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Access to water is not just about “liquid in a bottle” but instead touches on universal issues such as dignity, opportunity and equality, the UN General Assembly President said on Thursday, in opening a high-level meeting on ensuring water and sanitation are available to all. 

The COVID-19 pandemic seriously impacted all economies around the world last year, with trillions of dollars of lost earnings, UN trade and development experts UNCTAD said on Thursday, before highlighting how several countries also showed unexpected resilience, too.

Underlining that “diversity is a richness, not a threat”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for greater investment in promoting social cohesion and tackling bigotry in a message on Wednesday to mark the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. 

Women need to be “front and centre” of the pandemic recovery as a matter of economics, efficiency, effectiveness and social resilience, the UN chief told the women’s commission on Tuesday. 

The UN Secretary-General has urged corporate leaders to achieve gender equality, highlighting the benefits for the private sector and society at large. 

António Guterres made the appeal in a video message to the ‘Target Gender Equality LIVE’ event, held on Tuesday during the latest session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). 

Target Gender Equality is an initiative by the UN Global Compact, which supports businesses in adopting sustainable and socially responsible policies. 

The UN rights chief said on Tuesday that empowering women and girls to participate fully in public life is both the right and “smart thing to do”, speaking on a day that saw history being made with the first ever address to the UN by a woman Vice President of the United States. 

This week, Syria marks a grim anniversary: 10 years since the start of the country’s grinding conflict. Today, one decade into the catastrophe, about half the country’s population has been uprooted, with some 12 million people internally displaced or living as refugees.  

As the Syrian war reaches its grim decade-long milestone, the UN envoy for the country told the Security Council on Monday that it will “go down as one of the darkest chapters in recent history” referring to the Syrian people as among “the greatest victims of this century”. 

Health officials from the UN and the European Union will meet this week on the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine after several more countries suspended its use, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. 

Agency chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists that WHO’s Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety has been reviewing available data on the vaccine and will meet with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on Tuesday.

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday that it was aware of blood clot concerns linked to “a specific batch” of AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, but maintained that to date, no-one has died from any coronavirus vaccine.

The development comes after several European countries suspended the rollout of the jab as a precaution.