Trade : Attempts to slow down discussions on TRIPS waiver at WTO (PRIV)
(D. Ravi Kanth, Washington DC)
Notwithstanding the growing calls by more than 100 countries for text- based negotiations on the proposed TRIPS waiver, the new chair of the TRIPS Council, Ambassador Dagfinn Sorli from Norway, appears to be slowing down the five-month-old talks by asking the proponents of the waiver to prove all over again how IPRs remain a barrier in scaling-up production of vaccines, said people familiar with the development.

United States : Was Trump's family-separation policy torture? (PRIV)
(IPS, Seattle)
"A crime against humanity" and "a disgrace to our great country": that's how 99-year-old Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nazis at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, characterized the Donald Trump administration's coercive separation of thousands of immigrant children from parents seeking asylum.

Rights : Getting to better than normal in a post-COVID-19 world (PRIV)
(IPS, Johannesburg)
Girls in Asia don't want to go back to normal - they want to go "back to better than normal", says Zara Rapoport, a delegate during an online seminar on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender.