News headlines in August 2019, page 2

WASHINGTON DC, Aug 28 (IPS) - Everybody knows that nuclear weapons have been used twice in wartime and with terrible consequences. Often overlooked, however, is the large-scale, postwar use of nuclear weapons:

NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 27 (IPS) - Graduate students of the London School of Economics and Political Science gathered at Kenya's coast in September 2018, where the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Dr Mukhisa Kituyi told them: "With your international credibility, it is easier and tempting to leave and take out of the continent the little intellectual resource that could solve problems their countries face."

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 27 (IPS) - Africa is grappling with myriad environmental and climate challenges, from drought to loss of biodiversity, cyclones and plastics pollution.

PHILADELPHIA, Aug 27 (IPS) - Columbia's Katherine Phillips's longitudinal research shows that diversity makes us smarter and spurs innovation. Homogeneity of any kind can hinder the exchange of ideas and hamper intellectual ferment. As Philips has argued, expanding diversity in the workplace is a way to inject fresh ideas into a stagnant ecosystem.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 27 (IPS) - Sudan's transition to civilian rule offers a chance to end the ethnic violence that plagues the western province of Darfur and end a peacekeeping mission there, a top United Nations official said Monday.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 27 (IPS) - The US-China trade war has flared up again less than two weeks after US President Donald Trump delayed new tariffs of US$160 billion on Chinese imports until December, purportedly to avoid harming the holiday shopping season.

Aug 26 (IPS) - Tree planting is capturing the minds of those who look for fast climate action. Earlier this month, the Ethiopian Government announced a new world record: thousands of volunteers planted 353 million trees in one single day. This came shortly after a team of scientists identified suitable places in the world where up to 1 trillion new trees could be planted.

Such a massive effort could absorb about 20 years' worth of global greenhouse gas emissions. And on 8 August 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change launched a Special Report on the importance of land use for the climate. About 23 per cent of all emissions come from the agriculture, land use and forest sector. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlines land management opportunities with benefits for food security, biodiversity, and the climate, such as agroforestry.

GENEVA / KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 26 (IPS) - Malaysia lays claim to the world's lowest national poverty rate by using an unduly low poverty line that does not reflect the cost of living and by excluding vulnerable populations from its official figures.

WASHINGTON DC, Aug 26 (IPS) - Monsoon season is currently wreaking havoc on the more than 911,000 Rohingya refugees displaced from their homeland in Burma (Myanmar) to the ramshackle camps of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

HONG KONG, Aug 24 (IPS) - As protests in Hong Kong continue over the weekend, thousands of people joined hands to form a human chain that stretched across the city on Friday. It was yet another demonstration – this one entirely peaceful – in a series of protests that have rocked the former British colony for the past 12 weeks.