Washington, Dec 29: India is facing "very very big" challenges in gender justice, a top UN Women official has said, adding that the government has "prioritised" women's issues in its policies and programmes but there is a need for greater momentum.
Lakshmi Puri, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and deputy executive director of UN Women, called for setting up special courts for hearing cases of violence against women and providing gender-responsive training to police.
She said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has prioritised women issues in his policies and programmes.
"He (Modi) has prioritised it (gender equality and gender issues) in every programme, every mission that he has launched. He has put gender equality in the middle of that. Jan Dhan Yojana is a very big win for women. In Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, he is highlighting more gender-related issues. Similarly, Skills India, Digital India..." she told PTI.
Considered a guiding force in driving the women related agenda of the UN, Puri said, "We would, of course, like to see greater momentum in regard to some of these initiatives going forward."
Puri, who was acting head of UN Women from March to August 2013, noted that the challenges being faced by India in the arena of women equality and gender justice are "very very big".
In addition to addressing the challenges being faced by women in cities, she underscored the need for safety of women in rural areas in India.
"Rural women face different types of violence and the more disadvantaged amongst them, marginalised amongst them, the poorest face different types of violence. So that needs to be addressed. The number, the scale, the scope of the challenges are so big that sometimes the impact cannot be seen immediately, she said.
Despite India making considerable progress in the last 70 years, the country is still facing the challenge of patriarchal social and cultural norms that hold back women, she rued.
There is still high-level of girl aversion and boy preference which has led to sex selection, against which Prime Minister Modi launched the beti bachao, beti padhao campaign, she added.
"We have progressed considerably in the last 70 years. Whether you're looking at women's economic empowerment, whether you're looking at consciousness about gender equality and women's empowerment. Whether you're looking at political participation and leadership, there is some progress, she said.
On this whole issue of violence against women, what I see as progress is the consciousness and people recognising particularly domestic violence and its criminalisation. That's a really big, Puri said in response to a question.
While women have made considerable progress in the education field, but translating that to their participation in the formal workforce and access to finance has been disturbing, she said.
Now preparing to leave the UN Women to join her husband Hardeep Puri, the Union Minister of State with Independent Charge in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, next month, Lakshmi Puri said there is a need for greater representation of women in the Parliament and judiciary.
She joined the UN 14 years ago through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as Director of the flagship Division of Trade in Goods, Services and Commodities of UNCTAD and then as Acting Deputy Secretary- General.
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India facing huge challenges in gender justice: UN Women official
Agencies
December 29, 2017
New Cambridge Analytica leak unravels dangers to democracy
Agencies
January 6,2020
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is far from over. New explosive details leaked by a whistleblower shows that the extent of the rot is far deeper than previously thought.
An anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, has started releasing the documents, apparently on behalf of Brittany Kaiser, a former employee of the now defunct British data analytics and consulting company Cambridge Analytica.
"Democracies around the world are being auctioned to the highest bidder. We release the documents that explain how," reads the biography of the @HindsightFiles.
The document will reveal previously unreleased emails, project plans, case studies, negotiations and more spanning over 60 countries.
"Over the past two years I have given evidence to investigators, journalists and academics to analyse what happened at Cambridge Analytica, and how our data was used to influence democracies around the world. In the name of shedding light on these dark practices, I am releasing documents and emails in full for the public good," Kaiser, who worked with Cambridge Analytica from 2014 to 208, was quoted as saying.
"I do this to strengthen the case for data rights and enforcement of our electoral laws online globally. We should all be seeking more ethical digital future for ourselves and our children," added Kaiser who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary "The Great Hack".
The details released so far includes links to material on the firm's activities in Malaysia, Kenya, Brazil and Iran, an addition to the John Bolton archive.
Over the next months, more than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries are set to be released, according to a report in The Guardian.
More than one and a half year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal first became public, US regulators last month said that the now-defunct British data analytics and consulting company engaged in deceptive practices to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting.
According to Kaiser, the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation designed to manipulate people in collaboration with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns.
The unpublished documents contain material that suggests the firm collaborated with a political party in Ukraine in 2017 even while under investigation as part of Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, said The Guardian report.
"There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics," Kaiser was quoted as saying.
Similar tactics were deployed in other countries that Cambridge Analytica operated in, including Britain, she claimed.
The files released by Kaiser suggest that Cambridge Analytica offered to help United Malays National Organisation (Umno), the party of Malaysia's Former Prime Minister Najib Razak, to influence the voting of 40 parliamentary constituencies in the 14th General Election (GE14) in 2013.
Umno, according to the leaks, requested the company to prepare a proposal to regain 13 seats, The South China Morning Post reported on Saturday.
In 2018, Razak claimed that he had never engaged Cambridge Analytica in any way.
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US approved 4 COVID-19 vaccine candidates for clinical trials - FDA Head
News Network
July 1,2020
Washington, Jul 1: The United States has approved four coronavirus vaccine candidates for clinical trials, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) head Stephen Hahn told reporters.
"Four vaccines have been approved for moving into clinical trials... and another six are in the pipeline for us to review," Hahn said during a press briefing on Tuesday.
The US Administration launched in May Operation Warp Speed, a joint project of Health and Defense Departments, which aims to deliver 300 million doses of a vaccine for COVID-19 by January 2021.
The country's top pandemics expert Anthony Fauci warned on Tuesday, however, that there is no certainty the United States will be able to develop a vaccine against COVID-19 that works and will be safe.
Data on vaccine effectiveness, he added, may be available in the winter or early next year.
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Global Coronavirus Death Count Surpasses 5 Lakh Mark: Report
News Network
June 29,2020
Paris, Jun 29: More than half a million people have been killed by the novel coronavirus, nearly two thirds of them in the United States and Europe, according to an news agency tally at 2200 GMT Sunday based on official sources.
The official death count for the disease now stands at 500,390 deaths from 10,099,576 cases recorded worldwide. The United States has suffered the highest death count (125,747), followed by Brazil (57,622) and the United Kingdom (43,550).
The tallies, using data collected by AFP from national authorities and information from the World Health Organization (WHO), probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections.
Many countries are testing only the most serious cases.
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