'Unseen' News and Views
(UN News)* — At least 100 children in Gaza have died from malnutrition and hunger, prompting humanitarians to underscore the need to speed up medical evacuations from the enclave while also allowing more food to enter.
People in Haiti are living through “hell on earth,” according to William O’Neill, the UN’s designated expert on human rights in Haiti.
Armed gangs – predominantly in the capital Port-au-Prince – are parasitically extracting financial resources from the population and perpetrating horrific acts of violence, he says – but they’re just one cog in a larger cycle of impunity, corruption and violence.
Following the release of the most recent report on human rights in Haiti, UN News’ Naima Sawaya spoke to Mr. O’Neill about whether a path forward to peace even exists. She began by asking if he had ever met a gang leader.
Cuts to a programme that maintained communal facilities for refugees in Cox’s Bazar have meant lost income for families and a more precarious environment in the camps.
Monsoon rains bring flooding to Nayapara refugee camp in Teknaf, eastern Bangladesh, in July 2021. © UNHCR/Amos Halder
(UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)* — In the hilly terrain of Cox’s Bazar, life for over 1 million Rohingya refugees in the world’s largest and most densely populated refugee camp is always a struggle, but monsoon season brings fresh challenges.
Surrounded by burlap bags and a sea of sand, eight-year-old Sondos describes fleeing Sudan’s war-besieged city of El Fasher with her family, after weeks surviving on only millet.
“Hunger forced us to leave,” said the little girl, speaking from Tawila displacement camp, roughly 75 kilometres away. “Only hunger and bombs,” she added of the shells raining down on North Darfur’s capital.
Today, hundreds of thousands of people still trapped in El Fasher face starvation, as the city remains cut off from World Food Programme (WFP) and other humanitarian assistance.
In Sudan, women-led households are three times more likely to deal with serious food insecurity compared to male-led households. Credit: UN Women Sudan
New findings from UN-Women reveal that female-headed households (FHHs) are three times more likely to be food insecure than ones led by men.
(UN News)* — The UN has expressed deep alarm over a large-scale assault by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia on El Fasher, the government-held capital of Sudan’s North Darfur State, and the nearby Abu Shouk displacement camp, which has been under siege since April 2024.
(UN News)* — UN-mandated independent investigators have uncovered “systematic torture” in Myanmar’s military-run detention facilities – including beatings, electric shocks, strangulations and gang rape – a pattern of atrocities which is intensifying across the country.
Plastic garbage is offloaded from a fishing boat on the east coast of China. Credit: UNEP/Justin Jin
– The future plastics treaty is being sold as potentially an environmental breakthrough. But in its current form during this week’s negotiations, it contains a dangerous flaw that must be addressed before the final text is agreed — or it could undercut the world’s most widely ratified health treaty, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), and hand the tobacco industry the tools to expand its market under the banner of environmental action.
– The accumulation of still growing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in an increasingly unequal world is accelerating planetary heating. It is also worsening disparities, especially between the rich and others, both nationally and internationally.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Unequal emissions
In our grossly unequal world, international disparities account for two-thirds of overall income inequalities.
National income aggregates and averages can mislead by obscuring significant disparities within countries.
The World Inequality Report argues that GHG emission disparities are mainly due to inequalities within countries.
Meanwhile, GHG emissions continue to grow as their accumulation accelerates planetary heating.
Emissions disparities within nations now account for almost two-thirds of worldwide emissions inequality, nearly doubling from slightly over a third in 1990.
The bottom halves of rich country populations are already at – or close to – the 2030 per capita carbon dioxide equivalent emission targets set by their governments. Yet North America’s wealthiest 10% or decile are the world’s biggest GHG emitters.
The sheer, unrelenting horror unfolding in Gaza is not unique in its scale of human suffering. Sudan has endured catastrophic famine for over a year, reaching the same “fifth stage of starvation” Gaza now tragically enters.
Every second of august, under the GENOCOST celebration , the Congolese community and its allies around the world come together to honor the memory of the victims of the Congolese genocide.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 