News headlines in June 2022, page 12

Seoul, Tokyo, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Jun 20 (IPS) - Have you ever watched the movie “Free Willy”? A young boy, Jesse, had an Orca whale friend named Willy. Jesse freed Willy into the wild ocean believing that it was the best decision to make for his friend. Well, that was a long time ago.

With eight months remaining, the window of opportunity is closing for South Sudan to meet critical benchmarks required to complete its transition away from long-running civil conflict, the Special Representative for the country told the Security Council on Monday, pressing parties to the November 2018 peace deal, to implement their commitments in letter and spirit.

The Lebanese Government, the United Nations and partners on Monday announced a $3.2 billion appeal for the country to address ongoing impacts from the war in neighbouring Syria and the current economic crisis. 

Civic space is shrinking, together with a rise in human rights violations during peaceful protests worldwide, while governments adopt an increasingly militarised approach to policing demonstrations, said an independent UN human rights expert on Monday. 

The resolution of a civil conflict fuelled-displacement crisis in Côte d'Ivoire, that at its height forced more than 300,000 people to flee to neighbouring countries and beyond, is “a welcome bright spot amid a rising global trend of forced displacement”, said the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on Monday.

NEW YORK, Jun 20 (IPS) - The Islamic Republic of Iran faces widespread anti-government protests amid an economic crisis while doing little to ease tensions with the international community as it becomes a nuclear threshold state.

The UN World Food Programme, WFP, said on Monday that it will have no choice but to make further food ration cuts soon for refugees.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 20 (IPS) - The 164-member World Trade Organization (WTO) has implicitly rubber-stamped a widely-condemned policy of “vaccine apartheid” which has discriminated the world’s poorer nations, mostly in Africa and Asia, depriving them of any wide-ranging intellectual property rights.

As Max Lawson, Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, said at the conclusion of the WTO’s ministerial meeting last week: “The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly shameful”.

Further food ration cuts are imminent for refugees as humanitarian needs multiply around the world while funding struggles to keep pace, the UN food relief agency warned on Monday, World Refugee Day. 

The Secretary-General strongly condemned on Sunday, an attack in Kidal, a city in northern Mali, against a convoy of UN peacekeepers that claimed the life of a blue helmet.