NEW YORK, Nov 17 (IPS) - Once again, the U.S. faces a test case along racial lines. Will the courts mete out justice in the case of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by three white men while jogging in Georgia?

Despite a crisis of trust both within the country and abroad, three months after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, it is taking halting steps to pursue international legitimacy, a senior UN official in Kabul told the Security Council on Wednesday.

NAIROBI, Nov 17 (IPS) - For the last ten years, Angeline Wanjira’s food stall at Kirigiti Market in Kiambu County has featured the same foods, cabbages, potatoes and carrots, keeping with the community’s most preferred food types.

Although progress has been made in Somalia’s electoral process, it has been slow and uneven, the UN Special Representative for the country said in a briefing to the Security Council on Wednesday.

Nov 17 (IPS) - The cost of infectious diseases is somewhere between staggering and incalculable. Around $8 trillion and 156 million life years were lost in 2016 alone. Throughout human history, pestilences have wiped out more lives than famine and violence.

SANTIAGO, Nov 17 (IPS) - At the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used his allotted time at the podium to recount his views on Covid-19. He extolled the virtues of treatments that have been rejected by scientists and proclaimed that he had benefitted from the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine.

With more than 300,000 women dying from cervical cancer each year, the World Health Organization (WHO) is joining advocates from across the globe on Wednesday to commemorate a Day of Action against the disease. 

Following pandemic-driven school closures, five UN agencies threw their strong support behind an international coalition to improve the nutrition, health and education of school-age children around the world.

Seoul, Nov 16 (IPS) - Immediately after its release, the Squid Game went viral, grabbing the attention of the world's entertainment stage. The grotesque and hyper-violent thriller has reportedly become Netflix's biggest show, the world's most-watched and the most-talked-about streaming entertainment. Is it a case of art imitating life?

MADRID, Nov 16 (IPS) - It sounds incredible: while politicians have been cackling about the climate emergency and profiling in empty promises to halt it, they have spent six trillion US dollars from taxpayers' money to subsidise fossil fuels in just one year: 2020. And they are set to increase the figure to nearly seven trillion by 2025.