News headlines in 2020, page 107

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Feb 11 (IPS) - Many medicines and medical tests are unaffordable to most of humanity owing to the ability of typically transnational pharmaceutical giants to abuse their monopoly powers, enforced by intellectual property laws, to set prices to maximize profits over the long-term.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 11 (IPS) - Inequalities. The evidence is everywhere. And although they may be hard to measure and summarize, there is a sense in many countries that many are approaching a precipice beyond which it will be difficult to recover.

FOZ DO IGUAÇU, Brail, Feb 10 (IPS) - Fomenting biogas production among agricultural producers may seem at first glance to be a distraction from the purpose of Itaipu, the giant hydroelectric power plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay, but in fact it is part of their energy business strategy.

BANDIPORA, India, Feb 10 (IPS) - Warming himself with a kangri (a firepot) kept under his pheran (a long winter cloak worn by Kashmiris), 66-year-old Mohammad Subhan Dar sat chatting with a bunch of his fellow villagers on a January afternoon on the edge of the road overlooking Wular Lake in Saderkote-Bandipora, northern India.

NAIROBI, Kenya, Feb 10 (IPS) - By 2030, sub-Saharan Africa will be home to more than a quarter of the world's population under 25. Between 15 and 20 million young people will enter the African workforce each year, joining the ranks of the millions of currently under- and unemployed people searching for better livelihoods.

ROME, Feb 10 (IPS) - Reducing poverty and inequalities, eliminating hunger and all forms of malnutrition and achieve food insecurity for all – these are some of the most important objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Still, the rate of poverty and inequalities is increasing and over 820 million people are going hungry. In addition, 2 billion people in the world are food insecure with great risk of malnutrition and poor health.

This alarming situation is further aggravated by current trends such as the rate of population growth, impacts of climate change, loss of biodiversity, soil degradation and many others.

Transition to more sustainable food systems can provide adequate solutions to all these challenges.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Feb 10 (IPS) - In the wake of the latest coronavirus outbreak, movie buffs are drawing an eerie parallel with the film Contagion, a 2011 thriller based on a lethal airborne virus called Nipah and how the world's medical community battled to find a cure for the pandemic.

STOCKHOLM / ROME, Feb 10 (IPS) - Humans belong to a species that is constantly on the move . Since some Homo Sapiens 125,000 years ago began to move from the African continent, humans can be found all over the world, even in such utterly inhospitable places as the icebound plateaus of Antarctica.

By moving, humans have tried to escape inadequate food-supply or otherwise unacceptable living conditions.

Natural forces have forced them to leave, or even more commonly – violent actions by other humans. With them migrants have brought their means of expression and interaction, some of them expressed through their art.

NEW YORK, Feb 07 (IPS) - I soiled my pants, I could feel the wetness seeping into my waistband, my eyes started to become blurry. Only the sound of the blaring television assured me that I was still alive. I tried to stop thinking and make my mind go completely blank.

Over the years I have adapted and now I can make my mind go numb. But the only nagging question ringing on my mind during the last 45 seconds was: will this stain the carpet? Should I clean myself first or should I clean the carpet first? Which one is safer? Did he notice the stain?

WASHINGTON DC, Feb 07 (IPS) - The Caribbean economies have long recognized the value of working together. Improving regional integration—for instance, through more intraregional trade and policy coordination—can help the region's small-size economies build greater resilience and scale, as well as enhance bargaining power on the global stage.