News headlines in November 2021, page 6

COVID-19 cases have increased in the last week with 3.6 million infections reported globally, as opposed to the 3.3 million over the previous seven days, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday. 

NEW YORK / KAMPALA, Nov 24 (IPS) - There is a resurgence of anti-trans sentiment right now. It’s not only Dave Chapelle’s toxic rants in his most recent Netflix special: we see it across social, political and cultural arenas including in JK Rowling's ongoing embrace of trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs); the introduction of bills designed to harm trans kids in the US; Uganda's Sexual Offenses bill, which violates international human rights; and “gender-critical” academics like Kathleen Stock profiting from their inflammatory rhetoric.

Conflicts, humanitarian crises and increasing climate-related disasters have led to higher levels of violence against women and girls (VAWG), which has only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing into sharp focus the urgent need to stem the scourge.

LIMA, Nov 24 (IPS) - Despite significant legal advances in Latin American countries to address gender-based violence, it continues to be a serious challenge, especially in a context of social crisis aggravated by the covid-19 pandemic, which hits women especially hard.

In Colombia to mark the fifth anniversary of the peace accord between the Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC-EP, UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday visited a small mountainside village he described as a “laboratory of peace”, where former combatants and civilians are working and living side-by-side.

Nov 23 (IPS) - From its devastating economic impact and the migrant crisis to the startling death toll, the COVID-19 pandemic in India unfurled one crisis after the other. The glaring gaps in our system, which had always been there, became even more prominent during the pandemic. There is one question at the back of everyone’s mind that still remains unanswered: What went wrong?

For the past five years, poverty, food insecurity, climate shocks and violence have pushed, on average, some 378,000 Central Americans a year into the United States, according to a new report launched on Tuesday by the UN food relief agency. 

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Nov 23 (IPS) - When Bonolo Montle’s neighbours discarded bucketsful of fallen ripe morula fruit from their backyard, she saw food and fortune going to waste.

MADRID, Nov 23 (IPS) - Thirty percent of women and girls suffered physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, most frequently by an intimate partner. And more than 70 percent of all sold, bought and enslaved victims of human smuggling and trafficking are women and girls -- three out of four of them are sexually exploited.

Following “hard-earned” parliamentary elections on 10 October, Iraqis of all political stripes must exercise restraint, eschew violence and await the outcome’s final certification by the Federal Supreme Court, the senior UN official in the country told the Security Council on Tuesday.