasley, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme in a news release on today 20 July) 2017.
MOSCOW and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 20 2017 (IPS) – The transition to market economy and democracy in the Russian Federation in the early 1990s dramatically increased mortality and shortened life expectancy. The steep upsurge in mortality and the decline in life expectancy in Russia are the largest ever recorded anywhere in peacetime in the absence of catastrophes such as war, plague or famine.
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The Russian mortality crisis underscores the impact of stress on life expectancy. Credit: Alexey Yakushechkin/IPS
John Scales Avery, author of this book: We Need Their Voices Today! has generously granted Human Wrongs Watch permission to publish it in a series of chapters. This is Chapter 11: John Stuart Mill.The others will follow successively.
Figure 11.1: John Stuart Mill and his stepdaughter Helen Taylor, with whom he worked for fteen years after the death of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mills (Wikipedia).
He was not allowed to have a childhood
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) showed his genius at an early age, and his father, the Utilitarian philosopher and political economist James Mill, immediately began to groom him to replace Jeremy Bentham as the leader of the Utilitarian movement.
From the age of 3 onwards, Mill was deliberately kept away from children of his own age and made to spend all his waking hours in study.
Play was not allowed, since it would break the habit of continual diligence.
John Scales Avery, author of this book: We Need Their Voices Today! has generously granted Human Wrongs Watch permission to publish it in a series of chapters. This is Chapter 10: Robert Owen.The others will follow successively.
Figure 10.1: Robert Owen (public domain).
A pioneer of social reform
During the early phases of the Industrial Revolution in England, the workers suffered greatly.
Enormous fortunes were made by mill and mine owners, while workers, including young children, were paid starvation wages for cruelly long working days.
However, trade unions, child labor laws, and the gradual acceptance of birth control finally produced a more even distribution of the benefits of industrialization.
Renewed fighting in the Central African Republic (CAR) is increasingly targeting children, while there are concerns that the humanitarian needs in the country could escalate to levels not seen since the crisis four years ago, United Nations humanitarian officials on 18 July 2017 said.*
A commander of the anti-Balaka militia collects weapons handed in by children released by the group during a release ceremony in in Bambari in the Central African Republic. Photo: UNICEF/ Le Du
ROME, Jul 18 2017 (IPS) – While the business sector jumps for joy as the number of tourists grew in 2016 for the seventh consecutive year to reach 1.2 billion, and as the first four months of 2017 have registered 6 per cent increase, the sheer speed, abetted by technology, of an atrocious crime—the sexual exploitation of children in tourism, has, to date, out-paced all attempts to put an end to it.
In fact, failure of collective action and a chronic lack of robust data constitute the main challenges to eliminate this crime, underlines the Global Study “Offenders on the Move,” which is the largest pool of information on the issue to date.
As the world marks Nelson Mandela International Day, United Nations officials and UN Peace Ambassador Stevie Wonder on 18 July 2016 paid tribute to the South African activist and peacemaker’s tireless efforts to end intolerance and injustice, calling on the international community to follow his guiding example in efforts to build a better world for all.
Nelson Mandela, then Deputy President of the African National Congress of South Africa, raises his fist in the air while addressing the Special Committee Against Apartheid in the General Assembly Hall. UN Photo/P. Sudhakaran
“Nelson Mandela International Day is an opportunity to reflect on the life and work of a legend who embodied the highest values of the United Nations,” said UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson at a meeting of the General Assembly at UN Headquarters in New York to mark the Day, which is observed annually on 18 July.
ROME, Jul 19 2017 (IPS) – Poor rains across East Africa have worsened hunger and left crops scorched, pastures dry and thousands of livestock dead, the United Nations food and agriculture agency has warned in a new alert.
Herders collect water with camels at one of the few remaining water points in drought-affected Bandarero village, Moyale County, Kenya. Credit: Rita Maingi/ OCHA
The most affected areas, which received less than half of their normal seasonal rainfall, are central and southern Somalia, South-Eastern Ethiopia, northern and eastern Kenya, northern Tanzania and north-eastern and South-Western Uganda, according to a new alert by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
ROME, Jul 17 2017 (IPS) – Every single day, print and online media and TV broadcasters show images and footage of migrants and refugees adrift, salvage teams rescuing their corpses–alive or dead, from fragile boats that are often deliberately sunk by human traffickers near the coasts of a given country. Their dramas are counted –and told– quasi exclusively in cold figures.
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Every now and then a reporter talks to a couple of them or interviews some of the tens of humanitarian organisations and groups, mostly to get information about their life conditions in the numerous so called “reception centres” that are often considered rather as “detention centres” installed on both shores of the Mediterranean sea.
9 July 2017 (RT)* — There is a certain irony to the crisis that ails the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), now that Qatar has been labelled a pariah by Saudi Arabia. Terror aside, this stand-off has potential to reshape the region into a completely new geopolitical entity.
How fast yesterday’s allies become today’s enemies, and those we long held as foes sit together as reliable partners in a time of crisis. I don’t think that many political analysts can claim to have predicted Saudi Arabia’s fall from grace. Yet the writing was on the wall for all to see. Crude, pragmatic and as inevitable as man’s greed before the alluring calls of power.
