General News

People with autism often have remarkable abilities in pattern recognition and logical reasoning, according to an activist from Denmark.

Autism is a lifelong developmental disability that results from a neurological disorder affecting the functioning of the brain.

Thorkil Sonne, founder of Specialist People Foundation, was at UN headquarters in New York to attend a series of events to mark the World Autism Awareness Day on 2 April.

Somalia and the world have lost a great human rights advocate with the death of Ambassador Yusuf Mohamed Ismail ‘Bari Bari’ the Permanent Representative of Somalia to the United Nations in Geneva.

That’s according to the UN Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Somalia, Bahame Tom Mukirya Nyanduga.

Ambassador ‘Bari Bari’ died in a terrorist bomb attack in a hotel in the Somali capital, Mogadishu which reportedly claimed the lives of at least five other Somalis on Friday last week.

Vanuatu urgently needs assistance to recover from the destruction that was caused by Cyclone Pam, according to a UN official.

UN Humanitarian Coordinator Osnat Lubrani, visited Tafea Province, one of the hardest hit provinces in the South Pacific islands.

She has warned that a secondary emergency could hit Vanuatu unless more humanitarian lifesaving supplies are delivered in the coming months.

On the line from Suva, the capital of Fiji, Ana Carmo spoke with Ms Lubrani about what she saw in Vanuatu.

Duration: 4’57”

The silence has been broken in India over the issue of violence against women, but much more needs to be done to promote gender equality; that’s according to the director of a women’s rights organization in the country.

Suneeta Dhar is the Director of Jagori, a group based in New Delhi which is empowering rural and urban women in India to speak out against violence.

Ms Dhar has been working on gender issues for 30 years and attended the landmark Beijing conference in 1995.

The rainy season seems to have come early this year in South Sudan prompting what has been described as “a race against time” to preposition food for the people in need.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the conflict that started in December 2013 between government and opposition forces in the new African country.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) says that rain has been falling in the past few weeks ahead of the official start of the rainy season at the end of April.

A project to restore the livelihoods of households in northern Mali is being implemented by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with the Government of the country.

FAO says agriculture in parts of Mali, particularly the north, has been seriously affected in recent years by civil strife and climate change.

The US$5 million project will seek to immediately restore production assets to families in the Gao, Mopti and Timbuktu regions.

The devastating floods that hit Malawi at the start of the year affected more than one million people and have left more than 600,000 in need of food aid, the World Food Programme (WFP ) said Wednesday.

WFP spokesperson David Orr said that food aid is getting through and that redevelopment is under way “one step at a time”, since crops, houses and roads have been washed away by the floods that killed nearly 200 people.

Non-bank lending or “shadow banks” continues to happen without sufficient regulations, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

At times this non-bank lending can be an arrangement as simple as one friend lending to another.

It could also be a more complicated chain of agreements that offer large groups of people high rates of return at higher risks with the potential to cause bankruptcy.

Men in Zimbabwe are learning that women can be family breadwinners; that’s according to a community-based organization working on gender issues in the southern African country.

The Zubo Trust is encouraging women to break with tradition and take on jobs, many of which have typically been considered reserved for men.

Abbigail Muleya works for the organization which is based in Binga district on Lake Kariba in north-western Zimbabwe.

Daniel Dickinson began by asking her about the main mission of the Trust.

Duration: 2’48” [early out 2’08”]