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All of us have scoffed at scenes from films when the characters throw a coin in the well/fountain and make a wish because we all know it's a load of BS. Well, turns out it happens in real life too and the characters are actually world leaders.

Do you know the famous Trevi Fountain in Italy's Rome? Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with several other world leaders, were at the largest Baroque fountain in the Italian city on Sunday for the G20 summit.

Loved by tourists from all over the world, the fountain is a sight of beauty.

"Joined the @g20org leaders at Rome''s beautiful Trevi Fountain," Prime Minister Modi tweeted a group photo with the others.

Joined the @g20org leaders at Rome's beautiful Trevi Fountain. pic.twitter.com/cKDjrKmbOI
- Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) October 31, 2021

"#G20 Heads of Delegation start the 2nd day of the #G20RomeSummit with a walk to a symbolic place of the city: Trevi Fountain, one of the world's most beautiful fountains and famous for the traditional coin toss. #G20Italy," G20 Italy tweeted on Sunday.

#G20 Heads of Delegation start the 2nd day of the #G20RomeSummit with a walk to a symbolic place of the city: Trevi Fountain, one of the world's most beautiful fountains and famous for the traditional coin toss. #G20Italy

📽️Watch live: https://t.co/r9JkpLckyu pic.twitter.com/i5PLDD0PeY
- G20 Italy (@g20org) October 31, 2021

The group of leaders threw coins from over their shoulders into the fountain, showed a video released by the G20 Italy. What's the myth? It is believed that if you throw a coin over your shoulder into the fountain water, you will surely return to Rome.

One can say that the world leaders were just carrying out a tradition but do we need this right now, or affirmative action when it comes to the climate crisis? Our bet is on the latter.

Needless to say that this shenanigans backfired and people are not happy.

Why are they tossing a coin for luck when they're well within their powers to tackle the issue?!

This is madness. https://t.co/7r9y46eCx5
- Kelechi (@kelechnekoff) November 1, 2021

Elon Musk: "List out your plan to fight climate change and I'll sell all of my Tesla shares to fund it"

The plan: https://t.co/FHEfB4NAib
- Alex Cohen (@anothercohen) November 1, 2021

The Indian Prime Minister also attended a session on Sustainable Development and an event on "Supply Chain Resilience".

The Trevi fountain is 26.3 metres high and 49.15 metres wide. It is the largest Baroque fountain in the city, and of course, one of the most famous ones in the world.

Since last year, Italy has been holding the presidency of the G20, which is a prominent global forum that brings together the world's major economies. The members of G20 make up for more than 80 percent of the global GDP, 75 percent of global trade and 60 percent of the population of the world. It has been active since 1999.

This year, the summit is focused on the topic, "People, Planet, Prosperity".

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G20 Leaders Tossing Coin For 'Good Luck' To Fight Climate Emergency, Sadly It Is Our Best Hope

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All of us have scoffed at scenes from films when the characters throw a coin in the well/fountain and make a wish because we all know it's a load of BS. Well, turns out it happens in real life too and the characters are actually world leaders.

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The effects of the coronavirus pandemic could lead to a rise in people trafficking, the Salvation Army fears.

In its new report - released on Anti Slavery Day 2021 - it also says the number of people rescued from modern slavery after being forced into crime rose by 62% in the last 12 months.

The rise saw 90 more beds open in safe houses in the first six months of 2021.

One woman in a safe house told the BBC's Woman's Hour she was rescued with the help of a bus driver.

Kathy Betteridge, director of anti-trafficking and modern slavery for The Salvation Army, said: "The perpetrators often target the most vulnerable in our society: those in poverty, people who are homeless, those with mental health problems and those with addictions.

"And we fear that the economic fallout from the pandemic will put even more people at risk of falling prey to modern slavery."

She added that despite the number rescued this year, "many more" are "still trapped in slavery, unable to escape".

The charity manages the government's specialist support service for survivors of modern slavery. It runs a referral line for those needing somewhere to stay immediately having escaped from where they were being held.

Human trafficking is just one type of modern slavery - women and are smuggled in against their will and they are held in appalling accommodation, with no little or no pay. They often work in plain sight at beauty salons and restaurants, as housekeepers or in domestic service, in agriculture or on cannabis farms.

Sara*, who is in her 20s, was studying English and Russian at university when she met a man who later trafficked her to the UK.

"I tried to love someone," she told BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. "I trusted someone and it came to a point that I decided to follow him and to build our life together. But then things went completely wrong. I trusted the wrong person. I believed in the wrong person and that person exploited me."

The man took her to his home country for a short visit, before they travelled to another country - where she was raped by his friends.

"It was very traumatic for me," she said of her ordeal, during the pandemic. "I will never forget what I've been through, but I really wish that I never experienced, and no one in the world will experience, what I've been through."

From there, she said she was forced at gunpoint to go in a lorry to the UK, where she was locked in a room, with the windows covered with bars.

But thanks to her knowledge of English, she managed to get away.

"I ran away and I saw a bus station," she said. "I didn't have any money, nothing."

She asked the bus driver if she could get on board.

"I said to him, 'can I please come? I don't have any money with me but I really need help'. He kindly said 'yeah, please go inside, relax, don't worry about it'.

"I was terrified at the moment, but happy that people were there."

Sara was driven 45 minutes away before being dropped off near a police station, and later picked up by the Salvation Army. She remains in a safe house and has been recognised as a victim of trafficking. The gang that trafficked her is still thought to be at large.

*Sara is not her real name

From July 2020 to June 2021, there were 2,662 people in England and Wales referred to the Salvation Army for help - rising from 2,251 the previous year. Of them, 470 had been made to commit crimes - including drug offences, begging and shoplifting.

The survivors - 61% of whom were men and 39% women - were of 96 different nationalities, with the largest number being Albanian, and the second highest British. There were also 202 Sudanese people, an 87% increase from the previous year - the Salvation Army said this was due to war, oppression and poverty in Sudan.

Many were brought over to the UK by the so-called boyfriend route, where someone falls in love and then are trafficked by their supposed partner. More than half of the women helped are victims of sexual exploitation.

In the 10 years since the Salvation Army has had a role in supporting survivors, it has seen a 595% increase in the numbers they have helped - with 2011 bringing 378 new cases, compared to the new figure of 2,662.

This was, said Major Betteridge, "despite the pandemic, which made it more difficult for people to be rescued and closed down many of the places, like car washes, where people are being exploited".

She urged people to help, saying: "We can all help fight modern slavery by raising the alarm if we are worried that something is wrong."

A Home Office spokesperson said: "Human trafficking has absolutely no place in our society and we are committed to stamping out this abhorrent crime whilst ensuring victims are protected and offenders prosecuted.

"The UK has led the world in protecting victims of modern slavery and through the Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract, delivered by the Salvation Army, we provide specialist support to help people rebuild their lives."

The Salvation Army's confidential referral advice line can be contacted, 24 hours a day, on 0800 808 3733.

More on this story

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Covid pandemic may increase people trafficking says charity

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The effects of the coronavirus pandemic could lead to a rise in people trafficking, the Salvation Army fears. In its new report - released on Anti Slavery Day 2021 - it also says the number of people rescued from modern slavery after being forced into crime rose by 62% in the last 12 months.

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Getty Images

A Hollywood movie producer -- who once won an award from a Christian film festival -- used his production company as a front for a global prostitution ring, New York federal prosecutors said Thursday.

A grand jury indicted Dillon Jordan on charges that he operated the sex business across the United States, and in partnership with a madam in Great Britain, for at least seven years, from 2010 to 2017.

Jordan, whose clients were in New York City among other locations, allegedly laundered the proceeds through the movie company, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Jordan, an award winner for the Kevin Sorbo/Antonio Sabato Jr. religious drama "One Nation Under God," in recent years made a number of films featuring prominent stars. His credits include the 2018 Maggie Gyllenhaal film "The Kindergarten Teacher" and the 2019 Ethan Hawke picture "The Kid."

Jordan was arrested Thursday morning in California on a variety of charges carrying terms of up to 20 years in prison.

His production company was not immediately available to comment.

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Hollywood Movie Producer Ran a Global Prostitution Ring, Feds Allege

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A Hollywood movie producer -- who once won an award from a Christian film festival -- used his production company as a front for a global prostitution ring, New York federal prosecutors said Thursday.

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R&B Singer R. Kelly Found Guilty On All Counts of Racketeering, Sex Trafficking

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A jury found R&B star R. Kelly guilty on Monday on all counts of racketeering and sex trafficking.

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She Lives - A poem about human trafficking

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Learn about the impact of human trafficking in this modern poem, "She Lives." It will help you gain awareness of the issues in our society.

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The Art of Resistance in the Palestinian Struggle Against Israel

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The Art of Resistance in the Palestinian Struggle Against Israel

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The West Bank Wall cuts through families, communities, and commute routes, inflicting a spatial violence and segregation that essentially makes it an apartheid wall, not merely a 'separation barrier.' Though the wall is illegal under international law, according to the International Court of Justice, construction continues today, with only 65% of the projected 712 kilometres completed. In the 17 years since Israel began construction of the apartheid wall, local and international artists have taken to it as a blank canvas on which to paint their politics, illuminating different realities in the process.

Many Palestinian activists object to international artists who come to Palestine for a 'spraycation' - using the wall as their canvas for easy points for progressiveness on social media, while enjoying their privilege of leaving when they're done. Their art, some argue, also normalises the appearance of the wall, mainstreaming instead of highlighting its injustice, as most artists seek to do. On the other hand, work created by Palestinian artists can serve as both radical reminders of resistance and messages of hope for the Palestinian community, especially since the art is on the 'inside' of the wall (the side facing the West Bank).

Because of the populist quality of graffiti, as well as the legal and physical danger posed to artists, much of the work remains unattributed.

A mural of Leila Khaled, the first female member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The photograph of her in a kaffiyeh holding an AK-47 rifle, taken by Eddie Adams, became a symbol of the Palestinian resistance in the 1970s. She was also the first woman to hijack a plane in the late 1960s, and has consequently gone down in history as both a hero and a terrorist. Her mural on the wall, near Bethlehem in the West Bank, is a staunch reminder of both the resistance's past and its contested presence.
Photo credit: Edgardo Olivera.

A mural emulates the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. In October of last year, a photo by photojournalist Mustafa Hassona from the border protests in Gaza also went viral and was compared to the same painting.

In one fell swoop, this association does two things. On one hand, particularly with regards to the now-iconic photo of the shirtless protester holding the flag and a slingshot in a cloud of smoke, it runs the risk of romanticising the struggle into a series of poetic moments. But it also appeals to the very epistemology of a largely apathetic West. By positioning the struggle in the aesthetics of the French Revolution - which provided the foundational beliefs of liberal Europe and America - it appeals to a familiar value system of fighting for 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'

In July 2018, immediately before Ahed Tamimi's release from jail, two Italian artists and a Palestinian were arrested and the Italians banned from the country for 10 years for painting a 4-metre image of the teenage icon near Bethlehem. Their identity remained speculated until Italian street artist Agostino Chirwin (aka Jorit Agoch) came forward as the artist. Tamimi was released after an eight-month sentence she received after 'assaulting' two Israeli soldiers in December 2017 after her 15-year old cousin Mohamed Tamimi was shot in the head during a demonstration against the expansion of settlements.
Photo courtesy of AFP, Ahmed Gharabli.

Notorious-yet-anonymous graffiti artist Banksy has made art in Palestine several times. After tagging different areas of the West Bank, his famous trip to Gaza, and creating nine images on the apartheid wall (including the above 'Art Attack'), the artist has established 'The Walled Off Hotel' in the shadow of the wall, which boasts "the worst view of the world." Visitors are encouraged to get up close and personal, learning about the occupation and spray painting the wall themselves. Photo courtesy of the Universal Museum of Art.

"Issa", a Palestinian artist who used a pseudonym to protect his identity, told AlJazeera he was behind the graffiti that read 'Make Hummus Not Walls,' which has become a kind of motif to Banksy's Walled Off tourists. In reaction to the hotel, he later defaced his own graffiti, spraying the words 'welcome to the shopping mall' on top of it. There is growing concern over the small but dangerous industry of commercialising apartheid, and the fear that it might have a vested interest in actually maintaining the wall.
When he was painting the above 'Unwelcome Intervention', Banksy recounts that an old Palestinian man said his painting made the wall look beautiful. Banksy thanked him, but the man said: 'We don't want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.' This echoes local communities' fear that - by beautifying the wall, even with messages that seem supportive to the local community - these artists are both normalising apartheid and belittling the struggle. The epitome of this dynamic came in 2017, when Australian graffiti artist Lushsux painted huge murals of Donald Trump (pictured above), Hillary Clinton, and even one work of Trump and Netanyahu kissing - which reads as more than a little homophobic, despite the leftist bend of his subject matter. In a Medium article, Palestinian artist Soud Hefawi referred to him as "the 'Resident Tourist'...selfish and greedy. He gave a vague political shape to his graffiti, which gathered some artists and some local and international followers around him. They began helping him draw more and metastasize." Hefawi continues on what many see as a white-saviour dynamic to Western artists in the West Bank: "I don't want a colonialist to teach me how to fight colonialists," referring to Lushsux's Australian background.
Photo courtesy of Underground Paris.

Spanish twin brothers Raoul and Davide Perré, aka the street art duo How & Nosm, spoke to this dynamic in 2013 when they were in the West Bank, commenting that they "believe that just coming here and tagging, doing pieces, would be inappropriate and selfish." They instead tried to give back to the community by giving arts workshops to women in the West Bank.

What made things worse for the 'Resident Tourist' was that he seemed both upfront and utterly unconcerned about his intentions. He crowdsourced his ideas, which ended up obfuscating the point of painting the wall, because they weren't about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at all. One saw Trump writing a fan letter to Eminem (this was back when the rapper slammed the president). Another one shows Mark Zuckerberg with red eyes and the caption: "The more of your data I gather, the more I understand what it means to be human." The most offensive perhaps is one depicting the wall as Rick Sanchez from popular adult sci-fi cartoon series Rick and Morty. "To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," he said, sardonically referring to a viral meme from the show's fan base, which in turn was an irreverent reaction to critiques of fans' misogynist and self-congratulatory undertones. "I'm not pushing a number required to solve it. I'm here to paint memes."
In 2007, Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid and two assistants spent 10 days painting a 14-metre long, 2-metre high portion of the wall in what appears to be a jumble of Arabic letters. Unscrambled, the letters spell out the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, written in 1988 by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Unlike most of the works on this list which are in the same vicinity of the Bethlehem area, Abdel Hamid's is not in a famous or visible spot. It lies in an area where the only people likely to see it are locals, and acts as a message of hope for Palestinians, and them alone, according to the artist.

Near the Qalandiya checkpoint, the main connection point between the northern West Bank and Jerusalem, is a long-standing (now partially defaced) mural of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat by artist Vince Seven. The art serves as a poignant work of art that is also publicly popular, and thus opens questions of normalisation or reclamation of the physical space of the wall. Photo courtesy of Reuters, Darren Whiteside.
Photo credit: William Parry.
A mural of a blindfolded Palestinian being arrested by two Israeli soldiers carries the message: "We can't live, so we are waiting for death." To the right, a mural of a young man with a slingshot aimed at the burned out tower and the message: 'One day the sun will shine on a free Palestine.' (out of frame).

In the constantly developing visual iconography of Palestinian resistance, there is one integral symbol of defiance: Handala. In 1975, Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali created the 10-year-old boy, who will remain 10 years old until the occupation ends. Barefoot, with tattered clothes, and his hair meant to resemble a porcupine's spikes protecting him, Handala stands with his arms crossed behind his back, rejecting incomplete solutions that fail to address the root of the conflict: Israeli settler-colonialism. Though al-Ali was assassinated in 1987, Handala's image stands, painted in several murals along the apartheid wall today.

In June 2015, after the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the US, which caused an international uproar of support and (in much of the Arab World), controversy, Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar painted 'Through the Spectrum', the colors of the rainbow pride flag near the Qalandiya checkpoint. In doing so, Jarrar illuminated an impossible position between the heteropatriarchy of Palestinian society (which literally whitewashed his work within hours) and Israeli politics that claim 'liberalism' as the saviour of LGBT+ Palestinians (known as pinkwashing). In an article on Electronic Intifada, Jarrar explained his intentions of opening dialogue "by subverting a symbol of freedom and self-determination to apply in broader contexts that include our own plight as Palestinians."

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Apartheid Art: The Stories Behind 14 Striking Pieces of Graffiti on the West Bank Wall

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The West Bank Wall cuts through families, communities, and commute routes, inflicting a spatial violence and segregation that essentially makes it an apartheid wall, not merely a 'separation barrier.' Though the wall is illegal under international law, according to the International Court of Justice, construction continues today, with only 65% of the projected 712 kilometres completed.

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How does the Israel-Palestine conflict impact local art?

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Is art mean to be beautiful or is it meant to portray a message?

Is it ethical to cover up something ugly and bad with something pretty? is it a distraction?

Do we prioritise beautiful art over a deeper message?