General News

Conflict is putting Mali’s cultural heritage in danger. Eleven of the 16 mausoleums on UNESCO’s World Heritage sites and thousands of manuscripts may have been totally lost or destroyed by the Islamist groups, according to UNESCO’s Lazare Eloundou.

The Chief of the Africa Unit based in Paris, says mosques have not been maintained and the old town is in a very degraded state of conservation.

UNESCO’s Roni Ameland spoke to Lazare Eloundou about the state of Mali’s cultural heritage.

Duration: 2’25”

The food and agriculture sector is essential to human nutrition, but food and agriculture interventions do not always contribute to positive nutritional outcomes.

Specific attention is required to make agriculture “nutrition-sensitive”. But what does this mean in practice?

Solange Heise is a Nutrition Education consultant working for the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) project in Malawi to improve food security and nutrition in Kasungu and Mzimba districts.

Forest Whitaker, an American actor and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador led workshops on peace-building and conflict resolution at Hope North, in northern Uganda in December 2012.

Hope North is a rehabilitation campus in Masinde where refugees, orphans and former child soldiers rebuild their lives through education and vocational training.

Thirty young people between the ages of 15 and 25 years were selected from different districts in northern Uganda to attend the workshops.

Manual scavenging is a very old practice in India usually done by Dalit women, a group of people traditionally regarded as untouchables.

This degrading practice is not a career that the Dalits embrace, according to a human rights spokesperson, but it is a job that they inherited from their parents and usually passed on to their children.

Female genital mutilation or cutting, also known as FGM/C, refers to several different harmful practices involving the cutting of the female genitals. The United Nations Children’s Agency estimates that at least 120 million girls and women have experienced FGM in 29 countries.

UN Member States on December 20, 2012 approved a draft resolution aimed at ending this harmful practice. Fewer girls are now subjected to this life threatening practice, according to new data released on the International Day of Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting.

A team from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is in Nigeria to discuss the cleaning up of oil contamination in Ogoniland.

A comprehensive study by UNEP in the Delta Region found that oil contamination in Ogoniland is extensive as a result of oil industry operations in the area since the late 1950s.

The UNEP’s “Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland”, says the oil pollution has a grave negative impact on the environment.

According to a study published in The Bulletin of the World Health Organization (WHO), heroin dependence treatment is reducing HIV infections in Spain.

Laws passed in 1990 and 1996 made methadone treatment available. The study found that as a result of these laws, the number of new HIV infections has dwindled from an annual average of 6,200 in the early 1990’s to 690 new infections in 2010.

It is almost two years since the crisis in Syria began and there is still no solution in sight yet.

The United Nations humanitarian agency, OCHA, is warning that if the violence continues, the situation will worsen.

Already, the country is facing a serious humanitarian crisis with four million people in need of relief assistance.

Derrick Mbatha reports.

Duration: 3'28"

Jakarta is recovering from yet another flood. But Indonesia is no stranger to natural disasters. In fact, there is a flood here almost every month. Often deforestation on mountain slopes loosens the soil and heavy rain leads to landslides.

Four months ago, Lemusa village on Sulawesi island was buried under six metres of mud. In one night, most people lost their homes and their farms - their only source of income.

The red fruit palm oil was labelled as the “miracle find of 2013” by Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Turkish American television personality. His American syndicated programme, “The Dr. Oz Show” helped spur a global buying frenzy for the product.

As a result of this increased demand for palm oil, over 80 per cent of the orangutans' habitat in Borneo and Sumatra, Southeast Asia, has been lost to agricultural conversion, mainly for the production of palm oil. The wild orangutan population has dropped, and the Sumatran orangutan is now classified as "critically endangered."