UNITED NATIONS, May 7 2020 (IPS)* – The world’s poorer nations, reeling under an unrelenting attack on their fragile economies by the COVID-19 pandemic, have suffered an equally deadly body blow: being buried under heavy debt burdens.
6 May 2020 (UN News)* — Lockdowns, travel restrictions, resource cutbacks and other measures to curb the spread of the new coronavirus are putting victims of human trafficking at risk of further exploitation, while organized crime networks could further profit from the pandemic, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
7 May 2020 (UN Environment)* — The coronavirus pandemic is reminding us that we live in a connected world. It’s an opportunity to revisit our relationship with nature and rebuild a more environmentally responsible world.
It highlights the importance of conserving and restoring the ecosystems that support the natural cycles essential for the survival and well-being of migratory birds.
Migratory birds are part of our shared natural heritage and they depend on a network of sites along their migration routes for breeding, feeding, resting and overwintering.
3 May 2020 (Wall Street International)* – “The Past is a Foreign Country; they do things differently there”, so stated L.P. Hartley in his award-winning novel the Go-Between (1953). Beyond the mainstream critique of that text and accusations of its culturally narrow reference base, I would argue that before long we will have need to revisit textbook diagrammatic representations of the human timeline, and perhaps even the dendrochronological carbon record as we traverse this momentous watershed called Coronavirus.
What happened to balanced budgets, austerity, tight money, cut-backs in public spending, restructuring, streamlining, debt? – the entire architecture of fiscal and financial orthodoxy?
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The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Galadriel
5 May 2020 (openDemocracy)* — There is a prevailing journalistic narrative that the COVID-19 emergency will prove to be the portal to a brave new world of increasingly powerless citizens and increasingly powerful governments.
(UN News)* — In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic,United Nations agencies called on Wednesday [6 May 2020] for South-East Asian governments to show compassion to boats full of vulnerable people adrift in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.
UNHCR/Christophe Archambault | Stranded Rohingya people sit on the deck of an abandoned smugglers’ boat drifting in the Andaman Sea in 2015.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said that thousands of lives may be at stake if the stranded people are unable disembark.
Those at sea include hundreds of Rohingya, ethnic communities from Western Myanmar who faced persecution that was likened to ethnic cleansing by former top UN rights official Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.
