News headlines in 2016, page 64

UNITED NATIONS, May 17 (IPS) - In a world where annual defence spending is over 1.6 trillion dollars and the UN Peacebuilding Fund receives less than 700 million dollars, it would seem that the military industrial complex is unwaveringly entrenched.

BOGOTA, May 16 (IPS) - "If you're going to talk about Colombia and the peace process, do it somewhere else," was heard at a regional preparatory meeting for the World Humanitarian Summit, according to Ramón Rodríguez, with the Colombian government's Unit for Attention and Integral Reparation for Victims (UARIV).

ROME, May 16 (IPS) - A new spectre is haunting the world. It is not the spectre of communism, as Marx's Manifesto famously proclaimed. It is the spectre of fear, which has increasingly become the rationale behind politics. And, as the old proverb says, fear is not a good counselor.

ROME, May 16 (IPS) - Sadiq Khan is not just the new mayor of London, but happens to have individually won more votes than any other politician in British history.

Prime ministers and members of Parliament run in their home districts, where the total number of ballots are fewer.

ROME, May 16 (IPS) - When, in March 2015, delegates from the Middle East met in Amman for their regional consultations round in preparation for the May 23-24 World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, most likely what they had in mind is the fact that their region was --and still is-- the dramatic set of "the mother of all humanitarian crises."

ADDIS ABABA, May 16 (IPS) - Beekeeping and silkworm farming have long been critical cogs of Ethiopian life, providing food, jobs and much needed income.

GENEVA, May 14 (IPS) - In my personal capacity as an academic from the Global South and a retired international civil servant, I undertook a study for the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue which was published in November 2014. This was at a time when I had no idea that I would later become a member of this elite group of Special Procedures Mandate Holder. The study is entitled "In Defence of Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council: An alternative narrative from the South".

UNITED NATIONS, May 13 (IPS) - The murder of Honduran Indigenous woman Berta Caceres is only too familiar to Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, May 13 (IPS) - Since the 1980s, the world has been moving once again to the greatest level of national level income inequalities observed in recorded human history. A study by the Credit Suisse Research Institute suggested that the income share of the rich has increased at the expense of the ‘middle class' in most of the world.

UNITED NATIONS, May 13 (IPS) - The United Nations will undertake a major review of progress made in the world's 48 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) later this month.