Human Wrongs Watch
(UN News)* — Thousands of Eritrean refugees sheltering at a camp in the Ethiopian Afar region, have fled following a deadly attack on the facility earlier this month, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on 18 February 2022.
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'Unseen' News and Views
(UN News)* — Thousands of Eritrean refugees sheltering at a camp in the Ethiopian Afar region, have fled following a deadly attack on the facility earlier this month, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on 18 February 2022.
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(UN News)* — The consequences of colonialism are “still being felt to this day”, Chef de Cabinet Courtenay Rattray told the Special Committee on Decolonization on Friday [18 February 2022].

“Global cooperation is central to addressing its impacts”, he underscored, urging the Committee, also known as C-24, to “commit to making 2022 a year of recovery for everyone”.
– 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”.
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(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.

The Republican Party Has Become Irresponsible

John Scales Avery
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.
(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.

Russia does not want to invade Ukraine

John Scales Avery
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.
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.
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”.
There is an old expression that “the chickens have come home to roost.” The wars that the American Empire waged abroad have come to the continental USA. For more than a century the US has waged war, overtly or covertly throughout Latin America.
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And in recent decades throughout the Middle East. Not to mention its so-called Cold Wars with Russia and now China. But now the invasion of the Capitol one year ago has signaled the beginning of a second civil war at home.
This new, second civil war is now being widely recognized in the media. See, for example, the article in the Guardian : “The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it.”