The Human Consciousness Now...Our World in the Midst of Becoming...to What? Observe, contemplate Now.
Women receive food rations at a food distribution site in Herat, Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF/Sayed Bidel
- Recent visits to Afghanistan by senior-led UN delegations underscore the urgency to protect the rights of women and girls, including their access to humanitarian aid and their right to work.
The first delegation was led by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, who called for the Taliban to reverse its decisions that have limited womenâs and girlsâ rights.
The delegation, led on behalf of the Secretary-General, also included senior leaders from the UN; Executive Director of UN-Women, Sima Bahous; and the Assistant Secretary-General of the Department of Political, Peacebuilding Affairs, and Peace Operations, Khaled Khiari.
The delegation completed a four-day visit to Afghanistan to appraise the current situation and to engage with Taliban authorities. This visit followed the recent decree by the Taliban to ban women from working in national and international non-governmental organizations. This is among the latest in a series of decrees that have further stripped women and girls of the rights and means to actively participate in society.
In this mission, Mohammed and Bahous met with affected communities, humanitarian actors, and civil society in the cities of Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat.
âMy message was very clear: while we recognize the important exemptions made, these restrictions present Afghan women and girls with a future that confines them in their own homes, violating their rights and depriving the communities of their services,â Mohammed said.
Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed called for the Taliban to reverse its decisions that have limited womenâs and girlsâ rights. CREDIT: UN
Mohammed later told Al-Jazeera that some work had been resumed by three NGOs in Afghanistan, particularly in the health sector. âI think thatâs because the international community, and particularly the partners who are funding this, were able to show the implications and the impact of woman-to-woman services, particularly childbirth,â she said.
âWhat is happening in Afghanistan is a grave womenâs rights crisis and is a wake-up call for the international community,â Bahous said. âIt shows how quickly decades of progress on womenâs rights can be reversed in a matter of days. UN-Women stands with all Afghan women and girls and will continue to amplify their voices to regain all their rights.â
Ãquinoxe TV is running a YouTube campaign for justice for Martinez Zogo counting the hours since his brutal murder. Credit: YouTube
- The new year brought bad news for press freedom on the African continent with the brutal murder of one journalist and the suspicious death of another.
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Africa program head Angela Quintal said that to start the year with the death of at least two top journalists in one week was very bad news and is hopefully not an ominous sign for the year ahead.
âThe brutal murder of Cameroonian journalist Martinez Zogo who was abducted, tortured, and killed in the capital, Yaounde, and the suspicious death in a road accident of John Williams Ntwali, the independent and outspoken Rwandan journalist in Kigali, has left the media community reeling, I feel punch-drunk, and itâs only the start of the year,â said Quintal.
The CPJ has asked for a full investigation of journalist John Williams Ntwaliâs death in Kigali. Ntwali was an outspoken journalist who exposed human rights abuses in Rwanda and spoke out about threats to his life. Credit: CPJ/Screenshot: YouTube/Al-Jazeera
The African Editors Forum (TAEF) also expressed shock, anger, and outrage over these deaths and planned to make representations to the governments of Rwanda and Cameroon to âdemand full public reports on the circumstances leading to their deaths.â
Unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents. In 2022 alone, CPJ documented at least six journalists killed in sub-Saharan Africa and confirmed that four of them, Ahmed Mohamed Shukur and Mohamed Isse Hassan in Somalia and Evariste Djailoramdji and Narcisse Oredje in Chad, were killed in connection to their work.
âIn these four cases, the journalists were killed either on dangerous assignments or crossfire in relation to their work. We continue to investigate the death in Kenya of Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif and Jean Saint-Clair Maka Gbossokotto in the Central African Republic to determine whether their deaths are in connection to their journalism,â Quintal said.
Quintal said Somalia continues to top CPJâs Global Impunity Index as the worst country where âthe killers of journalists invariably walk free, and there is no accountability or justice for their deaths.â
In 2022, six journalists were killed in connection to their work: Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled and Jamal Farah Adan in Somalia, David Beriain and Roberto Fraile in Burkina Faso, Joel Mumbere Musavuli in DRC, and Sisay Fida in Ethiopia. This is the same number of journalists killed in 2021.
The Ukrainian Carpathians. Credit: Muhlynin/Shutterstock
- Next month (February 24) will mark one year since Russia began its full-scale war on Ukraine. This large-scale land invasion has had repercussions across the geopolitical, humanitarian, financial, and even food and energy domains. It has also had devastating ecological impacts.
Measurable environmental damageâvalued by Ukrainian authorities at an estimated US$46 billion and still risingâincludes direct war damage to air, forests, soil and water; remnants and pollution from the use of weapons and military equipment; and contamination from the shelling of thousands of facilities holding toxic and hazardous materials.
The longer-term costs for Ukraine with regard to lost ecosystem services are much harder to quantify. On top of this, the war effort has directed government attention and resources away from environmental governance and climate action, posing additional risks for national, regional and global sustainable development.
However, as this SIPRI Topical Backgrounder sets out, Ukrainian authorities, civil society and international partners are responding vigorously to these challenges, not only by drawing attention to the ecological impacts of the war but also by recording and measuring those impacts, pursuing accountability and restitution, and laying the groundwork for a green reconstruction.
Deforestation, along with fires, reduces the region's forests, expands the agricultural frontier, shrinks the habitat of indigenous peoples and wildlife, destroys water sources, and brings more diseases to populated areas. CREDIT: Serfor Peru
- The environmental priority for South America in 2023 can be summed up in the management of its terrestrial and marine protected areas, together with the challenges of the extractivist economy and the transition to a green economy with priority attention to the most vulnerable populations.
This management âmust be effective, participatory, and based on environmental and climate justice, with protection for the environment and environmental and indigenous activists,â biologist Vilisa Morón, president of the Venezuelan Ecology Society, told IPS.
Latin America and the Caribbean is home to almost half of the world’s biodiversity and 60 percent of terrestrial life, and has more than 8.8 million square kilometers of protected areas, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
It is thus the most protected region in the world, with the combined protected area greater than the total area of ââBrazil or the sum of the territories of Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Paraguay, from largest to smallest. The leaders in percentage of protected territory are the French overseas departments and Venezuela.
H.E. Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera is President of Malawi
Vainesi, a former trachoma trichiasis patient, cheers in celebration knowing that trachoma has been eliminated in Malawi. Vainesi had suffered with the pain caused by trachoma for 10 years before a local disability mobiliser encouraged her to go to the hospital for treatment.
- âI was blind, but now I see.â This is what Vainesi, from Salima District in Central Malawi, said after surgery to treat trachoma. A mother of three, Vainesi had been unable to work or provide for her family once the disease began to affect her eyesight.
Credit: ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR)
- Parliamentarians worldwide face increasing human rights violations and a greater risk of reprisal simply for exercising their mandate or expressing their ideas and opinions.
Asia follows the same trend according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). It is the second most dangerous region for MPs, with the number of cases recorded by the IPU increasing every year.
US M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank Credit: Military.com
- After much reluctance, the US and its Western allies last week agreed to provide Ukraine with some of the worldâs most sophisticated battle tanks: American-made Abrams, German-made Leopards and British-made Challengers.
But the question remains as to whether these weapons will make a decisive difference to Ukrainian armed forces fighting a relentless battle with one of the worldâs major military and nuclear powers.