'Unseen' News and Views
8 December 2020 – Writer Neil Gaiman launches animated version of ‘What You Need to Be Warm’ to raise life-saving funds for Syrian refugees left out in the cold.
A submission for the Neil Gaiman #DrawForRefugees initiative. © UNHCR/Christina Clemis
(Stockholm) — Sales of arms and military services by the sector’s largest 25 companies totalled US$361 billion in 2019, 8.5 per cent more than in 2018. The largest companies have a geographically diverse international presence. This is according to new data released on 7 December 2020 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
“The rights and needs of women and adolescent girls in emergencies are often overlooked, and COVID-19 has made matters worse, with rising intimate partner violence, sexual violence and child marriage”, said Natalia Kanem, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).
UNITED NATIONS, New York (UNFPA)* – A new data dashboard launched by UNFPA on 2 December 2020 shows that young women face the greatest risk of intimate partner violence. Yet partner violence is rampant around the world, and older women are not immune, the new tool reveals.
Mass Extinctions Due to Human Activities
John Scales Avery
According to a recent United Nations report, more than a million species of plants and animals are currently threatened with extinction because of human activities. Rates of extinction today are as much as 1,000 times greater than the normal background rate.
As the greenhouse gas emissions of human society push the earth towards catastrophic climate change, rates of extinction in the biosphere will certainly become higher.
Are Humans Threatened with Extinction?
What about our own species? Are we too threatened with extinction?
There are certainly several threatened catastrophes that might greatly reduce the global population of humans. In a thermonuclear war, followed by nuclear winter, a large part of the world’s population might perish.
Nairobi/Seattle (UNEP)* – A special issue of the Production Gap Report – from leading research organizations and the UN – finds that the COVID-19 recovery marks a potential turning point, where countries must change course to avoid locking in levels of coal, oil, and gas production far higher than consistent with a 1.5°C limit.
UN Security Council in session. Credit: United Nations
Simplifying his argument in more realistic terms, he said: “When two small powers have a dispute, the dispute disappears. When a great power and a small power are in conflict, the small power disappears. And when two great powers have a dispute, the United Nations disappears.”
And more appropriately, it is the UN Security Council (UNSC) that vanishes into oblivion, particularly when big powers clash, warranting a ceasefire, not in some distant military conflict, but inside the UNSC chamber itself.
There is a vast literature on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who died on this date, November 22, 1963. I have contributed my small share to such writing in an effort to tell the truth, honor him, and emphasize its profound importance in understanding the history of the last fifty-seven years, but more importantly, what is happening in the U.S.A. today.
In other words, to understand it in its most gut-wrenching reality: that the American national security state will obliterate any president that dares to buck its imperial war-making machine. It is a lesson not lost on all presidents since Kennedy.
Unless one is a government disinformation agent or is unaware of the enormous documentary evidence, one knows that it was the U.S. national security state, led by the CIA, that carried out JFK’s murder.
4 December 2020 (openDemocracy)* — The crunching sound of bulldozers came as a death rattle for men working deep in a gold mine in eastern Zimbabwe. On 15 November, contractors’ bulldozers converged on the mine on the outskirts of Mutare. They planned to “reclaim” it from the local community, who had been mining there independently with low-tech tools and without the backing of a company (known as artisanal or small-scale mining). However, the tonnes of soil and rock poured down the mineshaft to block up its entrances created a living grave for the men still at work underground.
4 December 2020 (Wall Street International)* — All economies are fundamentally based on the exploitation of the Earth and its resources, which are not infinite.
The most important oil companies constitute less and less transparent and more powerful economies (the case of Enrico Mattei teaches), more powerful than the States in which they are active.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 