News headlines in February 2019, page 8

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Feb 05 (IPS) - Dilum Abeysekera is Founder & CEO, LEEG-net | LexEcon Consulting Group*

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 has entered its fourth year of implementation.

In terms of the estimated cost and the universal coverage of both developed and developing countries, it is the biggest ever development program that is being implemented to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity.

GENEVA and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 05 (IPS) - In Davos in late January, several powerful governments and their allies announced their intention to launch new negotiations on e-commerce. Unusually, the intention is to launch the plurilateral negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO), an ostensibly multilateral organization, setting problematic precedents for the future of multilateral negotiations.

GEORGETOWN, Feb 05 (IPS) - IPS correspondent Desmond Brown interviews DOUGLAS SLATER, Assistant Secretary General at the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat.

In recent years Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries have experienced escalated climate change impacts from hurricanes, tropical storms and other weather-related events thanks to global warming of 1.0 ° Celsius (C) above pre-industrial levels. And it has had adverse effects on particularly vulnerable countries and communities.

STOCKHOLM / ROME, Feb 04 (IPS) - Is there a connection between sex education, gender equality and promiscuity? On this website, Fabiana Fraysinnet recently denounced a Brazilian crusade against sex education conducted by conservative and religious sectors. Such initiatives are common in several other countries, where politicians and religious leaders accuse sexual education of blurring boundaries between male and female and thus foment homosexuality and transsexualism, as well as a moral relativism undermining family structures and adherence to religious guidance and dogma.

BASEL, Switzerland, Feb 04 (IPS) - Christine Muttonen is a former Austrian parliamentarian who served as the President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly from 2016-2017. Jacqueline Cabasso is the Executive Director of Western States Legal Foundation and the North America Coordinator for Mayors for Peace. Alyn Ware is Global Coordinator for Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament and Disarmament Program Director for the World Future Council.

The United States last week officially announced it is walking away from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, an agreement made between the USA and the Soviet Union in 1987 to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapons that had been deployed in Europe and had put the continent on a trip-wire to nuclear war.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 04 (IPS) - Humans have long had a varied and complicated relationship with nature—from its aesthetic value to its economic value to its protective value. What if you could measure and analyse these values? One group is trying to do just that.

GENEVA, Feb 04 (IPS) - Idriss Jazairy Special Rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Council on the Adverse Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures.

The count down towards a tragic outcome in Venezuela has started. All outside powers express what they say is a shared concern for its peace-loving people that has the misfortune of sitting on what is maybe the largest oil reserves in the world. The problem is that geopolitics lead groups of foreign countries to express different, not to say opposed recipes as to how democracy can be restored and happiness pursued in Venezuela and want to make their own views prevail in this divided country.

Divided the country has been indeed for quite some time. Of course circumstances have not been clement, both political and economic, what with institutional breakdown, the collapse in oil prices and the increasingly stiflling unilateral sanctions which have targeted Caracas.

But governance has also been found badly wanting, in a context of increasing violence on all sides. Incidentally, recent debates seem to imply there are three sides to the domestic dispute and forget the fourth, the millions of Chavistas themselves who can only be ignored at the peril of peace.

Peru began the year with 11 femicides in January, despite progress made in laws and statutes and mass demonstrations against gender-based violence. This situation is also seen in other Latin American countries, raising the need to delve deeper into the causes of the phenomenon.

CARACAS, Feb 01 (IPS) - The protests in Venezuela demanding an end to the presidency of Nicolás Maduro in the last 10 days of January, whose soundtrack was the sound of banging on pots and pans in working-class neighbourhoods, had a high human cost: more than 40 deaths, dozens wounded and about a thousand detainees, including 100 women and 90 children under 18.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 01 (IPS) - Amina Mohammed is the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations.

After flying into the city of Bol in the Republic of Chad, over the lush fields and receding lakes, we landed to a rapturous welcome from traditional rulers and local women. Their faces reflected a hope and dignity slipping away under the harsh reality of poverty and insecurity.