News headlines in 2021, page 227

SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador, Mar 31 (IPS) - Salvadoran villager Maria Luz Rodriguez placed the cheese on top of the lasagna she was cooking outdoors, put the pan in her solar oven and glanced at the midday sun to be sure there was enough energy for cooking.

GENEVA, Mar 31 (IPS) - The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Hurricane Committee decided at its annual meeting to retire four tropical cyclone names from its rotating list after assessing the record-breaking hurricane 2020 season.

Vulnerable communities disproportionately bear the brunt of environmental degradation caused by plastics pollution, and action is urgently needed to address the issue and restore access to human rights, health and well-being, according to a new UN report published on Tuesday.  

Ending the war in Syria is the collective responsibility of the international community, UN Secretary-General António Guterres reaffirmed during a major pledging event on Tuesday which raised $6.4 billion to support people affected by the  conflict.

The report from a team of international scientists assembled by the World Health Organization (WHO) to examine how COVID-19 first spread to humans was published on Tuesday, and was described by the UN health agency’s chief as a welcome start, but far from conclusive.

BANGKOK, Thailand, Mar 30 (IPS) - The world is emerging from the biggest social and economic shock in living memory, but it will be a long time before the deep scars of the COVID-19 pandemic on human well-being fully heal.

In the Asia-Pacific region, where 60 per cent of the world lives, the pandemic revealed chronic development fault lines through its excessively harmful impact on the most vulnerable. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) estimates that 89 million more people in the region have been pushed back into extreme poverty at the $1.90 per day threshold, erasing years of development gains. The economic and educational shutdowns are likely to have severely harmed human capital formation and productivity, exacerbating poverty and inequality.

Disturbing reports of targeted attacks against civilians have continued to emerge from the northern Mozambique town of Palma, marking a serious escalation of violence and volatility in the Cabo Delgado region.

A group of world leaders have joined the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) in calling for an international treaty to improve pandemic preparedness and response in the wake of COVID-19, for the sake of future generations. 

BONN, Germany, Mar 30 (IPS) - The inability of developing nations to spend on post COVID-19 recovery and resilience has placed the world on the "the verge of a debt crisis". “We face the spectre of a divided world and a lost decade for development,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday, Mar. 29, during a high-level meeting on financing development post COVID-19.

STOCKHOLM / ROME, Mar 30 (IPS) - I was born in the winter in 1990 in a country not my own i was born with my father’s eyes maybe i stole them he doesn’t look like that anymore i was born in seven countries i was born carved up by borders i was born with a graveyard of languages for teeth i was born to be a darkness in an american boy´s bed ...

Safia Elhillo