What's New

New firsthand reporting by UN staff in Syria reveals “increasingly horrific brutality” by all parties in the de-escalation area of the country’s northwest, causing “significant civilian causalities” and hundreds of thousands displaced, a senior humanitarian official said on Thursday. 

“Three million people in Idlib need protection”, Najat Rochdi, Senior Humanitarian Adviser to the UN Special Envoy for Syria, said in a statement, adding that there was “grave danger” of a “humanitarian catastrophe” if the violence fails to end. 

In a world where international relations have become "more chaotic," world leaders must avoid a new Cold War, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told delegates attending the International Economic Forum, in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg on Thursday.

Thousands of acres of crops have been destroyed in Syria’s Idlib and north Hama provinces amid ongoing deadly violence, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday, in a call to the warring parties to stop using food security to hold people “hostage”.

In a briefing to journalists in Geneva, WFP Spokesperson Hervé Verhoosel expressed alarm at the humanitarian crisis in the north-western opposition-held enclave, where a Government-led military operation escalated in late April.

Amid the world’s largest humanitarian crisis still unfolding in Yemen, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has gained access to the rebel-held northern district of Nihm, for the first time since the war between Houthis and the Saudi-backed Government coalition escalated in 2015.

During the four years of violence, many districts have remained inaccessible for humanitarians, causing conditions facing civilians wracked by hunger, cholera, and bombardment, to “significantly deteriorate”, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).  

A marked escalation in fighting has put tens of thousands of children in northwest Syria at “imminent risk of injury, death and displacement”, the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) chief warned on Thursday.

Executive Director Henrietta Fore said in a statement that over the past few days, intensifying violence, had left children “hemmed in” especially in villages in northern Hama and southern Idleb, driving many families from their homes while “others are unable to move to safer areas”.

Further inaction on climate change is “simply not an option”, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Wednesday in an opinion piece where he called for “rapid and deep change in how we do business, generate power, build cities and feed the world.” 
 

If the world is to prevail against climate change, “then we must find the political will to take transformative measures,” declared the UN chief. 

Tobacco use continues to claim around eight million lives a year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, in a call for faster action from governments to tackle smoking and the “enormous” health, social, environmental and economic costs it entails.

Ahead of World No Tobacco Day, marked on Friday, 31 May, WHO’s Dr Vinayak Prasad, acting Director, Department for the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases, highlighted the damage that tobacco causes to the lungs of smokers and non-smokers alike.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is at the forefront of fighting hunger, mitigating the climate crisis and facilitating “the transition to smart sustainable cities", said the chief of the UN agency which specializes in information and communication technologies, Houlin Zhao, kicking off the third AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva.

Nowhere is safe in Yemen, the head of the UN Children’s Fund UNICEF said, after an attack in the city of Taiz claimed the lives of 12 civilians, including seven youngsters – the latest victims of the country’s more than four-year war. 

In a statement condemning reported airstrikes on a petrol station in the south-western city on Friday, Henrietta Fore said that the children who died were aged between four and 14. 

Like a well-tuned orchestra, successful modern societies have a balance of diversity and culture, that is a source of “enormous richness, not a threat” said the UN chief on Monday, speaking alongside UN Messenger of Peace, acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma in the Austrian capital, Vienna. 

He was speaking against the backdrop of European Parliamentary elections in recent days, which showed a surge in support away from political parties in the centre ground, towards those espousing more nationalist and anti-immigrant policy platforms.