27/06/2020
Martha Maocha runs a detergent manufacturing company but has recently started making hand sanitising gel, which protects against COVID-19. Bulawayo, April 2020. Photo: KB Mpofu / ILO.
To continue playing their crucial role in creating decent jobs and improving livelihoods, small businesses depend more than ever on an enabling business environment, including support for access to finance, information, and markets.
Let’s not forget that these enterprises, which generally employ fewer than 250 persons, are the backbone of most economies worldwide and play a key role in developing countries.
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27/06/2020
To mark Micro-, Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises Day, which falls on 27 June, we are profiling entrepreneurs who are helping to tackle some of the planet’s most pressing environmental issues.
Agricultural technician at a plantation in Cameroon, Ollivier Girard/CIFOR
27 June 2020 (UN Environment)* — Tabi Joda grew up in the forest, spending hours playing with his friends among the trees that lined the Mambila Plateau between Cameroon and Nigeria. But as they got older, there were fewer trees to climb amid a widespread and ruinous deforestation that turned trees into timber and agricultural land into deserts.
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27/06/2020
The Tropics account for 40 per cent of the world’s total surface area and are host to approximately 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity and much of its language and cultural diversity. Photo: FAO/IPPC
The Tropics are a region of the Earth, roughly defined as the area between the tropic of Cancer and the tropic of Capricorn. Although topography and other factors contribute to climatic variation, tropical locations are typically warm and experience little seasonal change in day-to-day temperature.
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27/06/2020
A massive dust storm currently blanketing many parts of the Caribbean, posing a significant threat to regional health, has revealed the importance of having effective warning systems in place, the World Meteorological Office (WMO) said on Friday [26 June 2020]. (*)
WMO | A dust storm which originated in the Sahara in Africa has arrived in the Caribbean.
The storm arrived in the Eastern Caribbean from North Africa last week, affecting a wide area so far, spanning from the northern coast of South America to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
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26/06/2020
(UN News)* — The decision by the United States to authorize sanctions targeting staff at the International Criminal Court (ICC) is “a direct attack to the institution’s judicial independence”, UN human rights experts said on Thursday [25 June 2020].
©UNICEF/Marko Kokic | Many schools in Afghanistan have suffered the effects of long-term conflict.
Washington announced this month that it would launch an economic and legal offensive against ICC officials investigating alleged war crimes committed by all sides in the conflict in Afghanistan, including US troops.
“The implementation of such policies by the US has the sole aim of exerting pressure on an institution whose role is to seek justice against crimes of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression”, saidDiego García-Sayán, UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, speaking on behalf of the 34 experts.
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26/06/2020
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jun 25 2020 (IPS)* – Katharina Pistor’s recent book, The Code of Capital: How the law creates wealth and inequality shows how law has been crucial to the creation of capital, and how capital continues to survive, evolve and enhance its ability to ‘make money’, or secure wealth legally, i.e., through the law.
Legal coding makes capital
In her magnum opus, the Columbia Law School professor explains how legal systems create capital and how law enables wealth creation through what she terms ‘legal coding’.
Notions of property and property rights have changed over the ages, reflecting and redefining social and economic relations more generally.
Pistor sees ‘legal coding’ — e.g., via collateral, trust, corporate governance, bankruptcy, contracts and other property laws — as means for assets to become capital, creating wealth for their holders. When “coded in law”, even “dirt” can become a valuable asset, capable of enriching its owners.
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26/06/2020
New records for extreme lightning bursts, or ‘megaflashes’, during 2019, have been made official, more than doubling the size and duration of the previous record flashes, the UN’s weather agency, WMO, announced on Thursday [25 June 2020]. *
WMO/Boris Baran | A lightning storm as seen from Istria, Croatia.
Closing the windows and covering your pet’s ears probably wouldn’t have made much difference to anyone stuck in the middle of the flash that developed continuously over northern Argentina on 4 March 2019, lasting a whopping 16.73 seconds.
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26/06/2020
The internet and new digital tools are being manipulated as never before to infringe on people’s right to free assembly, the UN’s top rights official said on Thursday [25 June 2020], in a call for a moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology during peaceful demonstrations.*
Unsplash/Ian Usher | A drone flies over Mount Tamalpais in the United States.
Amid global protests against systemic racism, corruption and economic woes exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet also expressed concern about the use of non-lethal weapons against demonstrators.
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26/06/2020
(UN News)* — The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a health emergency, but a multi-dimensional crisis for Afghanistan, dealing its people a painful blow just as Kabul and the Taliban prepare for peace talks in Qatar, the top UN official in the country says.
World Bank/Ghullam Abbas Farzami | Child farmers help to level fields in Balkh Province, Afghanistan.
Deborah Lyons, Head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), told the Security Council on Thursday [25 June 2020] that the novel coronavirus outbreak is casting “a huge shadow” over Afghan daily life.
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26/06/2020
UN Women/Ryan Brown | After surviving military enslavement in Guatemala, Maria Ba Caal received help through an emergency grant from the UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture.
Although international law “unequivocally prohibits torture in all instances”, the UN chief
pointed out that it nevertheless continues in many countries, “even those where it is criminalized”.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 