News headlines in February 2017

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Feb 28 (IPS) - International capital flows are now more than 60 times the value of trade flows. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is now of the view that large international financial transactions do not facilitate trade, and that excessive financial ‘elasticity' has been a major cause of recent financial crises.

ROME/GENEVA, Feb 28 (IPS) - The United Nations health organisation has just published its first ever list of antibiotic-resistant "priority pathogens" – a catalogue of 12 families of bacteria that pose the greatest threat to human health.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 28 (IPS) - Religious advocacy groups have a long history of working with the United Nations, pushing back against progressive interpretations of the terms ‘family' and ‘marriage' as enshrined  in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

NEW YORK, Feb 27 (IPS) - The day I met Julija she was playing cheerfully with her baby sister on the floor inside their room in Kragujevac, a small town in southern Serbia. When she saw me – a stranger -- on the doorstep, she smiled widely and stretched out her hands, offering a hug. As I held her, I could hear how difficult it was for her to breathe. I looked at her, she smiled and touched my face with her hands and only then did I see that Julija's fingers were webbed.

ROME, Feb 27 (IPS) - This is a story that one would wish to never have to write—the story of hundreds of millions of life-givers whose production and productivity have systematically been ‘quantified' in much detailed statistics, but whose abnegation, human suffering and denial of rights are subject to just words.

PENANG, Feb 27 (IPS) - Recently a very interesting article on why there are inequalities in access to health care and how  medicine prices are beyond the reach of many people was published in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.

ROME/BERLIN, Feb 27 (IPS) - Open data is a pretty simple concept: governments should publish information about what they do to fight corruption– data that can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose, according to two major international anti-corruption watchdogs. This is particularly important in the fight against corruption.

Feb 27 (IPS) - The Izcanal Radio and Television set is simple and austere, but this TV station made history in El Salvador, being the first, and until now the only one, to make the leap from community radio to community TV channel, in 2006.

MELBOURNE, Australia, Feb 27 (IPS) - Juvinal Dias has first-hand experience of mistreatment at the hands of a foreign power. Born in 1981 in Tutuala, a village in the far east of Timor-Leste, Dias' family fled into the jungle following the 1975 invasion by Indonesia.

MANAGUA, Feb 24 (IPS) - The unequal battle that small farmer Francisca Ramírez is waging against the Nicaraguan government of Daniel Ortega has become so well-known that people are calling for her security and her rights from the political heart of Europe.