General News

It’s a race against time to save the oceans, says an organisation concerned with marine conservation.

The Race for Water Foundation met with other marine experts at the UN headquarters in New York to discuss the numerous negative impacts of plastic pollution on the world’s ecosystem and the human population.

Plastic waste can damage wildlife habitats, fishnets can entangle whales and fish often ingest small pieces of plastic.

Cathrine Hasselberg has more.

Duration: 1'56"

More money must be spent in key areas such as education and health care in order to enhance gender equality, says the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the UN.

Lana Nusseibeh presented key findings from the UAE on how best to promote gender equality in the new development goals being elaborated by the international community.

It’s expected that funds will be focussed on areas such as early or child marriage, violence against women and a lack of access to sexual and reproductive health.

Access to justice for women victims of violence in Afghanistan needs to be strengthened.

That's according to a report released by the UN mission in the country, UNAMA,  on Sunday.

It says that while there is a legal framework in place for such cases, there remain many factors hindering access to justice for women.

Hamed Haleemi has filed this story from Kabul.

Duration: 3'37"

Crime and conflict are inextricably linked according to a researcher from the United Nations University (UNU).

John de Boer is Senior Policy Advisor on the role the academia can play in aiding the fight against crime at the UNU Centre for Policy Research.

He says researchers need to think ahead in tackling criminals who are known as great innovators who respond very quickly to environmental changes.

Women need to be food secure in order to advance and to tackle violence perpetrate against them.

That’s according to Chido Govera, a farmer, campaigner and educator from Zimbabwe who is teaching mushroom cultivation to hundreds of people in her country as well as in Tanzania, South Africa and the Congo.

Ms Govera participated in an event during this year’s Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington D.C. in the United States.

An emergency UN appeal launched Friday for $274 million to help 7.5 million people directly affected by fighting in Yemen.

The conflict now affects 18 of the country’s 22 governorates and the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that ordinary families are struggling to survive.

Serious violations of human rights have also been reported, OCHA said, while the fighting has aggravated the existing humanitarian crisis in the Arabian state where 12 million people are now food insecure.

Prisons could be places where the ideology of violent extremists could be reversed, according to the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI).

During the 13th UN Congress on crime prevention and criminal justice underway in Doha, Qatar, UNICRI organized an event on the “rehabilitation of extremist offenders”.

Understanding how demographic changes will unfold over the next 15 years is essential for the design and implementation of the new sustainable development agenda.

That’s the view of John Wilmoth, the Director of the Population Division in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

According to the Population Division older persons are now the world’s fastest growing age group at the same time the world’s population is projected to increase by an additional 1.1 billion people by 2030.

Cybercrime, from stealing online information for banking fraud to child pornography has become a serious threat around the world.

It is estimated that over 1.8 billion images are uploaded and shared over the Internet daily, which makes it difficult to track down online child pornography.

However, the US tech giant Microsoft is fighting back and has developed a new tool agencies to fight cybercrime which is distributed free of charge to law enforcement.

Coordination between military and civil organizations in times of humanitarian crises needs to be improved according to a senior disaster relief expert in Singapore.

Militaries around the world have been increasingly called on to help the relief effort when disasters strike, but their involvement does pose challenges.

The UN and Singapore government have been hosting the World Humanitarian Summit this week in the south-east Asian country to discuss civil-military cooperation.