Op-Ed

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 23 2019 (IPS) – Two years after the start of an exodus of Rohingya civilians from genocide-like attacks in Myanmar, members of the mainly Muslim minority have little hope of securing justice, rights or returning to their homes, according to the United Nations and aid groups. Reports this week from the U.N. and Oxfam, a charity, show ... Read More »

Should Americans, as part of their school curriculum, learn Arabic numerals? CivicScience, a Pittsburgh-based research firm, put that question to some 3,200 Americans recently in a poll seemingly about mathematics, but the outcome was a measure of students’ attitudes toward the Arab world. Some 56 percent of the respondents said, “No.” Fifteen percent had no opinion. Read More »

Dhaka, Aug 20 (UNB) – Nobel laureate Dr Amartya Sen on Monday vehemently criticised the government’s move on Kashmir, saying it not only emphasised majority rule “as opposed to it sustaining the rights of all human beings”. “I don’t think ultimately you will have any resolution in Kashmir without democracy,” he told NDTV in an interview. Pointing out the loopholes ... Read More »

The rawhide and skin merchants have started selling their merchandise – hide collected during the Eid-ul-Adha festival – after mediation by the apex business chamber FBCCI. Before the meeting with the FBCCI and the tanners, organised by the Ministry of Commerce, the merchants said they were prepared to export rawhide but did not have the papers like licences to do ... Read More »

Sudhirendar Sharma It is a decade since unsuspecting women and men drinking at a bar in Mangalore were at the receiving end of unprovoked violence at the hands of the self-styled moral custodians, the-so-called valiant foot soldiers of Sri Ram Sena, who had held the group responsible for violating Indian values. Read More »

By Thalif Deen UN, Aug 16 2019 (IPS) – The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) is convinced that the world’s 1.8 billion adolescents and youth– a quarter of the global population—have a key role to play in helping implement the UN’s 2030 Development Agenda. Read More »

By James Reinl Reprint UN, Aug 14 2019 (IPS) – World governments are not doing enough to stop armed groups from committing mass rape, torture and other war crimes, the head of the Red Cross aid group head Peter Maurer said on Tuesday. Read More »

Mostafa Kamal Majumder A tiny kid of two years carried in the lap was telling his father, ‘I will not be given this’ as another child was screaming as a paramedic at a reputed private hospital was piercing a needle to collect blood to test for dengue. The pathological laboratory at the hospital in Mirpur 11 Section was working overtime ... Read More »

By Manipadma Jena New Delhi, Aug 12 2019 (IPS) – “The Perfect Storm” was a dire prediction that by 2030 food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources together with climate change would threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration from worst-affected regions. Read More »

by Rachel Locke, David Steven San Diego/New York – In last year’s Pathways for Peace report – the result of a joint study by the United Nations and the World Bank – UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the world is facing a “dramatic resurgence” of conflict, which has caused immense human suffering and significantly undermined global order. Read More »

Sir Frank Peters A humanitarian group of compassionate youths were a sight for sore eyes and the answer to the soulful prayers of hundreds of appreciative villagers in the Kurigram (Char Rajibpur) area of Bangladesh this week. Read More »

Sudhirendar Sharma The Ganga’s sacredness doesn’t guarantee its purity, as devotees draw a distinction between material cleanliness and ritual purity. Paradox! Exploiting the very source of life for economic and political gains has reduced our individual and collective relationship with water. With the intrinsic value of water being ignored in its sheer assessment as a resource worthy of appropriation, an ... Read More »

By Miriam Gathigah Nairobi, Aug 9 2019 (IPS) – The villagers living on the foothills of Mount Kenya have a belief: If they burn the forest, the rains will come. Read More »

by Sahana Ghosh on 30 July 2019 • Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Italy’s port city of Genoa is making bioplastics from agro-waste. The institute has tied up with the city’s central vegetable market for sourcing raw material. • The use of agro-waste to churn out biodegradable plastics aligns with the concept of a circular economy and may address the ... Read More »

Sudhirendar Sharma Despite my wife’s trepidation, I couldn’t resist travelling to support local communities in their post-war rehabilitation, just about the time when the guns were falling silent during the Kargil War. The occasional thunder from the burning ammunition dump that had been targeted by the enemy didn’t bother the locals who had been through the worst. Read More »

By Liby Johnson BHUBANESWAR, Odisha, India, Jul 30 2019 (IPS) – Research and experience across more than two decades in rural Odisha, India, show that an effective rural sanitation model requires both financial assistance and integrated water supply. Read More »

By Daniel Gutman Buenos Aires, Jul 29 2019 (IPS) – On the outer edges of Buenos Aires proper, where the paved streets end and the narrow alleyways of one of Argentina’s largest shantytowns begins, visitors can find the En Haccore soup kitchen. Read More »

By Thalif Deen UN, Mar 7 2019 (IPS) – The United Nations, which diligently monitors human rights violations worldwide, believes that centuries-old slavery still exists worldwide. Read More »

By Friday Phiri Pemba, Zambia, Jul 26 2019 (IPS) – Jennifer Handondo, a small scale farmer of Choma district in southern Zambia, plants food crops such as maize mostly for her family’s needs. Because of uncharacteristically high temperatures and low rainfall during the planting season in March, the divorced mother who single-handedly supports her three children has not been able ... Read More »

Dhaka, July 26 (UNB)- Lok Sabha passed the bill of ‘Triple talaq’, a customary practice among Muslim that dissolves a marriage when the husband says the word ‘talaq’ thrice, after a day-long heated battle on Thursday that also witnessed a walkout by BJP ally Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal United (JDU). The JDU said such law would create a “lack of ... Read More »

By Thalif Deen UN, Jul 23 2019 (IPS) – With the rise of rightwing nationalism, primarily in the Western world, an increasingly large number of countries are not only abandoning multilateralism but also violating international treaties and conventions signed and ratified in a bygone era. Read More »

By Ifeanyi Nsofor ABUJA, Jul 19 2019 (IPS) – The 2019 G20 Summit was held recently in Osaka, Japan. The Summit ended with the “G20 Osaka Leaders’ Declaration”, which identifies health as a prerequisite for sustainable and inclusive economic growth, and the leaders committed to various efforts to improve epidemic preparedness. Read More »

By Tamara Tutnjevic Gorman New York, Jul 16 2019 (IPS) – Despite what you might have heard, things are getting better, every year. We are making amazing progress on fighting diseases, reducing the preventable deaths of children, and investing huge amounts to advance medicine and knowledge and to create better living conditions. However, this progress is too slow for some ... Read More »

By Caley Pigliucci UN, Jul 19 2019 (IPS) – Since 2010, donor funding to fight HIV/AIDS in low-and middle-income countries has dropped significantly, according to a new report released recently. Read More »

By Thalif Deen UN, Jul 19 2019 (IPS) – The United Nations, which has been tracking both the successes and failures of its highly-ambitious Agenda for Sustainable Development, has warned that “progress has been slow” in many of the 17 Goals after four years of implementation. Read More »

By Daniel Yang UN, Jul 19 2019 (IPS) – When the United Nations General Assembly met in 2007 to vote on North Korea’s human rights record, only 10 of the 56 African countries voted with the U.S.-led western coalition. Read More »

by Sebastiano Sabato, Bart Vanhercke and Francesco Corti on 17th July 2019 The focus of the European Union on fiscal consolidation has left European societies out of kilter and undermined the union’s legitimacy. A Social Imbalances Procedure could begin to put that right. Read More »

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram Sydney and Kuala Lumpur, Jul 16 2019 (IPS) – On 17 June, a Facebook white paper proposed a new global digital currency it plans to launch in the first half of 2020. The Libra will be managed by a ‘not for profit’ Swiss-based Facebook-led consortium of ‘for-profit corporations’, with Uber, eBay, Lyft, Mastercard ... Read More »

By Ambassador Amina Mohamed Nairobi, Kenya, Jul 15 2019 (IPS) – On 10 July 2019 I was honored to moderate a meeting with women’s groups for the UN Secretary General Mr. Antonio Guterres, whose aim was to better diagnose the role of women in the prevention or instigation of violent extremism. Read More »

By Isaiah Esipisu Dodoma, Tanzania, Jul 11 2019 (IPS) – Research scientists are studying groundwater resources in three African countries in order to understand the renewability of the source and how people can use it sustainably towards a green revolution in Africa. Read More »