News headlines in May 2020, page 2

May 26 (IPS) - Crucial global goals to reduce hunger and poverty and curb climate change have gone backwards or stalled, the United Nations Secretary-General warns in a new report, as the COVID-19 outbreak moves from being a health crisis to becoming the "worst human and economic crisis of our lifetimes".

UNITED NATIONS, May 26 (IPS) - A future repetition of the current COVID-19 pandemic is preventable with massive cooperation on international and local levels and by ensuring biological diversity preservation around the world, experts recently said.

NAIROBI, Kenya, May 26 (IPS) - Consider this. 24 women, children and babies were murdered at a hospital in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Even by standards of a country as accustomed to bloodshed as Afghanistan, the May 12 attack on a Kabul maternity clinic was an event of unmitigated horror.

ROME, May 26 (IPS) - Hunger and food insecurity continue to rise. The official 2019 statistics refer to 821 million people suffering from hunger all over the world. According the recently launched Global Report on Food Crisesthere are further 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse.

KATHMANDU, Nepal, May 26 (IPS) - In an interview*, Bina Pradhan, an independent researcher, focuses on gender, macroeconomics and emerging issues of inequality.

She is affiliated with the Federation of Business and Professional Women, Nepal (FBPWN), and has been working on the promotion and advancement of women in enterprise development and trade, post-earthquake community reconstruction, and rebuilding people's lives and livelihoods with a focus on sustainability.

In this interview, Ms. Pradhan shares her views on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically on women and excluded groups in Nepal.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, May 26 (IPS) - With well over five million Covid-19 infections worldwide, and deaths exceeding 340,000, the race for an effective vaccine has accelerated since the SARS-Cov-2 virus was first identified as the culprit.

NAIROBI, May 25 (IPS) - Complications of pregnancy and child birth are a leading cause of preventable deaths and ill health among adolescent women in Kenya. But research shows a combination of modern contraceptives for all adolescents who need it, and adequate care for all pregnant adolescents and their newborns, would reduce adolescent maternal deaths by 76 percent. So what needs to be done to prevent this?

May 25 (IPS) - Many well meaning education benefactorsand commentators in South Africa have expressed that in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic online self-guided learning could solve some of the current teaching problems and address the educational backlog. What learners need, the reasoning goes, is to get free internet access to educational support materials on offer online.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

NAIROBI, Kenya, May 25 (IPS) - When I was a little girl, my mother told us the story of a woman who escaped from a monster by cooking stones: when the monster fell asleep waiting for his dinner, the woman ran for her life.

MEXICO CITY, May 22 (IPS) - While it attempts to cushion the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the Latin American and Caribbean region also faces concerns about the future of the energy transition and state-owned oil companies.