News headlines in January 2023, page 7

The head of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on Wednesday underlined the need to achieve gender equality globally and fight hate speech, particularly that which targets women and girls online. 

The historic centre of the port city of Odesa, in Ukraine, has been inscribed on the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage List, 11 months since the full-scale Russian invasion. 

A combination of determination, a vision, and UN support is transforming the fortunes of remote villages in underdeveloped regions of Eastern Indonesia, and boosting the livelihoods and prospects of local farmers.

NEW YORK, Jan 24 (IPS) - “Is it a sin to be a girl? We don’t want to be at home and illiterate. We want to go to school, study and be intelligent.”

In just a few words, this plea for education from a young Afghan girl has captured the world’s attention. Her heartbreaking question shows how the Taliban’s recent ban on girls attending secondary school and university – effectively ending education opportunities for all Afghan girls and women – is not only violating their fundamental human right to education but shattering countless hopes and dreams in an instant.

PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico, Jan 24 (IPS) - The Mayan Train (TM), run by the government’s National Tourism Development Fund (Fonatur), threatens the Mayan Jungle, the second largest in Latin America after the Amazon rainforest. its ecosystems and indigenous communities, as well as underground caves and cenotes - freshwater sinkholes resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater.

SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 24 (IPS) - Denial at the top of the Democratic Party about Joe Biden’s shaky footing for a re-election run in 2024 became more untenable over the weekend. As the New York Times reportedinvestigators “seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, at President Biden’s residence” in Delaware.

NEW YORK, Jan 24 (IPS) - Our investment in education – especially for children caught in crisis and conflict – is our investment in a better future.

Education is our investment in peace where there is war, our investment in equality where there is injustice, our investment in prosperity where there is poverty.

NAIROBI, Jan 24 (IPS) - In the four years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of leprosy or Hansen’s disease, seemed to be losing steam. Between 2016 and early 2020, new case numbers remained more or less constant.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a statement deploring the abduction of a doctor working for the UN health agency in the town of Menaka, in eastern Mali, by unknown assailants on Monday.

Haiti’s protracted political and humanitarian crisis – marked by spiking levels of gang-related violence and a badly struggling national police force – are reversing crucial security and development strides made since the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake, the senior UN representative in Port-au-Prince told the Security Council on Tuesday.