Shoppers in Mali’s Gao, Timbuktu, and Ménaka regions can snap up AK-pattern assault rifles for $750 and cartridges for 70 cents apiece, from locally handcrafted pistols to smuggled French and Turkish machine guns, as a dizzying array of illegal weaponry dots market stalls across the Sahel, a 6,000-kilometre-wide belt in the middle of Africa.

Read the full story, “Trafficking in the Sahel: Muzzling the illicit arms trade”, on globalissues.org →

One of the world’s most celebrated poets is also one of the closest to the heart of the UN. Kahlil Gibran wrote The Prophet a century ago, and this milestone was marked at a special exhibit at the UN, which is also celebrating 75 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Read the full story, “Century-old call for equality resonates today”, on globalissues.org →

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 09 (IPS) - Children were thrown into the air and stabbed and cut with knives and machetes. The attackers first opened fire on the victims of the massacre before finishing them off with knives so that none of the 244 indigenous people of the village would survive. The 1904 massacre permanently marked the Xokleng people and may play a decisive role in the future of the native peoples of Brazil.

Read the full story, “A 1904 Massacre Could Help Save the Future of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil”, on globalissues.org →

LONDON, Jun 09 (IPS) - Nothing was more predictable than repression. Merely for holding candles and flowers, people were taken away by Hong Kong’s police.

The occasion was the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, 4 June 1989. Hong Kong was until recently home to mass annual vigils where thousands gathered to keep alive the memory of that day. But that’s all gone now in the crackdown that followed large-scale protests for democracy that erupted in 2019.

Read the full story, “Hong Kongs Lights of Freedom Extinguished”, on globalissues.org →

Plans to help the people of Ukraine following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam are centred on saving people “right now”, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths told UN News in an interview on Friday.

Read the full story, “UN relief chief outlines three-phase response plan to Ukraine dam disaster”, on globalissues.org →