News headlines in June 2021, page 10

The impact of conflicts old and new, climate shocks and COVID-19, in addition to a lack of funding, have left millions more on the verge of famine than six months ago, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 18 (IPS) - The industrial revolution took 100 years. The digital revolution, two decades. The next global revolution, the energy revolution, has already begun. But how fairly and how fast it happens is the biggest challenge of our time.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 18 (IPS) - People with disabilities were particularly hard hit by the social and economic impacts of efforts to control COVID-19.

Amid worsening socioeconomic conditions, rising criminal gang violence and a resurgence of COVID-19, Haiti’s leaders must commit to good-faith dialogue aimed at ending a longstanding and damaging political impasse, the UN’s senior official in the country told the Security Council today.

Sexual violence in conflict “reverberates down generations” and threatens both human and international security, the UN chief said on Thursday in his message for the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 17 (IPS) - June 17 is World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought. A new report shows that climate change, overuse and conversion for agriculture, cities and infrastructure, which also drive drought and desertification, have already degraded one fifth of the planet’s land area.

“Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic and there is no vaccine to cure it.”

New research published by the UN health agency on Thursday revealed that suicide remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide – taking more lives each year than HIV, malaria, breast cancer, war and homicide.

Innovative measures to address debt are required to help the world’s more than 100 middle-income countries expand their economies and exit the COVID-19 pandemic, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the General Assembly on Thursday. 

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 17 (IPS) - In 1956, the Caribbean held its first major scientific meeting, organised by the Standing Advisory Committee for Medical Research in the British Caribbean. At the time, the Mayaro Virus, a dengue-like viral disease often called ‘jungle flu’ had just been identified as a new human disease agent by W.G Downs and G.H Wattley in Trinidad.

STOCKHOLM / ROME, Jun 17 (IPS) - Like most male Swedes of my age I had to enter obligatory military service for almost a year. In my barrack was a “born-again-Christian” who when he became angry shouted “Now you mock me, but when the Last Judgement has come I will sit in heaven and smile down at you while you burn in Hell!” Since then I have wondered about the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. It was written by a frustrated Christian man who by the end of 100 CE by Roman authorities had been deported to an isolated island where he wrote a long letter to Christian congregations in Asia Minor.

Getting hard to breathe
hard to believe in anything
at all, but fear.
Peter Gabriel, Mother of Violence