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Senegalese Singer Thione Ballago Seck Recalled As “A Legend”

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".

: Global Information Network; ARTS & CULTURE; 15 March 2021

UN Keen to Achieve Gender Equality Far Ahead of 2150

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).

: UN Bureau; SUSTAINABILITY; Gender Equality; 14 March 2021

Image credit: United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

Afghan Women's Voices on Peace Heard with UN Mission's Backing

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.

: Devinder Kumar; SUSTAINABILITY; Gender Equality; 14 March 2021

Photo: United Nations Headquarters in New York City, view from Roosevelt Island. CC BY-SA 3.0

A Campaign Plans ‘Global Primaries’ for the UN Chief's Post

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.

: UN Bureau; UN INSIDER; 13 March 2021

Photo: The “Billionaire Raj” is preparing to turn India back from a country of hunger (on the 2020 Global Hunger Index, India is 94th out of 107 countries) to a country of famine. Child who starved to death during the Bengal famine of 1943. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Profit Hungry Modi Government Ready to Risk Famine in India

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.

: Opinion Editor; OPINION; 13 March 2021

Photo: Dorji Wangchuck, Bhutanese communication scholar and filmmaker, pleaded for 'Middle Path Journalism' instead of adversial journalism. Credit: Dr Kalinga Seneviratne.

Buddhists Map A New Paradigm for Dev. Communication

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.

: Asia Editor; THE WORLD; Asia-Pacific; 12 March 2021

UN Acclaims VODAN's Contribution to Fight COVID-19 in Africa

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.

: Reinhard Jacobsen; THE WORLD; Africa; 12 March 2021

Photo: Syringes are assembled and then packaged in a facility in Spain. © UNICEF/Francis Kokoroko

UN Campaigns to Make Vaccines a Global Public Good

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.

: J Nastranis; SUSTAINABILITY; Health & Well Being; 12 March 2021

Photo credit: The Daily Outlook Afghanistan

Detoxracy: The Current Challenge to Democracy in America

Viewpoint by Bill Dahl*

QUERETARO, Mexico (IDN) — Detoxification is essential to human life. Every cell of the human body must routinely detoxify. From the cellular level, these toxins are transported to our organs of elimination—the kidney and liver, to be processed and expelled. Organizations, institutions and governments also become toxic and must purge these life-threatening poisons.

Culminating in the siege of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the world has witnessed the fact that democracy in America is under siege. It has become toxic. This article examines the challenge to detoxify democracy in America; a process I refer to as detoxracy.

: Opinion Editor; OPINION; 11 March 2021

Photo: Tigray forces. Source: Tufts University.

Keeping an Eye on The Situation in Tigray War

By Reinhard Jacobsen

BRUSSELS (IDN) — The midnight of November 3-4, 2020 witnessed the unleashing of the armed conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa. For nearly a fortnight there was a communication blackout until on November 17 the Europe External Programme with Africa (EEPA) launched a daily situation report.

March 10 marked the 100th edition of its publication, which has been following the chain of events of the war in Tigray. A close look at the situation reports reveals that the continuing war is regional, has been so from the start and that it had been planned as such.