Since 2008, I have always devoted my end-year columns to counting down the Top Ten human rights issues as they pertain to Non-Japanese residents of Japan. This year I’m moving this feature to the Shingetsu News Agency.
Less than two weeks after the Shingetsu News Agency issued its SNA Covid Variant Handbook, the World Health Organization finally stepped up to plate and belatedly offered its own new nomenclature.
Asserting that humanity “cannot wait for the pandemic to pass” before acting to rapidly reduce carbon emissions fueling the climate emergency, more than 220 health journals around the world published an unprecedented joint editorial calling for “urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees celsius, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health.”
The European Union (EU) is preparing to launch its own vaccination passport system on July 1, while many other nations are considering similar initiatives.
Human Rights Watch has released a 43-page report that urges the Japanese government to revise what activists and experts call an “outdated” and “abusive” transgender recognition law.
The Shingetsu News Agency presents our own provisional handbook on nomenclature for the Covid variants which have been confirmed to have reached Japan.
The Covid-19 crisis became a dominating issue for the world, and Japan is no exception. This is a timeline of the events so far.
“I need to be blunt: the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure—and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”
Top United Nations officials have called on nearly two hundred member nations—including the world’s wealthiest and most powerful—to help raise tens of billions of dollars in aid for poor countries facing pandemic, ongoing war, and encroaching famine in what will be a “humanitarian crisis year” in 2021.
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported in the last half of May 2020.
