BONN, Jun 04 (IPS) - You want to breathe fresh air and have access to clean water? I guess you do, just like all of us. As populations in the so-called developed countries, we love to go for holidays in places where on high mountains you get to breathe deeply and enjoy the fresh air, where the oceans or lakes are clean and refreshing. And how do we arrive there? Mostly by airplanes or cars, polluting the air whilst travelling to the desired destinations, causing harm to people and the planet.

Interestingly, many people today, calculate their flight’s CO2 footprint and pay a certain amount of money to invest in renewable energy projects, in order to feel better about their travelling and to receive tax deductibility (depending on regulations of their country).

ROME, Jun 04 (IPS) - Requiring in-person voting to elect the governing bodies of UN agencies may exclude the countries most affected by travel restrictions derived from the pandemic.

Upholding human rights online must be part of global efforts to recover better following the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of UN independent experts said on Friday. 

DHAKA and NEW YORK, Jun 04 (IPS) - Every two minutes, a girl or woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications, including unsafe abortions. Every year, around 12 million girls are married while in their childhoods. An additional 10 million are now at risk of child marriage due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Independent UN human rights experts on Friday urged Canadian authorities and the Holy See of the Catholic Church to conduct prompt “full-fledged investigations” into a mass grave found in British Columbia containing the remains of over 200 children at a residential school for indigenous students, who had been forcibly taken from their homes.

Heads of Government, religious leaders, activists and artists joined the United Nations on Friday in a rallying cry to heal the planet, launching the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. 

Amidst the triple environmental threat of biodiversity loss, climate disruption and escalating pollution, Secretary-General António Guterres launched “an unprecedented effort to heal the Earth”, on the eve of World Environment Day. 

LONDON, Jun 04 (IPS) - June 4, 2021 marks 30 years since the killings of an undisclosed number of Chinese protestors at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. For many years, the Chinese government and its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with characteristic understatement, called it the ‘June Fourth incident’.

Some two billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been distributed globally but only 0.5 per cent have reached low-income countries where frontline health workers and the elderly have yet to receive a shot, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 04 (IPS) - The United Nations has been in the forefront of an ongoing battle against the growing hazards of climate change, including the destruction of different species of plants and animals, the danger of rising sea-levels threatening the very existence of small island developing states (SIDS), and the risks of oceans reaching record temperatures endangering aquatic resources.