Humanitarians were barred from delivering much-needed medicines to the town of Yei in South Sudan on Friday, a senior official with the UN humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, has reported. OCHA Operations Director John Ging said even though political leaders had granted permission to the convoy, it was barred from entering the town. Yei had previously [...]
Mazar car bomb blast in Afghanistan condemned The death of four civilians and the injury of hundreds of others in a car bomb attack in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif has been condemned by the UN. Shortly before midnight on Thursday, a vehicle loaded with heavy explosives blew up near the German Consulate [...]
UN policing operations need to be "realistic" and adequately resourced in order to ensure a "modern, agile and people-centred" force, the Secretary-General has said. Ban Ki-moon made the remarks at the closing of meeting with Heads of UN Police Components. Around 13,500 men and women are engaged in peace operations in post-conflict and other crisis [...]
There is a strong risk of violence escalating along ethnic lines in South Sudan, with the potential for genocide, a UN senior official has said. Adama Dieng, the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, said he did not make the remarks "lightly" and that his concerns were based on what he "saw and [...]
Fresh fears of terrible crimes by ISIL militants surfaced on Friday in which children, so-called "sons of the caliphate", have been deployed as suicide bombers to defend Mosul against Iraqi forces. Other reports from the besieged Iraqi city released by the UN indicate that teenagers have been forced to carry out executions and that women [...]
Listen to a bulletin of news and features from United Nations Radio, with Dianne Penn and Jocelyne Sambira. In today's programme: Chilling reports from Mosul, where the terrorist group ISIL has been using children as suicide bombers and executioners And why Sustainable Energy for All could be a reality by 2030
The goal to provide more than a billion of the world's poorest people with clean energy could be achieved in our lifetime. That's the belief expressed by the head of the UN Secretary-General's Sustainable Energy for All initiative, Rachel Kyte. Ensuring that all people have access to affordable, reliable and sustainable modern energy is one [...]
Countries are being urged by the UN to end child deaths from pneumonia and diarrhoea which together kill more than 1.4 million children every year. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) released a report on the issue on the margins of the ongoing climate change talks, dubbed COP22, in Morocco. Nearly half of all childhood pneumonia [...]
Mosul civilians "fleeing to Syria over fears of Iraqi army retribution" Evidence is growing that more families are fleeing the ISIL stronghold of Mosul and crossing into Syria, fearing reprisals from Iraqi soldiers and their allies. The UN Human Rights Office OHCHR said that several hundred Iraqi civilians now faced a dire humanitarian situation in [...]
Indigenous people in Canada have been marginalized when it comes to city life "for many decades" with women and girls suffering a "disproportionate level of violence." That's according to Christine O'Fallon, a member of Canada's Women Transforming Cities group, speaking at the UN's recent Habitat III conference on the future of urbanization, in Ecuador. She [...]
Challenges facing the Haitian government and UN teams, working to vaccinate 800,000 people from cholera, can be overcome to reach the most vulnerable. That's according to Jean-Luc Poncelet, who heads the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and World Health Organization (WHO) teams in the Caribbean country. There has been an uptick in cholera cases since [...]
