GENEVA, Jul 08 (IPS) - The Biden administration made a decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan based on the Trump-Taliban agreement. Their last combat soldier may have already left. There is nothing to argue about!

The global death toll due to COVID-19 officially passed four million late on Wednesday, marking yet another “grim milestone” and underlining the urgent need for the world to put a Global Vaccine Plan in place to get the pandemic under control, said the UN chief in a statement.

TANGAIL, Bangladesh, Jul 07 (IPS) - When the Bangladesh Forest Department felled Basanti Rema’s banana orchard, Rema, a Garo indigenous forest-dweller of Madhupur Forest, felt she was living a nightmare.

Rema, from Pegmari village in Madhupur, Tangail district, had cultivated the banana plants on half an acre in the Madhupur Forest. But the Forest Department claimed that the land on which the bananas were cultivated belonged to the department. 

A new government action plan in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has the potential to reverse the urgent and tragic deterioration in the east of the country, where thousands of human rights abuses are being committed against civilians by armed militants, the senior UN official in the country told the Security Council on Wednesday. 

Variants like Delta are “currently winning the race against vaccines” said the World Health Organization (WHO) chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday, pinning the blame squarely on a lack of equitable vaccine production and distribution.

Perpetrators behind the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse must be brought to justice, the United Nations said on Wednesday. 

Action must be taken now to halt alarming attacks against children and abductions - including of students - in parts of West and Central Africa, the head of the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said in a statement on Wednesday. 

ISLAMABAD / LAGOS, Jul 07 (IPS) - Never before have so many children been out of school. 1.6 billion children and young people – more than 90% of students worldwide – have been impacted by school closures during the pandemic. Hundreds of millions of those children have gone without any learning at all, deprived of all the benefits that being in school provides.

Jul 06 (IPS) - Over the last few years, the world has witnessed accelerated action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 5 on gender equality and women’s empowerment. This has also led to significant interest in menstrual health and hygiene management (MHHM) as a critical factor in girls’ education and women’s participation in many spheres of life. 

What began as a coup by the Myanmar military has ‘rapidly morphed’ into an all-out attack against the civilian population that has become increasingly widespread and systematic, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned on Tuesday.