'Unseen' News and Views
So far, 650 million women alive today were married as children
Ending child marriage and teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone | UNICEF Sierra Leone/2017
Yet another inhumane practice to be added to the already reported Born Complete, Don’t Mutilate Them! and Robert J. Burrowes’ Humanity’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ – Starving, enslaving, raping, torturing and killing our children.
Now it is about child-girls forced to be married before the age of 18.
From Britain to Hungary to Italy, the far right is on the rise. openDemocracy investigations over the past year have revealed the vital role of US Christian conservatives.
.Some of us have wondered, “Are people today too disconnected and frantic to calm down in order to solve global challenges together? Are we so polarized and self-absorbed that we cannot stop judging one another or insisting on our partisan ways?”
In Kabul, our thoughts and feelings are diverse, complicated and flawed, so we centre our three dreams on relationships.
Since 4 July, heavy monsoon rains and wind have pounded the refugee camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, with deaths, displacement and major damage following in their wake, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday [12 July 2019].
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“Those in the most vulnerable living situations have been relocated to safer, newly developed land in the camps”, WFP Spokesperson Herve Verhoosel told the regular news briefing in Geneva, noting that 5,600 people had been displaced.
An overloaded boat of refugees and migrants trying to reach Europe as seen from the deck of the Italian Coastguard ship, the San Giorgio, during a Mediterranean patrol in 2014. © UNHCR/Alfredo D’Amato
As a priority we ask that 5,600 refugees and migrants currently held in centres across Libya be freed in an orderly manner and their protection guaranteed, or evacuated to other countries from where accelerated resettlement is needed.
The Great Transition Initiative* — We have entered the Planetary Phase of Civilization. Strands of interdependence are weaving humanity and Earth into a single community of fate—the overarching proto-country herein christened Earthland.
A global scenario pioneer charts a path to an organic planetary civilization, a vision that opens before us as both possibility and exigency in an interdependent and dangerous century.
In the unsettled twenty-first century, the drama of social evolution will play out on a world stage with the perils many and dark premonitions all too plausible.
Still, a Great Transition to a planetary civilization of enriched lives and a healthy planet remains possible.
But how? What forms of collective action and consciousness can redirect us toward such a future? Who will lead the charge? What might such a world look like?
Journey to Earthland offers answers. It clarifies the world-historical challenge; explains the critical role of a global citizens movement in advancing social transformation; and paints a picture of the kind of flourishing civilization that might lie on the other side of a Great Transition.
Dr Natalia Kanem is Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA)
– Every year on World Population Day (July 11), UNFPA receives queries from journalists about the total number of people around the world. Numbers are indeed important because they help governments develop policies that respond to evolving needs for services such as education and health.
While global population is currently around 7.7 billion, what is perhaps more important than the numbers is the bigger story they tell–a story about sex: who has it, when they have it and under what circumstances. It is also a story about agency.
Maiduguri, 12 July 2019 (IOM)* – In a bid to better respond to trafficking in persons in Borno State, north-east Nigeria, where 7.1 million people need humanitarian assistance, twenty organizations are joining forces in a new Anti-Trafficking Task Force (ATTF) in humanitarian action.
At the Bakassi IDP Camp in Maiduguri, staff and community members attend a stage play about human trafficking. Photo: IOM/Paulina Odame
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), jointly with Heartland Alliance International and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) launched the Task Force on 9 July in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno.
Today’s Political World at a Glance
Global politics is overwhelmingly becoming robotic when question of safeguard of the mankind comes up.
Global political leaders are fast becoming actors on stage – issuing abstract statements of outrage and phony sense of grief when thousands and millions of human lives are constantly bombarded by the weapons they manufacture and sell to crush the human soul and to support the war economies.
The UNO and its Secretary General and the UN Security Council – all are just debating clubs engaged in time killing exercises to deceive the mankind and to betray the ideals of the Charter to “safeguard the humanity from the scourge of wars.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 
