Half the population of war-torn Yemen – 14 million people – are facing “pre-famine conditions”, the UN has warned.
Humanitarian co-ordinator Mark Lowcock said survey work showed the number entirely reliant on aid for survival was three million higher than thought.
There was a clear danger of a famine “much bigger than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives”, he added.
Medics say the number of deaths linked to food-related factors is rising.
Yemen has been devastated by a conflict that escalated in 2015, when a Saudi-led coalition intervened after the rebel Houthi movement seized control of much of the west of the country and forced President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to flee abroad.
At least 6,660 civilians have been killed and 10,560 injured in the war, according to the UN. The fighting and a partial blockade by the coalition have also left 22 million people in need of humanitarian aid, created the world’s largest food security emergency, and led to a cholera outbreak that has affected 1.1 million people.
A famine is declared when three thresholds of food insecurity, acute malnutrition and mortality are together all breached. The three criteria are:
At least one in five households faces an extreme lack of food
More than 30% of children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition
At least two people out of every 10,000 are dying every day
Mr Lowcock said assessments conducted a year ago, which are currently being repeated, had found that in 107 of Yemen’s 333 districts the first two thresholds were either already exceeded or dangerously close.
The third threshold about the number of deaths was more difficult to confirm.
He explained that many deaths were hidden because only half of Yemen’s health facilities were functioning, and many Yemenis were too poor to access the ones that were open. Very few families report deaths at home.
The UN warned of famine in Yemen last year, but Mr Lowcock said the situation was “now much graver” for two reasons.
“Firstly, because of the sheer number of people at risk,” he said. “Our revised assessment… is that the total number of people facing pre-famine conditions, meaning they are entirely reliant on external aid for survival, could soon reach not 11 million but 14 million.”
“And secondly, beyond the sheer numbers, while millions of people have been surviving on emergency food assistance for years, the help they get is enough merely to survive. Not to thrive,” he added.
“The toll is unbearably high. The immune systems of millions of people on survival support for years on end are now are literally collapsing, making them – especially children and the elderly – more likely to succumb to malnutrition, cholera and other diseases.”
Mr Lowcock said the humanitarian crisis had been exacerbated by an economic crisis in Yemen and continued fighting around the rebel-held Red Sea port of Hudaydah, through which the country has traditionally imported 90% of its food.
He appealed for a cessation of hostilities around all infrastructure and facilities on which the aid operation relied; protection of the supply of food and essential goods; a larger injection of foreign exchange into the economy; increased funding for the humanitarian operation; and for all parties to engage in peace talks.
This is his Jokers first day on the job, and he’s being such a good boy.
Donald W. Cook is a Los Angeles attorney with decades of experience bringing lawsuits over police dog bites — and mostly losing. He blames what he calls “The Rin Tin Tin Effect” — juries think of police dogs as noble, and have trouble visualizing how violent they can be during an arrest.
“[Police] use terms like ‘apprehend’ and ‘restrain,’ to try to portray it as a very antiseptic event,” Cook says. “But you look at the video and the dog is chewing away on his leg and mutilating him.”
Cook says the proliferation of smart phones and body cameras is capturing a reality that used to be lost on juries. “If it’s a good video,” he says, “it makes a case much easier to prevail on.”
The new generation of videos is capturing scenes of K9 arrests that are bloodier and more violent than imagined by the public. An NPR examination of police videos shows some officers using biting dogs against people who show minimal threat to officers, and a degree of violence that would be unacceptable if inflicted directly by the officers.
…
In fact, in many videos, the release of a dog appears to escalate the violence of an arrest.
“You just look at the dog as the source of pain and you do everything you can to address that pain,” says Seth Stoughton. He’s a former police officer, now an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force. “Those shouted commands — you’ll deal with that later, when the pain stops.”
And yet suspects who kick and try to shake the dog off are often accused of resisting arrest.
i don’t care what this dog in particular is being trained to do. furthering the idea that police dogs are somehow cute or good directly contributes to injustice and the perceived acceptability of police violence
My aunt rescues and rehabilitates german shepherds, and the vast majority are failed police dogs. The rehab process for these dogs is intense. They are trained to be hyper vigilant and to resort to violence. They are often is worse condition than formerly abused animals.
I spent a summer training one of these balls of anxiety. She was too fast and strong for my aunt to train her, so I did it. The biggest hurdle was getting her out of the mindset that biting someone gets her a treat. I had to let her bite my arm, forcible break the hold, and kennel her all without giving her a response because these dogs are trained to equate someone screaming at them as Go Time.
By letting her attack me and showing her that I was stronger than her and then not allowing her to play with the other dogs was what finally got her to stop attacking whenever she heard a loud noise or was surprised or just felt like it.
She still had to be homed in a gun-free, pet-free, child-free home because of the sheer anxiety she was bred for. These dogs are not cute, they are horribly mistreated.
My mom did the exact opposite of what the person above is talking about, she was involved in training the dogs not to restrain themselves when attacking. She was 18 – 21 and they had her wear this thick glove and then provoke the dogs onto biting her arm. She said they didn’t naturally want to be very aggressive towards a 100 pound, 5’3" girl, which is the size my mother was at the time. She has scars on her arm from getting time to bite so hard it broke the protective gloves.
I remember thinking that was cool as a kid. Now I just find it horrifying that they were teaching dogs to use brutal force against…. children. My mother may have been a young adult at the time but most people are 100 pounds and 5’3" as teenagers, not adults
What are short, skinny teens even doing that warrants the use of dogs? Can a grown man with a gun really not subdue someone that size on their own??
It’s animal abuse used to further police brutality
Yeah. This pup isn’t cute, it’s being trained to by exceptionally dangerous. If he fails (and chances are he will) he will be in for a very long recovery. If he ‘passes’ then when he gets older and can no longer work, they will merely euthanize him since rehabilitating him at ten will be too much work.
These dogs are exceedingly dangerous, suffered years of abuse at the hands of their handlers and trainers, and are quite simply not ‘adorable’, even ‘on their first day’ seeing as we know what abuses they are in for. They’re trained to do as much damage as possible, even against people who are no threat to begin with. And if the person tries to fight the dog off, as any person might, the dog is trained to escalate. If the person screams, struggles, or attempts to defend themselves, the dog is trained to escalate.
Read that again. If a person performs any normal human pain-responses in response to being bitten and chewed by a dog, the dog has been trained to do even more damage. In videos they are often forcibly removed from the victim by an officer who is wearing gear to protect them from the dog because they will not stop, and they are too dangerous for the officer to pull them away without heavy protective gear. Without protective gear, the officers are at risk of being mangled by their own dogs because the dog doesn’t care who it is attacking.
Shit i never knew all this or even thought about it 😕
does anyone else constantly get the feeling that you’re running out of time?? and for no reason!! i could be lying in bed in the middle of summer vacation and my mind is like “hurry up!!! before it’s too late!!!” and i’m just like “hurry up and do what?? leave me alone wtf!!!”
Do you ever think about how Jeff Bezos could feed literally more than a million food insecure people while losing an hour’s wage but you have to tell yourself no when you want to buy a coffee but can’t because that’s all your rent money?
when anticommunists tell u that “you havent paid attention to history” or “you need to study history” what theyre really saying is “why wont you take at face value the biased and often reductionist history you were taught by capitalists about why socialism is evil”. when they talk about “studying history” theyre not interested in talking about every coup the cia backed, every terrorist group the us funded in order to “fight communists”, every war that imperialist powers started over profit, or every innocent person killed in those wars. they dont want to talk about the history of violent racism and police brutality, or about every person the us government has tortured, or the history of suppression of leftists and the working class, or how companies fund right wing death squads, they just want to say “the ussr is why communism is bad”
ok since this post made a lot of people who cant stand to see capitalism critiqued in any form mad im going to provide sources for all the shit im talking about.
if you want to tell leftists they need to study history but you dont want to look at any of the crimes of capital, or the crimes committed in upholding capitalism then you dont give a shit about studying history. if you can recognize that gulags were fucked up and horrible, as you should, you cant turn a blind eye on the american prison system where people are being forced to work for almost no pay. so the question is do you actually care about studying history or do you just want to deflect off every critique of capitalism