News headlines in June 2020

BANGKOK, Thailand, Jun 30 (IPS) - Developing countries of Asia and the Pacific are experiencing unbalanced tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic. Grim milestones in infections and deaths have left countless devastated. Yet, we must look at the economic and social impacts in small island developing States (SIDS), where setbacks are likely to undo years of development gains and push many people back into poverty.

PILGAON/GOA, India, Jun 30 (IPS) - Jayashree Parwar has not traveled much outside of her village of Bicholim in the western coastal Indian state of Goa. But the homemaker-turned-social-entrepreneur has been reaching women in dozens of cities across the country with a hygiene product she makes at home along with women from her community.

Called Sakhi (friend in Hindi), the plastic-free sanitary pad is Goa's first menstrual hygiene product made with organic materials.

STOCKHOLM / ROME, Jun 30 (IPS) - Just as the U.S. is haunted by the 1963 murder of John F. Kennedy, Sweden is troubled by the 1986 murder of its Prime Minister Olof Palme. The American feelings were aired on Bob Dylan´s latest album, Rough and Rowdy Wayscontaining a 16 minutes long song with lines like:

NEW DELHI, Jun 30 (IPS) - Being the sole candidate from the Asia Pacific region for the non-permanent seat of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), India was elected by 184 votes in the 193-member United Nations' General Assembly on June 17, 2020.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jun 30 (IPS) - Seventy-five years ago, on 26 June 1945, before the Japanese surrender ending the Second World War, fifty nations gathered at San Francisco's Opera House to sign the United Nations (UN) Charter.

Jun 29 (IPS) - While COVID-19 has made the headlines every day over the past two months, services for tuberculosis (TB), one of the oldest diseases in the world, have been interrupted due to the lockdown. According to the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Tuberculosis Report 2019India had an estimated 2.7 million new cases and 440,000 deaths due to TB in 2018—the highest in the world.

WASHINGTON DC, Jun 29 (IPS) - Cast your mind back. Six months ago—it seems like a lifetime—the world's attention was on Madrid. The United Nations was meeting to take stock of international progress in fighting climate change. Headlines were dominated by young people pointing out—rightly—that governments were still not doing enough. They demanded urgent and ambitious action to cut emissions and help the most vulnerable.

Jun 29 (IPS) - Warnings at the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic that Africa could be hit by a wave of up to 10 million cases within six months thankfully now seem unfounded, although it is still far too early to be over-confident.

NAIROBI, Jun 29 (IPS) - Pauline Akwacha's popular chain of eateries, famously known as Kakwacha Hangover Hotels and situated at the heart of Kisumu City's lakeside in Kenya, is facing its most daunting challenge yet. As Akwacha and other women in business across this East African nation brace themselves for the post-COVID-19 economy. 

AYACUCHO, Peru, Jun 29 (IPS) - A communally built small dam at almost 3,500 meters above sea level supplies water to small-scale farmer Cristina Azpur and her two young daughters in Peru's Andes highlands, where they face water shortages exacerbated by climate change.