Children in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have the highest rates of child deaths in the world, a new Unicef report documents, yet much progress has been made globally to reduce child mortality since 1990. Here, a boy in Dhaka, Bangladesh. FRANCISCO MAGALLON
SAADA, YEMEN — Four Saudi warplanes launched airstrikes against the UNICEF-funded al Asayed Water Network, destroying water pumps, an electric generator, a nearby solar energy system, and a guard room. Much of the facility was destroyed in the attack, leaving thousands of residents of the Al Safra district of Yemen’s Saada governorate, including internally displaced families, without clean drinking water.
Mohammed Kamel — an engineer with the National Foundation which operated the Water Network — said in a statement to MintPress:
After a “shameful and unacceptable” vote by the U.S. Senate last week to kill a bill that would have halted the nation’s military support for a Saudi-led war in Yemen, the U.N. agency for children is warning about the likelihood of another deadly cholera outbreak.
I am constantly amazed in this day and age where Americans have a President who touts anything he doesn’t agree with as “fake news” that is the moment that people grow cynical of the term. Despite Donald Trump’s ability to shun astute critique of his politics, the term does carry currency in terms of how true or false news stories are. But it is not just American media that is stuck within this paradigm of readers never knowing what is or is not true, the British who have a n
The latest Oxfam sex abuse scandal does not exist in a vacuum. It is not the first time that aid groups have been accused of sexual misconduct towards the very people the entities purport to protect, and without significant change, it will not be the last time that such allegations emerge. The current debacle began with the revelation of sexual abuses by Oxfam’s Country Director in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake devastated the island nation.
GHOUTA, SYRIA — On February 20, from Amman, Jordan, UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Geert Cappelaere, issued a statement of “outrage” titled: “The war on children in Syria: Reports of mass casualties among children in Eastern Ghouta and Damascus.”
‘A Fantastic Foreign Secretary’? William Hague Leaves Office
by Ian Sinclair
Huffington Post
21 July 2014
You’ll have heard, of course, of the maxim “Don’t speak ill of the dead”. However, you are probably less familiar with the media’s recent modification to this: “Don’t speak ill of the recently departed Foreign Secretary”.
Syrian children buy vegetables at the town of Madaya in the Damascus countryside, Syria, May 18, 2017. (AP/Hassan Ammar)
The U.N. children’s agency warned Friday that a critical funding shortfall is threatening aid to 9 million Syrian children, both in their country and among the refugees in neighboring states.
The notion of a colonist as cannibal in Haiti is widespread. This idea, called manje moun (eating people), could hardly qualify as superstition, given the experience of colonialism. It is daunting to find a better description for those who grab control of water and food, and then calculate the minimum caloric intake a population needs so that a maximum of labor may be extracted from its emaciated and zombified workers without killing them. The neo-colonists may call themselves humanitarians, but their victims know exactly what they are.
There is no shortage of water in Haiti. Yet, everywhere on the island, Haitians travel for miles to get water, pay dearly for it if they can find it, and sometimes die on their journey to collect it, like so many antelopes snatched by predators on their way to drink. How does a thing like that happen in a country that gets reliably drenched with more than 50 inches (130 cm) of naturally distilled rainwater per year?
