News headlines in November 2024

BAKU, Nov 22 (IPS) - The drive home is uneventful. Our Bolt driver is a careful driver—the bright, half-moon provides a delightful end to an evening of song and good food. Our last night as an IPS team at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 22 (IPS) - On November 21, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as the former defense minister Yoav Gallant. In a statement released by the ICC, both Netanyahu and Gallant are wanted for crimes against humanity and war crimes that spanned from at earliest October 8 2023 through May 20 2024. This coincides with Israel’s respective wars with Lebanon and Palestine, for which there have been extensive damage on civilian infrastructure, thousands of civilian casualties, and repeated blockages of humanitarian aid.

BAKU, Nov 22 (IPS) - COP29 delegates have elaborated on how Africa’s dependency on agriculture is becoming increasingly untenable amidst alarming levels of global warming, wrecking havoc on the sector. Coastal communities, pastoralists, and those in the drylands are in the thick of the climate chaos.

LONDON, Nov 22 (IPS) - In 1960, the Rafael Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic assassinated the Mirabal sisters— renowned and respected for their courage and activism against dictatorship. To give their senseless violent death some meaning and to preserve their legacy, in 1999, the United Nations inaugurated November 25—the day of their assassination—as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW).

BAKU, Nov 22 (IPS) - As climate-induced disasters continue to wreak havoc worldwide, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a UN body specializing in emergency response, has issued a clarion call for an ambitious and fair global climate finance goal at COP29. Grey Puley, Head of the Climate Team at OCHA, highlighted the pressing need for enhanced disaster risk reduction and climate resilience measures, particularly in vulnerable and conflict-affected regions.

BAKU, Nov 22 (IPS) - The mental health impacts of climate change are not widely discussed, but increasing evidence shows how climate change is affecting mental health and raising the risk of new mental health challenges. Experts say that existing systems are not equipped to cope with the current and additional challenges related to health and mental health caused by climate change.

BAKU, Nov 22 (IPS) - Syeda Rizwana Hasan, an adviser to the interim government of Bangladesh and as Minister of Environment, Forestry, and Climate Change, urged the global and regional leaders to prioritize ambitious, evidence-based climate targets in the climate negotiations.

The past two months of intensifying Israeli bombardment in Lebanon have been the “deadliest and most devastating” in decades as communities uprooted from the front line flee continue to flee across the border to Syria, UN humanitarians said on Friday.

A new draft finance deal delivered to harried negotiators in Baku on Friday – the final scheduled day for the UN climate talks that have been under way for the past two weeks – proposes rich countries commit $250 billion a year to help vulnerable nations cope with our warming planet and to accelerate the global switch to renewable energy.

The World Food Programme (WFP) on Friday called for some $16.9 billion to address the escalating global hunger crisis – or roughly what the world spends on coffee in just two weeks.