General News

With the onset of winter, a UN-backed plan to get aid into Eastern Aleppo needs to be approved by warring parties very soon since the alternative could be “catastrophic”, a senior aid official said Thursday.

Speaking in Geneva after hosting a meeting of the Syria Humanitarian Task Force, Jan Egeland said that “the last food rations” were now being distributed in besieged areas of the city.

The Illicit trade in tobacco products is a “global concern” due to a lack of effective tracing and distribution, according to one expert in the field from the United States.

Stella Bialous is serving as a consultant for the secretariat of the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), which is holding its annual convention this week in New Delhi, India.

The WHO FCTC treaty was initiated in 2003 to address ways of controlling tobacco use.

Sustainable forest management will play an important part in global efforts to combat climate change, according to a senior official with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The head of the agency’s Forestry Department, Eva Muller, has been making the case for the world’s forests as countries meet in Marrakech, Morocco, for the latest UN climate change conference.

Libyan women are suffering from a rise in gender-based violence and a lack of trained midwives, making childbirth more hazardous.

That’s according to Georges Makram Georgi, from the UN’s Population Fund (UNFPA).

He said the problems stem from conflict and instability that’s plagued the country since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011.

UNFPA has been working to provide advanced training to personnel to protect women in Libya and help them tackle the challenges they face.

Mr Georgi spoke to Priyanka Shankar.

The battle to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul is “progressing well,” the UN Security Council heard on Wednesday.

The head of the UN mission in the country Ján Kubiš updated members on the operation launched by the Iraqi army and its allies to retake the northern city from the terrorist group ISIL, also known as Daesh.

Dianne Penn reports.

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Countries have given life to the UN-brokered Paris Agreement on climate change and it is now time to work on meeting its goal of limiting global temperature rises, Morocco’s Environment Minister has said.

Dr Hakime El Haite’s was speaking as experts gather in Marrakech for the latest UN climate conference, known as COP22.

Weather presenters worldwide are learning how to make climate change cool.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has been training these experts to better educate the public about extreme weather and its impact on the planet.

Belgian TV weather broadcaster Jill Peeters has been leading the sessions.

Corruption remains the “biggest challenge” for Liberia as it continues its recovery from a brutal civil war; that’s according to the Police Commissioner of the UN peacekeeping mission there.

UNMIL has been supporting the West African country since 2003 following the end of the conflict, but as long-term peace and stability returns, the mission has been drawing down and handing security responsibilities over to national authorities.

A film festival has been held for the first time in Beirut, Lebanon, in an attempt to expose the plight of Syrian refugees settling in the country.

Mirielle Girard, the UN’s Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) representative in Lebanon, said that the festival is aimed at showing people what is “behind the statistics”.

She added that xenophobia in Lebanon is “mounting” due to slow economic growth caused by the war in Syria and refugees overcrowding the country’s population.

Social spending in the Asia-Pacific region remains low compared to the rest of the world, leading to slow economic growth in some countries and lack of protection for children.

That’s according to Christopher de Bono, UN Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) Chief of Communication for the East Asia and Pacific region.

Governments from across the region have been meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to discuss ways to advance children’s rights in critical areas.