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By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — U.S. counterterrorism officials are stepping up their activities in Africa, addressing the expansion of violent extremism on the continent.
Two previously unlisted insurgent groups identified as foreign terrorist organizations operating in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been slapped with sanctions along with their leaders.
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — Tanzania is missing a president. John Magufuli, a pandemic denier, has not been seen for three weeks according to reports by the opposition which place him in India with Covid.
Speaking to the BBC, Tundu Lissu, opposition leader and Member of Parliament, cited unconfirmed sources alleging that the 61-year-old president had been hospitalized in Nairobi but was transferred to a hospital in India after falling into a coma.
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) — Thione Ballago Seck, born in a family of praise or "griot" singers and one of Senegal's beloved music stars over the last four decades, has died at the age of 66 in Dakar on March 14.
Tributes poured in after his death was announced with the former mayor of Dakar, Khalifa Sall, paying tribute to a "true monument of Senegalese music". El Hadji Hamidou Kasse, a former journalist and current advisor to President Macky Sall, tweeted that Seck was "one of the artist heroes of an era".
By Caroline Mwanga
NEW YORK (IDN) — The international community has set the goal of achieving gender equality by 2030. But UN Women, a United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, maintains that "at the current rate of progress, gender equality will not be reached among Heads of Government until 2150, another 130 years".
This projection is based on the new data published ahead of the ten-day 65th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW65).
By Devinder Kumar
NEW DELHI | KUNDUZ (IDN) — While the UN Security Council on March 14 "condemned in the strongest terms" the alarming number of attacks deliberately targeting civilians in Afghanistan, women activists were over several days knocking on doors in Kunduz, posing two questions to their relatives, neighbours and fellow residents of the city: “What does the peace process mean to you? How do you see your role in it?”
The members of the Security Council expressed their deep concern regarding the increase of these targeted attacks in the months following the start of the Afghanistan peace negotiations on September 12, 2020.
The goal of the campaign is to democratize the selection process and give António Guterres a viable candidate to run against.
By Stéphanie Fillion*, Passblue
NEW YORK (IDN) — A new grass-roots campaign, called #Forward, is launching open, digital global primaries to find a “people-backed” candidate to run for United Nations secretary-general this year, for a five-year term starting in 2022. The campaign aims to make the selection process more transparent and democratic while also attracting more attention to the election itself.
Viewpoint by Justin Podur*
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
TORONTO (IDN) — India’s right-wing government has been deploying all the modern tools of repression against a historic farmers’ protest. Much is at stake. For the people of India, their agricultural system is about to get far more precarious. For its farmers, ruin, and bankruptcy for millions, is all but guaranteed. For the government of Narendra Modi and his elite backers, it’s a crossroads moment; they calculate that their political power is assured for decades if they can refashion the politics of rural India and force dependency upon the farmers.
By Krishan Dutta
BANGKOK (IDN) — A group of Buddhist economists and communication scholars from Asia are embarking on a mission to redefine the development communication paradigm using concepts from the Buddhist philosophy.
A webinar held earlier this month organized by Lotus Communication Network (LCN) in association with the Institute of Asian Studies (IAS) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and Delhi-based International Buddhist Confederation (IBC) discussed how ‘sufficiency economics’ (sometimes referred to as ‘Buddhist Economics’) and ‘middle path journalism’ could be incorporated into a new development communication paradigm.
By Reinhard Jacobsen
BRUSSELS (IDN) — The United Nations has commended VODAN-AFRICA for their innovative approach to "data sharing and re-use under the present COVID-19 circumstances". The Virus Outbreak Data Network is a system of sharing data on Coronavirus that ensures that the information remains in the country that generated it, rather than being exported and unavailable to local doctors and scientists.
The network includes computer scientists and health data management experts, clinicians and social scientists from all of the participating countries. Presently, these include Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tunisia, Liberia and Zimbabwe.
By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) — New research has cautioned against the growing trend towards "vaccine nationalism" where countries prioritize their own vaccine needs. The study warns that in monopolizing the supply of vaccines against the Covid-19 pandemic, wealthy nations are threatening economic destruction which will hit affluent countries nearly as hard as those in the developing world.
Even if wealthy nations are fully vaccinated by the middle of this year, and poor countries largely shut out, the study concludes that the global economy would suffer losses exceeding $9 trillion, a sum greater than the annual output of Japan and Germany combined. Nearly half of those costs would be absorbed by wealthy countries like the United States, Canada and Britain.
IDN-InDepthNews offers news analyses, features, reports and viewpoints that impact the world and its peoples. It has been online since 2009. Its network spans countries around the world.