Afghanistan, Brazil, Ethiopia.

Today's three stories you should know.

Feb 12, 2022

Afghanistan

In a move that many are calling stunning in its callousness, US President Joe Biden today ordered that half of the Afghan central bank’s funds, which are held in the US, be handed over to the families of 9/11 victims. As mentioned in several previous editions of Proximities, 23 million of Afghanistan’s 40 million population are at risk of starvation, according to the World Food Programme. The crisis, experts say, has largely been caused by the central bank funds and aid money from the World Bank being withheld when the Taliban took power. “The people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11; that is an undeniable fact,” Bilal Askaryar, an Afghan-American activist, told Al Jazeera. “What Biden is proposing is not justice for 9/11 families, it is theft of public funds from an impoverished nation already on the brink of famine and starvation brought on by the United States’ disastrous withdrawal.”

Brazil

The number of trees felled in the Brazilian Amazon was five times larger in January of this year than in January of 2021, and the highest total since deforestation started being recorded via satellite in 2015. Deforestation has surged under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro who has prioritized opening the forest to industry.

Ethiopia

Three senior leaders of the Oromo Liberation Front, an opposition group in Ethiopia, have gone on hunger strike, accusing prison authorities of holding them in poor conditions. The Ethiopian government recently released a slew of opposition politicians but OLF members were not among them. As regular Proximities readers know, Ethiopia has been struggling through a horrific war for more than a year.