News headlines in January 2021

MEXICO CITY, Jan 31 (IPS) - Mexico is seeking to mitigate water shortages in part of its extensive territory by resorting to seawater, through the expansion of desalination plants. But this solution has exorbitant costs and significant environmental impacts.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Jan 29 (IPS) - Internationally COVID-19 extracted a heavy toll on older people – raising concerns in the Asia Pacific region where more than half of the world’s ageing population live.

HYDERABAD, Jan 29 (IPS) - Lilibeth Evarestus of Lagos, Nigeria doesn’t like the concept of handouts — she is against the idea of thinking of leprosy-affected people as weak.

Yet, for several months now, Evarastus – a human rights lawyer and founder of community welfare organisation, Purple Hope Foundation – has been spending a lot of time on the road, distributing food items and hygiene products among the leprosy-affected people of her community.

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 29 (IPS) - Lebanon must “shield and preserve” the skills, knowledge, and experience of its people in order to move forward with the country’s development, according to Christophe Abi-Nassif, the Lebanon programme director for the Middle East Institute (MEI).

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 29 (IPS) - Franck Kuwonu, Africa Renewal Central African Republic and in Niger held their presidential and parliamentary elections on 27 December 2020 to round up a challenging year where despite fears of disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries in Africa managed to stick to their scheduled elections.

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 29 (IPS) - The country’s Environment Ministry is defending the January 29 auction as a conservation strategy, but conservations say the move is based on false population statistics, disputed claims of human-elephant conflict and puts 3% of Namibia’s last elephants up for sale Over 100,000 concerned petitioners have urged the Namibian government to scrap its plan to auction off 170 wild elephants -- which include rare desert-adapted elephants -- but the country’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism said this week that today’s Jan. 29 sale will go on as planned.

PARIS, Jan 28 (IPS) - Renowned activist and intellectual Angela Davis turned 77 years old on Jan. 26, marking more than five decades of her fight against systemic racism and inequality.

HAVANA, Jan 28 (IPS) - Most beginnings are rocky and sometimes the obstacles seem insurmountable, before they are finally overcome. This was certainly the case for the Finca Marta, a farm in Cuba that had to begin by digging a well in search of water and with the hard-scrabble work of clearing an arid, stony and overgrown plot of land.

Jan 28 (IPS) - As Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, reportedly experienced a massive shortage of oxygen cylinders last week — with demand increasing fivefold in one of the city’s main hospitals just as the country recorded some of its highest number of coronavirus cases — its youth leaders are concerned about the impact on vulnerable women.

GENEVA, Jan 28 (IPS) - A new UN report published on Wednesday warns that the failure of Sri Lanka to address past violations has significantly heightened the risk of human rights violations being repeated.