In a camp for internally displaced people in Bossaso, northeastern Somalia, children and their caregivers gather to receive rations of a special high-nutrition food. Bossaso, where tens of thousands have sought refuge from ongoing conflict, drought and loss of livestock, has some of the country’s worst rates of malnutrition. UNICEF
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes says he is concerned that the expulsion of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Sudan “does have and will have” a dramatic impact on the ability to provide assistance in Darfur and northern Sudan. UNTV / UNAMID
In 2005 a catastrophic earthquake killed 73,000 people and left three million homeless in northern Pakistan. UNICEF pledged to reconstruct some of the nearly 6,000 schools destroyed in the quake. One of the new earthquake-resistant permanent buildings recently opened in the village of Banaw Langla. UNICEF
On the 21st anniversary of the massacre against the Kurdish population of the Iraqi town of Halabja, Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth says that at the time of the atrocities, Saddam Hussein was an ally against whom “the US government and its allies in Europe were unwilling to speak out.” UNTV
A senior UN official in southern Sudan says the recent joint military operation against rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) by Ugandan, Congolese and southern Sudanese troops has created humanitarian conditions that are “deteriorating and they are deteriorating quickly”, with over 100,000 people affected. UNMIS