Robert Mugabe would have rejected the role of World health Organisation (WHO) goodwill envoy had he been formally asked, his spokesman said on Tuesday, October 24, 2017, days after state media cheered the Zimbabwean president’s appointment. WHO Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, named Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador on Wednesday at a conference in Uruguay that both men were attending. The appointment ...

Some 264 million school-age children and young people worldwide were not in education in 2015, the United Nations culture and education agency, UNESCO, said on Tuesday, October 24, 2017. The agency, in a progress report on the UN’s development goals for education, said that after a decline in the early 2000s, out-of-school rates have started to stagnate. “Worldwide, there was ...

The drought-torn city of Cape Town in South Africa has officially rolled out water rationing as a result of the critical nature of available water supply. This move is part of the city’s Critical Water Shortages Disaster Plan (CWSDP). In a statement, the Cape Town government announced on Monday, October 23, 2017 that the rationing is the Phase 1 of its ...

Nicaragua on Monday, October 23, 2017 deposited its instruments of accession to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, becoming the 169th Party to the global treaty. Nicaragua’s accession to the Agreement has been lodged formally with the UN headquarters in New York and will be effective as of November 22, 2017. Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate ...

In a landmark ruling on Tuesday, October 24, 2017, the Indian Supreme Court bench comprising of Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Deepak Gupta banned the use of dirty furnace oil and pet-coke in Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh from November 1, 2017. These fuels are already banned in Delhi. In a swift reaction, the Centre for Science and Environment ...

The 7th Regional Conference on Human Rights and Agribusiness in South East Asia on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 issued a resolution calling for a range of measures aimed at securing real change in land tenure recognition and security. The resolution calls for accessible mechanisms to map and register customary lands, to provide clarity of ownership. The resolution also called for a rethinking ...

Director General of National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA), Dr. Rufus Ebegba, has said that regulators of modern biotechnology need to be necessarily trained so as to ensure that Nigeria benefits maximally from the technology. Dr Ebegba made the observation while opening a training session for staffers of the agency organised in conjunction with M and A Global Projects entitled, “Capacity ...

It has become the norm for the Nigerian biosafety chief, Dr Rufus Egbeda, to rise to the defense of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This was my response to some participants (not Nigerians) at a high profile meeting, who also saw this article published on Premium Times “Nigeria bio-safety chief defends GMOs” on October 9, 2017, and were visibly alarmed that ...

Countries across the world on Monday, October 23, 2017 celebrated the International Snow Leopard Day, an annual holiday dedicated to saving one of the rarest wild cats on the planet. The snow leopard, also known as the ounce, is a large cat that inhabits alpine and subalpine zones in the mountain ranges of Central and South Asia. As of 2016, ...

Nigeria’s delegates to the 23rd Session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP23) holding in Bonn, Germany next month have been urged to solicit for international partnership and funding. Mr Richard Inyamkume, the Senior Programme Officer of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Initiative, an NGO, made the call in an interview ...