News headlines in August 2019

Aug 30 (IPS) - Namugongo is a lush, forested community in central Uganda where tall trees are home to colourful birds and noisy monkeys.

The community has a tragic place in history: on 3 June 1886, 22 Ugandan Christian converts were publicly executed, on the orders of King Mwanga II of the Buganda Kingdom, in an attempt to ward off the influence of colonial powers with whom the Christians were associated.

BANGKOK, Thailand, Aug 30 (IPS) - It's 1962, and in a modest Hong Kong neighborhood, a poetic love story unfolds. Filmed almost twenty years ago, Wong Kar-wai's seminal movie In the Mood for Love captured the world's imagination about lifestyle in the region.

STOCKHOLM / ROME, Aug 29 (IPS) - The last frontier for utilizing and maybe even exhausting Earth´s natural resources is opening up in the Arctic and some of the world´s wealthiest nations are trying to secure their piece of the cake. Some act openly, others are more secretive – recently one of the competitors entered the game in a remarkably unwieldy manner.

LONDON, Aug 29 (IPS) - It must be a daunting prospect to sing songs made famous by the incomparable Nina Simone, but performers Ledisi and Lisa Fischer brought their individual style to a BBC Proms concert in London, honouring Simone and gaining admiration for their own talent.

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Aug 29 (IPS) - The crisis of regional and multilateral institutions goes hand in hand with the international rise of right-wing populism. In the US, the UK, Russia, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines and Brazil, we are experiencing the rise of right-wing populist politicians who throw headline-grabbing barbs at global compromises and the negotiating processes of supranational institutions such as the UN.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 29 (IPS) - When two-time Wimbledon tennis champion Boris Becker, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, refused to make a commitment not to play in South Africa, a country blacklisted for its apartheid policies, the UN children's agency stripped him of the prestigious title, back in October 1987.

ROME, Aug 28 (IPS) - The right to food is a universal human right. Yet, over 820 million people are going hungry, according the latest edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI 2019). In addition, 2 billion people in the world are food insecure with great risk of malnutrition and poor health" ¹.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Aug 28 (IPS) - African leaders have been asked to walk the talk, and lead from the front, in order to build resilience and adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change on the continent.

MANILA, Aug 28 (IPS) - With the record rate blaze in the Amazon that struck Indigenous communities, the world is confronted by a humanitarian crisis in the midst of an ever-worsening political-economic condition.

BANGKOK, Thailand, Aug 28 (IPS) - The past five years have been the hottest on record in Asia and the Pacific. Unprecedented heatwaves have swept across our region, cascading into slow onset disasters such as drought.

Yet heat is only part of the picture. Tropical cyclones have struck new, unprepared parts of our region and devastatingly frequent floods have ensued. In Iran, these affected 10 million people this year and displaced 500,000 of which half were children. Bangladesh is experiencing its fourth wave of flooding in 2019. Last year, the state of Kerala in India faced the worst floods in a century.