News headlines in 2019, page 40

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 27 (IPS) - The US-China trade war has flared up again less than two weeks after US President Donald Trump delayed new tariffs of US$160 billion on Chinese imports until December, purportedly to avoid harming the holiday shopping season.

Aug 26 (IPS) - Tree planting is capturing the minds of those who look for fast climate action. Earlier this month, the Ethiopian Government announced a new world record: thousands of volunteers planted 353 million trees in one single day. This came shortly after a team of scientists identified suitable places in the world where up to 1 trillion new trees could be planted.

Such a massive effort could absorb about 20 years' worth of global greenhouse gas emissions. And on 8 August 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change launched a Special Report on the importance of land use for the climate. About 23 per cent of all emissions come from the agriculture, land use and forest sector. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlines land management opportunities with benefits for food security, biodiversity, and the climate, such as agroforestry.

GENEVA / KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 26 (IPS) - Malaysia lays claim to the world's lowest national poverty rate by using an unduly low poverty line that does not reflect the cost of living and by excluding vulnerable populations from its official figures.

WASHINGTON DC, Aug 26 (IPS) - Monsoon season is currently wreaking havoc on the more than 911,000 Rohingya refugees displaced from their homeland in Burma (Myanmar) to the ramshackle camps of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

HONG KONG, Aug 24 (IPS) - As protests in Hong Kong continue over the weekend, thousands of people joined hands to form a human chain that stretched across the city on Friday. It was yet another demonstration – this one entirely peaceful – in a series of protests that have rocked the former British colony for the past 12 weeks. 

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 24 (IPS) - Fourteen-year-old Fanta lives in a tent in a settlement in Zamaï, a village in the Far North Region of Cameroon with her mother and two brothers. They came here more than a year ago after her father and elder brother were murdered and her elder sister abducted by the extremist group Boko Haram.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 24 (IPS) - August is the month of major political crises in Brazil, but no one suspected that an environmental issue would be the trigger for the storms threatening the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, just eight months into his term.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 23 (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.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 23 (IPS) - As leaders of the seven major industrialised nations (G7) meet in the coastal seatown of Biarritz in the south west of France, one of the world's leading women's organisations is calling for the protection and advancement of women worldwide.

LHASA, Aug 22 (IPS) - According to the Tibet's Social Science Academy's Institute of Rural Economic Studies, the number of Tibetans still living in poverty has been brought down from 850,000 a few years ago to 150,000.

Tibetan officials say the government is committed to reducing that number to zero by the end of this year.