(UN News)* — The World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed deep concern over the impact of US funding cuts on critical global health initiatives, warning they pose a direct threat to public health efforts worldwide.
In a media briefing on Tuesday [], WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus highlighted the consequences of funding suspensions, including disruptions to HIV treatment, setbacks in polio eradication and limited resources for responding to mpox epidemics in Africa.
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 13 2025 (IPS)* – The Trump administration’s decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the US government’s primary channel for humanitarian aid and disaster relief, is expected to have a devastating impact on the world’s developing nations.
The 2025 Budget Request, under the former Biden administration, amounted to a staggering $58.8 billion in US foreign aid for this year.
The proposed aid included funding to fully support the US priorities and commitments made at the U.S.-Africa Leader’s Summit in May last year.
The request also fulfills Biden’s pledge made at the U.S.-hosted Seventh Replenishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria to match $1 for every $2 contributed by other donors by providing $1.2 billion to the Global Fund.
Reaching for the stars: ‘We know the answers’ to support women in STEM
.
UN News/Pia Blondel | Woman astronaut Amanda Nguyen addresses the UN General Assembly on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
(UN News)* — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) are crucial to economic growth – yet gender inequality in these fields remains widespread.
HARARE, Zimbabwe, Feb 11 2025 (IPS)* – Many in the West, of the political right and left, now deny imperialism. For Josef Schumpeter, empires were pre-capitalist atavisms that would not survive the spread of capitalism. But even the conservative Economist notes President Trump’s revival of this US legacy.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Economic liberalism challenged
Major liberal economic thinkers of the 19th century noted capitalism was undermining economic liberalism.
John Stuart Mill and others acknowledged the difficulties of keeping capitalism competitive.
In 2014, billionaire Peter Thiel declared competition is for losers.
According to Elon Musk, USAID, the US chief foreign aid agency, “deserves to die.” Why? Because it is “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”
Richard E. Rubenstein
What planet does this strange fellow live on? I AM a radical-left Marxist professor – one who happens to love the USA–and for more than forty years I have been criticizing USAID for not being radical or leftist at all.
What the irate oligarch means by “Marxist” is anyone’s guess.
—Everyone knows the saying ‘life imitates art’, but we’d argue that art imitates life when it comes to Disney’s Moana film franchise. Moana 2 premiered in theatres in late November following the title character’s quest to protect her community’s ancestral way of life.
(UN News)* —The world has just experienced the hottest January ever recorded, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on , citing data crunched by UN partner the Copernicus Climate Service
Last month was 1.75 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level and 0.79°C above the 1991-2020 average, despite expectations that the La Nina weather phenomenon might bring cooler temperatures.
In 2015, the international community agreed to try to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
()* — Armed groups in Haiti are inflicting “unimaginable horrors” on children, turning their “bodies into battlegrounds”, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The agency’s spokesperson James Elder has just visited Port-au-Prince, the capital of the embattled Caribbean nation and has been speaking about what he experienced there.
Staggering abuse and neglect
“There has been a staggering 1,000 per cent rise in sexual violence against children in Haiti, which has turned their bodies into battlegrounds.
The 10-fold rise, recorded from 2023 to last year, comes as armed groups inflict unimaginable horrors on children.
( UN News)* — Some 230 million girls in more than 90 countries – predominantly in Africa and Asia – have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) and can suffer lifelong physical, emotional and psychological scars, an issue that the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency has been tackling with the support of the international community including the United States.
Zeinaba Mahr Aouad, a 24-year-old woman from Djibouti, remembers the day when, as a ten-year-old, an unexpected visitor came to her house: “She had a syringe, a razor blade and bandages.”
The woman was there to carry out a brutal, unnecessary and – since 1995 in the Horn of Africa country – illegal operation known as female genital mutilation, which involves sewing up a girl’s vagina and cutting out her clitoris.
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 6 2025 (IPS)* –A new executive order from the United States White House calls for withdrawing support from major UN entities and a review of all international intergovernmental organizations which the United States is a member of.
Coly Seck (at microphone), Chair of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and Permanent Representative of the Republic of Senegal to the United Nations, briefs reporters with Members of the newly-elected Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP Bureau). At fourth from right is Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations. Credit: UN Photo: Manuel Elías
The 2025 Budget Request, under the former Biden administration, amounted to a staggering $58.8 billion in US foreign aid for this year.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 