What's New

While peacekeeping is an “essential tool” for preventing conflict and reducing the risk of relapse, “political solutions are a prerequisite to sustainable peace”, the United Nations peacekeeping chief told the Security Council on Monday.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched the Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative 18 months ago, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, reminded the chamber, noting A4P calls on all participants to “collectively address peacekeeping challenges”.

As children in many parts of the world return to school, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) launched a haunting installation on Sunday that displays 3,758 school backpacks as headstones to illustrate the grave scale of child deaths in conflict in 2018 and call for greater protection of children living in conflict. 

Despite progress in national prevention strategies, one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director-General lamented on Monday, highlighting key findings of the agency’s latest report on global suicide estimates.

A new UN report on Thursday shows that while improved security and rainfall across Syria's farming areas have boosted the country’s harvests, higher prices mean that many citizens are still struggling to feed their families.

Lise Grande, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen, described Sunday’s deadly airstrikes in Dhamar City as a “horrific incident”, and the scale of the casualties, as “staggering”. “These are very dark times for Yemen,” said Ms. Grande. "There have been days of fighting and strikes in the south and hundreds of casualties”.

The strikes hit a former community college compound on the northern outskirts of Dhamar City. According to sources on the ground, as many as 170 prisoners were being held in a detention facility within the compound. 

In her message for the day, Audrey Azoulay pointed out that there are some 7,000 living languages being spoken today, and called them “instruments for communication, engagement in lifelong learning, and participation in society and the world of work”. 

The relentless outbreak of crises around the world – from the fires in the Amazon to “carnage” in Syria and demonstrations in Hong Kong, Russia, Indonesian Papua and elsewhere - risk pushing the world “further and further away from global solutions to global problems”, the UN’s top rights official said on Wednesday.

Briefing journalists one year since she took office, High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, appealed for greater international cooperation.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday welcomed Facebook’s pledge to ensure users can separate fact from fiction when it comes to vaccines, across its platforms from Facebook Search, to Groups, Pages and forums.

Seven health centres in Syria’s north-west have been reportedly attacked in recent days and two of them have been destroyed, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. 

Attacks ‘verified on four facilities, three pending’ 

In a statement, the UN health agency said that the facilities included four hospitals and two primary health care centres “that were functional at the time they were hit”. 

Geir Pedersen, UN Special Envoy for Syria, flagged that the scale of violence and instability in Syria is “extremely alarming”.