(UN News)* — To the millions around the world who celebrate the birth, enlightenment and passing of Lord Buddha, the UN chief sent warm wishes on Thursday [7 May 2020], officially marked as the Day of Vesak, noting that “we can all be inspired by his teachings”.
UN News/Jing Zhang | The Shwedagon is the most sacred Buddhist pagoda in Myanmar.
“As the human family suffers the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are reminded of the sutra, ‘because all living beings are subject to illness, I am ill as well’”, Secretary-General António Guterres said on Thursday, in his message.
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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Agence Olloweb on Unsplash. | Some rights reserved.
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.
6 May 2020 (UN News)* — The COVID-19 pandemic is not only a health crisis, but it is also proving to be an economic disaster for huge numbers of people worldwide. A senior UN official with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) is calling for countries to provide citizens with a universal basic income, to help the millions who have lost their jobs, because of measures to curb the virus, combined with increasing levels of inequality.
UN Photo/Kibae Park | A woman in Viet Nam makes environmentally-friendly biomass briquettes, a biofuel substitute to coal and charcoal cooking fuel.
Kanni Wignaraja, who runs the UNDP’s Asia-Pacific bureau, spoke to UN News and started by explaining why the idea of universal basic income (where governments give a minimum sum of money to all citizens, based on work status or income) is starting to gain traction.
(UN News)* — Unabated violence, particularly in and around the Libyan capital, has now been raging for more than a year, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) told the Security Council in a virtual briefing on Tuesday [5 May 2020], warning that war crimes may have been committed.
“Of particular concern to my Office are the high numbers of civilian casualties, largely reported to be resulting from airstrikes and shelling operations”, said Fatou Bensouda.
The press asked Brazil’s President about a change of officers that could be related to an attempt to obstruct justice.
President Jair Bolsonaro gestures against journalists as he leaves his headquarters, Brasilia, Brazil, May 5, 2020. | Photo: Twitter/ @Metropoles
5 May 2020 (teleSUR)* — Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro lost his head on Tuesday [5 May 2020] morning and told reporters to shut up after they asked him about his interference in the Federal Police, of which he was accused by Sergio Moro, his former Justice Ministerand political ally.
Photo by Pixabay
Yayoi Kusama, The spirits of the pumpkins descended into heavens (2015) Installation view at Museum MACAN © Yayoi Kusama | Image posted here from Wall Street International.
UN Photo/Kibae Park | A woman in Viet Nam makes environmentally-friendly biomass briquettes, a biofuel substitute to coal and charcoal cooking fuel.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 