News headlines in 2020, page 33

NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 15 (IPS) - We have known for a long time that biodiversity, and the services it provides, have been in decline. It is on this background that ten years ago, the international community adopted the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020.

Sep 15 (IPS) - The EU is thinking about agreeing to a €4 billion trade deal with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay (known as the Mercosur bloc). In our new academic research, myself and 21 international co-authors looked at the details of this deal so you don't have to. What we found wasn't pretty.

CHOKWE, Mozambique, Sep 15 (IPS) - High fuel prices and transportation costs isolated Mozambique's farmers from one of their biggest markets while the country's growing debt and economic crisis strained the budgets of many. But restrictions imposed by President Filipe Nyusi's government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened food security as farmers have been unable to get their produce to market. This is the first in a two-part series. Like many Mozambicans in the agricultural sector, 39-year-old Fatima Matavele, a commercial farmer in the district of Chokwe, some 213 kilometres north of the capital, Maputo, has had a tough year. Although the last few years have been hard, 2020 has proven to be the most difficult of all.

BERLIN and KUALA LUMPUR, Sep 15 (IPS) - In recent decades, many contemporary macroeconomic and financial problems have been blamed on ‘soft budget constraints' (SBCs), with the term becoming quite popular in the economics lexicon, financial media and political discourse.

YOKOSUKA CITY, Japan, Sep 15 (IPS) - Maritime security in Asia Pacific is often viewed through a traditional security lens, where the main responsibility falls on maritime law enforcement agencies to protect maritime borders and territorial sovereignty.

NEW YORK, Sep 14 (IPS) - The Turkish diplomat elected to be the president of the 75th session of the UN General Assembly, Volkan Bozkir, is taking on the role as the Organization grapples with an unprecedented pandemic, and questions surrounding the future direction it should take.

LAGOS, Nigeria, Sep 14 (IPS) - "I need help, right now I cannot walk properly," trafficking victim Nkiru Obasi pleaded from her hospital bed in a video she posted online.

The young Nigerian woman had been injured in the Aug. 4 Beirut blast, which ripped through the Lebanese capital, killing 190 people injuring a further 6,500 and damaging 40 percent of the city. However, it's not her injuries keeping her in Lebanon but a restrictive and abusive system of migrants laws.

KATHMANDU, Sep 14 (IPS) - A new report out this week warns that hundreds of glacial lakes in the Himalaya are in danger of bursting because global heating is melting the ice on the world's highest mountains. However, on only two of them have there been mitigation measures to reduce water levels.

KAMPALA, Uganda, Sep 14 (IPS) - The year 2020 was considered a "Super Year" for biodiversity. A string of interconnected events offered a unique opportunity to build a global coalition and international policy framework that recognized the central role of nature to all life on Earth.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 11 (IPS) - Back in 1998, Senator Jesse Helms, a rightwing Republican from the US state of North Carolina, carried out a virulent one-man hate-campaign against the UN-- and its very presence in New York.