News headlines in August 2019, page 5

TORONTO, Canada, Aug 16 (IPS) - The special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  on climate and land, launched last week, makes it clear that without drastic changes in land use, agriculture and human diets, we will fall significantly short of targets to hold global temperature rise below 1.5°C. 

ENTRE RIOS DO OESTE, Brazil, Aug 16 (IPS) - Romário Schaefer is fattening up 3,300 pigs that he receives when they weigh around 22 kg and returns when they reach 130 to 160 kg - a huge increase in meat and profits for their owner, a local meat-processing plant in this city in Brazil.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 14 (IPS) - World governments are not doing enough to stop armed groups from committing mass rape, torture and other war crimes, the head of the Red Cross aid group head Peter Maurer said on Tuesday.

NAIROBI, Aug 14 (IPS) - For many people, climate change is about shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels, longer and more intense heatwaves, and other extreme and unpredictable weather patterns.  But for women pastoralists—livestock farmers in the semi-arid lands of Kenya—climate change has forced drastic changes to everyday life, including long and sometimes treacherous journeys to get water.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 14 (IPS) - When Yassir Arafat was denied a US visa to visit New York to address the United Nations back in 1988, the General Assembly defied the United States by temporarily moving the UN's highest policy making body to Geneva-- perhaps for the first time in UN history-- providing a less-hostile political environment for the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

VILLA DE ZAACHILA, Mexico, Aug 13 (IPS) - Reyna Díaz cooks beans, chicken, pork and desserts in her solar cooker, which she sets up in the open courtyard of her home in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of this town in southwestern Mexico.

STOCKHOLM / ROME, Aug 13 (IPS) - We live in different worlds. The ones of friends, family and work colleagues. Worlds which are overshadowed by other, much bigger ones.

Global spheres of international finance, politics, climate change, etc., contexts that might threaten our smaller circle of relationships; our family, our income, our general wellbeing, in short – our entire existence.

However, even at those levels there exist small circles of acquaintances and associates able to make decisions that affect the entire humankind.

Let me take one example – the regimes of U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro, which are menacing our global natural habitat.

Aug 13 (IPS) - Women comprise a very small proportion of the financial industry workforce, and this has implications on the way female clients use and benefit from financial services.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 13 (IPS) - Every year, over 12,000 women are killed in Latin America. The region is plagued by extremely high levels of violence, and a vacuum of state power persists. Public face of this violence is caused by paramilitary, guerrilla, gangs and armed groups. 

BANGKOK, Aug 13 (IPS) - The Asia-Pacific region is at a crossroads. The traditional export-oriented, manufacturing-driven growth is facing headwinds from sluggish external demand and rising protectionist trade measures.