News headlines in 2017, page 88

ADDIS ABABA, Mar 12 (IPS) - Throughout a Sunday afternoon in the Ethiopian capital, Yemeni émigré men in their fifties and sixties arrive at a traditional Yemeni-styled mafraj room clutching bundles of green, leafy stalks: khat.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS) - The Super El Nino of 2015 to 2016 wrought droughts and floods around the world, yet it is its sister La Nina that is now fuelling drought and hunger in East Africa.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, Mar 11 (IPS) - On Nov. 30 last year, a new high-performance ‘Super Computer' was installed at the University of the West Indies (UWI) during climate change week. Dubbed SPARKS - short for the Scientific Platform for Applied Research and Knowledge Sharing - the computer is already churning out the ‘big data' Caribbean small island states (SIDS) need to accurately forecast and mitigate the effects of climate change on the region.

ROME, Mar 10 (IPS) - Every day some 370 million children around the world are fed at school, while learning about healthy food and nutrition through school meals programmes that also help boost attendance, the United Nations reports.

ROME, Mar 10 (IPS) - In the northern part of Mount Kenya, there is an indigenous community -- the Il Lakipiak Maasai ("People of Wildlife") -- which owns and operates the only community-owned rhino sanctuary in the country.

ACCRA, Mar 09 (IPS) - Ghana turned 60 years old this week. The West African country gained independence from Britain on Mar. 6, 1957, and remains a study in contradictions.

LA PAZ, Mar 09 (IPS) - A new bill in Bolivia, which will allow the amount of land allocated to producing coca to be increased from 12,000 to 22,000 hectares, modifying a nearly three-decade coca production policy, has led to warnings from independent voices and the opposition that the measure could fuel drug trafficking.

ROME/GENEVA, Mar 08 (IPS) - "The women's movement has brought about tremendous change but we must also recognise that progress has been slow and extremely uneven and that it also brought its own challenges," warned the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Mar 08 (IPS) - Last month, the United Nations declared another famine threat in Somalia due to yet another drought in the Horn of Africa. Important lessons must be drawn from the Somalia famine of 2010-2012, which probably killed about 258,000 people, half of whom were under-five. This was the greatest tragedy in terms of famine deaths in the 21st century, and in recent decades since the Ethiopian famine of the late 1980s.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 08 (IPS) - The United Nations has frequently been accused of vociferously preaching gender empowerment and women's rights to the outside world -- but failing miserably to practice what it preaches in its own political backyard.