News headlines in 2023, page 169

BLANTYRE, Malawi, Jun 12 (IPS) - “Cyclone Freddy was a terrible experience, and now many women who lost their homes and their livelihoods are at increased risk of sexual exploitation and abuse,” warns Caleb Ng'ombo, Director of People Serving Girls at Risk (PSGR), a frontline NGO in Malawi that supports vulnerable women whose lives have been devastated by the record-breaking tropical storm.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Sunday condemned in the strongest possible terms the deadly attack on the Pearl Beach Hotel and Restaurant in Mogadishu, Somalia, that left 16 dead, including a staff member.

Fleeing armed conflict is frightening, forcing people to escape violent clashes and leave behind their homes, schools, and daily lives in a desperate search for safety.

Shoppers in Mali’s Gao, Timbuktu, and Ménaka regions can snap up AK-pattern assault rifles for $750 and cartridges for 70 cents apiece, from locally handcrafted pistols to smuggled French and Turkish machine guns, as a dizzying array of illegal weaponry dots market stalls across the Sahel, a 6,000-kilometre-wide belt in the middle of Africa.

One of the world’s most celebrated poets is also one of the closest to the heart of the UN. Kahlil Gibran wrote The Prophet a century ago, and this milestone was marked at a special exhibit at the UN, which is also celebrating 75 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 09 (IPS) - Children were thrown into the air and stabbed and cut with knives and machetes. The attackers first opened fire on the victims of the massacre before finishing them off with knives so that none of the 244 indigenous people of the village would survive. The 1904 massacre permanently marked the Xokleng people and may play a decisive role in the future of the native peoples of Brazil.

LONDON, Jun 09 (IPS) - Nothing was more predictable than repression. Merely for holding candles and flowers, people were taken away by Hong Kong’s police.

The occasion was the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, 4 June 1989. Hong Kong was until recently home to mass annual vigils where thousands gathered to keep alive the memory of that day. But that’s all gone now in the crackdown that followed large-scale protests for democracy that erupted in 2019.

Plans to help the people of Ukraine following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam are centred on saving people “right now”, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths told UN News in an interview on Friday.

The UN has strongly condemned an attack on a peacekeeping patrol in Mali which left one ‘blue helmet’ from Burkina Faso dead and eight others with serious injuries.

The UN on Friday announced that following serious allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse, an entire unit of 60 peacekeepers from Tanzania formerly based in the western part of the Central African Republic (CAR), is to be repatriated.